Former President Donald Trump defended his flip-flop on the question of banning TikTok Tuesday by lumping the popular China-linked platform with Google and other controversial tech giants.
During a question-and-answer session at the Economic Club of Chicago, Trump, 78, was asked “why do you no longer see TikTok as a security threat” after he vowed over the summer to “never” shut down the short-form video host.
“I think it is a threat,” the 45th president and 2024 Republican nominee acknowledged to Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait.
“Frankly, I think everything’s a threat. There’s nothing that’s not a threat, but sometimes you have to fight through these threats,” he added. “Just like Google. I’m not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But if you — are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company?”
During his presidency, Trump signed an executive order outlawing transactions between TikTok parent company ByteDance and US citizens on national security grounds.
He has since come out against legislation Congress passed in April to force ByteDance to divest itself of TikTok within nine months.
“To me, it was a flip of a coin,” The former president reflected Tuesday. “You know, you have some real First Amendment problems. You have a lot of problems with it.”
GOP megadonor Jeff Yass is speculated to have privately attempted to change Trump’s mind and get him to oppose a TikTok ban.
Most Republicans in both chambers of Congress had backed the April legislation, citing concerns about ByteDance’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
TikTok has a trove of browsing history, biometric identifiers, location data, and other information about millions of US users.
There have been fears that the CCP could access that data and that the US adversary is leveraging the platform for propaganda.
Trump previously conveyed fears that Meta, his least favorite platform, could get more market share if TikTok was barred in the US.
The 45th president joined TikTok back in June and had sought to court younger voters peeved by the divestment bill.
