Bulwark Takes - If Trump Can Ignore the TikTok Ban, What’s Next?

Episode Date: August 22, 2025

Tim Miller and Andrew Egger take on Trump’s lawless TikTok play. The White House just launched an official account even though the platform was supposed to be banned under U.S. law — a ban upheld 9–0 by the Supreme Court. Trump shrugs it off, admits he’s doing it to chase young voters, and meanwhile creators say TikTok is censoring anti-Trump voices.

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here with my buddy, Andrew Eggger, out of the Morning Shots newsletter, which you damn well better be subscribed to over at the Bullwark.com. We want to talk about the White House joining TikTok. I'm going to admit it. I'm a TikTok consumer. I'm more of a user. You know, you see me producing to you here on YouTube and other platforms, but I'm a consumer

on TikTok. I know I shouldn't be. The Chinese are spying on me, but I'm weak. But the issue here, I think, was more to do with like the law the fact that we don't have laws in this country anymore anymore i guess i guess the laws are just whatever don't trump wishes because the white house launched their account on tuesday uh with donald trump saying i am your voice posted a bunch of videos it did have some they they were trolled a lot uh but there's one little problem here which

was there was a law that was passed that required ticked up to stop operating by january 19th of this year nine months ago um eight months months ago? Who knows what month it is? And, um, and, uh, that law was signed. The Supreme Court ruled that it was legal nine to zero. And I guess the Supreme Court doesn't have an army to enforce the law because Donald Trump's just like, whatevs? What do you make of all this, Andrew? Yeah. So it was about seven months ago, actually, Tim, uh, that, that, uh, that this law was supposed to go into effect. Um, basically when, when Congress wrote this law last year, when Joe Biden signed it into law last year, there was a,

a provision that the White House could delay its implementation one time, one time while they were supposed to be, you know, trying to find a way around it. The way the law has worked is that TikTok would essentially be banned in the U.S. unless its Chinese parent company bite dance were to divest from it because, you know, U.S. policymakers said they have way too much control over the algorithms here. It's basically, you know, they kind of have a humongous part of U.S. discourse in sort of a stranglehold that they can put their thumb on the scale in different ways. And so the idea was, unless bite-dance sells to a non, you know, a non-Chinese company, probably a U.S. owned company, TikTok would be delisted from app stores. And so what we're seeing now, it's kind of funny because this is like the most visible way that the White House has kind of thumbed their nose at that thing.

This is not like the illegal thing, right? It's not, it's not like it's illegal for them to be on there. Anybody can be on TikTok. Anybody can have a TikTok account, create content on there, consume content on there. it's not supposed to be an app stores right like so so the illegal thing is the thing they've been doing all along up until now and this is just sort of like the cherry on top because because trump continues to say they're going to find a buyer and i mean i guess i mean it's not i guess particularly illegal for trump to get on there but it's like just in the spirit of a rule of law country

you would think that the president of the states who has uh you know uh sworn an oath to uphold the laws of the country would do that rather than flouting the law that has been you know passed by bipartisan by Congress signed, affirmed by the Supreme Court. And he's just like, you know, waving his little stubby middle finger at it. And like, whatever, I'm going to get on here because I want the kids to like me. I said, like, literally the rationale is like, I want the kids to like me. It's like literally the rationale for not enforcing the law here. And he has said that explicitly all along.

I mean, like right after the 2024 election, it's like one of the things he came away from that election with, whereas, you know, he very famously won younger vote. voters in greater numbers than in either of his, you know, previous attempts to run for president. And one of the things he came away from that with was, man, this TikTok thing is really working out well for me. And he said that. He said that. He's like, you know, we love TikTok. TikTok was great for us last time around. And so from very early on, there was this explicit sort of like quid pro quo of I really think this thing's helping me out. And so I'm not going to, I'm certainly not going to not going to blow up this, this good thing I have going. We're going to, we're going

to slow roll this thing. He's still been trying to negotiate his people have still been trying to negotiate a sale, that may still happen. But, but, but, but certainly not going to the, the hardball nuclear option for that. And now what we're seeing with this is just sort of making that arrangement even more explicit, right? It's not just like, ambiguously good for me. He's now going there to, to, you know, make the sale entirely. While that is all happening, I feel like this has been underplayed. Like, there is some chatter out there, at least in social media, that TikTok is, you know, that the mysterious algorithm, mysterious decision makers, are doing things to make Donald Trump happy

while he is helping them to flout the law. Our guy, Hawk, who you may have seen here on this YouTube, I did an interview with Hawk, who's a big TikToker, said that he was getting feedback like that from TikTok that accounts like his that criticized Trump should be careful in various ways. There's this, again, I mean, this is public. It's not rumor. This guy posted this.

His name is Elijah Daniel. He has 600,000 followers. he's a big account. He says that he made a video saying that TikTok is working with the Trump administration on suppressing anti-Trump content. He offered some evidence of that. But he didn't even mention Trump's name. He was doing the thing that the youth do where like instead of saying suicide, they say unalive and shit like that. I don't know, I don't know what he said instead of Trump, maybe grump or something. And he was banned from the app until 2032. He says. He shows a screenshot of this, which I don't have any reason to believe is not legitimate.

You know, I mean, it sure seems like this is something to be concerned about, like the White House potentially doing what they've done, you know, much more publicly with these big TV networks. Frankly, TikTok has more influence over the culture than like CBS news. No offense to our friends of the CBS Nightly News. But I mean, Trump bullying TikTok into suppressing critical content, you know, while he extrajudiciously judicially keeps the app open, seems bad. Isn't that just such a grim picture that policymakers were so in a twist about the idea that China's government was going to be going to be sort of like oppressively monkeying with the algorithm so much so that they signed this extremely disruptive bill that in theory would

have like blown up this insanely popular app if they didn't get a sale. Obviously that hasn't happened for the reasons we've discussed. But that now it's not just China, who in theory can be doing that, you know, anytime they feel like it with very little visibility from anything. And when we know it does happen, you know, all kinds of things that are sort of buzzwords for the, for censorship from the Chinese government just can't appear on TikTok and don't surface in searches on TikTok. But now it's the, it's our guys. It's our, it's, you know, good old liberal democracy, US of A doing the exact same thing, you know, reportedly here of, of, and. And there's no, I mean, like, what reason would you, would you have to look at that story and say, that doesn't make any sense like that. Surely that can't be. I mean, it's totally in keeping with. Yeah, like I said, I'm just saying, I don't have, I don't have hard evidence of it. But like it is in the spirit of the way that Donald Trump has acted across multiple verticals with universities and other big media companies. And, and he has leverage here over TikTok in the same way they did over Paramount and all that. So I mean, people are reporting that this is happening. I don't, I mean, you know, whatever I think it would be incumbent upon them to demonstrate otherwise at this point. but you know it's funny you mentioned that Andrew because like during the whole

TikTok banning debate I was like a swing voter on that you know I I kind of reluctantly came down on the side of being for the TikTok ban I think had God forbid I've been a member of Congress but I kind of mixed views on it and one of the one of the arguments that was made by like the don't ban TikTok side that at the time Joe Biden was president, I was very dismissive of, was this idea that, like, why would you single out TikTok here for this behavior? Like, sure, it's not good that the Chinese government is doing that, but how is that any different than Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk putting their finger on the scale? I mean, you know, and like that argument, which I rejected with intensity in

2023, 2024 is seeming a little stronger today, I guess, that it was back then. I mean, it's still not good to want to have the youth be influenced by something that the Chinese Communist Party can monkey with. But it's hard to single it out, I guess, as a unique threat. Yeah, but I think I get what you're saying with that. At the same time, I think the way I'd push back is that there's always been sort of friction between government and corporations even here, right? I mean, like, it's longstanding sort of like civil liberties stuff about how much, you know, tech companies are going to cooperate with law enforcement investigations and help, help the FBI get into a terrorist's phone and stuff like that. I mean, and that, you know, there's always push and pull. There's always tension. There's always tensions about speech and, you know, how much governments are going to pressure corporations to take down speech they don't like, all that kind of stuff. I think one big difference here is that we are still in an environment where this is a corporation that really answers to Americans. in no way, right? I mean, like, it's a Chinese-owned and operated corporation that plays in the U.S. market. market, you know, wouldn't want to lose a bunch of market share over here or anything

like that, but it's not like, it's a little different than, than something like, you know, sure, no, no, it's still different. Yeah, for whatever. Where, like, those guys have to, like, go out into the world and, like, face their fellow Americans or something like that. And I think it's, I think, you know, TikTok is a lot more willing to just be like, you know, whatever you say, Mr. Donald Trump, sir, that sounds great than, then, like, then even, you know, are currently obsequious crop of tech titans are. Not that there's like no merit to what you're saying, but I think that like there's like an extra zest to it when it's, I agree with you. I guess my broader point, I agree with you. Look, the Chinese company is probably just is still bad and we should not be

giving them unfettered access to millions of Americans to influence the way that they think. I think that that should be a pretty popular position. No, others will disagree. I guess my point is that we're clouding the distinctions, less that there is not a distinction. with like the behavior of the American government and the behavior of our big tech leaders are making that it harder for you to make that argument than maybe it might have been five years ago. That's absolutely the case. And just to say one more thing about this. Like I was kind of playing like a little game with myself as we were preparing to tape this. I was like trying to go through the different parts of the original TikTok critique. And and you know, one that we haven't really

talked about is just the insane access to your data that that app reportedly, according to people who know a lot more about these sorts of things than I do, apparently it scrapes like ungodly amounts of data from your phone, much more so than many other comparable apps, even though everybody's trafficking in data to a certain extent. I was like, is there any part of this story that is not like somehow like been mirrored and duplicated under the first six months of the Trump administration? And then I was thinking about like, well, I mean, that that's very similar to what has already happened, you know, with Elon and Doge and their access to not just sort of proprietary app data, but government data and, you know, Peter Thiel and Palantir and like the, you know, it's the whole

thing, like all of these sort of like real intense civil liberty concerns that people have had for a number of years now about TikTok are all being sort of reduplicated in one way or another by by this administration and, and its own sort of homegrown tech, tech overlords. So that's, that's kind of a cool thing too um last thing jviel likes to take us to the most dystopian place always um and so i'm going to stand in for him there is like a little bit of an ominousnessness of this like i don't know i feel like for some reason because the ticot man like lives in this unique space where it's like nobody's really that excited about it and like there are all these countervaining intervailing interests and nobody's really unhappy that he hasn't like there's not this big groundswell of people that

they're like, ban it now, right? Like, even the people who voted for it, like, some of them are kind of happy that he didn't, that he's not banning it, right? Like, so because of the uniqueness of that situation, like, we're not getting the constitutional crisis talk that we were getting during, like, the Abrago Garcia case or these other cases where, like, Donald Trump was just saying, fuck you to the Supreme Court and the ruling. But, um, I don't know.

Just the fact that he can just take a Supreme Court ruling, 9-0 and just say, don't care about it. does not augur optimistically for when that is a, let's say, election case, you know, in the future. I don't know. Does that not worry you a little bit? It worries me a lot. Yeah, when you put it that way, it is certainly worrisome. And yeah, it's not just the fact that there's like no gigantic constituency that's like foaming at the mouth for this to happen immediately.

It's the fact, it's that. But it's also the fact that in theory, it's still happening. soon question mark right because they are supposedly still sort of like actively negotiating toward um toward a sale and so what what this ends up being one of those stories with like so many trump stories where people just kind of string themselves along on the hopium of like well you know maybe if we stop paying it if we just kind of put our heads in the sand on this one eventually it will go away sort of quietly and seamlessly without uh they're having to be any kind of like confrontation or crisis. Those rarely work out. Could work out here. But, but, but, but, but, but, but, but, so far,

no end insight to the strings along and then obviously the White House as we, which is the whole point of the video is, uh, is just sort of proceeding as though, as though they will, they will never take it down. So that's all right. Well, if you were on TikTok and, uh, the White house's content comes across your for you page, feel free to let them know what you think about it, you know, give a, give a, give a little bit of, you know, give a little bit of the what for. And that's the best we can do at this point of citizens, which is complain about our government on a Chinese spyware app. Everybody subscribe to the feed either way, whichever side of that argument you're on. And we'll be back here soon.