Donald Trump forged a bipartisan consensus that correctly identifies the People’s Republic of China as an enemy deserving of confrontation, rather than appeasement.
When Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015, the Chinese Communist Party was still benefiting from the United States’ failure to see its brutal regime for what it was — as well as the naïve American hope that integrating the PRC into the global community would yield ideological moderation.
Trump saw through this illusion, won the presidency and in so doing opened the eyes of the rest of the political class.
Americans owe him a debt of gratitude for that service.
But now, after pushing the ball down to the one-yard line, he’s contemplating taking a knee.
Last year, President Biden signed a bill that would ban the popular social media platform TikTok in the US if it’s not sold by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, by Jan. 19.
In a puzzling reversal, Trump has not only professed to have a “warm spot” in his heart for this virtual weapon, but has actually filed a legal brief urging the Supreme Court to prevent the ban from going into effect, ahead of a hearing set for Friday.
“We did go on TikTok and we had a great response, we had billions of views,” Trump boasted last month.
“Maybe we got to keep this sucker around a little while.”
To the contrary, Mr. President-elect, that sucker has got to go.
This week, The Wall Street Journal made it clear why, as it reported that Chinese hackers have infiltrated US infrastructure and telecommunications networks in anticipation of a future military conflict — likely over Taiwan.
Brandon Wales, the former executive director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, told the Journal that the infiltrations were “designed to ensure they prevail by keeping the US from projecting power, and inducing chaos at home” in the event of such a conflict.
It’s proof that Trump had it right the first time: The PRC is a malicious actor with designs on supplanting America as the world’s preeminent power.
TikTok is among its insidious tools.
Because it’s subject to Chinese law, ByteDance can be — and probably already has been — compelled to turn user data over to the CCP at a moment’s notice.
And as former Rep. Mike Gallagher and incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio have observed, the connections between the PRC and ByteDance are more than theoretical.
ByteDance has already been caught red-handed using TikTok to track journalists’ and protesters’ movements.
Many high-ranking directors at the company are alumni of Chinese state media outlets.
It even has an internal CCP Committee headed by Zhang Fuping, the vice president and editor-in-chief of its Chinese operation, who has called for the app’s algorithm to be informed by the “correct political direction.”
All available evidence suggests that his call has been heeded.
TikTok doesn’t just amplify a steady stream of overt CCP propaganda — it is advancing Chinese interests around the world.
The app has a readily observable bias against Ukraine and Israel, two American allies fighting defensive wars against Russia and terrorist proxies of Iran — the junior members in an emerging, PRC-led axis of evil.
A new study from Rutgers University’s Network Contagion Research Institute found that while Instagram and YouTube searches about the Uyghurs and Tiananmen Square generated overwhelmingly negative content about the PRC, the opposite was true on TikTok.
Joel Finkelstein, the director and chief science officer at the NCRI, has characterized TikTok’s work as that of “scaled indoctrination.”
The debate over TikTok, then, is a debate over whether to allow the United States’ chief geopolitical competitor — a cartoonishly evil regime carrying out a genocide within its own borders and sowing chaos outside them — to continue to gather intelligence on and pump out propaganda to 170 million Americans.
It’s such a no-brainer that even our incompetent, gridlocked Congress managed to see reason and take action.
Biden deserves accolades for signing the TikTok ban into law, just as Trump deserves praise for changing the national conversation on China in the first place.
By coming to TikTok’s defense now, though, Trump risks undoing one of his most significant accomplishments — and doing great harm to his legacy as a relentless defender of US interests.
History will be as kind to those who advocate on TikTok’s behalf as it has been to those who touted the pre-Trump conventional wisdom on the PRC.
The platform might have done the president-elect some good on the campaign trail, but it’s still a Trojan horse.
One that ought to be burned to ashes outside the city walls, not celebrated within them.
Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite.
