A couple years ago, millions of young people globally were afflicted by a mysterious condition involving the nervous system but unconnected to any known infectious agent. Symptoms included Tourette-like involuntary repetitive body movements and vocalizations, sometimes occurring 29 times per minute. Thought to be the byproduct of a need to express anxiety, suffering and depression brought on by the pandemic, the disorder spread through videos posted on social media and often subsided when afflicted individuals no longer maintained contact with one another online. Clinicians called the phenomenon “TikTok Tics.”
This month, Donald Trump displayed his own TikTok Tics, which appear to reflect personality and character traits he is unwilling to or incapable of changing.
In 2020, as President Trump blamed China for the Covid-19 pandemic and engaged in a tariff war with Beijing, he issued an executive order, based on his “emergency powers,” banning TikTok if ByteDance, its parent company, did not sell the app in 45 days. TikTok’s collection of data on 150 million monthly American users, Trump declared, “threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the location of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail and conduct corporate espionage.” Because “the risks are real,” Trump added, “the United States will get this one right.”
But as ByteDance began negotiating a sale to Oracle and Walmart to evade the ban and the executive order was challenged in court, Trump put it on hold.
In 2022, the Biden administration prohibited use of TikTok on devices issued to federal employees and military personnel. Despite concerns that a general ban violated the First Amendment, however, bipartisan support for it grew in Congress. Sounding a lot like Trump, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) claimed TikTok is “Communist Chinese malware that is poisoning the minds of our next generation and giving the CCP unfettered access to troves of Americans’ data.”
Nonetheless, on the eve of a House of Representatives vote on legislation forcing China to divest from TikTok — the bill would pass 352-65 — Trump flip-flopped.
The former president acknowledged that TikTok poses a threat to national security “and we have to very much admit we are protecting American people’s privacy and data rights.” But Trump subordinated this danger to his eagerness to court young voters (one-third of Americans under 30 get their news from TikTok) and settle scores with his enemies.
A lot of young kids, Trump predicted, “will go crazy without it.” Most important, Trump complained that Facebook, which suspended his account for violating rules against inciting violence the day after the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, is “an enemy of the people.” And Mark Zuckerberg “spent $500,000 against me and our great Republican Party.” Trump doesn’t want Facebook and “Zuckerschmuck” — a portmanteau using the Yiddish vulgarity for penis — “who cheated in the last election,” doing better by gaining TikTok users. (Fact check: Zuckerberg donated $400,000 to the Center for Tech and Civic Life and the Center for Election Innovation and Research to support initiatives by state and local governments to facilitate mail-in voting during the pandemic).
Trump’s TikTok Tics — repetition, self-absorption, incoherence, indifference to the truth — were on display in his recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin on CNBC. Here’s his explanation for supporting a ban before he opposed it:
“I had it done. And then Congress said, well, they never, they they ultimately, usually fail, you know, they are a gooch — likely, extremely political and they’re extremely subject to people called lobbyists, who happen to be very, very talented, very good, and very rich. I could have banned TikTok. I had it banned just about, I could have got that done. But I said, you know what? But I’ll leave it up to you. I didn’t push them too hard because, you know, let them do their own research and development, and they decided not to do it. But as you know, I was at the point where I could have got that done if I wanted to. I sort of said, you guys decide, you make that decision because it’s a tough decision to make.”
Trump’s TikTok Tics provide compelling reasons why Mar-a-Lago, the 11,000-square-foot apartment in Trump Tower, or even less capacious accommodations supplied by the government are more appropriate homes for him than the White House. Don’t they?
Glenn C. Altschuler is The Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American History at Cornell University.