If all goes according to plan, in roughly 24 hours, the Republican-led House will vote on a bill that would require Chinese company ByteDance to either sell TikTok or face a ban in the United States. As an Associated Press report on the effort noted, the legislation cleared committee on a rare unanimous vote, but its fate on the House floor remains to be seen.
Given the broader circumstances, it’s likely that many members of the GOP majority will want to align their votes with Donald Trump’s position. The trouble is, the former president has taken more than once position — and they tend to contradict one another.
To be sure, up until fairly recently, Trump’s position was relatively clear. In 2020, for example, the Republican announced plans to ban TikTok in the United States, and an executive order soon followed. That policy ultimately failed in the courts, though the former president made no effort to hide his belief that the app should not exist on Americans’ phones.
That, in and of itself, doesn’t have to be seen as controversial. Politicians and candidates sometimes reverse course — remember Trump supported abortion rights? — in response to new information. What matters, of course, is the motivations behind the shifts.
In this case, why did Trump flip-flop on TikTok? My MSNBC colleague Zeeshan Aleem noted:
Nobody knows what’s caused his shocking reversal, but a week ago Trump had a meeting with [Jeff Yass] an ultrawealthy hedge fund manager who has a multibillion-dollar stake in ByteDance, and could theoretically be a potential future donor. Trump is nothing if not transactional.
During a CNBC appearance yesterday, the former president noted his executive order that effectively would’ve banned TikTok, before quickly adding, “I didn’t push them too hard.” If that sounds like a position that doesn’t make a lot of sense, it’s because his on-air comments were largely incoherent.
It was only natural to wonder whether he was struggling to explain his position publicly because he wasn’t prepared to tell the truth about why he did a 180-degree turn.
All of this came on the heels of Trump also flip-flopping on Anheuser-Busch — right around the time a top Republican lobbyist for the company announced plans for a Trump fundraiser. It’s a problem, of course, when the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee appears to be for sale, feeding the impression that Trump will take positions — and abandon previous positions — in response to prospective donors’ wishes. But as Rachel noted on last night’s show, that problem is made vastly worse by the fact that Trump is in desperate need of cash, especially in the wake of his latest legal defeats, to the point that he’d likely struggle to get a security clearance if he were anyone else. Perhaps now would be a good time to reconsider plans to provide Trump with pre-election intelligence briefings?
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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