On Wednesday, the House passed a bill that could result in the banning of social media app TikTok.
Despite Donald Trump declaring earlier this week that TikTok should not be banned, 197 Republicans—including Speaker Mike Johnson, usually so eager to do Trump’s bidding—joined in a lopsided 352-65 vote to do just that. The bill still needs to be approved by the Senate, where it may not have the necessary support. Some Democrats, such as Virginia’s Mark Warner, who chairs the Select Committee on Intelligence, support it. However, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has not yet scheduled the issue for debate.
If passed, the bill would give Chinese company ByteDance six months to divest itself of the TikTok app. Failing that, TikTop would be banned in the United States. With 170 million Americans reportedly using the app, the potential for political pushback seems high.
But the biggest story about the vote may be Trump’s last-minute turn in favor of TikTok, and just how few Republicans were willing to follow his lead.
In 2020, Trump signed an executive order that temporarily blocked users from downloading TikTok, describing it as a national threat. Trump spoke out against the app on multiple occasions, associating the app and ByteDance with the Chinese Community Party.
President Joe Biden lifted Trump’s executive order in 2021 while directing the intelligence community to study any potential threats. Last month, the Biden campaign joined TikTok.
As Daily Kos reported on Tuesday, Trump reversed course to announce his support of TikTok after meeting with Republican megadonor Jeff Yass. Yass holds a 15% stake in TikTok’s parent company through his own firm, Susquehanna International Group.
Facing over half a billion in debt following a pair of enormous legal defeats, and signs that his ability to grift off small dollar donations may be running out, Trump has been seeking a real billionaire to bail him out of his problems.
Despite his ninth-inning change of heart on TikTok, only 15 Republicans voted to protect TikTok from a possible ban. That includes Georgia’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who hurried to claim that she hadn’t checked in with Trump on this issue.
“So it doesn’t mean that we’re all robots,” said Greene. “We make our own decisions, and mine was to vote no on this bill.” That her vote mirrored what Trump wanted was, as always, just a coincidence.
Among those voting no was Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who, fittingly enough, issued an official statement concerning her vote on TikTok.
“I’m voting no on the TikTok forced sale bill,” she wrote. “This bill was incredibly rushed, from committee to vote in 4 days, with little explanation. There are serious antitrust and privacy questions here, and any national security concerns should be laid out to the public prior to a vote.”
Wisconsin Democrat Mark Pocan also voted no, saying that an intelligence briefing on Tuesday caused him to line up against the bill. Pocan also noted that pretending to fix the issue by just addressing TikTok missed the real problem.
“We need to address data privacy across all social networks, including American companies like Meta and X,” he wrote on social media, “through meaningful regulation that protects freedom of expression. Not just single out one platform.”
According to CNN, Republican Rep. John Duarte mentioned the same intelligence briefing on the security risks associated with TikTok when explaining why he voted no.
“I went to the briefing yesterday, the top secret briefing, it was vacuous," said Duarte. "There was no specific information given in that briefing that was well founded evidence and specific about what TikTok or anybody else was doing."
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