Kristof: Trump has already made U.S. weaker, more vulnerable

By Nicholas Kristof / The New York Times

President Donald Trump said in his inaugural address that he had “no higher responsibility than to defend our country.”

So what did Trump do on his first day in office? He made America weaker and more vulnerable.

Trump’s move to breathe new life into TikTok in the United States is the best example, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. But it wasn’t the only such move.

One of the threats looming over all of us is a viral disease that begins in a distant corner of the world, as we saw in the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak and in the coronavirus pandemic. A guardrail protecting us from pandemics is the World Health Organization, which works to stop viruses early in foreign countries, before they spread. Yet Trump announced on his first day that the United States will withdraw from the organization, elevating the risk that the next virus goes global and kills large numbers of Americans.

Trump is not entirely wrong when he accuses Democrats of sometimes having been too lax about law and order. Yet on assuming the presidency, he sided with domestic terrorists over law enforcement when he moved to free every person incarcerated for attacking the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

“I got a pardon baby,” posted Jacob Chansley, known as the QAnon Shaman. “Now I am gonna buy some guns,” he wrote, using an expletive.

One Proud Boy told Reuters the pardons would help with recruitment and that members would feel “bulletproof.” On a pro-Trump website, Reuters counted more than two dozen people calling for the execution of judges, police officers or Democratic officials, saying that some of these people should be hanged, beaten to death or fed into wood chippers.

Some Republicans will disagree with me on Trump’s pardons. But Democrats and Republicans largely agree that a central threat to U.S. national security comes from China. If a conflict arises, it’s assumed that the United States and China will be in a race to turn off each other’s electrical grids, banking networks and satellite systems.

In this competition, TikTok is a Chinese ace. Instead of adhering to a 2024 law forcing China to give up that card, Trump has now extended the deadline for 75 days “so that we can make a deal” for TikTok to survive in the United States. That delay undercuts the rule of law and raises the prospect that China may continue to have a window on the 170 million of Americans with TikTok accounts.

The Supreme Court, in its unanimous decision upholding the law against TikTok, cited reports that the data TikTok collects from users includes ages, phone numbers, contacts, internet addresses, exact locations and contents of private messages sent through the app.

Indeed, when Trump tried to restrict TikTok in 2020 (he was against it before he was for it), he cited the way it “automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users.”

If I were China’s minister of state security, I would be asking about any TikTok accounts of Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s four children. I’d also inquire about accounts of children of people across the government and military, looking to turn phones and laptops into microphones and cameras, as well as track locations, find blackmail material and locate still more targets.

TikTok didn’t dispute the data collection in the Supreme Court case but claimed that it was “unlikely” that China would force the company to hand over information. Really? Chinese companies are required by law to cooperate with State Security. Even foreign-owned companies have wilted under the pressure.

Just ask Wang Xiaoning, a dissident whom China imprisoned for 10 years after Yahoo provided the government evidence linking him to emails and pro-democracy writings on Yahoo forums. If a major U.S. company kowtows to the Chinese government, how can one expect that a Chinese company will withstand the pressure?

I spent five years as The New York Times’ Beijing bureau chief, living in a bugged apartment (one of my Chinese friends worked part-time translating private conversations in my compound for the Chinese government) and being tailed when I left the apartment, with Chinese staff forced to report to State Security on my activities. Once I pointed out to a taxi driver the way we were being tailed, and he glanced at me in astonishment. “What are you?” he asked. “A murderer?” All that may be inevitable for certain Americans in China, but we shouldn’t help State Security engage in surveillance on U.S. soil.

There’s another factor: About 40 percent of young adults in the United States regularly get news from TikTok, and researchers find evidence that TikTok’s algorithm systematically manipulates information to present users with a pro-China view of the world.

As a journalist, I’m hostile to government censorship. But we don’t normally allow foreign ownership even of minor radio or TV stations, so why would we permit China to control a far more significant information source?

There’s nothing unusual about China’s trying to spy on Americans or promote itself. That’s what countries do. China once bought a Boeing 767 as its presidential plane, the equivalent of Air Force One, and discovered 27 bugs embedded inside. We will spy on China, and China will spy on us; but we shouldn’t make it easier.

The 2024 law passed overwhelmingly by a bipartisan congressional majority required TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell it or lose access to the U.S. market. A sale will be complicated, however, for the heart of TikTok is its algorithm, and as long as ByteDance controls the algorithm, the security concerns remain.

I’m also troubled by the way Trump switched positions on TikTok. He hasn’t been clear on why he changed his mind, but the timing is curious. In March 2024 Trump met Jeff Yass, a billionaire who is a major investor in ByteDance; Trump says they didn’t discuss TikTok, but it’s around that time that he reversed himself and sought to save the app.

So at the dawn of his second term, we have Trump proclaiming his defense of America while taking actions that benefit a Republican megadonor and may assist China in undermining America’s national security.

Contact Nicholas Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, X.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018. This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.