from the gosh-did-the-alarm-go-off-already? dept

Who Knew You Could Press A Snooze Button On The Law? Trump Delays TikTok Ban Enforcement Again

If you’re the President of the United States and you don’t like a law, you can apparently just… decide not to enforce it for a while? I mean, it’s not supposed to work that way, but for the past 74 days, that’s exactly what’s happened with the TikTok ban. Not just ignoring it quietly — Trump has explicitly declared we’re ignoring it. And today, he announced we’ll keep ignoring it for another 75 days.

The history here is instructive. First, Trump wanted to ban TikTok because teens were mean to him on it. Then Biden wanted to ban it because… China bad? Then Congress actually passed a ban because kids were using TikTok to express opinions about Gaza. Throughout all of this, the ban remained both stupid and unconstitutional (yes, even though the Supreme Court disagrees).

Somehow, this collection of terrible reasons resulted in an actual law, scheduled to take effect the day before the new administration started. But then Trump, whose stance conveniently shifted after a major TikTok investor donated to his campaign, simply declared “let’s ignore the law for 75 days” while floating vague ideas about “the US” buying TikTok.

For 75 days, we’ve mostly heard whispers about potential buyers expressing interest. There was some talk about how a deal was “imminent,” though many of the leaked details sound suspiciously familiar — China would retain control of the algorithm, data would be hosted on Oracle servers, with Oracle auditing for safety. If this sounds like déjà vu, it should: this already happened back in 2022. We wrote about it at the time, but apparently that was in a parallel universe, because everyone has been acting like it didn’t happen.

Anyway, apparently that “imminent” deal wasn’t actually so imminent. Because what is time, really?

Again, let’s be clear, because this is beyond ridiculous. The President has no authority to just declare “we’re ignoring this law for 75 days unless you do the thing I want.” But, that seems to be what a bunch of people are just going with. Astounding.

And, remember, this comes after years of politicians and the media insisting loudly and repeatedly that TikTok was “digital fentanyl” and the most dangerous thing in the world. The reasons would change based on who you were talking to, but either it was the Chinese Communist Party spying on all your phones (not how this works) or they were promoting pro-China propaganda (even as US views towards China are at all time lows) or they were promoting division (seems like that was cable news actually) or they were promoting terrorists (I dunno, man, none of this makes sense).

The fundamental problem isn’t just that this is Calvinball policymaking — though it absolutely is that. It’s that we’ve stumbled into a world where federal laws have expiration dates determined by presidential mood swings. And while everyone’s focused on whether TikTok will sell or survive (that is, if they’re not focused on their retirement savings being drained by the whole “destroying the economy through not understanding trade deficits” thing), they’re missing the bigger story here: we’re running an experiment to see if laws still matter when the president decides they don’t. Early results aren’t encouraging.