When Trump planned his big comeback rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, former campaign manager Brad Parscale could not have been more excited. Day after day Parscale reported that tens of thousands, not hundreds of thousands, no a million people had requested tickets to see Trump speak in the middle of a pandemic. With just 19,000 seats available in the stadium, Trump’s campaign assembled a huge outdoor stage and massive television screens so that Trump’s words could be broadcast to the enormous overflow crowd. Trump and Pence were even scheduled to visit with those unfortunates locked out of the promised land before moving inside to grace those whose perseverance scored them a golden ticket.
Then, of course, Trump found himself facing a “crowd” that was humiliatingly small and the giant overflow area was disassembled even as the pitiful rally inside continued. Since that rally, Parscale has been demoted, COVID-19 cases in Tulsa have spiked, and thousands of young TikTok users and K-Pop fans have revealed that they trolled Trump’s campaign by requesting tickets they never intended to use. A month later, it’s clear that kicking Parscale to the curb hasn’t cured Trump’s humiliating itch. So now he’s threatening to eliminate an entire social media platform.
Trump has complained about TikTok before, blaming his hate on “security concerns” about the Chinese ownership behind the app. As he prepared to fly back to the White House on Friday, Trump told reporters he could act as soon as Saturday to ban TikTok by executive action. “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” said Trump. He repeated that threat in a tweet on Friday evening.
It’s unclear exactly how such a ban might work, or what law it would involve, but according to CNBC, Trump thinks it falls under this all-powerful Article II. “I have that authority. I can do it with an executive order or that,” said Trump. Whatever “that” is.
TikTok has tried to point out that U. S. data never leaves the U. S., and that it already employees almost 1,000 people on its U. S. team. But that’s assuming that Trump’s concerns with the social media platform have anything to do with security. Which they don’t.
Instead, Trump seems to be pressuring TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to accept an offer from Microsoft to buy the platform. By threatening to cut the app off from the U. S. market, Trump is reducing the value of TikTok and could encourage ByteDance to sell to Microsoft or another U. S. company at a reduced price. The best sign that this is the case—Trump denied it.
TikTok users and K-Pop fans were not responsible for Trump’s failed rally in Tulsa. That rally failed in part because of Parscale’s bad planning, but mostly because Trump decided to allow COVID-19 to rampage across the nation in order to score what he thought would be a political win. That decision killed his rally. And thousands of Americans.
But since Trump is absolutely incapable of admitting any mistake, TikTok is a handy target.
Saturday, Aug 1, 2020 · 4:37:10 PM +00:00 · Mark Sumner
As Reuters reports, Trump’s threat to close down a social media platform appears to be generating results, First Amendment be damned.
China’s ByteDance has agreed to divest the U.S. operations of TikTok completely in a bid to save a deal with the White House, after President Donald Trump said on Friday he had decided to ban the popular short-video app, two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday.