In July, Donald Trump tried to throw a political rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a move discouraged by medical experts due to the COVID-19 crisis. Fortunately, the “nearly one million” tickets that had been requested, which Trump did not hesitate to brag about, didn’t all represent actual Trump supporters. There is a theory that users on the social media, video-sharing platform Tik Tok were requesting tickets en masse in order to leave those seats empty during the rally. Less than 7,000 total supporters showed up for the rally.
#BREAKING: President Trump says TikTok must be bought by US company and pay cut of selling price into US Treasury: "Right now they don't have any rights unless we give it to them." pic.twitter.com/VJ7gC1u6nc
— The Hill (@thehill) August 3, 2020
On Monday, Trump repeated his promise to ban the social media company from operating within the United States, a move he says is related to the data mining of user information, which poses a security threat, although that doesn’t appear to be a concern of his in any instance prior to now. Trump bragged that he had a great conversation with Chinese officials in which he told them that an American company would be buying Tik Tok if they expected to operate in the United States and that they would be paying a big portion of it to the U.S. Treasury.
‘Here’s the deal: I don’t mind if it’s Microsoft or somebody else, a big company, secure company, very American company buys it…I did say that “if you buy it, whatever the price is, it goes to whoever owns it because I guess it’s China, essentially…I said a substantial portion of that price is going to have to come into the treasury of the United States because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen. You know, they don’t have any rights unless we give it to them.’
While Trump has never truly subscribed to the Republican ideology when it didn’t directly benefit him to do so, the interference in a free trade market, as well as the extortion inherent in Trump’s statement, should have any true Republican up in arms.
Twitter was quick to respond to Trump’s Monday rant. Read some of their comments below:
Featured image screenshot via Twitter video
