TikTok CEO Tries Sucking Up to Trump After Supreme Court Upholds Ban

Following the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold a federal law that effectively bans TikTok, the social media platform’s CEO is trying to butter up Donald Trump.

Shou Zi Chew posted a video to the platform Friday thanking the president-elect “for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States.

“We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform—one who has used TikTok to express his own thoughts and perspectives, connecting with the world and generating more than 60 billion views of his content in the process.”

By specifically mentioning Trump and his fan base on the app, Chew appears to be making a last-ditch effort to save TikTok in the U.S., with the service scheduled to shut down on Sunday if the platform’s China-based company does not divest. The actual language of the law technically just requires the platform to be removed from app stores so new users can’t download it.

President Biden said Thursday that he wouldn’t enforce the ban during the last few days of his presidency, leaving its interpretation and implementation to Trump. The president-elect has said in recent months that he opposes a ban, going against his own previous position and what used to be near-universal opposition to TikTok on the right.

A ban on TikTok may not even be effective in deterring China from collecting the personal data of Americans, and conservative Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, while voting to uphold the ban, questioned its wisdom. But right now, the app may be functionally useless by Sunday, unless it’s sold to an American owner in the eleventh hour. Perhaps Trump has his own plans for TikTok that involve its CEO pledging allegiance to him like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

Republicans are looking to gut and slash federal programs in order to afford an extension to Donald Trump’s 2017 tax plan.

The extension, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and could add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit, would arrive at the expense of dozens of popular federal programs. But perhaps most egregious among the penny-pinching proposals is a plan to literally take food away from hungry children by nixing free school meal plans made available to some of the poorest families in the country.

Raising the threshold of eligibility for schools to receive the Community Eligibility Provision could save the government $3 billion over a span of 10 years, according to a menu-like list released by the House Ways and Means Committee intended to serve as cutting options for the House reconciliation package.

“The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP) allows the nation’s highest-poverty schools and districts to serve breakfast and lunch at no cost to all enrolled students without collecting household applications,” the proposal reads. “Instead, schools that adopt CEP are reimbursed using a formula based on participation in other specific means-tested programs, such as SNAP and TANF. Currently, schools can qualify if 40 percent of students receive these programs. This proposal would lift that to 60 percent.”

It shouldn’t take much to argue that taking food away from children is a bad thing. But data shows that food insecurity has been on the rise in the U.S. for the last several decades, and it has seen a considerable spike since the pandemic, according to the USDA. It affects roughly one in seven American households, according to data from the Food Research and Action Center, affecting an estimated 47.4 million people across the country.

A 2013 survey of K-8 public school teachers by No Kid Hungry found that six in 10 teachers across the nation knew that their students were regularly coming to school hungry. Teachers in the same study reported that 80 percent of students were coming to school hungry one or more times per week and that “most or a lot of their students” relied on school meals as their “primary source of nutrition.”

And there are immediate educational benefits to supplying children with meals: A 2018 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research found that students who received the subsidized lunches were far less likely to need disciplinary action, such as school suspensions. Other studies have suggested that more breakfasts and lunches could improve academic performance or their health.

Donald Trump has a set of executive orders to carry out his disturbing plans ready to go as soon as he is sworn in as president on Monday.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump is ready to bypass Congress with orders on the border, tariffs, and other agenda items. In a meeting with Senate Republicans that lasted two hours, Trump said he had already prepared about 100 executive orders that push the limits of presidential authority.

It’s a worrying prospect, considering Trump’s actions during his first presidential term, which included instituting a “Muslim ban” on immigration or rolling back close to 100 environment rules. This time, Trump has set the stage for even worse with the extreme promises he made on the 2024 campaign trail, from mass deportations to taking on birthright citizenship.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the Trump administration used Title 42, a public emergency order, to close the southern U.S. border. During his second term, his aides are actually looking for the threat of a new disease to justify closing the border. As for the tariffs, Trump has already proposed creating a new, unnecessary “External Revenue Service” to handle their collection and is already preparing plans to tailor the tariffs to target “critical imports.”

All of these plans, even if they are successfully implemented via executive order and survive legal challenges, will have unforeseen consequences to the economy and to American life. But Trump has been emboldened by his election victory, and believes he has a mandate to force his agenda forward. If things don’t work out the way he wants, he will find someone else to blame and claim the opposite is what he wanted all along.

Failed presidential candidate and Trump disciple Vivek Ramaswamy is planning to run for governor of Ohio, according to The Washington Post.

Ramaswamy, who is set to co-lead Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency with Elon Musk, apparently plans to work with the group for a year before setting out on the campaign trail in Ohio. “Vivek’s base plan remains [the] same: to get accomplishments at DOGE and then announce a run for governor shortly,” a source familiar with the matter told the Post.

Ohio will have gubernatorial elections in 2026, and current Governor Mike DeWine is term-limited. Ramaswamy is from Cincinnati.

This surprising news comes after Ramaswamy went on a wild rant last month criticizing what he saw as a lazy, anti-intellectual white American culture, in an apparent defense of H-1B visas. He was eviscerated by the MAGA right for his views, and the DOGE co-lead has been relatively silent online since then. His only post on X in recent weeks has been a reference to Trump’s upcoming inauguration. It’s hard not to speculate that this sudden move may have something to do with that internal rift he helped fuel between tech MAGA and base MAGA.

Elsewhere in Ohio news, DeWine on Friday announced his Lieutenant Governor John Husted will replace JD Vance as one of Ohio’s senators.

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of homeland security, got some heat for rattling off dubious statistics during her Senate confirmation hearing Friday. 

Michigan Senator Gary Peters noted that the hearing had considered a “fair amount of political theater,” and reminded those listening that the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee endeavored to be a “fact-based committee.”

“We’ve heard a lot of numbers being thrown around here. And I don’t have time to go through and challenge those numbers; some of them we don’t even know where they came from,” Peters said. “I don’t think that’s helpful to the very important mission of confirm that you’re gonna be dealing with.

“So, I hope that in the future that we’re actually dealing with facts. You’ve mentioned many times that you want to deal with facts, and real data. And again, we’ve heard a lot here that’s not real data. And we should not operate that way,” Peters said.

Peters’s comment, though not directed at any particular person, seemed to be a way to chastise those present for providing sourceless numbers about immigration—including Noem.  

“President Trump was elected with a clear mandate,” Noem said in her opening statement. “He needs to achieve this mission because two-thirds of Americans support his immigration and border policies, including the majority of Hispanic Americans.”

But a postelection survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that just 26 percent of Americans agreed that the U.S. military should put undocumented immigrants into internment camps until they can be deported, which is exactly Trump’s plan. Not even two-thirds of Republicans support such an extreme plot, only 46 percent. Not exactly a mandate. 

Noem also rattled off a slate of numbers about immigration that didn’t seem totally sound, either. 

“Over 13,000 murderers loose in this country that have come over that border. We have had almost 16,000 rapists and sexual assault perpetrators that are loose in this country right now. Four hundred eighty-five thousand–plus people have criminal convictions that are here in this country,” she insisted

Noem appears to have gotten her numbers from DHS’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, but she is misstating some of the facts. In July, ICE reported that there were 13,000 immigrants who have been convicted of homicide, either in their home country or in the U.S., and 16,000 who are convicted of sexual assault but who were not currently in ICE detention. While Noem suggested that these individuals are “loose,” she failed to provide the essential caveat that they could already be in jail for their crimes or not “prioritized” for detention by ICE itself.

The ICE report also stated that there were 425,431 undocumented immigrants outside of ICE detention who were convicted criminals, and an additional 222,141 with pending criminal charges—not “485,000-plus.”

Much of Noem’s hearing revolved around so-called “migrant crime,” as she insisted that undocumented immigrants had been allowed to get away with rape and murder under the Biden administration—something that is simply not true.