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It is only three weeks since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Undeniably, a lot has happened in that time. Looking at events that ran in parallel with the inauguration (TikTok) and the current battle over USAID, as well as a select few other outrages, a picture begins to emerge. One of a perfect storm. Spoiler alert, it also involves gutting any form of oversight. Whatever your political affiliation, and especially if you pretend to care about government waste or corruption, that should concern you.
Let’s start with the TikTok saga, because that story is literally indicative of the dangers of the times that we have entered. The background to this is quite simple, Congress passed a law that deemed this social media app a threat to national security and insisted that the Chinese owners of the platform divest of their holdings related to US-based users or the app would be shuttered. Not closed immediately, but no downloads will be allowed either for new users or allowing existing users to update their app. That was how things had been left, by Congress.
In order to present the fullest of pictures, it should be remembered that it was President Trump who first ordered TikTok to be shut down in the US. Trump signed an Executive Order to that effect in his first term in office, on 6 August 2020. That’s the first big red flag to the “Trump saved TikTok” narrative that TikTok themselves created on 19 January, the eve of Trump 2:0.
In the eventual legislation to ban TikTok (not the Trump 2020 Executive Order, the Senate bill passed on 23 April 2024) there was provision for a pause, triggered on 19 January, on the condition that there was substantive progress towards a sale to an entity outside of Chinese control. Biden, as President, was asked by a reporter what he intended to do with TikTok. “Leave it for the next guy”, was the essence of his answer.
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Biden wasn’t going to bend over to blackmail from a foreign corporation who had not met the sole precondition for a pause So, TikTok went dark that day. But they didn’t have to do this. It was a deliberate manipulation. The app could have stayed live, nothing happened in the US (or nothing Biden did) made the app inaccessible. The Chinese owners chose to do that. American TikTokers, 175 million of them, waited to see what would happen without realising what had happened.
In a Day One Agenda Executive Order, Trump authorised the ban to be paused, and the platform instantly went live again on 21 January. Bytedance, the Chinese owners of TikTok, informed their users that Trump was their saviour, whereas he had “saved” them from the unilateral (and manipulative) actions of Bytedance only.
A very important consideration, one that few people actually understand, is why is it that Congress decided TikTok represented a national security threat. This is important because the fears that Senators clearly saw have now been brushed under the carpet by Trump. Let me repeat. A national security threat, in the opinion of Congress, is ignored by President Trump. That should concern you, regardless of how many dance moves you have been inspired to emulate.
Of those 175 million US users, many are voters. What has just been described can easily fit under the description of election interference, something Trump complained about relentlessly, but many TikTokers are not voters. “They’re young people. They just use the app for fun, where’s the harm in that?” people ask. Good question. The answer lies in another question, what is TikTok?
TikTok, as we all know, is a social media platform. Well, that’s the packaging. TikTok is a data harvesting company. So is Facebook, X (“valued” at $44 billion, once, for that reason), and so is Google. These vast tech titans exist and have soared to unprecedented valuations because of the ways in which they use data. They call it the algorithm. You think it’s just how they filter their content to you as an individual, but those capabilities only exist because of the vast volumes of data that they hold on each of their users. In that data, who you are, what you like, what you hate, your moods and preferences and thoughts, all of these are being captured and analysed and looped back to you because the algorithm knows your inner secrets.
Now, it’s not really a major problem that the Chinese government knows what kind of baked goods their teenaged US-based users have a weak spot for. But those young people will go on to become police officers, politicians, and business people, and some of them will go on to serve in the US armed forces. Do you want an adversary to know what hopes and fears, phobias and fantasies, those men and women have held during their lifetimes? That’s not just the future national security risk explained, that’s the national security risk that Donald Trump just chose to ignore.
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To add to the danger of that, and why this is the perfect storm. The bill establishing TikTok as a national security threat was passed by Congress, which, under the US Constitution, is a co-equal branch of government. The warnings of that co-equal branch of government were sidelined in the 21 January Trump Executive Order.
Moving up to today, and the most recent assault on basic decency and honest deliberation, we find ourselves in a position where the integrity of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is in question, and its future existence is in jeopardy. Their work, globally, at the time of writing is all but frozen.
Without delving too deeply into the history of this organisation, suffice it to say that this entity has (until now) functioned under the Administrations of both parties. The funding for USAID is approved through Congress and it is rarely if ever a partisan issue. USAID has, for a very small part of the US budget, helped the United States to secure influence throughout the world simply by following the principle of assisting vulnerable people. Be they vulnerable to famine, disease, or natural or man-made disasters. The soft power value of USAID is beyond the dollars that it costs, with the win-win being that those spent dollars really save lives.
We cannot be certain of the reasons behind this concerted current effort to get USAID closed down, and there is a legal fly in the ointment for the Musk/Trump effort to do so insofar as they can’t do it because they lack the authority, but we can be certain of what the outcome of USAID being shuttered would be. Lives will be lost. US global influence will shrink, and adversaries will take advantage. Equally, we can be certain that the Musk/Trump tandem is determined to do this because having discovered that they lack the authority to legally shut it down the revised plan to reduce a 10,000 strong workforce to just 300 does the same thing, technically. Another skirt of the law, and dirty trick to circumvent Congress rolled into one.
The kicker here is that on top of the moral abhorrence and abdication of the richest country in the world not saving lives when it has the capacities to do so, is that this effort is by and large based on lies. Anyone who has been exposed to the USAID debate in recent days can tell you that the discussion has blown up from deliberate exaggeration to outright falsification to the deeper depths of conspiracy land. A reminder: X owner Elon Musk is one of the biggest sources of misinformation on X.
The general accusation against USAID is that it is corrupt. Like any other Agency that is a part of the US government, the fact is that they are audited strenuously and always have been. They are not an unaccountable sink fund of taxpayer money used without oversight. Their budgets and the results of their work are analysed for accuracy and impact. They always have been. That’s how things work, in real life. In the fake world where USAID needs to be closed forever, Elon Musk shared a fake E! News video clai