Pence: TikTok Divestiture Bill Is ‘Consistent’ with the Trump Administration’s China Agenda

Former vice president Mike Pence said that he views the pending legislation that would force the sale of TikTok as “consistent with the agenda that we advanced” during the Trump administration. He added that he was encouraged to see Donald Trump support the forced sale of the app, after the former president had initially expressed hesitation about the bill.

Pence said: “We took a strong stand against China’s trade abuses. We, by the end of the administration, our State Department, declared China’s treatment of the Uyghur Muslims a genocide. But it was late in the administration that we issued an executive order forcing the sale of TikTok, which is nothing short of Chinese spyware.”

The former vice president spoke to a small group of journalists this morning to highlight a new $2 million ad campaign that his advocacy organization, Advancing American Freedom, is rolling out in support of the bill, which would force TikTok parent ByteDance to sell the app within six months or face a U.S. ban.

The ad targets states with Democratic Senate incumbents who are up for reelection, and it’s a direct response to a TikTok ad buy that targets the same states and lawmakers.

“I think the time is now for the Senate to act,” Pence said, introducing the ad buy. The House passed the bill last month, but its prospects remain uncertain in the Senate. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not spoken about the bill so far, and Senator Maria Cantwell, the chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Committee, has said that she prefers a broader approach that addresses data privacy.

While the point of Pence’s effort is to pressure Schumer to take up the TikTok legislation, Pence also mentioned how the issue has divided the right, noting that he had “parted ways with my running mate on this issue along the way.”

Before the House voted on the bill, Trump had said that TikTok was “less of a danger” than U.S. platforms. “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he wrote in a post on Truth Social.

The position articulated in that post conflicted with an executive order Trump had advanced in 2020 to effectively force TikTok’s sale to a U.S. company. The post followed Trump’s appearance at an event hosted by the Club for Growth, a grassroots conservative political group, where he had a conversation with Jeffrey Yass, a billionaire investor in ByteDance who donates to the Club for Growth.

But Trump appeared to partly reverse his position once again. In an interview on Fox News on March 17, after the House had passed the TikTok bill, he reiterated some of the concerns he had expressed in his Truth Social post about how Facebook would benefit from a “ban” of TikTok. But, he added, “what you can do is let them sell TikTok.” “Let them sell it in the market. . . . But take it away from China control.”

He also claimed that he didn’t know about Yass’s stake in ByteDance when they spoke and that TikTok did not come up during their conversation.

“I was grateful to see the former president at least signal that he would be supportive of forcing the sale,” Pence said of that interview.

ByteDance’s extensive, well-funded lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill have dovetailed with the Club for Growth’s efforts to quash the bill. The conservative political group reportedly hired former Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway to advocate for TikTok.

Asked about this, Pence said that he doesn’t “like to speculate on people’s motives.”

“But it’s disappointing for me to see allies and organizations that have been champions of freedom for as long as I’ve known them essentially defending the Chinese spyware on the telephones of 170 million Americans,” he said. “We’ve got to be blunt about what’s at risk here.”