This week in Bidenomics: The TikTok head fake
If you want to see Joe Biden having fun, check out his presidential campaign’s TikTok account.
The account’s avatar is “Dark Brandon,” Biden as a superhero mockup with laser-beam eyes. In short videos, Biden and his surrogates troll Donald Trump using images that make the former president look overweight, sweaty, and pallid. Other clips show Biden in heartwarming encounters with ordinary people that aren’t testy enough to make it onto cable news.
Biden is clearly trying to connect with young Americans who constitute a big chunk of TikTok’s 170 million American users. Yet he also said recently he'd sign a bill working its way through Congress that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese owners don’t sell to a non-Chinese entity. So what’s going on?
It would be thoroughly self-damaging for Biden if he were the man to sign the bill that put TikTok out of commission. He could easily alienate enough people, including millions of small-business operators who rely on TikTok, to give his opponent Donald Trump the edge in the 2024 presidential election. Biden is courting every tiny voting bloc that might break his way, so would he really commit political suicide by enraging millions of voters in one fell swoop?
The answer is obviously no, which suggests Biden knows something he’s not saying: that TikTok will be alive and well come Election Day and probably long after that.
Biden is serious about the underlying problems unique to TikTok, which mainly have to do with a Chinese company’s ownership of the app and the potential for Chinese hacking, propaganda, or abuse. But electoral politics and legal realities will save Biden from being the TikTok killer, at least in 2024.
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The bill to force TikTok to divest or face a ban passed the House of Representatives by a comfortable margin on March 13, which seemed to catch the company’s leaders off guard. In the normally fractured and dysfunctional House, Republicans and Democrats joined forces to put TikTok on notice that Washington can act quickly when it comes to concerns about China.
But the path is hazier in the Senate, which normally moves slowly and has other pressing business in the queue ahead of TikTok. The Senate also tends to back away from touchy issues during election years, which Biden surely knows. It seems safe to assume Biden is working closely with his fellow Democrat, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, to maximize Democrats’ odds of holding on to power in the 2024 elections. Sending Biden a bill to ban TikTok would do the opposite.
Politicians often say they favor bold action when they know they’ll never actually have to take it. This is probably one of those times. Biden surely knows what Schumer plans and is probably even conspiring with him on the shrewdest way forward. These powerful Democrats could surely miscalculate, but barring that, TikTok isn’t going to be Joe Biden’s undoing in 2024. The Senate will almost certainly delay moving on the TikTok bill until after the election.
The concerns about TikTok, however, seem plausible. Chinese company ByteDance owns TikTok, and while ByteDance is a private sector company by Chinese standards, it’s also bound by the rules set by China’s Communist Party (CCP), which can put private companies to the party’s use as it chooses. Many policymakers in Washington, of both parties, think the CCP could coerce ByteDance to exploit its presence on millions of American phones to conduct surveillance of key Americans, promote election propaganda, or cause other forms of trouble.
TikTok hasn’t helped itself, as Kevin Roose pointed out recently in the New York Times. Trump first tried to ban TikTok by executive order in 2020, but courts blocked the effort. Since then, TikTok’s stumbling make-nice campaign has been a mixture of belligerence and manipulation. It has accused critics of bigotry, as if the risk of China’s Communist leaders meddling in Western affairs is a racist myth, which it is not. It amped up its Washington, D.C., lobbying operations à la Facebook, except that Facebook is an American company with no vulnerability to the CCP, at least not in the United States. Most clumsily, TikTok got caught obtaining the user data of two US journalists and other American users in 2022, which sounds exactly like something a Chinese surveillance operation would do.
China has few friends left in Washington, with the two political parties now competing for which can be “toughest” on China. Biden’s approach has been a series of legislative and executive actions to deepen domestic supply chains, reduce dependency on China, and block China’s acquisition of advanced Western technology that could be used for weapons or national security. A TikTok divestiture movement fits more or less within those boundaries.
If 2024 is the year of the warning shot for TikTok, 2025 could be the year of the full broadside — but only if Biden wins in November. A second-term Biden who wouldn’t have to worry about reelection would have more freedom to press Congress to pass the divestiture-or-ban law, sign it, then play hardball in terms of enforcement. TikTok seems sure to challenge any such law, so it could be tied up in court for years if it ever does pass. But parent ByteDance could also become more amenable to a sale — which it expressly rejects now — if a ban is hanging over its head.
If Trump wins in November, TikTok may have less to worry about. Though Trump once favored a ban, he seems to have changed his mind, arguing recently that banning TikTok would only make his archenemy Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook stronger. Trump also seems to be getting cozy with billionaire investor Jeff Yass, who owns a stake in ByteDance worth at least $15 billion. Yass has become a Republican mega-donor and a rumored candidate to be the next Treasury secretary if Trump wins.
Trump's flip-flop sounds like a good topic for a cheeky Biden TikTok video.
Editor's note: There will no weekly Bidenomics on March 22. It will resume March 29.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter at @rickjnewman.
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