By David French / The New York Times
There’s a pattern to President Donald Trump’s second term. He breaks the law and bullies his opponents; and yet he still wins.
The examples are legion. He barrels through the First Amendment rights of law firms and universities, and they cut a deal. The chair of the Federal Communications Commission threatens to revoke broadcasting licenses over Jimmy Kimmel, and ABC yanks him off the air, if briefly. He files a meritless lawsuit against CBS, and the network writes him a huge check.
One of Trump’s most consequential victories occurred Friday, when he reportedly reached a deal with the Chinese government to hand control of TikTok, the wildly popular social media app, to a consortium of American investors, including Oracle and Andreessen Horowitz, which are connected to billionaire Trump allies Larry Ellison and Marc Andreessen.
In the process, he defied a law passed by Congress and risked U.S. national security. All to preserve access to a social media app while he negotiated a deal that benefited his billionaire allies, pulling even more of America’s public square into MAGA’s sphere of influence.
Arguing that Trump’s TikTok deal is one of the most consequential actions of his second term may seem surprising. After all, only a relatively small minority of U.S. adults over 50 use the app; it’s popular mainly with members of Gen Z (and it is very popular with them). If you’re unfamiliar with it, it may seem like one of many similar apps. Doesn’t every social media site feed you videos now?
But TikTok is no ordinary social media app. In 2024, Congress passed a law by a wide bipartisan majority banning it in the United States unless it divested itself of its Chinese ownership. That was because Chinese control of the app raises two serious national security concerns.
First, TikTok, like virtually every social media app, vacuums up an enormous amount of personal data from its users. The national security implications are obvious. Under Chinese law, TikTok’s parent company could be forced to hand over its data on American users; data that, among other things, could potentially be used to blackmail prominent Americans.
Second, TikTok is wildly popular in large part because of its algorithm, and Chinese control of that algorithm means that one of our nation’s most powerful foreign rivals could flood the American public square with Chinese propaganda, or — more insidiously — it could subtly tilt the conversation in China’s favor or just continue to promote content that exacerbates American divisions.
Imagine if, in the days leading up to World War II, Germany or Japan had instant, unfettered access to roughly half of America and was able to immediately sow doubt and confusion on the eve of open war. No rational country would allow such access.
But Trump has continued to court this risk, day after day, month after month, throughout his second term. His actions aren’t just unwise; they’re blatantly illegal. He defied the TikTok ban with impunity while he and his administration negotiated a deal with the Chinese government for an entity that will now be at least partially controlled by some of his billionaire allies.
Crony capitalism has reached a new low.
When Congress passed the ban, it was able to achieve rare bipartisan consensus in part because the first effort to ban TikTok came from … Trump. In 2020, Trump published an executive order outlawing transactions between ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok, and any U.S. citizens. So banning TikTok was initially a Republican foreign policy position.
But Trump’s executive order never went into effect. Instead, it was replaced by something far better, an actual statute. In an exceedingly rare example of the branches of American government working exactly as they were intended to work, Congress passed the law banning TikTok, President Joe Biden signed it and the Supreme Court upheld it without any dissenting votes.
The law was supposed to be enforced Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s second inauguration. According to the statute, the president had the power to grant a single 90-day delay in enforcement, as long as he certified to Congress that TikTok was making progress in divesting its Chinese ownership.
Biden was the first president to disregard the law. He declined to enforce the act on his last day in office, leaving the matter to Trump.
Trump, for his part, just threw the law in the trash. Last week, he extended the enforcement delay for a fourth time.
It’s unclear why Trump has reversed course on TikTok, but we do know that he has a huge following on the platform, and MAGA influencers — led in part by Charlie Kirk before he was assassinated — also reach tens of millions of Americans every day.
When Trump unilaterally extended the law’s deadline last week, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said that China and the Trump administration had reached a “framework” on a new deal, but even Friday the details of that framework were vague, and the deal appears far from final.
Earlier in the week, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., put out a statement expressing concern that “the reported licensing deal may involve ongoing reliance by the new TikTok on a ByteDance algorithm and application that could allow continued CCP control or influence.”
That would be a worst-case scenario; in which Trump declares victory without coming close to fully addressing the national security concerns posed by the app.
But even a best-case scenario is bad. Trump will have openly defied the law and potentially given the Chinese Communist Party access to months more of American data through control of the application, then handed control of the app — and its immense reach — to close political allies.
It’s impossible to separate Trump’s actions regarding TikTok from his administration’s threats against broadcast networks (including the threats that preceded Kimmel’s ouster) and his grotesque bullying of journalists. On Friday, for example, he said, “When 97% of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech” — a blatantly erroneous statement about constitutional law.
Trump’s quest for media control is bad enough, but it’s incalculably worse when he compounds lawlessness with a reckless disregard for America’s vital national security interests. Checking Chinese influence appears to be less important to Trump than controlling American discourse and expanding his own media reach.
If our laws depend on Trump’s voluntary compliance — and Congress won’t lift a finger to defend the laws it has passed — then the president is unleashed. There is no law holding him back. Instead, we are left to the whims and desires of a man who cares about only himself, a man who is willing to discard any law or standard to satisfy his insatiable lust for power.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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