The details: When he was president, Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. He described its potential impact on U.S. security as a “national emergency”: The company’s “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
Last week, though, Trump reversed himself by saying it would be a mistake to “get rid of TikTok.” He later expanded on his thinking in an interview with CNBC. He still considers the company a “national security risk,” but he worries that banning it will mostly help Facebook, “which has been very bad for our country.” A major Republican donor has an ownership stake in TikTok, and many Trump associates have financial ties to the company.
Trump’s reversal had no discernible impact on House Republicans. The vast majority of them have just voted to force the company’s Beijing-based owner to sell it. Only 15 House Republicans opposed the bill. Most Democrats backed the legislation as well, although by a less lopsided margin. In a House that has passed very few bills, this one achieved a wide consensus.
House Republicans might not have thought Trump was serious about his new position. During and after his presidency, Trump has regularly shown a willingness to tolerate a lot of disagreement on policy questions. None of the senators who voted against his immigration plan in 2018 ever faced any consequences for it, not even a tweet. Trump recently endorsed the Senate campaign of former Michigan congressman Mike Rogers, whose foreign-policy record places him squarely in the middle of the pre-Trump Republican Party.
Rep. Mike Gallagher, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, notes that Trump’s statement was itself equivocal, since the legislation bans TikTok only if there is no divestment. “It wasn’t like a full-throated effort to quash our bill,” he told me. “And then he didn’t double down, which was helpful.”
Alternatively, House Republicans might have judged that on this issue, the former president was out of step with his own base. To the extent that there really is a political tendency that deserves the label of “Trumpism,” the anti-TikTok bill would seem to be a pure expression of it: It’s an attack on China and its “swamp” lobbyists in defense of U.S. sovereignty. Not even criticism from Trump, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson combined could overcome Republican voters’ inclination to support the bill. (By contrast, a lot of Republicans were primed to oppose a bipartisan immigration deal even before Trump opposed it.)
Even so, Trump’s stand on behalf of TikTok also seems unlikely to dim any of his supporters’ enthusiasm for him. When you’ve defined yourself as a strong leader, they’ll let you flip-flop.
Trump’s ineffectual intervention in the TikTok debate sheds light on how another presidential term for him would go. Different groups have tried to outline a Trumpist agenda to guide him if he returns to power, and there has been widespread speculation that he will surround himself with true believers instead of conventional Republicans. Knowing more of how government works, he will supposedly be less susceptible to agreeing with whoever last spoke to him.
Maybe. But his stance on TikTok suggests that Trump remains more mercurial than an “America First” ideologue — and that when he tells congressional Republicans to jump, sometimes they will just tune him out.
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