Unfortunately, Trump Played the TikTok Ban Perfectly
The TikTok ban saga perfectly captures both Republican cynicism and Democratic incompetence: Trump takes credit for “saving” an app his administration originally moved to ban, while Democrats fumble another opportunity to connect with young people.
Donald Trump has not only managed to evade responsibility for his role in promoting the TikTok ban but has taken credit for ending it. (VCG via Getty Images)
In the days approaching January 19, 2025, millions of TikTok content creators and consumers prepared to say their final goodbyes to the app. After a TikTok ban was passed in Congress, requiring the app either to be sold to an American company on an impossible timeline or to go dark, it appeared the social media platform would be pulled out from under its 170 million US-based users.
As promised, on the evening of January 18, TikTok went dark. A message appeared for users attempting to open the app that read:
A law banning TikTok has been enacted in the U.S. Unfortunately, that means you can’t use TikTok for now. We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.
Less than twenty-four hours later, the app returned with the message, “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.”
These messages, delivered the day before his inauguration, failed to mention that Donald Trump had yet to assume the presidency. They similarly failed to mention that it was the Trump administration that had called for the legislation banning TikTok during his first presidential term. The law was championed by pro-Trump members of Congress, including Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), whose racist line of questioning of TikTok CEO Shou Chew went viral for pressing Chew on his citizenship status and alleged affiliation with China (Chew is Singaporean). Finally, the ban was upheld by Trump-appointed members of the Supreme Court.
Now Trump has not only managed to evade responsibility for his role in promoting the TikTok ban but has taken credit for ending it. Shortly after his inauguration, Trump signed an executive order delaying the ban of TikTok by seventy-five days. The order was sandwiched between challenges to birthright citizenship, a constitutionally protected right, and deregulation of oil drilling, among other horrors. But Trump’s TikTok order was designed to overshadow a more robust extension of the sale deadline that was introduced to Congress by senators Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Ron Wyden (D-OR), Cory Booker (D-NJ) and Rep. Ro Khanna (CA-17), which would extend the deadline by 270 days.
TikTok’s message celebrating “President Trump’s efforts” has raised some eyebrows among users, even breeding conspiracy theories that it was a ploy for Mark Zuckerberg–owned tech conglomerate Meta to “secretly” purchase the app. Of course, it would be impossible for Meta to make this big-money purchase without public knowledge. The Meta plot aside, Shou Chew is clearly cozying up to the Trump administration in exchange for the continued operation of TikTok in the United States. At Trump’s inauguration, Chew joined the front row seats reserved for tech billionaires Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Tim Cook, among others. (The combined net worth of the billionaires in attendance reached over $1.35 trillion)
These tech billionaires hold immense power over the expression of free speech for millions of Americans who rely on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok for communications and news. Working in concert with both Republicans and Democrats, they can — and have — squashed dissenting views critical of the US government and especially the genocide in Gaza.
TikTok’s older users have mostly responded to the events of the last month in ways that are consistent with their preexisting political affiliation. But the impact on the app’s millions of very young users is yet to be determined. Though there aren’t exact counts of how many users on the app are under eighteen, internal documents from 2020 indicated that up to a third of the app’s then 49 million users (now 170 million) are under fourteen years old.
While Kamala Harris ultimately won the majority of voters under thirty in the 2024 election, her 54 percent support was below the typical rate of youth support for the Democratic Party since 2008, which has fluctuated around 60 percent or higher. Instead, young voters — particularly young men — swung right; the Harris campaign lost support among young voters in nearly every swing state but Georgia.
Trump himself stated that he believes TikTok gave him a boost in the 2024 election among younger voters, contributing to his shift away from his initial support of the ban. Although it’s unclear if TikTok contributed to his growth in popularity, it’s clear that Trump’s latest political stunt is an attempt to continue influencing young people to veer further right.
Democratic Malfeasance
As cynical as Trump’s maneuvering is, we can’t let the Democratic Party off the hook. True to form, they bungled what could have been a slam dunk. In the House, 155 Democratic Party members voted in favor of the TikTok ban, which ultimately passed in a bipartisan 352–65 vote.
While the Republican Party has moved firmly to a far-right, unabashedly pro-Trump political regime of technocrats — best exemplified by Elon Musk’s horrifying Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration, now being embraced by white nationalist groups — the Democratic Party has been dismayingly ineffective at stopping them.
For almost a decade, the Democratic Party has existed for one purpose alone: keeping Trump out of office. It has used quashing Trumpism as an excuse to quash every critical and popular policy that bubbles to the surface, from Medicare for All to student debt cancellation to ending US support for Israel’s genocide. And yet the party has been completely unable to halt the rise of the far right, which continues to make inroads through social media monopolies, manosphere podcasts, and traditional corporate media — in large part because Democrats stand for nothing beyond opposing Trump.
The failure of the Democratic Party to read the room and align itself with popular opinion, instead handing an easy win to the Right for no discernible benefit, is yet another reminder that the Democrats are simply unable to defeat the Trumpism they’ve used to goad voters for the last three election cycles. The story of the TikTok ban is a microcosm of Republicans’ cynicism and dishonesty, yes. But it’s a microcosm of the Democratic Party’s embarrassing ineffectiveness too.
This post was originally published on here
