The Trump-TikTok Flirtation

donald trump phone
The view from inside TikTok is that Trump is not only a top performer, but his hypothetical future presidency may also be their best shot at avoiding a forced sale or outright ban. Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post/Getty Images
Tara Palmeri
May 9, 2024

What a difference four years can make. Several months before the 2020 election, Donald Trump floated the idea of banning TikTok, likely following the recommendation of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was pushing the argument that the app being owned by a Chinese company, ByteDance, constituted a national security risk. Soon after, Trump indeed attempted to ban TikTok by executive order, but the effort was thwarted by the D.C. District Court for being “arbitrary and capricious.” Some perceived it as a cynical ploy by Trump to disconnect Biden from the millions of young people who’d become hooked on the app during Covid and got a kick out of posting anti-Trump content. But Washington has been largely unified in its TikTok anxiety. Last month, of course, Biden signed a startlingly bipartisan bill into law that will ban the app if ByteDance hasn’t divested from its U.S. operations within nine months.