Try to Make Any Sense of What Trump Says About TikTok Here

Donald Trump struggled Monday to give a coherent answer on whether he thought the United States should actually ban TikTok.

The House of Representatives is poised to pass a bill this week that would ban TikTok from U.S. app stores unless ByteDance, the app’s Chinese parent company, sells TikTok to an American company. Trump was one of the original arbiters of anti-TikTok sentiment on Capitol Hill.

But last week, Trump advocated against banning TikTok. His reasoning? He doesn’t want Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to reap any unintended benefits in the fallout.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump warned on TruthSocial.

When asked Monday about his apparent flip on banning TikTok, Trump insisted, “I had it done.”

“And then Congress said, well, they never, they ultimately, usually fail,” he continued on CNBC’s Squawk Box. “They are a gooch—like, extremely political, and they’re extremely subject to people called lobbyists who happen to be very, very talented, very good and very rich.”

“I could have banned TikTok. I had it banned just about, I could have got that done. But I said, ‘You know what? But I’ll leave it up to you.’ I didn’t push them too hard because, you know, let them do their own research and development, and they decided not to do it. But as you know, I was at the point where I could have gotten it done if I wanted to. I sort of said, ‘You guys decide, you make that decision.’ Because it’s a tough decision to make.”

While he was in office, Trump made banning TikTok a pet project. In 2020, he signed an executive order prohibiting any transactions between ByteDance and U.S. citizens, citing national security concerns. The order was eventually blocked in court.

Trump admitted Monday that his main incentive for keeping TikTok around is preventing Facebook from expanding—and he threw in some election fraud conspiracy for good measure.

“I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media. What Facebah-book did with lock boxes, with a $500 million, Zuckerberg’s, lock boxes that he put in. I mean, I considered illegal,” Trump said, referring to a conspiracy he started that Facebook had paid for “lock boxes” of fraudulent ballots that made up “96 percent” of votes for Joe Biden.

Trump told CNBC that he still believes TikTok poses a threat to national security. “We have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights,” he said. “But, you know, we also have that problem with other, you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too.”

“I mean, they get the information, they get plenty of information, and they deal with China and they’ll do whatever China wants. You know, if you look at, some of our American companies, when you talk about, highly sophisticated companies that you think are American, they’re not so American. They deal in China, and China, if China wants anything from them, they will give it. So that’s a national security risk also.”

TikTok is one of the few issues that unites Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill. A company associated with the Chinese government owns a 1 percent stake in TikTok parent company Bytedance. With both political parties eager to seem tough on China, cracking down on TikTok is an easy move. TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew has testified twice before Congress and has faced far tougher, and sometimes more racist, grilling than any of his American tech CEO counterparts.

Republicans also regularly use TikTok as a scapegoat because the platform is popular with young people, the majority of whom tend to lean left. Many lawmakers say they want to ban TikTok to protect both national security and children’s privacy and well-being.

Bizarrely, Trump got one thing right during his weird rant: When it comes to security, both national and personal, TikTok is far from the only bad actor.

Google and YouTube have violated children’s privacy. Livestreaming platform Twitch is rife with sexual harassment and child predators. Apple and Google parent Alphabet design their products to be addictive to teenagers.

Facebook parent company Meta knew its products were destroying teens’ mental health, particularly teenage girls’, but made no changes to its platform. Zuckerberg was aware of this but lied to Congress under oath about it.

Meanwhile, the United States has no overarching data security legislation. Instead, data privacy and security is regulated by a patchwork of state laws. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass laws that would actually protect children online. In fact, in the past decade, Congress passed just one narrow children’s online safety law.