Sen. Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut Democrat, is advising President-elect Trump to drop his plan to save TikTok from a looming federal order to shut down operations in the United States.
Mr. Trump pursued a ban during his first term as president, but changed his mind during his presidential campaign this year, announcing that he now opposed efforts to restrict the wildly popular China-founded video-sharing app.
Congress passed and President Biden signed a conditional ban into law earlier this year, ordering TikTok’s U.S. operation to separate itself from ByteDance, its China-based parent company, or face severe operating restrictions in America. Ongoing litigation challenging the law is swirling in federal courts as a potential ban looms early next year.
Mr. Blumenthal said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday that lawmakers are determined to see the law enforced and TikTok forced to divest or shut down, regardless of the president-elect’s policy preferences.
“The law requires the divestment of TikTok’s American operations next year; the president can extend the deadline once, but he can’t ignore the law,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “If he wants to change the law, he can try, but I can tell him and tell the American people, the Senate’s pretty strong here in favor of that law.”
TikTok officials said that the app at the start of 2024 had some 170 million monthly active users in the U.S. market. Efforts at the state level to block TikTok have been put on hold by courts on First Amendment free-speech grounds.
Tracking the president-elect’s position on the controversy has not been easy. More than four years ago, the first Trump administration worked to ban TikTok via executive order, citing national security considerations and ByteDance’s links to the communist government in Beijing. Following an August 2020 order from Mr. Trump, then-Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said the following month that he would begin banning transactions involving TikTok.
But federal courts stymied the attempted ban in December 2020 and the Biden administration came to power the following month with a different agenda. The Democratic administration pursued a more deliberative approach, favoring federal agencies reviewing national security concerns associated with the app.
In the face of strong support in Congress, Mr. Biden signed a bill into law in April requiring TikTok’s U.S. branch to break its links to China or halt operations in the American market by January 2025. By then, however, Mr. Trump began raising concerns about the wisdom of restricting the app.
“The thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media,” Mr. Trump told CNBC in March. After the TikTok law passed in April, Mr. Trump formally joined the platform in June.
By September, Mr. Trump came out strongly for keeping the platform online. In a video posted to his Truth Social platform, Mr. Trump encouraged TikTok users to vote for him if they wanted to maintain access to the app: “For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump,” Mr. Trump said in the September video. “The other side’s closing it up but I’m now a big star on TikTok.”
“If you don’t care about TikTok and other things like safety, security, and prosperity, then you can vote for a Marxist who’s going to destroy our country,” Mr. Trump added.
Complicating the picture is the fact that some of Mr. Trump’s early nominees for top national security posts in his new administration have differing views of the potential ban. Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, for example, Mr. Trump’s pick to be secretary of state, has long favored a TikTok ban.
Regardless of Mr. Trump’s policy decision, Congress looks poised to pursue additional measures to crack down on China’s influence on American politics. Mr. Blumenthal indicated that TikTok is not the only Chinese application in lawmakers’ crosshairs and he advocated for a new tough approach to China from the Congress.
“We need to radically rethink how we are protecting against Beijing’s spying and influence,” Mr. Blumenthal said.
He said lawmakers’ restrictions on TikTok could also apply to Chinese apps that seek to take TikTok’s place in the American market.
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
• Ryan Lovelace can be reached at rlovelace@washingtontimes.com.
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