Last night TikTok went dark. They were not subtle about whose fault it was:
Donald Trump, the hero of TikTok! This morning he announced his plan:
This is all wildly illegal. Trump has no authority to simply ignore a law passed by Congress. The law does have a provision for a 90-day extension, but only if TikTok's owners have found a buyer—which they patently haven't. In fact, they've been vocal in their refusal to even consider it.
And then there's the dealmaker-in-chief's suggestion that the federal government buy a 50% share in TikTok. I'm at a loss for words here. He thinks the United States—CEO: Donald Trump—should own the most popular social media app on the planet? And be in control of content moderation? Maybe the government should nationalize a bunch of other pesky media sites while it's at it? The mind boggles.
I'd try to say more, but I really am at a loss for words. You'll have to make up some of your own.
it's a bad sign that the NYT doesn't highlight Trump is ignoring a law passed by Congress.
So far only KD is taking that key fact front and center.
The NYT covers it mid-article, but the lede is all wrong. This story is about the rule of law.
Biden is also ignoring the law. There is plenty of blame to go around.
If I were president I would have announced that prosecutions would begin at 12:01am Sunday and that storing backups for TikTok is covered.
Get their data deleted is a stake through the heart. They would not be able to resurrect the beast.
Who’s answering the phone at the DoJ at 12:01 a.m. on a Federal holiday?
And who should be prosecuted? My understanding is that Apple Store and Google Play have dropped the app, as the law required. Who else is in violation?
Oracle is in violation of the law.
Oracle hosts TikTok and is presumably holding their data, server side software, configurations, all of it.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/oracle-prepares-to-start-shutting-tiktok-servers-saturday-night#:~:text=Oracle%2C%20the%20main%20cloud%20computing%20provider%20for%20TikTok%2C%20has%20told,law%20that%20bans%20the%20app.
Oracle should have been told to permanently delete all of that data on stroke of midnight.
And yes, for something important you can pay some lawyers to work OT to confirm the data is being deleted or to send an indictment over to a judge who is also asked to keep the lights on late that night.
Breaking the law on a Saturday night is also illegal.
Biden is not ignoring the law you dishonorable liar.
Really?
He is still president but he has announced that he will not enforce this law. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/01/17/tiktok-ban-biden-wont-enforce-decision-trump/77773281007/
Apparently, for things he thinks are important, he is president until the last minute if that lets him sabotage the Trump administration (for example, https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_popover.aspx?guid=e0333de6-27c2-44dd-99a8-7941c8faa8a5) but he cannot do something that is important for the security of the United States.
Classic - China is the opposition, Republicans are the enemy.
As always, the word is “Hilarious”.
I prefer ridiculous. He's a joke of a human being, but not in a ha ha sort of way.
This is just another test to see what he can get away with. He's playing games.
No.
He feels he can earn popularity form this.
True enough. But an executive order to counter a law is definitely unconstitutional. He is either ignorant of it or doesn't care. Like his private business, he'll try to see how far he can step over the line before he gets pushed back.
He is
eitherignorant of itorand doesn't care.Fixed that for you.
+1
My vote is for doesn't care. He is untouchable and knows it. MAGA goons will make sure any impeachment efforts go no where, SCOTUS has already ruled.
Enforcement decisions for Federal law are up to the DOJ and ultimately the President, yes? How do we get DACA? Does immigration law have an explicit opt-out?
The Federal government has to prioritize cases since it does not have infinite resources. DACA is an extreme example of that.
Completely ignoring the law is a different issue. That does happen with old laws that now considered unenforceable, e.g. considered unconstitutional but have not been removed from the books nor directly challenged in court. With new laws, it may take time setting up a way to enforce it--and there can be confusion on which who has authority to enforce it, e.g. SEC, DOJ, etc.
Then you have Congress de-funding enforcement mechanisms or refusing to appoint department heads to keep laws from being enforced.
Tom Cotton was right, Trump does not have the legal authority to issue a 90 day reprieve in the law. But he can argue that they're just setting up shop, so will not be able to issue guidance and start enforcing that law for a while, say 90 days.
Except it's already been not enforced.
DACA was simply about prioritizing enforcement of the law which is clearly a standard executive authority
. Fact 1). Congress only appropriates enough money to deport ~2% of the illegals in the country per year.
2) DACA separated illegals into three categories a) violent criminals, b) people who arrived as children before 2009 c) everyone else
3) DACA prioritized the deportation of violent criinals, (which on its face sees a no-brainer, and deprioritized deportation of people not responsible for having come illegally. (DACA opposition to DACA literally was complaining about prioritizing the deportation of violent criinals!!!!!!)
It also used another provision of federal law allowing the president to give anyone work visas that the president feels it benefits the national interest to have.
There is nothing remotely outside the normal powers of the executive in DACA.
Bullshit.
Fine to prioritize violent criminals - nothing wrong with that.
But why does that means that someone who arrived as a child before 2009 should not be deported if you have the opportunity to do so?
DACA was a clear attempt to give these peopel safe harbor, not to prioritize removing other people.
So what’s the enforcement process? If what he is doing is unconstitutional, how is it stopped at this point?
In principle by going to the courts, which should declare it is unconstitutional and give appropriate orders to undo it.
And, if that highly unlikely thing happens, there's always impeachment, which for the next two years seems to be literally impossible.
Check.
Oh, you wonderful silly boy, Josef. Don't you know anything the POTUS (if you are a Republican) does is now constitumutional.
By the US owning, likely what Trump really means is some Trump-friendly US oligarchs will by it. See the model Orban uses in Hungary. Orban's cronies have bought up the major media, and they make it Orban-friendly. Journalists, if they want to stay employed, must censor and re-frame their reporting. The goal, I guess, is like Fox News – but on every channel! MAGA bliss!
This is exactly it. It's just another step on the road to pure Soviet-style oligarchism.
Several have already offered, but the deal excludes the algorithm that makes the platform so addictive.
Surely Snowden or Assange or Greenwald or … can “liberate” the algorithm for the greater good of humanity? …
Theoretically, AI should be able to recreate it. So anyone could stand up their own clone, but you also need a userbase uploading content and viewing.
"By the US owning, likely what Trump really means.."
You are over-reading it.
He means to write something that will help his popularity. That is the sole consideration.
https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-ban-trump-biden-china-bdc79b7ce741a81761f67ea56d410103
...Which is nonsense. Biden didn't enforce the order against TikTok, and they literally could not 'begin operations' for an EO that hasn't yet been signed.
Why do I have such a strong feeling of deja vu? Haven't we been here before on something else during Trump Pt. 1?
I just can't recall what it is.
I’m not clear on why exactly Trump can't simply ignore a law passed by Congress. He can’t be prosecuted criminally. Neither can he be removed from office by the utterly supine Republican Congress. The Democrats are fragmented and entirely ineffective in opposing Trump. Indeed, many Democrats have recently announced that they are prepared to “work with him” to accomplish supposedly worthy goals.
Structurally, the US was set up for dictatorship but because of it's original small size and small population, the assumptions about how the structural checks and balances would work were somewhat reasonable (especially given the almost universally held assumption the the country needed to accommodate the slave power. And the assumption that the slave states could never be shamed into renouncing the source of their wealth and power).
But now, obviously, the structure is the same but shame and the popular will are not remotely enough to keep Trump and the Republicans from garnering total power. Trump and the Republicans are utterly shameless. They care only for power and, having achieved total power, they're not just going to walk away and allow some kind of a democratic system to continue. And the structure of the American systems makes it practically impossible to change that structure.
Exactly. He's going to spend 4 years ignoring congress and any other rule of law he doesn't like. SCOTUS had made him a king, he will ignore them as well.
Why just four years?
I've been saying this for some time. Anyone who thinks Trump is just going to leave after four years hasn't been paying attention, 22nd Amendment be damned.
+1
We are not structurally "set up" for dictatorship, simmer down.
If you look at the structure of this country, it’s really designed for minority rule. The Senate and the electoral college being the two really obvious examples. With the Supreme Court’s aggregation of power in Marbury v. Madison being another.
The assumption, as I said, was that the separation of powers and a degree of self-interest would prevent a dictatorship. Hence, the reliance on impeachment and removal, which rested upon the assumption that Congress would act both reasonably to protect its power from executive encroachment and responsibly to act only on legitimate “high crimes and misdemeanors”. That was combined with what I think were unspoken assumptions that we wouldn’t have a unified parliamentary style party such as the modern Republican Party or popular political figures who couldn’t ultimately be shamed into doing the right thing.
Overlaid on that structure and those assumptions, was the perceived necessity of avoiding a civil war by accommodating the slave power. The slave power gave strength to the desire of the smaller states to avoid being in a union in which they’d be dominated by the larger ones. But, obviously, the growth in our population and it’s extreme concentration in the costal states has meant that a unified parliamentary party like the Republicans could become a reality and that such a minority party could indeed take advantage of the anti-democratic features of our national political structure to gain and hold political power.
But there is no way to reverse these “features” because the only way to abolish the Senate and the electoral collage is for the smaller states to agree to renounce their own powers (highly unlikely) or for the Supreme Court to release its grip on our throats (which is even more unlikely). So, what’s the way out of this mess?
Very true.
If demographics are indeed the doom for the Republican Party it was (at least until Harris' et al's showing in 2024) then the way out of this mess is for enough people living the good life in "blue" states to be willing to take one for the team and move to purple/red states. Then you get the Senate. Then you get the Electoral college. And then with the same patience Republican string-pullers showed to get their SCOTUS majority, you undo that majority, and perhaps alter the Constitution to the way those pesky small colonies weren't willing to accept because they didn't want Virginia and Pennsylvania running the show.
(I picked those two states based on an in-my-head ranking of the various populations listed in https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/1790_United_States_census )
Yes because it’s super easy to uproot your life/career, your spouse’s life/career and your kids’ lives to move from a blue state to a purple or red state. All on the off-chance that millions of other people will do the same, and render your life-changing decision/sacrifice not futile, because what you’re describing only works if lots of other people do it too. All so you can begin a multi decade collective crusade to change everything that’s gone wrong since at least Nixon - and possibly since reconstruction was allowed to end before it thoroughly had disenfranchised the confederates still living among us - while also not bankrupting the blue states hemorrhaging population and tax base as a direct result of all this politically-motivated relocation.
Sounds perfect, what could go wrong? I only ask: you go first.
I would offer another way of looking at this. The system was set up assuming good faith and predicated on unwritten norms. This worked for 220 years. Then Obama got elected and the norms started breaking down. Then Trump came along and smashed what was left.
Good analysis. The Constitution is too hard to amend and a key weakness, Senate misallocation, is specifically unamendable. I'd call that unconstitutional except it is in the constitution.
Minor quibble, weren't the larger states the ones with the most slaves? I think Virginia had the most people. The low population states were places like Vermont and Rhode Island.
Yes, you're correct that Virginia was a very large state with significant population. But Virginia was willing to forgo some of its power as a large state to the smaller states to guarantee the continuation of the institution of slavery. It's likely that, if left to their own devices and with larger states having slightly more votes in the Senate and House, but without the 3/5th compromise, without the electoral college, etc, the strong abolitionist movement in the northern states would very likely have ended slavery quite early in the nation's history.
The creation of this country was the result of a series of negotiations and compromises, leading to a still innovative focus on protecting against the tyranny of the majority, while preserving power for the states to preserve how they want to do things in an overall rubric of "limited government" (some combination of Hutcheson, Locke and Montesquieu).
As such, the design ("set up") was a republic with liberal democratic principles. The Senate was apportioned so as to protect the interests and powers of individual states, with the House representing the popular will more generally. The citizens of each state would elect their own legislatures, who would then vote on the two senators who would protect the interests of both state and nation. This purposeful indirect representation was meant as a separation of powers itself, and a way to slow down the "tyranny" of any particular national majority, unless a super majority of states agreed (amendment process).
The Electoral College follows similar principles, none of which envisioned "dictatorship", which is a much different claim than minority rule, which was also not the goal.
Of course, we later changed the Senate to direct representation and voting, thanks to the efforts and persuasion of Dewey and other progressives of the time, which was ripe with massive concentration of wealth, robber barons, widespread racism, nativism and xenophobia, and so on.
Today isn't much different. People primarily vote their pocketbook, in terms of who generally wins elections, and often they don't want their children killed in foolish conflicts either. Too much concentration of wealth leads to economic malaise, followed by political malaise, and the ongoing corruption also tends to make the government worse too, so people eventually throw em out.
Our next presidential election will also come down to how well the economy is doing, in terms of how people feel about it, and likely a growing concern about corruption and/or incompetence in government. It still doesn't take flipping all that many votes in several key states to change outcomes, and this goes for Congress too for all the states, despite continuing gerrymandering.
People often forget how many constitutional amendments have passed in this country, at various periods, all or most of which have been for the most part "progressive" in nature in terms of strengthening rights and/or enfranchisement, so those who pooh pooh the odds of rallying public opinion for amendments were likely present in all these periods too, and people ignored them and got it done.
Let's call it permanent Republican Senate and Presidency. That is true is true at this point. What changes that? It's pretty bad right now.
There were no "slave states" when the Constitution was written because slavery existed throughout entire country. It wasn't until after ratification that some states began to outlaw slavery.
That's both true and not exactly true. Yes, chattel slavery was legal in all of the colonies (starting with Virginia) but it wasn't widely practiced outside of states that were dependent on slave labor for harvesting cash crops like tobacco, sugar, and cotton.
Anti-slavery sentiment was stronger and routinely growing in the northern colonies and middle colonies like Pennsylvania because they were not as dependent on slave labor for plantations as the were the southern colonies. My guess is that as the other sates grew economically and without the anti-democratic features of the American government as devised after the War of Independence, slavery would have been abolished in the American colonies at least by the middle of the 18th century.
And, of course, it's an open question about whether a victorious Britain deriving some benefits from slavery in some of its American colonies would have passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807. My guess is that the abolitionist sentiment was strong enough in England that it very likely would have done so if it had "won" the war against American independence.
While the corrupt SCOTUS majority is protecting Drumpf from criminal prosecution, that does not mean that an illegal action cannot be enjoined by the courts. Of course, since the same SCOTUS corrupt six would have the final word, don't hold your breath.
Another practical problem is that it goes without saying there will be no action by the US government taken to block anything that Unser Drumpfenfuhrer does (up to and including a preannounced mass murder on Fifth Avenue). So the only action will come from private parties and what are the chances that any judge appointed by Drumpf, or SCOTUS, will find that they have standing? (I am a retired lawyer, but have not taken federal procedure in fifty years, so cannot really comment on the law of standing here. But believe me, SCOTUS is not going to let a little thing like the law stand in the way of enabling their fascist orange daddy.
Grin. Go back to Biden on the border. The executive has discretion on what to enforce and what to prosecute, remember?
I disagreed then and I disagree now.
I suspect you thought it was alright when Biden was doing it. What is your excuse for your hypocrisy?
So the problem with Bytedance was that it's too cozy with the PRC government, which might spy on Americans.
So we hand it over to a joint venture with the USA government... that absolutely also spies on Americans.
Well, obviously, if the First Convict "breaks the law" by buying TikTok himself, it's not actually a crime because ... Supreme Court. So, with his $rumpBit winnings, he ought to be able to swing 50%, particularly if he gives Xi Jin Ping a few "off the books" bennies. Or he could swap it for "truth social."
Then the whole world (under 60 years old) thanks him. He "wins the news cycle" again!
I'm so old I can remember when Republicans and Democrats alike would call a plan like Trump's "socialism."
I can also remember a time when Republicans especially thought having the government interfere with social media was censorship.
Or maybe, like old man Clemens said, I'm remembering things that never happened at all.
Also, good morning to Mark Zuckerberg who thought he found himself a new best friend who immediately turned around to "rescue" his overseas competitor.
I'd be somewhat surprised if Zuckerberg isn't in on the bidding for TikTok USA. Bytedance won't like it. But they're irrelevant. It's up to
Hitler and StalinTrump and Xi. And if the latter can get concessions from Trump for greenlighting a deal, Bytedance will do as it's told.That was my immediate thought, too. The US government owning a media company? I guess IOKIYAR applies to socialism, too.
The recurrent lesson of Trumps life is that rules don't apply to anything he does.
Or to state another way George Orwell: 'All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.'
As his niece says, Trump has lived his entire life in a padded cell where the consequences of his actions don't hurt him.
If Obama had nationalized the bank in 2009 they would have called it socialism. But is anyone calling for the Federal government to use your tax money to buy a private company socialism, hmm?
I did, not even an hour ago. But let that be.
I'm compelled to point out that Trump isn't proposing using any taxpayer money. He'll let someone else buy the compny, but only if he can immediately become a full and equal partner. They provide the money and he provides...well, nothing.
https://bsky.app/profile/teroterotero.bsky.social/post/3lg4upztbik2q
Tero Kuittinen @teroterotero.bsky.social
I know this is a hard discussion, but it’s dementia. He is being exploited by cheap grifters just making the worst possible decisions. He will continue doing whatever some nameless weirdo whispers in his ear next. This is gonna get super weird for all of us. But particularly Denmark.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Hey! Another memecoin dropped. $MELANIA
Release appears to have hurt $TRUMP plenty. And other meme coins (dogecoin). This is incredibly sad news. Where's my crying towel? Somewhere on the blockchain, I suspect.
I don't know. This seems more like theatrics than anything else. I just checked and TikTok is still unavailable on the Google Play store. And I imagine the same is true of the Apple Store. Which makes sense. They're at risk if they make TikTok available. And they're not going to do anything until there's a definitive decision one way or the other.
I interpret Trump's observations in their entirety - not just this one tweet - to mean "a US company" buying half of TikTok, not the US government. But since TikTok isn't for sale, and there's no reason to think that's going to change, this would appear to be the usual Trump deranged babbling, not a serious proposal.
Trump took a $15 million bribe to save TikTok and he has to be seen to be doing his best, otherwise other billionaires might start to think he's dishonest.