Biden’s Two Cheers for the TikTok Bill

Plus: Checking in with Optimus and Pessimus.

The rematch is officially on: Joe Biden and Donald Trump both locked up the delegates they need to secure their parties’ presidential nominations last night. A USA Today poll out this morning gives Trump a 40–38 lead over Biden, but with some good news for the president: Americans’ views on the state of the economy are finally starting to improve. And America got another televised special counsel sideshow.

TikTok vote coming up in the House today! Happy Wednesday.

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(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)

Biden: Two Cheers for the TikTok Bill

Donald Trump’s apparently donor-driven flip-flop on the dangers of TikTok has drawn plenty of ridicule around Washington this week. But one guy who’s not twisting the knife: President Joe Biden.

Biden has said he would sign the TikTok bill that the House of Representatives is voting on today, which would ban the app in the United States unless Chinese tech giant ByteDance agreed to sell it. But he has not mentioned or critiqued Trump’s stance on the bill. Neither have his spokespeople at the White House. Neither have his official campaign accounts—including the one that’s on TikTok—which have been focusing instead on comments Trump made this week on Medicare.

It’s easy to see why Biden isn’t trying too hard to turn the TikTok distinction between himself and Trump into a political issue: It’s far from clear whether it’s a political winner.

The national security case against the Chinese-owned app, as we noted yesterday and JVL expanded upon, is straightforward: TikTok gives the Chinese Communist Party a constant wellspring of digital data on more than 150 million Americans, as well as the ability to shape their views by fiddling with the algorithms that drive the content they see.

But the vast majority of people who use apps like TikTok aren’t thinking about information warfare; they’re thinking about the fun dancing and cooking videos. As TikTok use in the United States has continued to grow, support for a ban has sagged: Last March, a Pew survey found that Americans supported a ban by a two-to-one margin; by December, the same survey found only 38 percent in favor of a ban, with 27 percent opposed and 35 percent unsure. And of course the people most likely to have strong opinions on the bill—outside of D.C. national-security think tanks—are the app’s power users.

The bill’s defenders, including the White House, are quick to argue that nobody wants to ban TikTok, just to compel ByteDance to divest.

“The ultimate objective of the bill is about a question of ownership,” National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told reporters yesterday. “Do we want TikTok, as a platform, to be owned by an American company or owned by China? Do we want the data from TikTok—children’s data, adults’ data—to be staying here in America or going to China? That is the fundamental question at issue here.” 

This would be the goldilocks scenario: The bill passes and ByteDance agrees to sell. Biden and Republican leaders get a bipartisan national-security win, China loses a valuable tool for manipulating American public opinion, and nobody has to forego their drip feed of short-form video content.

Ultimately, however, the decision to sell or pull out of the U.S. market would be up to ByteDance—and it’s far from clear which option they’d choose. Asked by The Bulwark this morning whether Biden would see the latter option as an improvement over the status quo, a spokesman for the White House declined to answer directly, instead referring back to Sullivan’s comments.

Should ByteDance pull up stakes, the political dangers of passing the bill sharpen for everyone involved. That wouldn’t matter so much when banning TikTok was an everybody-jumps bipartisan affair, but what about now that Trump has reinvented himself as TikTok-ambivalent? Could we see the OG TikTok-ban president himself adopt the tragic demise of TikTok as a campaign issue? We’ve seen weirder things happen around here lately.

—Andrew Egger

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Checking in on Optimus and Pessimus

DATE: Early Wednesday morning, March 13, 2024

LOCATION: A hip coffee shop around the corner from Bulwark HQ, Washington, D.C.

Optimus: Hey, good to see you again.

Pessimus: Optimus, what are you doing sitting outside? It’s cold out here. [checks phone] It’s 52 degrees.

Optimus: It’s going up to 70 this afternoon!

Pessimus: [Snorts.] An optimist: Someone who sits outside now in 52 degree weather because it’s going to be 70 degrees later.

[They head inside.]

Optimus: Anyway, I told you last week things were looking up. I was right! How ‘bout that State of the Union? Biden showed ‘em.

Pessimus: He did fine—but will it make any difference in the polls? I’m doubtful. ​​I see Biden’s approval rating is now 37.4 percent in the FiveThirtyEight average—the lowest of his term.

Optimus: You know, as President Biden said the other day, the polls are less reliable than they used to be. See, no one uses landlines anymore . . .

Pessimus: [Snorts loudly, as heads in the coffee shop turn.] That’s utter hogwash, and if Biden and his team really think that pollsters haven’t figured out how to deal with the landline problem—and that polls haven’t been accurate the last few cycles—that’s more worrisome than the polls themselves. They can’t really believe that, can they?

Optimus: My intern friend at the White House says they do—though he’s been pretty tied up organizing staff petitions criticizing the president for being too pro-Israel, so he’s a little out of touch . . .

Pessimus: Oh, great.

Optimus: But hey, you’re a China hawk. Aren’t you happy the House is voting today on TikTok?

Pessimus: Yup, but let’s see what happens, and if the Senate acts. I’m glad we’re trying to get serious about China, including about its information operations, and that we’re really in a situation of system-to-system warfare, as the RAND report I was reading last night explains. Have you read it?

Optimus: RAND reports aren’t really my thing.

Pessimus: But here’s the problem: The legislation could impose a real cost on millions of people who like TikTok. And I’m pessimistic that the political system has the will to do that. Trump’s probably ahead of the curve in turning against it.

Optimus: You’re such a Debbie Downer. But speaking of Trump, did you see that CNN interview with the Trump employee who moved all those boxes from Mar-a-Lago? That’ll help wake people up . . .

Pessimus: Oh sure. Dream on. And by the way, how’s that trial going? Judge Cannon is making sure it’s delayed until after the election. AND NO ONE IS EVEN MAKING AN ISSUE OUT OF IT! And the D.C. trial was originally scheduled to start LAST WEEK. HOW’S THAT COMING? WHERE’S THE OUTRAGE? TRUMP IS SUCCEEDING IN PLAYING OUR LEGAL SYSTEM . . .

Optimus: Hey, Pess, you’re yelling again, just like last week. That was kind of why I thought we’d sit outside. Chill, my man!

Pessimus: [Snorts even more loudly than before, as D.C. hipsters on their phones turn to look over at him.] Well, one area I’m a little hopeful about is Ukraine, with the discharge petitions filed. But I don’t know—there’s still not the urgency there should be. By the way, have you listened to that very interesting conversation on Ukraine with Tim Snyder? Really brings home what’s at stake.

Optimus: Is it on TikTok?

Pessimus: [Buries face in hands.]

Optimus: Well, same time, same place, next week. And it should be warm enough to have our coffee outside.

[Optimus heads off jauntily. Pessimus decides he can wait a few minutes before getting back to work on Republicans for Ukraine, and pulls out his well-thumbed copy of Camus’s “The Myth of Sisyphus.”]

 —William Kristol

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Catching up . . .

• Biden and Trump clinch party nominations, setting up rematch: NBC News

• As Biden impeachment stalls, House GOP turns to backup plans: Politico

• China condemns U.S. proposal to force the sale of TikTok: New York Times

• ‘A harbinger of things to come’: Trump’s RNC shakeup signals plans for 2025: Axios

• China’s grip on Hong Kong just became a little tighter: Vox

• Under Biden, U.S. oil production is as high as it’s ever been: Vox

• The Fed’s inflation fight is starting to feel like a forever war: Axios

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Quick Hits

1. Unpacking ‘I Don’t Recall’

It might not shock you to hear that Special Counsel Robert Hur’s televised congressional testimony yesterday about his investigation into Biden’s handling of classified documents generated more heat than light, with partisans rushing to rack up political points for themselves. 

Or occasionally for the other side: Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s assertion that Hur’s report had “completely exonerated” drew a protest from Hur, who maintained it wasn’t his role as special counsel to exonerate anybody—“that’s not part of my task as a prosecutor.” This, of course, prompted a batch of tabloid-style headlines: “Special Counsel insists he did ‘not exonerate’ the president by not charging him,” the Daily Mail blared.

But that’s not to say we didn’t learn anything new about the Hur report yesterday—in fact, the release of the president’s interview transcript with the special counsel shed a lot of light on the conversations that infamously led Hur to suggest a jury would see Biden as “a well-meaning elderly man with a poor memory.” Vox has the best piece we’ve seen contextualizing some of these viral moments from the transcript:

Rather than simply admit to failing to prove his case, Hur used the standard “don’t recall” answers to try and advance a larger narrative about Biden’s age and memory.

To do so, he picked a handful of examples of purported memory failures unrelated to the documents themselves. Some of these can be explained perfectly well by Biden simply misspeaking in the moment.

But one stood out as egregious even to many inclined to defend Biden: “He did not remember, even within several years, when his son Beau died,” the report claimed.

So what happened here?

The transcript makes clear that Biden remembered the day of Beau’s death (May 30), but seemed to be genuinely mixed up on which year it happened.

The context is that Hur was asking Biden where he kept his papers in 2017. He had also previously been asking about what Biden’s plans were for his future at that time—for instance, whether he intended to go into business, or whether he knew he’d run for office again.

Biden responded by attempting to tell his frequently told tale about how he eventually decided to run for president. Here’s the way the story, a condensation of two-and-a-half years of events in Biden’s life, is supposed to go: In early 2015, a sick Beau made him promise to stay involved, before dying. Biden then decided not to run for the 2016 cycle, but once he was out of office, the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville in August 2017 made him realize he had to run again, to fulfill his promise to Beau.

Biden has repeated this story endlessly in recent years, but in impressionistic fashion without generally pausing to note specific dates—and never to a prosecutor trying to nail down specific facts and details. And, in telling the story to Hur, he got mixed up on the sequence of events, and about which year particular events occurred. . . . It is admittedly odd for a lifelong politician to get mixed up on which year is a presidential election year. But again, there’s no actual forgetfulness being demonstrated about what events happened, just imprecision about exactly when they happened.

Read the whole thing.

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2. The DeSantis 2028 Shadow Campaign

Don’t look now, Marc Caputo writes in MAGAville, but Ron DeSantis is still basically running for president:

Next month, DeSantis hosts a two-day presidential-donor gathering at the Hard Rock Hotel in South Florida that’s billed as—don’t call it a “fundraiser”—an “Investor Appreciation Retreat.” It’s the latest phase of an image makeover DeSantis started after he officially dropped out of the 2024 race on January 21 and endorsed Donald Trump.

For the past month, DeSantis has hosted one-on-one thank-you calls with donors, small meetings with more of these “investors” in Naples and in Miami, and conference calls with former volunteers.

In a rarity for DeSantis, he’s expressing some regrets, notably about the way his star-crossed campaign and super PAC stiff-armed the national media.

“I should’ve done as much media as I could because the election was directly a reflection of how much earned media each candidate got,” DeSantis told one group, according to a participant who heard the remarks and relayed them on condition of anonymity. (Another source confirmed the substance of the remarks.)

Coming from a politician who isn’t known for introspection or personal accountability, this admission of error was the clearest sign yet that DeSantis is already laying the groundwork for 2028.

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