When Donald Trump sat down for his latest interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, the president, unprompted, boasted, “We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way.” When the host asked who the buyer is, the Republican replied, “I’ll tell you in about two weeks.”
The point of Trump’s “two-week” trick is unsubtle: When he’s facing a question he doesn’t want to answer, he relies on this tired timeframe to punt the issue, assuming that people will forget 14 days later.
With this in mind, it becomes all the more important to not forget — and note that the president vowed to update the public about this four weeks ago. It was against this backdrop that Variety reported late last week:
Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s Commerce Secretary, said TikTok will go dark for the video app’s millions of American users unless China agrees by a Sept. 17 deadline to a deal that will give the U.S. owners majority control over the app. ‘We’ve made the decision. You can’t have Chinese control and have something on 100 million American phones,’ Lutnick said Thursday on CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street.’ If China doesn’t approve the deal, ‘then TikTok is going to go dark.’
I won’t pretend to know whether the administration intends to follow through on such a threat, though Lutnick's on-air comments did not suggest that the president was telling the truth about having already lined up new ownership for the app.
For those who are new to this story, let’s quickly review how we arrived at this point. During the president’s first term, the Republican made no effort to hide his opposition to TikTok. In fact, it was just five years ago when he announced plans to go after the platform, and an executive order soon followed. That policy ultimately failed in the courts, but Trump was explicit in arguing that the app should not exist on Americans’ phones.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” the president said during his 2020 re-election campaign.
Trump, true to form, ended up reversing course, but policymakers stuck to his original position: Last year, Congress approved, and Joe Biden signed, a measure that moved toward a ban on TikTok, deeming it a national security threat.
On the first day of his second term, Trump delayed implementation of the law — with the Supreme Court’s approval — by 90 days to give federal officials time to complete a transfer of ownership from China to the United States. In April, as the deadline approached, the president did it again, and in June, he did it for the third time.
At that point, The Associated Press reported that Trump was acting without a “clear legal basis,” and it’s a critically important point: The president keeps issuing orders that effectively say, “I’ve decided that I’m not going to enforce federal law in this area for the next few months.”
When a reporter recently pressed White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt as to whether such moves are legal, she said administration officials “strongly believe” that it’s fine. But that was hardly reassuring: Team Trump telling Team Trump that it can do what the president wants to do isn’t much of a justification.
As my MSNBC colleague Ja’han Jones explained, “Donald Trump’s refusal to impose a congressionally authorized ban on TikTok is a clear example of his disregard for democracy,” adding that the president’s delays reflect “a very Putin-esque way of doing business.”
Even some congressional Republicans, who are generally inclined to act like Trump’s lapdogs, have started to express some concerns about the administration repeatedly delaying implementation of federal law.
I won’t pretend to know what might happen next, but for now, an American president is allowing a Chinese-owned company to operate illegally in the U.S., at least in part because he thinks it helped his 2024 candidacy. The public is entitled to some kind of explanation for this — and Trump’s latest two-week deadline expired two weeks ago.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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