Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Beyond rewarding his Big Tech buddies and flexing his muscles on China, U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed deal to spin off TikTok’s domestic operations from its China-based parent may have new political significance in the wake of the assassination of conservative activist and MAGA evangelist Charlie Kirk.
Mr. Trump credited the reach of TikTok and Mr. Kirk for winning over millions of young voters in the 2024 election in ways that Republicans – whose support has historically skewed older – had not been able to do in the past. That shift was among the leading factors contributing to Mr. Trump’s win.
With Mr. Kirk gone – the victim of an assassin’s bullet at a Utah college earlier this month – and the future of his Turning Point organization in limbo, there may be new urgency on a TikTok deal for Mr. Trump and the GOP heading into the next year’s midterm elections and the presidential election in 2028.
While the US$14-billion deal has not been finalized, the current structure outlined by the White House last week would see Mr. Trump’s tech allies and investors in control of the app’s U.S. operations.
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It’s not a stretch to believe that Mr. Trump would leverage the power of the platform as a partisan megaphone in his increasingly controversial presidency, now dented by the loss of one of its most influential ambassadors to a critical block of voters.
The political stakes for Mr. Trump and the GOP are as high as TikTok’s reach is wide. The platform has about 1.8 billion active users worldwide, almost 140 million in the U.S. That means about 40 per cent of Americans use TikTok, and those users tend to skew younger than the national average.
That generation of voters, who are active and often obsessive users of social media apps such as TikTok, flocked to Mr. Trump in last year’s election in numbers that shocked both the Republican and Democrat faithful.
Even though voters aged 18-29 favoured Democratic hopeful Kamala Harris over Mr. Trump by four percentage points – 51 to 47 per cent – that was a significantly smaller margin than the 25-point margin former president Joe Biden held over Mr. Trump with this group in 2020.
Of those young voters, young men supported Mr. Trump by 14 points over Ms. Harris, a sharp reversal from support for Mr. Biden in 2020. Though young women favoured Ms. Harris at the polls last year, the margin was smaller than in 2020.
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Mr. Trump’s ability to activate TikTok for his own ends and those of Republicans more broadly – if he so chooses – is linked to the structure of the proposed deal, which would create a joint venture to oversee the new U.S. entity.
Under the current terms, Oracle would lead the group and have the role of security provider for the spun-off app. Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO, has made a notable shift in recent years from supporting candidates on both sides of the aisle to ally more closely with Mr. Trump, along with other Big Tech notables such as Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook.
Other investors include the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and private equity firm Silver Lake. Mr. Trump has suggested that Michael Dell and Rupert Murdoch are other potential investors.
The proposed deal would see ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent, maintain a 20-per-cent stake in the new U.S. entity. But Oracle will have the authority to “fully inspect” and “retrain” U.S. user data, according to the Trump administration.
Six of the seven board seats in the new entity will be filled by Americans.
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Mr. Biden started the ball rolling, saying the platform posed a national security threat because of concerns that the Chinese Communist Party, through ByteDance, could use the app to spy on U.S. users and infuse content with propaganda.
Mr. Trump initially agreed with Mr. Biden and the former president’s push to serve ByteDance with an ultimatum: divest its Chinese ownership or the app would be shut down in the U.S.
But Mr. Trump eventually changed his posture – perhaps after he saw what the app could do for him politically. He has pushed out the deadline for a resolution several times and seems to have choreographed a solution that has the potential to benefit him and his party as well as U.S. national security.
“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” Mr. Trump said when crediting the social media app for winning the youth vote in last year’s election.
That spot seems to be even warmer now for Mr. Trump in the aftermath of Mr. Kirk’s death and with approval ratings that are increasingly volatile.