Former president Donald Trump said in an interview Monday morning that he opposes a bill making its way through Congress that would force ByteDance, the Chinese corporation that owns TikTok, to sell the app to an American entity or face a ban in the United States, telling CNBC that legislative action against TikTok would only help Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns and operates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, among other properties.
“Without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger,” the sole remaining candidate in the Republican presidential primary race said, “and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people.”
Trump, defending TikTok, said “there are a lot of people on TikTok that love it” and “a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it.”
While Trump did note that he believes TikTok presents national-security concerns, the CNBC interview was the second time in recent days in which the former president signaled a turnaround in his thinking on the issue. The Trump administration attempted to have the social-media platform removed from app stores in the U.S. in 2020 and sought to force a sale, neither of which materialized.
Immediately after the House Energy and Commerce Committee passed its bipartisan bill, Trump posted on Truth Social that he disagrees with the move.
“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business,” he wrote. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”
Trump has explained his drastic change of heart with his personal disdain for Zuckerberg and his company, but National Review‘s Jim Geraghty noted Monday morning that Jeff Yass, a billionaire hedge-fund manager and high-dollar GOP donor, has a $33 billion stake in ByteDance through his fund. The New York Post reported that Yass had been calling GOP members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee in an attempt to thwart the passing of the anti-ByteDance bill.
Supporters of the bill in the House were galvanized last week when TikTok directed its millions of users to bombard congressional offices with calls urging lawmakers not to support the bill. Some of the callers, many of whom were children, threatened to commit suicide if the bill passed, the Spectator reported.
A full House vote on the bill is expected this week. The bill is likely to face stiffer opposition in the upper chamber, where Senator Rand Paul has already begun speaking out vociferously in opposition to what he sees as an infringement on the ownership rights of a foreign company.