It’s funny how so many Republican hardliners—including China hawks who’d decried TikTok as a Communist psyop—have suddenly become civil libertarians now that Congress is finally doing something about ByteDance, the app’s China-based parentco. In the end, 15 Republicans (and 50 Democrats) voted against the bill, raising the question: Which of the nays were actually limited-government types voting their principles, which were doing the bidding of the Club for Growth, and which were simply going along with Donald Trump?
The C.F.G., the limited government, libertarian-leaning conservative activist group, was a staunch opponent of Trump in 2016, but on the TikTok issue they’ve been totally aligned. As my partner Teddy Schleifer has reported, one of the Club’s biggest donors is Jeff Yass, a billionaire investor whose fund has a massive stake in ByteDance. Over the past few days, I’m told the group has been furiously whipping candidates they’ve backed in the past, such as Thomas Massie, Scott Perry, Greg Steube, Dan Bishop, Nancy Mace, David Schweikert, Barry Moore, Andy Biggs, Tom McClintock, and Warren Davidson, all of whom voted against the divestment bill. Some of them are ideologically aligned with C.F.G. (Massie, Mace, McClintock, and Bishop automatically passed the smell test). Then there are MAGA heads like Biggs, who previously introduced a resolution declaring China “the greatest foreign threat” and specifically cited their “access to the personal data of most citizens of the United States.” I guess he had a change of heart.
Another key voice in the conservative split over TikTok has been FreedomWorks, one of Washington’s premier Tea Party-turned-populist interest groups, which declared its opposition to the bill on Monday. While they cited the same concerns as the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks gave additional MAGA air cover to sway populist members such as Clay Higgins and Marjorie Taylor Greene—members who were now leery of new government power that could force a sale of a foreign-owned company. The more influential voice, of course, has been Trump, who also came out Monday against banning the popular Gen Z app, although presumably for more self-interested and electoral reasons. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better,” Trump said on Truth, his competing social media site.
Indeed, in my conversations with MAGA sources outside Capitol Hill, the possibility of inadvertently benefiting Meta and Mark Zuckerberg was frequently invoked as a reason to oppose a TikTok ban. Greene herself inserted Meta as a bogeyman during her floor speech, suggesting that it may be interested in buying TikTok should ByteDance be forced to sell it—although she, too, may have been motivated by a simpler rationale. “Greene will do whatever Trump wants, for the most part,” a Republican operative told me.
Alas, according to one Republican lobbyist I spoke with, TikTok’s influence campaign was poorly timed, out of step with current conservative moods, began far too late, and ultimately turned off lawmakers with its aggressive tactics, such as encouraging the app’s users to inundate congressional offices with calls. “The way TikTok handled this—all the protests, the money, and the innuendo and mistruths—underscored just how dangerous TikTok is,” the lobbyist told me.
Of course, even with Trump switching sides, it was probably always going to be difficult to win over both right-wing media and the libertarian/MAGA crowd, given the overwhelming suspicion of anything linked to China. “If there’s one thing I heard from other Hill staff, it would be this,” said one senior G.O.P. aide focused on foreign policy issues: “Every time the TikTok lobbyists said, ‘You must be crazy! There is absolutely, positively, no sharing of data with China, and they don’t control the app,” their case got weaker.”