Lessons from Trump’s TikTok zigzag

One of the accepted media tales about the Republican Party is that because Donald Trump dominates it politically and stylistically, he also dominates its policymaking process. There are several examples where this hasn’t been true, both during his presidency and after it — but perhaps none more prominent than the TikTok debate on Capitol Hill, which resulted in that modern rarity of a sweeping 352-65 bipartisan vote in the House last week, a vote immediately applauded by populist conservative leaders such as Missouri senator Josh Hawley and institutions such as the Heritage Foundation.

Why would nearly 200 elected Republicans just ignore the former president, who declared his opposition to the forced TikTok divestment effort on Truth Social, with language echoed by a supportive chorus including his son Don Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy and Tucker Carlson?

Well, perhaps it’s that after years of learning about the former president and all his various tendencies, the TikTok push is one where they know: Trump’s heart just isn’t in it. He’s still the guy who tried to shut down TikTok as president, albeit unsuccessfully, and no Truth Social post is going to change that. Trump showed as much in an interview released Sunday on Howard Kurtz’s MediaBuzz, where he said in part:

I know a lot about TikTok, and I gave the option of banning it and I had it pretty much done. And I said I didn’t do any jawboning, I didn’t do anything. I just said, you guys want it banned if you want, and Congress probably didn’t want it banned, you know, et cetera. It wasn’t something that I was demanding. If I demanded it, I think I would have gotten it…

And went on to say:

But what I would like to see is if you’re going to do it to TikTok, do it to Facebook. And what you can do is let them sell TikTok, let them sell it in the market, maybe get a good price, maybe not get a good price, I don’t know. But take it away from China control.

Well, conveniently, that’s just what the House bill does: force the sale of the company away from CCP control within six months. It’s one of Trump’s tendencies to zig toward something, have a bunch of his most dedicated supporters scramble to defend his newly formed rationale, then zag back to his original and typically more sane position, leaving them out on a limb. (On some level you have to wonder if he gets personal enjoyment out of watching it play out time and again.) But in this case, the idea that he was going to be a defender of TikTok and China’s data snagging abilities in a serious way always seemed laughable, especially with the news that Steve Mnuchin is putting together a group to buy it.

The dominant theory in Washington as to why a handful of typically anti-China populist voices shifted rapidly and inorganically on the TikTok issue — Ramaswamy was calling the app “digital fentanyl” mere days before joining it, while Carlson had called it “a major security risk, disseminating propaganda” a year earlier — is the influence of a major conservative donor, Jeff Yass, who happens to own a major stake in TikTok’s parent company ByteDance.

Yass’s influence, both as a Republican megadonor and Club for Growth backer, is outlined at length in this Fast Company article:

Trump’s about-face on TikTok came just last week, one week after Yass — a previous critic of his administration whose support would represent a major score for Trump’s cash–strapped reelection campaign — invited Trump to attend a Club for Growth retreat. Last week, insiders also revealed that former Trump senior advisor Kellyanne Conway is coincidentally now on the Club for Growth’s payroll as a TikTok lobbyist. Known to put his financial and electoral prospects first, Trump may have spied a way to appeal to a major donor, while teeing himself up to be able to tell young voters that, unlike Biden, he supports TikTok.

As for Ramaswamy, his TikTok position reportedly “evolved” last year. According to records, Yass donated $4.9 million to Ramaswamy’s American Exceptionalism PAC sometime between July 1 and December 31.

So perhaps this incident provides multiple lessons. First, even billionaires can’t buy support with real impact within the GOP if you’re seen as taking a soft-on-China position. Second, that right-wing influencers who rail against policies as backed by “RINOs” or “the uniparty” have a hard time advancing that claim when it’s also backed by prominent populist elected leaders. And third, that many Republican politicians have gotten wise to understanding when Trump really means something he says, or when his heart’s not really in it. That last lesson may prove the most important should the former president get his old job back in November.