Donald Trump, Who Initially Pushed To Ban TikTok, Now Campaigning On TikTok
from the politics-is-all-about-hypocrisy dept
This was entirely predictable, but it’s still worth calling out. Donald Trump, who started the whole “we should ban TikTok” idea before changing his mind as soon as Joe Biden decided it was a good idea (and a billionaire Trump backer who also was heavily invested in TikTok gave Trump a call), is now joining Biden in using the platform to campaign.
Former president Donald Trump has joined social media platform TikTok and made his first post late Saturday night, a video featuring the Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO, Dana White, introducing Trump on the social media platform.
The move came despite that fact that as president Trump pushed to ban TikTok by executive order due to the app’s parent company being based in China. Trump said in March 2024 that he believed the app was a national security threat, but later reversed on supporting a ban.
Not too long ago, we mocked Biden for continuing to use TikTok while signing a bill to ban the app as a national security threat, so it’s only fair to now do the same to Trump.
As you may recall, Trump initially moved to ban TikTok after a bunch of folks on TikTok made him look like a fool by reserving thousands of tickets for a rally and then not showing up. Within days, Trump had his administration cook up plans to ban the app, an effort that was eventually blocked by the courts.
You could argue that due to Trump’s recent flip-flop on whether the app should be banned this isn’t quite as hypocritical, and maybe that’s true, but only by a very slight degree.
In both cases, we’re talking about Presidents freaking out over an app that the kids use because they didn’t like how it was being used… and then deciding to use it themselves, because they feel the need to “reach young voters.”
It’s not just ridiculous pandering. It’s hypocritical pandering. If the app is a “national security threat,” then that should surely be true for Presidents and presidential candidates as well.
Or maybe this should be seen as evidence for what both of the candidates know: that TikTok isn’t really a national threat, but is a useful MacGuffin to present themselves as “tough on national security” or “against China” or some shit like that.
Filed Under: campaign, donald trump, joe biden, tiktok ban
Companies: tiktok
Comments on “Donald Trump, Who Initially Pushed To Ban TikTok, Now Campaigning On TikTok”
Some Gen Alpha kid is gonna give him a stroke and we’re gonna owe them for the rest of our lives.
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Oh, if only…
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It’s like raaaaiiiiiiiiiin on your…wedding day…
It was a trap
Trump inadvertently (because he’s too dumb to do smart things on purpose) set a trap for Biden, and Biden idiotically jumped into it by signing the blatantly unconstitutional TikTok ban.
Sometimes stupidity has consequences, and in this case, while nobody’s going to vote for Trump because he magically changed his mind on TikTok, it’s possible that some young people — particularly those with very large, loyal, young audiences whose livelihoods Biden chose to shit on — will refuse to vote for Biden over this.
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Biden would have ended up clobbered on Nat Sec with old folks terrified and looking for any reason to vote Trump. And scared old folks vote reliably. All roads lead to Rome.
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Sometimes stupidity has consequences, and in this case, while nobody’s going to vote for Trump because he magically changed his mind on TikTok, it’s possible that some young people — particularly those with very large, loyal, young audiences whose livelihoods Biden chose to shit on — will refuse to vote for Biden over this.
So long as they’re not just idiots but ones with a particularly short memory, given Trump was the one who started the whole ‘TikTok must be shut down!’ fearmongering. Sure Biden pulled the trigger on the ban, but he was just doing so with the gun Trump handed him when his efforts to do so didn’t work out.
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Actually, Congress pulled the trigger, using the same structure as the attempted ban that failed in the courts under Trump. Like that one, it’s subject to a lawsuit where the justification and reasoning is going to be scrutinized, especially with (mostly GOP) lawmakers stupidly admitting the basis of support for the PAFACA was because of (constitutionally protected) speech they don’t like (like content critical of or highlighting the horrors of the war in Gaza, along with foreign propaganda, which the “right to receive” concept applied in Lamont v. Postmaster General—a case dealing with a Postal Service statute requiring mail recipients to opt into receiving Communist propaganda, lest it be detained and destroyed by USPS before reaching the recipient otherwise—also prevents the government from restricting).
Unless the government can prove that the law is the only way to address the issue (they likely can’t, especially when mitigative measures like privacy reforms, including one built into the divest-or-ban law itself that prohibits data brokers from selling data to adversary countries, exist and the government can’t prohibit access to propaganda, especially without ensnaring other kinds of protected speech, as the First Amendment doesn’t exempt disinformation), the D.C. Court of Appeals may well reduce the PAFACA to just the data broker provision (a la how the courts left Section 230 as the only constitutional provision in the Communications Decency Act, while striking down the unconstitutional “indecent material” regulations).
Well of course. Republicans love hurting kids.
If Republicans actually believed that TikTok was bad they wouldn’t use it.
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Most Republican politicians don’t use it. The irony is that there has been conservatives and libertarians on TikTok for years, but because of the “China bad” posturing in targeting the platform, the right’s presence is limited to random everyday people (many spouting bad political takes easily roasted by anyone with a functioning thought process), and a handful of influencers (some who grew through TikTok, and a few who developed their presence on other platforms).
Vivek Ramaswamy fits the hypocrite description in the same way as Trump, as he railed against TikTok during his campaign, only to join it after dropping out of the Republican presidential primaries. That said, in Trump World, now that TFG’s using it, anyone who rails against TikTok now will face his wrath, and either be forced to flip-flop in support of the platform or get targeted by Trump and his inner circle (Marco Rubio, who was railing against TikTok on the day of this post, hasn’t gotten the memo, and that may mean bye-bye to his hope of being Trump’s sycophant VP).
With Trump using it, TikTok is definitely a national security threat.
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Amen.
It’s pretty sad after all the efforts Elon made to build an heaven for Trump voters.
Or maybe it become such a havoc that Trump himself couldn’t get any visibility from his nonsense.
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The Jeff Yass thing aside, we know Trump holds grudges against anyone who he believes wronged him, including social media platforms that banned him as a result of J6 for understandable reasons. The fact is he (and his campaign) has barely posted on X/Twitter and YouTube, and hasn’t posted on Facebook since his accounts were reinstated.
TikTok is the only major mainstream social media platform left that hasn’t blocked him, since he wasn’t using it before this past Saturday, and he is running for president to stay out of prison, so he figures reaching a broader base (not that he’s done a good job at expanding his voter base, despite what polls suggest) will help him win, even if he’s branded a hypocrite for using the very platform he tried to illegally shut down (under the same forced sale rationale that the law Biden signed is purportedly based on, even though several aspects in that provision seem like an attempt at a backdoor attempt at a ban by putting unworkable demands that would actually hinder a sale, rather than facilitate one) to campaign.
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i don’t really trust the polls
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I’ll never understand the US obsession with constant campaigning and polling. This far out, there’s even a term coined about how things regularly change late in the game (“October Surprise”) and it seems fairly well accepted that there’s many potential voters who just won’t answer polls anyway. Some pollsters seem to have this figures out, but the results of special elections that ended up being largely decided by a backlash against attacks on female reproductive rights seem to have blindsided many pollsters.
Polls can be interesting things for internal use within a campaign, but in terms of trying to determine an outcome months away from an election for the general public they don’t seem very useful. At best, they confirm what people are already seeing in the news, at worst they can sway people to not bother voting and thus affect the outcome away from what would have happened if the polls weren’t telling people a result was inevitable…
Surprising absolutely no one.
Obviously, DJT is now under the Chinese government’s direct mind control. Spread the truth!
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Your claim of a mind existing within the Donald is just too courteous.
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Trump’s statements are for entertainment purposes only. Any relation to Trump’s actual opinions, or to reality, are purely coincidental.