It’s Long Past Time to Crush TikTok Like the CCP Bug It Is

Transcript of Peter's latest Taking Back Trump's America podcast.

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Hi. Peter Navarro here. It’s March 17, 2023, and the banning of the Communist Chinese social media app TikTok once again is prominently in the news.  In this episode, I want to explain why this ban is long overdue within the context one of my biggest failures within the West Wing when I was serving President Trump.

In fact, the Boss was all set to ban the Communist Chinese spyware for kids back in May of 2020; and in the ensuing months, I would have to engage in hand-to-hand combat with both Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin a.k.a. the Neville Chamberlain of our times as well as FOXBusiness host Larry Kudlow, at the time the National Economic Council Director in the Trump White House.

Interestingly, the Trump administration’s attempted TikTok ban started with a Communist Chinese invasion of India.

In retaliation for China’s aggression, the Prime Minister of India Narendra Modi, on June 29, 2020, banned more than fifty Chinese social media apps, most notably WeChat, Weibo, and TikTok itself. When the Boss saw the decisive courage of Modi, a Tough on China light bulb immediately went off in the East Wing. With a late-night order from on high, the National Security Council quickly went to work on an executive order that would impose a similar type of ban on select Chinese apps—including both TikTok and WeChat.

As I write about in my Taking Back Trump’s America book, banning Chinese social media apps like TikTok and WeChat was not just good Tough on China politics. It was very good policy. From both an economic and national security perspective, these Chinese social media apps pose an intricate and interrelated set of threats.

Most obviously, these social media apps collect a tremendous amount of personal and financial information from American citizens and businesses and routinely transfer that data over servers on the Chinese Communist mainland. By law, this data is accessible to the Chinese government and, by extension, China’s large cadres of Chinese government hackers.

Now most internet users tend to log on to multiple applications using the same username and password. So let’s say you do that, and you log into TikTok. Communist China’s hackers can then access any other applications for which you may use that same username and password combination, including your bank accounts and credit cards.

These social media apps can also archive photos and videos that can be used for nefarious state activities like facial recognition tracking. Travel to Communist China, for example, and the government may already have a whole dossier ready to review on you as you step off the plane on your way to passport control.

For all these reasons, it was very good policy for the White House to swiftly move on an executive order that would, as Modi’s India had boldly and swiftly done, ban a large number of social media apps within the Communist China cyber universe.

While the task of drawing up the TikTok ban fell to the National Security Council per the Boss’s orders, I would have at least a hand in the matter. The problem the NSC lawyers and I quickly ran into, however, was that while NSC had the pen, Mnuchin’s Treasury Department had the eraser.

This is because the real hammer in the executive order was the imposition of economic sanctions on any company that engaged in financial transactions with TikTok, and Treasury was in charge of imposing any such sanctions.

Mnuchin’s Treasury minions didn’t just drag their heels. They dug in, and as they dug in, Mnuchin began hatching a plot to blunt the order by engineering the sale of TikTok rather than going for an outright ban.

Now, once Mnuchin’s “buy” versus “ban” option was in play, Microsoft was initially floated as a possible buyer. This was, of course, beyond laughable as the Microsoft House of Crappy Software that Bill Gates built has been one of China’s biggest kowtowing lackeys for more than two decades and clearly not trustable.

Predictably, the Washington Swamp with a “K Street” lobbying crowd that salutes no American flag was working overtime to grease the skids for TikTok. To that end, TikTok’s parent company ByteDance strategically showered one of the president’s closest confidantes—and swampiest of Swamp Creatures David Urban—with obscene sums and a top executive position to sway the president.

When Urban called to lobby me on behalf of TikTok, I was surprised for two reasons. First, while I knew he was a lobbyist, I didn’t think he would be so venal as to represent the interests of Communist China.

Second, and this is where it got really interesting, when Urban called me, I was surprised at his threatening tone. He had seen my negative public comments about Microsoft and TikTok, and thirty seconds into the call, he went off on a long rant about why I was wrong and why I needed to get in line—or else.

“Or else what,” thought I. Now I have to add David Urban to my long list of enemies in Washington, DC? And what does this big lobbying dog think he can possibly do to me that my very, very, very long list of enemies in the DC Swamp and West Wing haven’t already done or tried? Put a bad word in with the Boss? Oh please. Get in frigging line, Davey.

The issue all came to a head in what the Washington Post would correctly describe as a “‘knock-down, drag-out’ brawl” between me and Mnuchin in front of the president in the Oval Office.

In the end, I would lose this particular battle to Mnuchin and Kudlow; and this late stage pulling of our TikTok punch would further solidify further solidified further solidified the public’s perception that the White House was not filled with serious policymakers seeking to bend the arc of history to the side of the working men and women of America. Wrote the New York Times:

The saga of TikTok had everything: Ominous threats of surveillance. A forced fire sale. Threats of retaliation. Head-spinning deal terms that morphed by the hour. Dark horse bidders and a looming deadline. Now, as the dust settles on the weeks of drama over the social media app, investors and others are asking what it was all for.

The answer? A cloud computing contract for the Silicon Valley business software company Oracle, a merchandising deal for Walmart and a claim of victory for President Trump.

Yep. TikTok was indeed the one that got away. It is an open question as to whether TikTok’s lobbyists will once again have their way with the American political establishment. But TikTok, along with every single Communist Chinese social media, should be banned forthwith for both our economic and national security. Peter Navarro. Out.