Politics
Trump has notched a list of once-unthinkable 'firsts.' Will they prevent him from winning?
Former President Trump stands on the verge of a series of firsts that once would have seemed unthinkable.
Winning a second term as president would make the Republican nominee the first occupant of the White House to be: a convicted felon, an adjudicated sexual offender, a twice-impeached federal office holder and a serial denier of election results that have been certified by the courts and Congress.
Trump has not only weathered those largely self-inflicted wounds, but persuaded somewhere approaching half of Americans to consider putting him back in the White House. For a significant share of Trump supporters it is his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is too extreme to lead the country.
Many Harris supporters express incredulity that Trump remains a viable candidate. But veteran political analysts said that, for mostly apolitical voters who don’t follow the news closely and who may decide the election, Trump’s repeated departures from political norms may have little practical effect on their daily lives.
The analysts say it is incumbent on Harris to use the closing days of the campaign to explain why Trump’s past failures should matter to them.
“I think for her it is about saying that this is a guy who brings chaos, who is unhinged, who is too out of control,” said Patrick Toomey, a partner in BSG, a Democrat-aligned polling firm. “With that and his crazy vendettas and penchant for retribution, will he ever be focused on delivering help for average Americans?”
A longtime Republican pollster agreed. Greg Strimple of GS Strategy Group said the best possible messengers to make that case to the small group of moderate and wavering voters are the phalanx of Republicans and former Trump administration officials who say Trump is unfit for office.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, former national security advisor John Bolton, former White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly and Gen. Mark Milley — the former chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — are just a few of a large cadre of those who served during the Trump administration who have since signaled that they believe he is not fit to serve a second term. No other president in modern history has provoked so many high-level defections.
Strimple said those once handpicked by the former president to help him lead the country can deliver a powerful closing argument against Trump: “We saw it from the inside,” they can say. “And it’s worse than you think.”
“Trump right now is doing what he needs to do to be successful, and that’s making it an issues referendum on the last four years of Biden-Harris,” Strimple said. “She really needs to find a pivot to get this back onto a referendum [about] character and the leadership style of Donald Trump.”
The list is long of politicians who foundered after a single misstatement or damning personal revelation. Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s bid for the presidency disintegrated in 2011 after he froze on a debate stage when asked to name the three federal departments he had pledged to eliminate.
Trump’s misstatements became so frequent, and his insistence on spurning corrections so adamant, that much of the U.S. media pushed back harder. It became common for Trump not just to be accused of being wrong, but of intentionally lying.
By the time he left the White House in 2021, the Washington Post had cataloged 30,573 Trump falsehoods during his four years in office. That amounted to 21 erroneous claims a day — what the newspaper called a “tsunami of untruths.”
But Trump not only has transcended the fact-checking, he has turned his battles with the mainstream media, academics and other experts into a cudgel: Only he dared stand up to elites, who he contended did not understand, or care about, average Americans.
His most ardent followers see each ensuing condemnation from the media and the courts not as proof of guilt but as a continuation of a “witch hunt” against their hero. Evangelicals look past personal shortcomings because Trump delivered on his promise to overturn the abortion rights protected in Roe vs. Wade. Business leaders focus on tax cuts and deregulation. Working class Americans remember that prices were lower when Trump was president.
A partial list of some of Trump’s impolitic and scandalous moments and how he responded:
34 felony convictions
• In May, a New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts, involving his part in a cover-up of hush money payments to keep former adult film star Stormy Daniels from going public about having sex with him.
Trump is scheduled to be sentenced on Nov. 21. He continues to appeal, charging, among other things, that politics motivated prosecutors.
Jan. 6: Impeached and indicted
• On Jan. 6, 2021, having lost his November election against Biden, Trump urged his followers to march to the U.S. Capitol and “fight” as Congress voted to certify the result. His loyalists stormed the Capitol, injuring about 140 police officers, while he watched on TV. It took three hours before Trump said in a Rose Garden video that his followers should “go home now.”
Trump has repeatedly said he did nothing wrong because he told the crowd to march “peacefully and patriotically.” He recently reframed the melee as “a day of love.” But in his hourlong speech on Jan. 6, he invoked the word “fight,” or variations, 20 times, saying at one point: “We fight like hell and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”
The House voted to impeach Trump for inciting the insurrection, but the Senate acquitted him of the charges, allowing him to remain in office.
Special counsel Jack Smith led a federal investigation that resulted in Trump being charged with taking part in a scheme to interfere with the peaceful transfer of power. The prosecutor is trying to keep the case alive by showing that many of Trump’s actions fall outside so-called official acts that the U.S. Supreme Court has said should be immune from prosecution.
Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), continue to claim that Trump won in 2020 — a claim that dozens of courts and reviews have rejected.
Georgia election interference charges
• In early 2021, as Congress prepared to certify former Vice President Joe Biden’s victory over then-President Trump, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, making various claims about ballots being “shredded” and his supporters being denied a chance to vote. Without offering proof of widespread abuses, Trump insisted: “I just want to find 11,780 votes. I need 11,000 votes, give me a break.”
More than two years later, a grand jury in Fulton County, Ga., indicted Trump on charges of racketeering and other crimes, saying the former president had conspired to change the outcome of the 2020 election while participating in a “criminal enterprise.”
A judge later threw out some of the counts against Trump, saying prosecutors failed to provide enough detail about the underlying felony he was accused of committing. Trump contends the prosecution amounted to retaliation by a Democratic prosecutor, Fulton County Dist. Atty. Fani Willis. The case remains unresolved, in part because of the former president’s efforts to disqualify Willis.
Classified documents case
• In June 2023, a special counsel filed dozens of felony counts against Trump, accusing him of illegally hoarding classified documents from his time in the White House. Special counsel Smith contended that Trump kept the documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., and then obstructed the FBI when federal agents tried to get the records back.
He pleaded not guilty and denied doing anything wrong. A federal judge appointed by Trump dismissed the case in July, saying that Smith had been improperly appointed by Atty. Gen. Merrick Garland instead of being confirmed by Congress.
Found liable for sexual abuse
• In May 2023, a New York jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing advice columnist E. Jean Carroll in 1996. She won a $5-million judgment. Earlier this year, a jury awarded an additional $83.3 million after concluding that the former president continued to defame Carroll on social media.
Trump’s lawyers have tried to have the verdicts thrown out, contending the trial court allowed jurors to hear improper and inflammatory evidence.
Ukraine and the first impeachment
• In 2019, Trump called Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and suggested his government should launch an investigation into former Vice President Biden, his Democratic opponent, and Biden’s son Hunter. The request came at the same time that Trump was withholding crucial military aid to the struggling U.S. ally.
The Democratic-controlled House of Representatives impeached Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for what House prosecutors said was Trump’s attempt to strong-arm the Ukrainians.
Trump said the House’s investigation and impeachment amounted to “three years of sinister witch hunts, hoaxes, scams,” with Democrats “trying to nullify the ballots of tens of millions of patriotic Americans.” He was acquitted by the Senate.
A $355-million fraud judgment
• In February of this year, a judge ordered the former president to pay $355 million, plus interest, after concluding that Trump lied for years about his wealth on financial statements. Those documents were used to obtain loans to support his real estate empire.
Appellate court judges signaled last month that they may have sympathy for some of Trump’s arguments. They noted that none of the companies he did business with suffered financial harm and questioned whether the trial judge awarded too large a judgment.
Each time the media and other observers have predicted Trump had crossed a threshold he couldn’t survive, he has proved otherwise. It’s a pattern that has been repeated throughout Trump’s life: He has moved ahead, despite reports of marital infidelity, multiple business failures, half a dozen bankruptcies and the airing of a video in which he boasted that he could grab women “by the pussy.”
Trump’s odd behavior lands the same way. He makes speeches with long and sometimes nonsensical digressions. Just in recent days, he stopped a Q&A session near Philadelphia when a couple of people fainted, instead playing music for the crowd for more than half an hour while he swayed along on stage. He used a four-letter word to describe his opponent, Harris. And he ended a long digression about Arnold Palmer with a vulgar aside about the golf great’s anatomy.
But even some who describe themselves as exhausted with Trump’s misbehavior say they are more focused on other things. The two issues mentioned most commonly: Inflation and illegal immigration.
“All of these [Trump failures] should matter. But common-sense arguments, arguments that worked in the past have stopped working,” said Strimple, who recently has completed polling for the Cook Political Report. “Right now, Trump has successfully made it a referendum on the Biden-Harris administration.”
Strimple agreed with Toomey, the Democratic pollster, that Harris needs to put the focus back on Trump’s most outlandish statements and actions.
But to truly be the “change” candidate that she needs to be, Harris also must make much clearer how her presidency would be different from that of Biden, whom she has served with for four years, said Strimple, and Steve Schmidt, a one-time Republican political strategist and ardent Trump opponent.
Harris did serious damage to that effort when she went on “The View” this month and said that “not a thing that comes to mind” when she was asked if there was anything that she would have done differently from President Biden over the last four years, Schmidt said on his podcast, “The Warning.”
Harris later has said she would appoint a Republican to her Cabinet and focus on housing and small business in new ways, trying to distinguish herself from Biden.
But Schmidt urged her to do even more to make her independence clear.
“What people want to know is what she will do differently from Biden,” Schmidt said. “Unless and until you cross that bridge, you’re going to fall short on election day.”
Mark Zuckerberg kept the circle of people who knew his thinking small.
Last month, Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, tapped a handful of top policy and communications executives and others to discuss the company’s approach to online speech. He had decided to make sweeping changes after visiting President-elect Donald J. Trump at Mar-a-Lago over Thanksgiving. Now he needed his employees to turn those changes into policy.
Over the next few weeks, Mr. Zuckerberg and his handpicked team discussed how to do that in Zoom meetings, conference calls and late-night group chats. Some subordinates stole away from family dinners and holiday gatherings to work, while Mr. Zuckerberg weighed in between trips to his homes in the San Francisco Bay Area and the island of Kauai.
By New Year’s Day, Mr. Zuckerberg was ready to go public with the changes, according to four current and former Meta employees and advisers with knowledge of the events, who were not authorized to speak publicly about the confidential discussions.
The entire process was highly unusual. Meta typically alters policies that govern its apps — which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Threads — by inviting employees, civic leaders and others to weigh in. Any shifts generally take months. But Mr. Zuckerberg turned this latest effort into a closely held six-week sprint, blindsiding even employees on his policy and integrity teams.
On Tuesday, most of Meta’s 72,000 employees learned of Mr. Zuckerberg’s plans along with the rest of the world. The Silicon Valley giant said it was overhauling speech on its apps by loosening restrictions on how people can talk about contentious social issues such as immigration, gender and sexuality. It killed its fact-checking program that had been aimed at curbing misinformation and said it would instead rely on users to police falsehoods. And it said it would insert more political content into people’s feeds after previously de-emphasizing that very material.
In the days since, the moves — which have sweeping implications for what people will see online — have drawn applause from Mr. Trump and conservatives, derision from fact-checking groups and misinformation researchers, and concerns from L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups that fear the changes will lead to more people getting harassed online and offline.
Inside Meta, the reaction has been sharply divided. Some employees have celebrated the moves, while others were shocked and have openly castigated the changes on the company’s internal message boards. Several employees wrote that they were ashamed to work for Meta.
On Friday, Meta’s makeover continued when the company told employees that it would end its work on diversity, equity and inclusion. It eliminated its chief diversity officer role, ended its diversity hiring goals that called for the employment of a certain number of women and minorities, and said it would no longer prioritize minority-owned businesses when hiring vendors.
Meta planned to “focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background,” Janelle Gale, vice president of human resources, said in an internal post that was relayed to The New York Times.
In interviews, more than a dozen current and former Meta employees, executives and advisers to Mr. Zuckerberg described his shift as serving a dual purpose. It positions Meta for the political landscape of the moment, with conservative power ascendant in Washington as Mr. Trump takes office on Jan. 20. More than that, the changes reflect Mr. Zuckerberg’s personal views of how his $1.5 trillion company should be run — and he no longer wants to keep those views quiet.
Mr. Zuckerberg, 40, has regularly spoken to friends and colleagues, including Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and Meta board member, about concerns that progressives are policing speech, the people said. He has also felt railroaded by what he views as the Biden administration’s anti-tech posturing, and stung by what he sees as progressives in the media and in Silicon Valley — including in Meta’s work force — pushing him to take a heavy hand in policing discourse, they said.
Meta declined to comment.
In an interview with the podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Mr. Zuckerberg said it was time to go “back to our original mission” by giving people “the power to share.” He said he had felt pressured by the Biden administration and the media to “censor” certain content, adding, “I have a much greater command now of what I think the policy should be, and this is how it’s going to be going forward.”
The latest changes were catalyzed by Mr. Trump’s victory in November. That month, Mr. Zuckerberg flew to Florida to meet with Mr. Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Meta later donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.
At Meta, Mr. Zuckerberg began preparing to change speech policies. Knowing that any moves would be contentious, he assembled a team of no more than a dozen close advisers and lieutenants, including Joel Kaplan, a longtime policy executive with strong ties to the Republican Party; Kevin Martin, the head of U.S. policy; and David Ginsberg, the head of communications. Mr. Zuckerberg insisted on no leaks, the people with knowledge of the effort said.
The group worked on revising Meta’s “Hate Speech” policy, with Mr. Zuckerberg leading the charge, they said. They changed the name of the policy, which lays out what to do with slurs, threats against protected groups and other harmful content on its apps, to “Hateful Conduct.”
That effectively shifted the emphasis of the rules away from speech, minimizing Meta’s role in policing online conversation. Mr. Kaplan and Mr. Martin were cheerleaders of the changes, these people said.
Mr. Zuckerberg decided to promote Mr. Kaplan to Meta’s head of global public policy to carry out the changes and deepen Meta’s ties to the incoming Trump administration, replacing Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of Britain who had handled policy and regulatory issues globally for Meta since 2018. The night before Meta’s announcement, Mr. Kaplan held individual calls with top conservative social media influencers, two people said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Zuckerberg made the new speech policies public in his Instagram video. Mr. Kaplan appeared on “Fox & Friends,” a mainstay of Mr. Trump’s media diet, saying Meta’s fact-checking partners “had too much political bias.”
(Fact-checking groups that worked with Meta have said they had no role in deciding what the company did with the content that was fact-checked.)
Among its changes, Meta loosened rules so people could post statements saying they hated people of certain races, religions or sexual orientations, including permitting “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation.” The company cited political discourse about transgender rights for the change. It also removed a rule that forbade users to say people of certain races were responsible for spreading the coronavirus.
Some training materials that Meta created for the new policies were confusing and contradictory, two employees who reviewed the documents said. Some of the text said saying that “white people have mental illness” would be prohibited on Facebook, but saying that “gay people have mental illness” was allowed, they said.
Meta locked access to the policies and training materials internally late on Thursday, they said, hours after The Intercept published excerpts.
The company also removed the transgender and nonbinary “themes” on its Messenger chat app, which allows users to customize the app’s colors and wallpaper, two employees said. The change was reported earlier by 404 Media.
That same day at Meta’s offices in Silicon Valley, Texas and New York, facilities managers were instructed to remove tampons from men’s bathrooms, which the company had provided for nonbinary and transgender employees who use the men’s room and who may have required sanitary pads, two employees said.
Some employees were livid at what they saw as efforts by executives to hide changes to the “Hateful Conduct” policy before it was announced, two people said. While people across the policy division typically view and comment on significant revisions, most did not have the opportunity this time.
On Workplace, Meta’s Slack-like internal communications software, employees began arguing over the changes. In the @Pride employee resource group, where workers who support L.G.B.T.Q. issues convene, at least one person announced their resignation as others privately relayed to one another that they planned to look for jobs elsewhere, two people said.
In a post this week to the @Pride group, Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, defended Mr. Zuckerberg and said topics like transgender issues had become politicized. He said Meta’s policies should not get in the way of allowing societal debate and pointed to Roe v. Wade, the landmark abortion case, as an example of “courts getting ahead of society” in the 1970s. Mr. Schultz said the courts had “politicized” the issue instead of allowing it to be debated civically.
“You find topics become politicized and stay in the political conversation for far longer than they would’ve if society just debated them out,” Mr. Schultz wrote. He said looser restrictions on speech in Meta’s apps would allow for this kind of debate.
Mr. Zuckerberg traveled to Palm Beach, Fla., this week, four people with knowledge of his activities said, and on Friday was said to have been at Mar-a-Lago.
In his interview with Mr. Rogan, Mr. Zuckerberg denied making sweeping changes to appease the incoming Trump administration, but said the election did influence his thinking.
“The good thing about doing it after the election is you get to take this cultural pulse,” he said. “We got to this point where there were these things that you couldn’t say that were just mainstream discourse.”
Theodore Schleifer, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan contributed reporting.
Politics
'Deeply disgusted': GOP senator shreds Biden admin in scathing letter on new immigrant deportation shield
FIRST ON FOX: Newly sworn-in Sen. Bernie Moreno, R-Ohio, in his first letter as a member of the Senate, sent a blistering inquiry to the Department of Homeland Security demanding answers on the extension of deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals from a slew of countries.
“I write to express my sincere concerns regarding the extensions of the designations of El Salvador, Venezuela, Ukraine, and Sudan for Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”),” Moreno wrote in a letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Friday. “These 18-month extensions allow these noncitizens to remain in the United States through the Fall of 2026, when the designations were set to expire.”
“These decisions were shamefully made by an outgoing administration ten days before President Donald J. Trump takes the oath of office. One would think that after handedly losing the 2024 Presidential Election when voters overwhelmingly rejected the Biden-Harris Administration’s open-border policy, that you would finally understand American citizens’ mandate. And yet, you continue to completely disregard the will of the majority of voters, by unilaterally deciding to allow nearly 1 million noncitizens who entered our country without original authorization to remain in the United States.”
DHS announced on Friday it is extending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for El Salvador, Venezuela, Sudan and Ukraine for an additional 18 months beyond their current expirations.
RED STATE AGS WELCOME TRUMP CRACKDOWN ON ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AFTER FOUR YEARS BATTLING BIDEN
Senator Bernie Moreno, left, and President Joe Biden, right (Getty)
TPS grants protection from deportation and work permits for nationals living in the U.S. from countries deemed unsafe for them to be returned. DHS cited environmental disasters in El Salvador, including storms and heavy rainfall, that it said resulted in a “substantial, but temporary” disruption of living conditions. It also cited the political and economic crises in Venezuela, political instability in Sudan and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine with Russia.
In his letter to Secretary Mayorkas, Moreno criticized the government’s rationale for the move.
“I am also deeply disgusted by your attempts to justify these decisions,” Moreno wrote. “For example, according to your Department, the extension of the TPS status of 234,000 noncitizens is due to “geological and weather events” in El Salvador. However, a quick review of the current weather in San Salvador, El Salvador currently shows that it is “mostly sunny” and 81 degrees Fahrenheit.”
NEW REPORT REVEALS MASSIVE NUMBER OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS BENEFITING FROM BIDEN-HARRIS ADMIN’S ‘QUIET AMNESTY’
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas speaks during a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee hearing on the department’s budget request on Capitol Hill on April 18, 2024 (Getty Images)
The moves do not redesignate countries for the status, meaning only those currently protected by TPS are eligible for an extension and no new applications can be received. Venezuela’s extension will apply to approximately 600,000 nationals; El Salvador’s will apply to 232,000; Ukraine’s will apply to approximately 103,000; and Sudan will affect about 1,900 nationals. Venezuela’s extension will run until October 2026, and El Salvador’s will run until September 2026, with both having been scheduled to end in the spring of 2025.
The moves, particularly for El Salvador and Venezuela, could complicate efforts by the Trump administration to deport illegal immigrants from those countries. Venezuelan nationals have been a particular focus, given the rise of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, while El Salvador is where the MS-13 gang originated.
Moreno’s letter asked Mayorkas to provide answers to a series of questions, some of them related to the concerns about MS-13.
“What is the current number of MS-13 members known to be in the United States?” Moreno asked. ” What is the current number of TdA members known to be in the United States? How many of the noncitizens suspected of being associated with MS-13 and/or TdA have remained in this country through a TPS designation?”
The letter also asks for sourcing and data related to the “geological and weather events” cited by the government as well as information about the vetting process for these individuals and answers about how the government is ensuring that these migrants will not commit crimes in the United States.
Fox News Digital reached out to DHS and the White House but did not receive an immediate response.
The first Trump administration moved to cut down on the number of countries designated for TPS, but the Biden administration has used it broadly, designating or redesignating a number of countries, including Venezuela, Afghanistan and Haiti. There are currently 17 countries designated for TPS.
Both President-elect Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance have indicated they want to cut back on TPS once in office, specifically for Haiti.
Fox News Digital’s Adam Shaw contributed to this report
Politics
Supreme Court casts doubt on TikTok's free-speech defense as shutdown law is set to take effect
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court justices sounded highly skeptical Friday of TikTok’s free-speech defense, signaling they are not likely to strike down the law that could shut down the popular video site the day before President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office.
The justices, both conservative and liberal, said Congress was concerned with the Chinese ownership of TikTok and the threat to national security. They also said the law in question was not an effort to restrict the freedom of speech.
“Congress doesn’t care about what’s on TikTok,” said Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. “Congress is not fine with a foreign adversary gathering all this data on 170 million Americans. … Are we supposed to ignore the fact that its parent company is subject to doing intelligence work for the Chinese government?”
He said he knew of no court precedent that would call for striking down such a law on 1st Amendment grounds.
In their comments and questions, all the justices appeared to agree.
“This law is targeted at a foreign corporation that doesn’t have 1st Amendment rights,” said Justice Elena Kagan.
“There is a long tradition of preventing foreign ownership or control of media in the United States,” added Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Lawyers for TikTok and many of its creators described the law as an unprecedented attack on the 1st Amendment.
“Shuttering the platform will silence the speech of 170 million monthly American users,” they said.
But Congress and the Biden administration said the Chinese-owned platform gives the government in Beijing access to “vast swaths of data about tens of millions of Americans,” which it “could use for espionage or blackmail.”
The justices agreed to decide TikTok’s 1st Amendment appeal on a fast-track schedule, and they are likely to issue a ruling within a few days.
None of them sounded ready to declare the law unconstitutional.
In recent years, the justices have often struck down federal regulations, usually on the grounds that Congress had not authorized such a far-reaching rule.
But they are wary of striking down an act of Congress, particularly one based on a claim of national security.
The shutdown law is due to take effect on Jan. 19.
“We go dark. The platform shuts down,” TikTok attorney Noel Francisco told the court, if it did not act.
Even if the justices were not ready to strike down the law as unconstitutional, he said they should issue an order that temporarily delays the law from taking effect.
“A short reprieve would make all the sense in the world,” he said, because it would give Trump time to try to work out a deal that could keep TikTok in operation.
In 2020, Trump, in his first term, issued an executive order requiring TikTok to separate itself from Chinese ownership, but it was blocked by courts.
President Biden and Congress took up the issue after receiving classified briefings about the potential threat from ByteDance, the Chinese-controlled company that operates TikTok.
The administration tried and failed to work out a deal that would separate TikTok from Chinese control.
The shutdown law had the support of large bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, and Biden signed it in April. By its terms the law was due to take effect in 270 days, on Jan. 19.
If the law goes into effect, it would be illegal for service providers such as Google or Apple to “distribute or maintain … a foreign advisory controlled application” in the United States. Violations could result in huge civil fines.
TikTok’s last and best hope may now rest with Trump. He changed his view last year about TikTok, which he said helped him reach young voters.
Two weeks ago, he filed a brief urging the court to stand aside and allow him to make a deal with TikTok’s owners.
None of the justices asked about Trump’s intervention.
The law allows for a one-time extension of up to 90 days if the new president determined there has been “significant progress” toward arranging a “qualified divestiture.”
It is not clear whether Trump could invoke that provision to delay the law from taking effect.
On Wednesday, an investor group spearheaded by former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt submitted an offer to ByteDance for TikTok’s U.S. business. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and a representative for the group, known as the People’s Bid for TikTok, declined to discuss the state of negotiations with the Chinese company on Friday.
“Our assumption is the Supreme Court will uphold the law, and at that point the only way to preserve TikTok under law will be a divestiture,” said Tomicah Tillemann, president of Project Liberty, a New York-based organization that assembled the bid.
Tillemann said the investment group would rebuild the platform in a way that prioritizes the privacy of TikTok users.
“What we are focused on is providing a clear path forward that will allow for the preservation of the dynamic, vibrant community that is TikTok under American ownership,” Tillemann said.
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