John Cassidy writes:

Donald Trump is a compulsive issuer of executive orders: since January, there have been more than two hundred of them. Some are glorified press releases; others are more significant. “Saving TikTok While Protecting National Security” falls decidedly into the second category. Signed last week, on the same day that the Department of Justice indicted James Comey, it is designed to facilitate the transfer of a social-media platform with a hundred and seventy million American users to a consortium that features several of the President’s political and financial benefactors. According to news reports, the potential investors in the TikTok deal include two conservative billionaires—Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, and Rupert Murdoch, the proprietor of Fox News—and two investment firms with ties to the Administration: Susquehanna, which already owns a stake in TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance; and Andreessen Horowitz. Also said to be involved is MGX, an investment fund backed by the government of the United Arab Emirates that recently deposited two billion dollars into crypto assets created by World Liberty Financial, a company that the Trump family controls.

Perhaps the timing of these developments was coincidental, but it didn’t appear that way. Indicting Comey and bringing the U.S. arm of TikTok into the MAGA fold seem like part of the same grand project to concentrate media power in Trump’s hands, or the hands of his allies, and to rout his perceived enemies. To be sure, the executive order was signed days after Disney pushed back against the White House’s pressure campaign and restored Jimmy Kimmel to the air after a brief suspension. But, in today’s media ecosystem, late-night comics on network television don’t have anything comparable to the reach of a social-media behemoth such as TikTok.

The campaign to force TikTok to divest its U.S. operations started out as a bipartisan initiative driven by ill-defined concerns that the app represented a threat to national security. Trump, toward the end of his first term, issued an executive order to ban the social-media platform on these grounds, but the courts struck it down. When Joe Biden was in the White House, he formally rescinded Trump’s ban but demanded a divestment. In 2024, Congress passed a bill, with support from both parties, that mandated a sale or closure of the app by January of this year. While campaigning for reëlection, Trump used TikTok to reach out to younger voters and had a change of heart about banning it. Since coming to office, he has disregarded the language of 2024 legislation and postponed the deadline for a sale four times. The deal he has finally come up with to resolve the impasse warrants inspection from every angle. [Continue reading…]