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, a mock-up of a superhero with laser beam eyes. In a short video, Biden and his surrogates troll former President Donald Trump with images that make him look overweight, sweaty and pale. Other clips show Biden having heartwarming encounters with ordinary people who aren't patient enough to make it onto cable news.
Biden is clearly trying to connect with young Americans, who make up the majority of TikTok's 170 million U.S. users. But he also recently said he would sign a bill to ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese owners do not sell it to a non-Chinese company. what happened?
If Biden were the one to sign the bill that shuts down TikTok, it would be a complete self-inflicted wound. He could easily alienate enough people, including the millions of small business owners who rely on TikTok, to give his opponent Donald Trump an advantage in the 2024 presidential election. Biden is courting every small voting bloc that could break his path, but will he really commit political suicide by enraging millions of voters at once?
The answer is clearly no, which suggests that Biden knows what he's not saying. The bottom line is that TikTok is here to stay on Election Day and perhaps even beyond.
Mr. Biden has been serious about fundamental issues specific to TikTok, primarily related to Chinese company ownership of the app and the potential for Chinese hacking, propaganda and abuse. But electoral politics and legal realities will at least prevent Biden from becoming the TikTok killer in 2024.
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A bill to force a divestment or ban on TikTok passed the House by a wide margin on March 13, apparently catching company executives off guard. In a normally divided and dysfunctional House of Representatives, Republicans and Democrats joined forces to signal to TikTok that the U.S. government can act quickly when it comes to concerns about China.
But the path is murkier because the Senate typically moves slower and has other pressing business ahead of TikTok. The Senate also tends to retreat from sensitive issues during campaigns, and Biden is certainly aware of that. It is safe to assume that Mr. Biden is working closely with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a fellow Democrat, to maximize the chances of the Democratic Party retaining power in the 2024 elections. Sending Biden a bill to ban TikTok would do the opposite.
Politicians often say they prefer bold action when they know they don't actually have to do it. This is probably one of those times. Biden certainly knows what Schumer is planning and will likely even collude with him on the shrewdest advances. These powerful Democrats could definitely miscalculate, but other than that, TikTok won't be Joe Biden's undoing in 2024. The Senate will almost certainly postpone consideration of the TikTok bill until after the election.
But concerns about TikTok are plausible. The Chinese company ByteDance owns TikTok, and although ByteDance is a private company by Chinese standards, it is also bound by rules set by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which controls private companies into parties. It can be used at will. Many Washington policymakers of both parties believe that the Chinese Communist Party has paid millions to ByteDance to conduct surveillance on key U.S. figures, promote election propaganda, and cause other forms of trouble. They believe they may be forced to take advantage of the fact that they are present on many American cell phones.
As Kevin Roos recently pointed out in the New York Times, TikTok itself isn't helping. President Trump first tried to ban TikTok by executive order in 2020, but courts blocked that effort. Since then, TikTok's faltering Make Nice campaign has been a mixture of belligerence and manipulation. China's communist leaders have accused their critics of bigotry, as if the risk of meddling in the affairs of Western countries is a racist myth, but that is not the case. The company has stepped up its Facebook-style lobbying efforts in Washington, D.C., except that Facebook is an American company and is not vulnerable to the Chinese Communist Party, at least in the United States. Most clumsily, TikTok was caught harvesting the user data of two American journalists and other American users in 2022, which sounds like exactly what a Chinese surveillance operation would do.
China has few friends left in Washington, and the two political parties are now competing to see who can be the “toughest” on China. Biden's approach calls for a series of legislative measures to strengthen domestic supply chains, reduce dependence on China and block China's acquisition of advanced Western technologies that could be used for weapons and national security purposes. This is an administrative measure. The TikTok divestment movement more or less falls within that boundary.
If 2024 is the year of warning shots at TikTok, 2025 could be the year of all-out broadsides, but only if Biden wins in November. In his second term, without having to worry about re-election, Biden will have more freedom to pressure Congress to take a tough stance on passing, signing and enforcing divestment legislation. If the bill passes, he could be tied up in court for years, as TikTok seems certain to challenge such a law. But parent company ByteDance may also be more amenable to a sale if a ban is imposed (it currently explicitly refuses to do so).
If Trump wins in November, TikTok may be less of a concern. Trump had previously favored a ban, but recently appeared to change his mind, arguing that banning TikTok would only strengthen his arch-rival, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. President Trump also appears to be on good terms with billionaire investor Jeff Yass, who owns at least $15 billion worth of ByteDance stock. Yass is a major Republican donor and is rumored to be a candidate to be the next Treasury secretary if Trump wins.
President Trump's flip-flops sound like a good topic for a cheeky Biden TikTok video.
Editor's note: There will be no Weekly Bidennomics on March 22nd. It will reopen on March 29th.
Rick Newman is a senior columnist in the United States. Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @rickjnewman.
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