Trump Loves TikTok Now, Begs SCOTUS To Save It
Is this payola for his generous benefactor? Surely not!
One thing about the incoming administration, we can put aside whatever remaining pretense that every policy is about anything but greasing up the old man, with favors, flattery, or most preferably, cash.
Latest example, TikTok, and its majority shareholder, Jeff Yass. Remember him? When banks said no to Trump, Jeff Yass said yass!
Back in March, things weren’t looking good for a certain adjudicated conman who’d bankrupted six companies. His properties were on the verge of seizure from the state of New York, and Trump Tower was fixing to be renamed the Letitia James Center for The Art of Kicking Trump In The Balls. His Twitter ripoff, Truth Social, was losing money. It was (and still is) not attracting any new eyeballs or advertisers other than peddlers of Trumperphenalia, gold bars, and we dunno, probably mail-order-bride matchmakers and boner pills made out of dryer lint and fruit snacks or something.
In the first nine months of 2023 Truth had $3.3 million in revenue, and lost $49 million.
Enter Jeff Yass! After a meeting with Trump in March at a Club For Growth dong-honking sesh at The Breakers in Palm Beach, Yass’s company, Susquehanna International Group, bought two percent of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with Trump Media & Technology Group. And that made the share price surge 140 percent! It defibrillated Trump’s flatlining company, and boosted the value of Trump’s own shares by billions of clams. And as it also happens, Yass’s company has owned a 15 percent of shares in TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, since 2012. Yass personally has a seven percent share of ByteDance that’s worth about $21 billion.
A mere three and a half years earlier, in August of 2020, then-president Trump had issued an executive order demanding ByteDance sell TikTok within 90 days or the app shalt be BANNED from the US. Why did he hate it? No one quite knows the reason.
Maybe because some teens used TikTok to register to attend Trump's rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, then not show up? Who can say! But at least three right-wing nutjobs, plus Oracle and Walmart Inc., were all hot to buy a red-blooded-American stake in the addictive-as-sugar app.
Back then, Trump was heaving that TikTok “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.” There’s never been any public evidence that TikTok has made content decisions in the United States at the behest of the Chinese government, or has been doing any of those things with the app, FWIW.
Mark Zuckerberg/Meta was all about the TikTok smearing, hiring a conservative consulting firm, Targeted Victory, to tap out op-eds and letters to newspapers from “concerned parents” about the dangers of TikTok, and lobbying reporters to do stories about how TikTok was spawning dangerous teenager trends, like a challenge called “dangerous licks” that every month gave kids some kind of asshole thing to do, like slapping a teacher, or stealing stuff out of school bathrooms.
But alas, these challenges did not exist on the platform. In fact, the challenges, such as “December: Deck the halls and show us yo balls at school halls,” actually originated on Facebook, from adults, who heard it about from other adults, assumed it was an actual thing, and posted the challenges to warn other parents about them.
Wrote a Targeted Victory staffer: “Dream would be to get stories with headlines like ‘From dances to danger: how TikTok has become the most harmful social media space for kids.’” As opposed to Facebook and Instagram Reels, which are practically bowls of Wheaties.
Anyway, back to Yass! Until very recently, he was a never-Trumper, though a top-six donor to other Republican candidates. Yass even told The Wall Street Journal in 2022 that he tried to stop Trump from running in 2024, warning him, “You’re gonna lose and be humiliated.” If only!
But wow, within days after Trump got that investment, he rrt-skrrt-screech whipped an immediate 180, and suddenly TikTok was not a security threat anymore.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he growled on his garbage platform. (Just me, or does “Zuckerschmuck” sound kind of anti-Semitic?) “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” (Though he said that way back in March, before Zuckerberg hightailed it to Mar-a-Lago with a million-dollar check and Meta Ray-Bans in hand, to sing and dance along with the January 6 rioter version of the national anthem.)
But the anti-TikTok campaign had already marinated. Congress passed a rare bipartisan bill to force ByteDance to sell, and Joe Biden signed it. And TikTok’s got until January 19 (one day before inauguration!) to save its digital hide. So now Mr. Art O’Deal is in the position of begging the Supreme Court to save TikTok after all, or at least delay its demise. He’s filed a 25-page amicus brief, suddenly very concerned about the “170 million Americans who use TikTok” and the rights of his 14.7 million TikTok followers who want to watch him do his dong-honking dances on there.
“President Trump and his rival both used TikTok to connect with voters during the recent Presidential election campaign, with President Trump doing so much more effectively.” Hey, wonder if TikTok helped boost his algorithms? Surely not, and it was just a coincidence that in November my feed of “Sopranos” clips was choked with Trump-flag-flapping yokels.
“Furthermore, President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government.”
He didn’t possess that when he was president last time, but that was before his company got those ByteDance clams! Will SCOTUS step in and do as he asks? Well, they sure do love the guy, like Nara Smith loves making Capri Sun from scratch in a J’Amemme dress. So, probably, and we shall see!
[Seattle Times archive link / New York Times archive link / Vanity Fair / Wall Street Journal gift link “A Betting Man With a Plan for America“ / Wall Street Journal gift link, “Larry Ellison’s TikTok Bid Puts Oracle Chairman Back in the Spotlight” / Fortune / Washington Post archive link / Trump amicus brief]
The whole brief is mindboggling, though what really stands out is that Trump's lawyers put *in writing* that if the Court doesn't grant this request he will simply ignore the law and do it anyway. Because what is the law to someone granted TOTAL IMMUNITY?!?
MSNBC columnist Hayes Brown has noticed a good deal of schadenfreude about these reports from Trump critics — but he's urging people on the left to resist the temptation to relish MAGA fans' misery.
"The recent tales of early-stage regret and fear are prompting a sense of grim satisfaction from some on the left... Whatever happens, these Trump supporters will be getting what they deserve," he wrote Monday. "It’s hard for me to reach that conclusion, though. The schadenfreude that others are feeling or anticipating seems as hollow as the beliefs that Trump supporters projected onto him. As I see it, the problem with taking solace in the suffering of others in this case is that it still requires the suffering of others."
***
Except...
A) The suffering is inevitable at this point. They were warned. They were BEGGED. Since it is inevitable, enjoying their comeuppance is all there is left.
B) Some people WILL NOT CARE...and WILL NOT LEARN... until it HURTS THEM.
So, do they need to suffer? Kinda, yeah.
Am I going to enjoy seeing them learn?
Just as much as they would enjoy my suffering.