Source: Patriot Post | VIEW ORIGINAL POST ==>
Just after noon today, Donald Trump will take the Oath of Office as our nation’s 47th president. And within minutes of doing so, he’ll likely subject himself to a case of writer’s cramp.
Some 200 executive orders await Trump’s signature — everything from declaring a national border emergency to declaring war on the drug cartels to terminating the electric vehicle mandate to abolishing the Green New Deal to withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accords to unleashing Alaskan energy to ordering federal workers back to their offices to establish a biological definition of sex to ending DEI programs across the federal government.
It’s a sign of the times, though, that one executive action will outweigh them all in terms of its appeal: Trump has vowed to “SAVE TIKTOK!”
The Communist Chinese social media and spyware app is wildly popular with some 170 million Americans, and Trump’s position has evolved over the years from vowing to ban it to now vowing to save it. Here’s how he put it yesterday on Truth Social:
I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.
Americans deserve to see our exciting Inauguration on Monday, as well as other events and conversations.
I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to say up. Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars — maybe trillions.
Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.
It’s a strange evolution, to say the least, for a president whose political career got its start with his fiery campaign-trail pronouncements about the need to get tough with China. The lying, spying, thieving ChiComs are, after all, our nation’s foremost geopolitical foe.
Not every Republican is on board with Trump’s plan. Take Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts, for example: “Now that the law has taken effect,” said the two senators in a joint statement, “there is no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China.”
The law that Cotton and Ricketts were referring to was the one that the Supreme Court upheld Friday in a resounding 9-0 decision. Indeed, the high court ruled that a law calling for the ban of TikTok in the U.S. unless it is sold to an American company can stand. This set the stage for the shutdown of the Communist Chinese spyware platform on Sunday, just hours before Trump’s inauguration.
As for the shutdown, the ChiComs didn’t even wait until the deadline to arrive, pulling the plug on the app on Saturday night, causing an online freakout while posting the following note: “Sorry, TikTok isn’t available right now. A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now.”
Then, TikTok kissed Trump’s ring: “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office. Please stay tuned!”
Yesterday, despite the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling that the ban was constitutional, the app was back online. So much for Rule of Law.
Rarely does an issue cut so jaggedly across political lines as does the TikTok debate. On the one hand, there are legitimate arguments about free speech in a free society; about allowing the citizenry to decide for themselves what sorts of information they want to consume. On the other hand, freedom of speech doesn’t give the Communist Chinese carte blanche to target our kids with, for example, transgender cultishness and suicide ideation.
Said TikTok in response to Trump’s lifeline: “We thank President Trump for providing the necessary clarity and assurance to our service providers that they will face no penalties providing TikTok to over 170 million Americans and allowing over 7 million small businesses to thrive. It’s a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship. We will work with President Trump on a long-term solution that keeps TikTok in the United States.”
The censorship of TikTok is anything but arbitrary. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley explained about the Supreme Court’s ruling, “It spends a lot of time dealing with the free-speech issues that were obviously of great concern to the justices.” How so? Turley said that the justices viewed the law as content-neutral. That is, it isn’t predicated on what TikTok is saying so much as what it’s doing — namely, spying on American citizens.
Clearly, the justices were persuaded by the national security threat that the platform poses. As Turley interprets the decision, the court is saying that those national security concerns are valid, and that the executive and legislative branches can legitimately make these decisions without violating the First Amendment.
The unanimous ruling also lends overwhelming legitimacy to the law. As such, it poses a thorny issue to Trump. After all, Republicans are supposed to be the law-abiders. In addition, the ruling bucks the general trend of the most interesting and consequential Supreme Court cases, which tend also to be the most fraught, the most narrowly decided, and the most politically divisive.
But whereas the high court was in lockstep about the danger that TikTok poses, the American people are decidedly less so.
“I just spoke to Chairman Xi Jinping of China,” Trump posted yesterday. “The call was a very good one for both China and the U.S.A. It is my expectation that we will solve many problems together, and starting immediately. We discussed balancing Trade, Fentanyl, TikTok, and many other subjects. President Xi and I will do everything possible to make the World more peaceful and safe!”
We can all agree on the desirability of a “more peaceful and safe” world. But the same Communist Chinese who are poisoning us with fentanyl shouldn’t be allowed to poison the minds of our young people with TikTok.
