Déjà vu: TikTok’s time was nearly up, and then President Donald Trump stepped in to save it. This happened in January, and also earlier today, when Trump said that he will sign another executive order to delay a possible ban on the social-media app.
Out of concern about the app’s possible weaponization by the Chinese government, Congress passed a law in April 2024 that required TikTok to spin off from its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or else stop operating in the United States. When the deadline for such a sale initially arrived earlier this year, American TikTok users had the hallucinatory experience of losing access to the app … for 14 hours. Trump intervened for the first time then by pushing the deadline for a sale back for 75 days—an extension he is now doubling—and the app soon came back. Months of news coverage, analysis, discussion, viral memes, and even some widely covered “Keep TikTok” protests outside the U.S. Capitol culminated in a brief shutout and a punted deadline. The app reappeared with a pop-up message thanking Trump for the reprieve: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!”
TikTok went back to business, mostly as usual. Many American companies and rich people have been rumored to have an interest in acquiring the app. These have ranged from the interesting but unserious (YouTube personality MrBeast or one of the Shark Tank guys) to the serious but uninteresting (current TikTok U.S. data-center operator Oracle) to the obvious names that would pop up no matter what big tech acquisition we were talking about (Elon Musk, Amazon, Microsoft). In his post today, Trump alluded to a pending deal without specifics. “My Administration has been working very hard on a Deal to SAVE TIKTOK, and we have made tremendous progress,” he said. “The Deal requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed.”
This drama is getting tiresome. It’s just an app, and many Americans—at least those who are old enough to vote—don’t actually care that much about it. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that TikTok’s popularity was second only to YouTube among teenagers, but it’s far from the country’s most popular social-media app overall, despite its salience as a conversational stand-in for “internet culture” or “annoying thing that young people like.” “It’s a lot of fanfare and suspense over an app that, well, just isn’t all that important,” Kate Lindsay wrote in The Atlantic in January, pointing out that only a third of U.S. adults interviewed for another Pew survey said they’d ever used it. (More of these people say they use Pinterest!) Among young adults, she added, Snapchat and Instagram are more popular.
More recent polling from Pew shows a country with negative but not-very-strong feelings about the ban. Fifty percent of adults supported the idea in March 2023, and that number has now dropped to 34 percent. The percentage of Americans who oppose it has grown from 22 percent to 32 percent. But the percentage of Americans who say they’re not sure about it has risen as well, from 28 to 33 percent. We have approximately a three-way tie on the issue, with opposition and support about as prevalent as shoulder shrugs. Pew didn’t see a big partisan divide on this, either—39 percent of Republicans support the ban, compared with 30 percent of Democrats. People who oppose the ban tend to do so on free-speech grounds, whether they are Democrats or Republicans. They also tend to say they’re unconvinced by arguments about TikTok’s threat to national security.
Perhaps the problem is that these arguments were abstract in the way that data protection is always kind of abstract. They also seemed hypothetical, because as far as the public knows, the U.S. currently has no evidence that Chinese intelligence has ever accessed Americans’ data en masse via TikTok. That’s not to say there’s no chance that TikTok could be used for some nefarious purpose, but the app is not exactly an outlier in this regard; ByteDance employees have been caught using it to track journalists, for example, similar to the accusations more than a decade ago that employees at Uber were using their app’s “God View” to track individual users. The government has also made it seem like we have bigger problems on our hands when it comes to China (and not just a trade war). For instance, the Biden administration accused the Chinese of intelligence efforts to gain control of American power grids and water pipelines, which sounds acutely terrifying; the vague notion of China pushing propaganda on social media falls more into the bucket of “not ideal.” Trump acknowledged this disconnect in January with his signature wild directness: “Is it that important for China to be spying on young people? On young kids watching crazy videos?”
Of course, he was also the one to have first proposed the ban, back in 2020. At that time, some of his more important allies were anti–social media, arguably anti-tech Republicans such as Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who argued strenuously that TikTok was an urgent threat to national security. This was a time-limited approach—years passed and nightmare scenarios remained hypothetical. And Trump’s commitment to the ban disappeared when he was out of office. While campaigning in 2024, Trump made a TikTok account that now has more than 15 million followers; in his second term, his administration is tightly knit with the tech industry.
During President Joe Biden’s term, Congress followed through on the ban seemingly because it represented a quick and dramatic intervention to ease anxieties about social media in general. (This is the logic behind the billionaire Frank McCourt’s bid to acquire the app and strip it of its famous recommendation algorithm.) But Americans don’t currently appear to care very much about the narrative that TikTok is addictive, either. Fewer than half of the Pew respondents who said they support a ban cited people spending too much time on TikTok as a major reason. It wasn’t among the top three reasons overall.
The law on the books now reads as the semipermanent result of a political moment that has ended. The whole years-long debate may soon feel like a hallucination, too.
This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Baseball, perhaps fittingly for America’s pastime, is a game of stubborn tradition and incremental change. This year, the Yankees will allow their players to don beards (and their fans to eat tiramisu out of little helmets). But women remain unable to play serious baseball, no matter how much they adore the sport. My colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany asks in our April magazine issue: “In a game in which everything matters, in which we who love it wish to see every possible outcome unfold, how can we stomach the absence of women’s baseball?” Today’s newsletter explores the changes to baseball in recent years, and what has stayed the same.
On Baseball
Why Aren’t Women Allowed to Play Baseball?
By Kaitlyn Tiffany
Women have always loved America’s pastime. It has never loved them back.
Goodbye to baseball’s most anachronistic rule: “The New York Yankees have abandoned their half-century prohibition of beards, a policy that was archaic even from its infancy,” Steve Rushin writes. “Now I find myself strangely, unexpectedly bereft, stroking my own beard in contemplation.”
How AI baseball explains the limits of AI: The iconic Yankees broadcaster John Sterling reminds us that what makes us human cannot be imitated, Yair Rosenberg wrote last year.
Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy drew a comparison between President Donald Trump and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) after the latter topped Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in a head-to-head poll by double digits.
The liberal firm Data for Progress shared survey results this week with Politico, finding that in a primary matchup, 55% of Democratic likely voters backed or leaned toward Ocasio-Cortez compared to 36% feeling the same about Schumer. Another 9% were undecided between the two.
The margin of error in poll is 4%. It was conducted in late March among 770 likely voters through text messages and web panels.
The results follow Schumer facing internal backlash in his party for choosing to back a GOP funding bill last month to keep the federal government from shutting down. The Senate leader has maintained that he feels he made the right decision in avoiding a shutdown.
“This poll really does show that Democrats are united in just wanting to stand up, wanting to fight, wanting to see someone taking a stand for them,” Danielle Deiseroth, executive director of Data for Progress, told Politico.
While reporting on the poll on Fox & Friends Weekend, hosts Campos-Duffy, Griff Jenkins, and Charles Hurt all argued Ocasio-Cortez should not be “underestimated,” arguing she has become the new face of the more progressive Democrats.
Campos-Duffy also claimed the congresswoman has a similar appeal to Trump.
She argued:
This is one of the dangers of staying too long, of not exiting stage right while still on top. And Chuck Schumer has been there a long time and I have always said do not underestimate AOC. People write me by the way, they think I support AOC. I don’t like AOC but I can recognize raw talent, raw political talent when I see it. AOC is a person who understands her base, who understands the leftist populist streak that runs through the party, she understand social media, she has a massive following, she took a page off of Donald Trump by the way speaking directly to the people, not having to go through the media all the time, although the media is very friendly to her. She should not be underestimated. If this matchup happened, I believe that poll is right. I believe she would win.
Jenkins added that Schumer backing the GOP funding bill was a “major political move” and gave Ocasio-Cortez an opening to rise through the ranks.
“I think that’s when AOC saw the moment to strike. That’s why you saw her out in the country doing her town hall stuff with Bernie Sanders,” Jenkins said, referring to recent town halls hosted by Ocasio-Cortez and close ally Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
“That was Bernie handing over the torch to her for that wing of the party,” Campos-Duffy said. “No question.”
President Donald Trump told Americans to “hang tough” as stocks are plummeting following his implementation of tariffs on a number of countries.
“China has been hit much harder than the USA, not even close,” Trump wrote on Saturday morning. “They, and many other nations, have treated us unsustainably badly.”
China implemented a 34% tariff on U.S. imports in response to the president’s tariffs, which he signed on Wednesday, a day he’s repeatedly referred to as “Liberation Day.” Despite uncertainty in the markets, Trump has maintained that his use of tariffs will lead to better trade deals and a manufacturing boom in the U.S.
On Truth Social, the president touted companies making investments in the United States and told people to “hang tough” through what he promises will be an “economic revolution.”
On Friday, the Dow Jones was down by 2,200 points or 5.5% at closing. The Nasdaq and the S&P 500 also both closed down 5.8% and 5.9%, respectively. It was the worst trading week since March 2020.
Trump claimed that past trade deals made the United States into the “whipping post” for other nations and his current tariff war will end that.
“We have been the dumb and helpless ‘whipping post,’ but not any longer,” he wrote. “We are bringing back jobs and businesses like never before. Already, more than FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS OF INVESTMENT, and rising fast! THIS IS AN ECONOMIC REVOLUTION, AND WE WILL WIN. HANG TOUGH, it won’t be easy, but the end result will be historic. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
The storm has already wreaked havoc across the South and the Midwest, killing at least eight people, including a boy who was swept away by floodwaters in Kentucky.
In one 48-minute speech, President Trump scrambled every American’s budget, every U.S. company’s balance sheet and every global alliance.Tariffs, a sometimes obscure economic tool, have
President Trump’s tariff revolution is rooted in a simple thesis: America has been humiliated and exploited by foreign nations for decades, and only he has
The first lady spoke about (wait for it) diversity as she presented awards to courageous women from around the world
Let’s take a quick break from the increasingly dreadful news for a little check-in, shall we? So … how are you holding up right now? How are those stress levels?
