Trump’s Cabinet picks are deeply divided over banning TikTok
Dec. 1, 2024, 4:00 AM PST
As President-elect Donald Trump assembles his White House staff and selects his Cabinet picks, an ideological divide has emerged around a hot-button topic: a ban on TikTok, the social media video app used by around half of the U.S. population.
That divide and a lack of clarity around the administration’s priorities and current positioning on a ban have thrown the fate of TikTok in the U.S. into question.
TikTok is defending itself in federal court over legislation President Joe Biden signed in April that would ban TikTok if it doesn’t sell itself to an American owner by the time Trump takes office.
Further complicating matters for TikTok is the fact that Trump has reversed his public stance on the app as he has announced Cabinet picks with a wide array of views about it.
In 2020, he tried to ban it outright with an executive order that was struck down in the courts. At the time, teen TikTok users claimed to have coordinated lower turnout at one of Trump’s rallies by reserving seats they had no intention to fill. This March, Trump acknowledged that he believes TikTok is a “national security threat” but said a ban would double business for Meta’s Facebook, which he calls the “enemy of the people.”
In June, Trump started his own TikTok account, which now has over 14.6 million followers, the most of any U.S. politician, although he hasn’t posted since Election Day. In a Truth Social post in September, he said he would “save TikTok in America” if he was elected.
If Trump sticks to his word, he could be TikTok’s best chance to avoid a ban. But that’s not a sure thing — most of Trump’s Cabinet and other administration picks who have spoken about the app’s future have strongly encouraged a ban, with a few who have large TikTok and other social media followings opposing one.
Project 2025, the conservative playbook outlining plans for the administration, refers to TikTok as “a tool of Chinese espionage” that should be “outlawed.” In his goals outlined for the Federal Communications Commission in Project 2025, Trump’s choice for FCC chair, Brendan Carr, wrote that one of his main priorities is “reining in” big tech, including banning TikTok.
During his campaign, Trump disavowed Project 2025, a project led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, after it became a central subject of Democratic attacks. However, at least three of his staff picks contributed to or wrote sections of Project 2025, and his transition staffers are pulling from its personnel database, according to a person familiar with the situation.
In the foreword to Project 2025, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts writes that TikTok and other social media platforms “are specifically designed to create the digital dependencies that fuel mental illness and anxiety, to fray children’s bonds with their parents and siblings. Federal policy cannot allow this industrial-scale child abuse to continue.”
Trump’s pick for head of the CIA, John Ratcliffe, whose nomination requires Senate confirmation, is another author of Project 2025. He plans to devote even more resources to countering China. “TikTok is a national security threat,” Ratcliffe told Fox Business in 2022, agreeing with the host that the U.S. should “kick out” TikTok.
Most Trump allies who oppose TikTok have cited claims of Chinese government influence over American users, which TikTok denies. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have also referred to TikTok as a national security threat and a way for the Chinese government to get data on Americans, while its proponents have argued that such data is accessible with or without TikTok.
Even as some members of Trump’s incoming administration have advocated banning TikTok, other members have become rising TikTok stars, including Vice President-elect JD Vance, who has over 2 million followers, and press secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has posted only one video (following the popular “day in the life” format in October) and has 36,000 followers. But Leavitt has also spoken out against the platform.
“As a generation Z American, I can tell you all my friends, my colleagues, my former classmates are on TikTok. It is the main source of news for the majority of American youth, and it is truly the bane of our society right now,” Leavitt said last December on Fox Business.
Referring to the Chinese Communist Party, she said: “It is owned by the CCP. They are pushing algorithms that are very damaging to the intellectual curiosity and to the ideology of young Americans today.”
Sebastian Gorka, a Newsmax host and the incoming deputy assistant to the president, described TikTok as a “CCP instrument,” “a way to collect data from Americans, including children, and then exploit it for the purposes of the world’s largest communist regime,” on his show in April 2023.
“People want to ban it, especially on the right,” he added.