In the world of crypto, to get “rug-pulled”, or “rugged”, means to be scammed out of your investment. Typically, some anonymous backers will hype up some cryptocurrency or NFT or whatever, and then disappear with the investors’ cash.
Crypto is risky, but so is the world of populist politics. Many conservatives who care deeply about national security chose to invest their hopes and their political support in Donald Trump, on the theory that he’s tough on China. During his first term, this seemed to clearly be the case. Trump ditched the long-standing policy of engagement with China, slapped major tariffs on Chinese goods, implemented export controls on Huawei, initiated a hunt for Chinese spies in academia, tried (unsuccessfully) to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company, and blamed Covid squarely on China. Biden has continued this hawkish approach, but Trump was the original. So it made sense for conservatives to assume that if Trump was reelected, he would keep the pressure on the CCP.
Trump’s turn against aid to Ukraine only put a slight dent in that hope. Conservatives like Elbridge Colby, who have been arguing in favor of a refocusing away from Europe and the Middle East and toward Asia, were able to see the turn against Ukraine aid as an opportunity rather than as an ominous warning. If Trump forced the Europeans to take the lead in holding the line against Russia, while pivoting U.S. attention and power toward China, all would be well. Buoyed by this hope, and watching traditional conservatives like Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley fall before the MAGA juggernaut, natsec conservatives have been reconciling themselves to the idea of Trump 2024.
But this past week, that hope was pretty conclusively dashed.
There have been sporadic efforts by both Congress and the Biden administration to force the Chinese company ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company, but these efforts didn’t go anywhere. Then suddenly, last week, the House of Representatives advanced a bill to force a TikTok sale, on the grounds that it’s a “foreign adversary controlled application”. (You can read the text of the bill here, if you’re interested.)
TikTok launched a desperate all-out campaign to keep the bill from getting out of committee. The app sent a push notification to its users, urging them to call their representatives and stop the bill. The campaign failed, and the bill passed the committee 50-0, with leaders of both parties voicing thunderous support. Biden has said that if Congress passes it, he’ll sign it.
And then, suddenly, the Chinese company found a savior. That savior’s name was Donald Trump. In a stunning reversal, Trump came out swinging against a TikTok ban:
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump wrote on Thursday night.
Observers quickly came up with a theory for why Trump flip-flopped. Trump recently had a very cordial meeting with the billionaire Jeff Yass, who has a $33 billion stake (yes, you read that right) in the Chinese-owned company:
One American who does not [want to force TikTok to sell] is Jeff Yass, a conservative hedge-fund manager who has a $33 billion stake in TikTok and has reportedly threatened to cut off funding to Republicans who support the divestment bill.
Last week, Yass visited Mar-a-Lago, where Trump praised him as “fantastic,” and media reports touted that Yass could potentially contribute generously to Trump’s campaign.
Trump badly needs money; his campaign is hurting for funds and he’s in legal trouble as well. Given that, plus his record of corruption, it’s absolutely plausible that he’d sell out to an ally of the Chinese Communist Party for a few bucks. The theory is bolstered by the fact that former Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway is being paid by the Club for Growth to advance ByteDance’s interests on Capitol Hill; Jeff Yass is the Club’s biggest donor.
The TikTok bill’s conservative champions thus abruptly found the rug pulled out from under their feet. The bill might still pass, but given how House Republicans lined up behind Trump on Ukraine aid, it’s fair to say that its future is now much more in doubt.
If the bill gets defeated, it won’t just be the embarrassment of a lifetime for China hawks who placed their hopes in Trump. It will allow an engine of propaganda and spyware to continue to compromise America’s national security. And it will show that the U.S.’ position in the emerging cold war is perilously weak.
TikTok is really bad, and should be forced to sell
First, let’s talk about why forcing ByteDance to sell TikTok is important. A lot of people call this a “TikTok ban”, but in fact it’s not. The bill in Congress would simply force TikTok’s corporate ownership to change; the video service itself, with all its silly dance videos and bad news analysis, would remain.
But it’s notable that to TikTok’s current leadership, a change of ownership might as well be the same as a ban:
This is absolutely false (though the Community Note on this tweet was mysteriously removed). But it shows that to TikTok’s current leadership, a sale and a ban amount to the same thing. And the Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda mouthpieces agree. Hu Xijin, the former editor-in-chief of the CCP-run Global Times, tweeted this:
So these folks definitely think it’s crucially important that TikTok remain Chinese-owned and controlled.
The desperation of TikTok’s attempt to kill the bill only drives home this point. Let’s pause for a moment and consider the absolute insanity of telling millions of American children that their sign up as foot soldiers in an ad-hoc political pressure campaign:
US congressional offices have told the BBC they are being deluged with calls from TikTok users about legislation that could see the popular app banned.
Callers range from teenagers to the elderly, and most are "really confused and are calling because 'TikTok told me to'", one Republican staffer revealed…Florida Congressman Neal Dunn's office told the BBC it has received more than 900 calls from TikTokers, "many of which were vulnerable school-aged children" and some of whose extreme rhetoric had to be flagged for security reasons…
“I am deeply troubled by reports of young people calling Congress, threatening to commit suicide or otherwise harm themselves," [New York Representative Ritchie] Torres said in a statement to the BBC.
In fact, it gets even wilder. TikTok is seizing the stock of shareholders who publicly criticize it:
Current and former TikTok employees who criticize the company risk losing any stock they own—in some cases worth millions of dollars—under a shareholder agreement that bans disparaging the social media service…Five attorneys who practice shareholder law told Fortune that TikTok’s non-disparagement provision is unusual, but not illegal…
TikTok’s shareholder contract, viewed by Fortune, says shareholders cannot “directly or indirectly make any critical, adverse or disparaging statement or comment about the Company or any of the Company’s subsidiaries, affiliates, directors, officers, or employees.” If shareholders are caught doing so, “all of the participant’s restricted share units will be immediately forfeited.”
Why are both TikTok’s current management and CCP mouthpieces so desperate to prevent a sale? After all, TikTok would still exist, and ByteDance would get tens of billions of dollars in cash. There’s only one answer that makes sense: Chinese authorities believe that TikTok is an important tool for influencing public opinion in the United States.
There are two reasons usually given for forcing a TikTok sale. First, people complain that the app spies on Americans for the CCP. This is true. The company has repeatedly been caught doing any number of bad things with its American users’ data — tracking journalists who criticize the company, forwarding private data to the Chinese parent company (where the law stipulates that the CCP then owns the information), and so on. Efforts to police the app to prevent these misuses of data have been helpless, hapless, and ultimately hopeless.
But the bigger concern about TikTok isn’t spying — it’s propaganda. About a third of young Americans, and a seventh of Americans in general, now regularly get their news from the app:
The problem here isn’t that the news young Americans get on TikTok is bad — much of it certainly is bad, but that’s more of a problem with news consumers than with the app. The problem is that the news is subtly and invisibly controlled by a foreign adversary government.
Back in December, I wrote about a recent study showing that TikTok selectively suppresses videos on topics of concern to the CCP:
[There’s a concern that] through subtle manipulation of the algorithm, TikTok can steer Americans away from topics of discussion that are sensitive to the CCP, and toward CCP-approved points of view.
A new study by the Network Contagion Research Institute confirms that this is already happening, in a very substantial way. By comparing the hashtags of short videos on Instagram and TikTok, they can get an idea of which topics the TikTok algorithm is encouraging or suppressing.
The results are highly unsurprising for anyone who’s familiar with CCP information suppression. Hashtags dealing with general political topics (BLM, Trump, abortion, etc.) are about 38% as popular on TikTok as on Instagram. But hashtags on topics sensitive to the CCP — the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Hong Kong protests and crackdown, etc. — are only 1% as prevalent on Tiktok as on Instagram. The difference is absolutely staggering:
For some of these topics, differences in the user bases of the two apps might account for these differences — for example, TikTok is banned in India, meaning the topic of Kashmir is unlikely to be discussed on the app. But overall, the pattern is unmistakable — every single topic that the CCP doesn’t want people to talk about is getting suppressed on TikTok.
Again, pay close attention to what this study says. The point is not that topics like Tiananmen Square are less popular on TikTok than on Instagram. The point is that the difference between the two platforms is much, much greater for topics like Tiananmen Square than for other politically sensitive topics that the CCP doesn’t care about.
This is very damning evidence indeed. And even if you’re skeptical of circumstantial evidence like this, there are leaked documents that prove the company has done exactly the kind of censoring that the study found:
TikTok, the popular Chinese-owned social network, instructs its moderators to censor videos that mention Tiananmen Square, Tibetan independence, or the banned religious group Falun Gong, according to leaked documents detailing the site’s moderation guidelines.
If this isn’t a smoking gun, there’s no such thing as a smoking gun.
So why does this matter? Suppressing Americans’ access to videos about Tiananmen Square might or might not sound like that big of a deal, but consider what TikTok would be able to do in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The U.S. would have to make a very rapid, highly consequential decision about whether to come to Taiwan’s aid. Imagine anti-Taiwan videos flooding TikTok, threatening to send the President’s poll numbers plunging. Imagine the U.S. government hesitating in the face of that concerted flood of manipulated public opinion, and thus losing a critical confrontation with its most powerful foreign adversary — along with TSMC, the freedom of 23 million people, and the confidence and respect of the world.
TikTok’s desperate pressure campaign against the divestiture bill backfired precisely because it seemed to provide a clear demonstration of the app’s power. If TikTok could instantly convert its users into lobbyists against that bill, why couldn’t it do the exact same thing in the case of a war between China and the U.S.?
TikTok defenders will claim, of course, that the app’s silent, algorithmic suppression of its users’ videos, and its occasional attempts to co-opt users into a lobbying campaign, is no different than a newspaper demonstrating an editorial slant — and is thus protected by the First Amendment. I don’t know whether that argument will hold up in court. But I do think that if liberal democracies can’t prevent a totalitarian government from pressuring their children into its service, then liberalism as a system of government is in grave peril in the 21st century.
Trump is just going to keep doing this
There are many models that you can use to interpret the events you read about in the news. I’ve found that one of the most useful models is “Cold War 2” — the idea that every issue of international importance eventually breaks down into two sides, corresponding to the two main power blocs of nations in the world. As long as this conflict continues, every international issue will tend to be polarized into a pro-China/pro-Russia camp and a pro-liberal-democracy camp.
I find that this is a good model for explaining Trump’s sudden defection from the China hawks to the pro-CCP shills. Yes, of course Trump is corrupt, and yes of course he wants money from wherever he can get it, including Jeff Yass. This will inexorably drive him away into the Chinese camp, because China has the deepest pockets with which to buy mouthpieces in liberal democracies. The book Wireless Wars cites a number of cases in which Huawei paid critics in the UK and elsewhere to become its spokesmen, after which their positions on the company did an abrupt 180. China can’t pay Trump quite that directly, but Russia has shown that it’s possible to get money to places where it can help him out.
Meanwhile, the U.S. legal system is bleeding Trump’s fortune, and U.S. institutions continually clash with Trump. So defending liberal democracy is not in the interests of Trump’s pocketbook, but finding ways to take money from the totalitarian powers definitely is.
Of course, some national security conservatives have deep pockets as well. Jacob Helberg, author of The Wires of War, listed some of these in a recent thread. But even if the likes of Vinod Khosla, Palantir, Anduril, and Founders Fund could match billionaires like Jeff Yass dollar for dollar, there’s little chance that their pockets are as deep as those of the Chinese and Russian governments.
And it’s also probably true that Trump has non-monetary incentives to protect TikTok. The app leans strongly to the left, but many of its videos attack Biden over the Gaza war. That could help Trump win in November. Of course, those videos would still be on the app even if ByteDance were forced to sell TikTok — but maybe Trump thinks the current Chinese ownership is giving anti-Biden videos an algorithmic boost.
And the other force pushing Trump to align with China is Russia. China and Russia have strengthened their alliance despite the stresses caused by the Ukraine war. Trump’s MAGA faction, influenced more by Tucker Carlson and other right-wing influencers than by Trump himself, has taken the pro-Russia side in that conflict. In order to keep his base fired up, Trump has to take generally pro-Russia stances as well. Meanwhile, Biden is still a staunch defender of Ukraine aid. And there’s anecdotal evidence that TikTok has steered users toward pro-Russia videos, so this theoretically helps Trump.
Note that Tucker Carlson, Russia’s staunchest defender within the overall MAGA movement, was fighting against a TikTok ban long before Trump flipped sides. “Where Tucker goes, so goes Trump” is not a bad predictor.
In other words, it makes sense to say the TikTok fight is part of Cold War 2, and that at least parts of the MAGA faction of the GOP have been co-opted into the anti-American side. This is hardly unprecedented — the isolationists in World War 2 were often co-opted into pushing Axis narratives, and leftists in Cold War 1 were often co-opted into becoming Soviet mouthpieces. It’s just an inevitable challenge that liberal democracies have to deal with, again and again.
This puts national security conservatives in a very difficult position. Even if they privately think Trump is bad, and wish for someone like DeSantis or Haley to take over the GOP, they can’t go against Trump publicly. Trump’s base, and therefore his control of the GOP, is way too strong. If natsec conservatives start loudly denouncing Trump, they’ll get slammed as RINOs, and Republicans will stop listening to what they say. But if and when Trump becomes a CCP defender, the price of loyalty and continued influence for natsec conservatives becomes total abandonment of their primary political cause.
It’s definitely not a position I’m envious of. Honestly, I don’t know what they should do. But something like this was always likely from the start; Trump is just a corrupt operator who cares only about himself and is willing to throw anyone and anything else overboard at a moment’s notice. That was always a bad horse to hitch your wagon to.
Update: Here is a good post by Mike Solana, whom I would generally place in the “national security conservative” camp. He pulls no punches regarding Rand Paul and Vivek Ramaswamy, but goes easier on Trump, writing that his TikTok defense was token and halfhearted:
A few days after that [meeting with Jeff Yass], Trump turned against the TikTok policy he himself first championed. “America First”? Sure, right after China.
An incredible scandal…
Jeff Yass has funneled MILLIONS of dollars into Vivek's PAC…Practically, then, it’s clear [Vivek] just wants the CCP to control the company. Which is insane. How did we drive all the way from “China virus” to “I will defend China’s access to American data with my life”?…It’s a strange position for a purportedly “America First” politician…
While popular figures in Trump’s orbit, from Hope Hicks to David Urban, were recently bought by ByteDance, my sense is there is nonetheless too much momentum for divestiture, and Trump doesn’t want to fully torch his anti-globalist reputation. As bad as it looks — on account of it is actually bad — it’s worth keeping in mind Trump is sufficiently influential among Republicans that he could probably kill the divestiture overnight if that’s what he really wanted. Instead, he published a transparently silly post, clearly in exchange for money, and did not explicitly call to stop the bill.
This seems like the most prudent path for the natsec conservatives — demolish Trump’s pro-TikTok allies, but give Trump himself a way to gracefully back out. But knowing what kind of guy Trump is, and knowing how lavishly the CCP compensates their shills, I fear that this strategy is setting the natsec conservatives up for continued disappointment.
Update 2: Predictably, MAGA types are beginning to fall in behind Trump and his new pro-CCP position. Marjorie Taylor Greene has been tweeting repeatedly about how the TikTok bill is a Democratic plot:
And then there was this gem, posted (and then later deleted) by a college Republican group at UCLA:
It’s not difficult to see the way things are heading here.
Update 3: Amazingly, the TikTok bill passed the House with a comfortable bipartisan majority despite Trump’s opposition. Even more impressively, only 15 of the 65 Representatives who voted against the bill were Republicans, showing that Trump’s sway over the party may not be as absolute as believed. More likely, Trump & co. simply didn’t have enough time to work their magic on the opinion of the GOP base. Anyway, we’ll see how the bill does in the Senate.
This bill seems like a great opportunity for America to have a hard conversation with itself about the balance of individual rights in the form of freedom of speech and the collective good in the form of a strong democracy.
Incredible how Trump continues to get worse over time. Every time you think he’s reached the nadir, it gets worse.
This bill seems like a great opportunity for America to have a hard conversation with itself about the balance of individual rights in the form of freedom of speech and the collective good in the form of a strong democracy.