National Security

Trump’s Forced Sale of TikTok is Dead

Written by SK Ashby

Trump's effort to force TikTok parent company ByteDance to sell the social media platform to Americans was already effectively dead when a federal judge blocked the Trump regime from blacklisting the app, but now it's official.

The Biden administration is not going to continue or carry out Trump's personal vendetta against the video sharing platform.

From the Wall Street Journal:

A U.S. plan to force the sale of TikTok’s American operations to a group including Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. has been shelved indefinitely, people familiar with the situation said, as President Biden undertakes a broad review of his predecessor’s efforts to address potential security risks from Chinese tech companies.

The TikTok deal—which had been driven by then-President Donald Trump—has languished since last fall in the midst of successful legal challenges to the U.S. government’s effort by TikTok’s owner, China’s ByteDance Ltd.

In November, a federal judge ruled that the Trump regime could not block TikTok's American operations for "national security" reasons because the regime did not substantiate any of the claims against the platform. The ruling judge wrote that the threats alleged by the government were purely "hypothetical."

The truth is Trump tried to ban the platform because Generation Z kids used it to disrupt his failed rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma (pictured above) last summer. You know, the rally that killed Herman Cain. This was one of Trump's personal grudges translated into official policy.

Even if TikTok poses some kind of cybersecurity threat, the Biden administration is going to make their own determinations and take their own actions. It would be necessary to do so in any case given that the Trump regime's effort was already blocked in court.

Like the Biden administration's handling of Trump's blacklisting of Huawei, the way they handle this related issue might be an indication of what the next several years of relations with China will look like. It already looks less confrontational or at least less nonsensical.