Or, the Canadian Girlfriend Theory of Executive Power

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Hello from Washington, where the inaugural festivities have concluded and life now returns to normal—not only in the sense that the tourists all go home, but also in the sense that a president is once again leading the executive branch. It would have been hard, in January 2021, to imagine how President Biden could fail so badly in the basic discharge of his duties that Trump’s return to the Oval Office would be cause for a sigh of relief. But here we are. At least we know again who is making the decisions.

Something of a scattershot edition today, collated after spending the past five days bouncing around various meetings and events. In the Financial Timesyesterday I put down some initial thoughts, on having “optimism but not confidence as Trump takes control”:

The grounds for optimism lie in the quality of the senior appointments that Trump has made, which represent extraordinary improvements over his first-term choices. If the administration’s discipline and execution have travelled as far as the distance from a Mike Pence to a JD Vance, a Rex Tillerson to a Marco Rubio, or a Reince Priebus to a Susie Wiles, a new golden age may indeed be upon us.

Whereas in 2016 Trump outran the supply lines of supporting institutions, ideas and staff, he can now draw from a deep bench of talent and a thick playbook aligned with his own priorities. Across agencies and White House offices, he is quietly stocking his team with serious players.

But the team captain, the coach and the quarterback is still Trump himself. Not many people have done well placing bets on the decisions he will make in the Oval Office, least of all when predicting he will do the expected thing that the conventional analysis recommends. The fruit is larger and juicier and hanging lower than ever, and now everyone waits to see what he will pick.

TikTok on the Clock

Already we’re seeing this with TikTok, which has quickly taken on the sordid character of a bipartisan humiliation. Trump signed an executive order back in 2020 seeking to force the app out of the American market, and then Biden signed a law in 2024 that would shut it down this week unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, relinquished control. But neither has shown an appetite for placing the national interest and the rule of law above their narrower political priorities.

First, Biden indicated that he would not enforce the law that he had signed. Then TikTok shut itself down anyway, blaming Biden and offering Trump the opportunity to be the hero who restored service. Trump is taking the Chinese up on the offer, and his team actually sat the TikTok CEO next to Tulsi Gabbard, nominee to be the U.S. Director of National Intelligence. TikTok turned the service back on and Trump signed an executive order with no basis in law whatsoever granting it a 75-day reprieve. Now he is attempting to tie his threat of imposing tariffs on China to the demand that the U.S. should be given “half of the value of TikTok,” saying, “if I don’t do the deal it’s worthless. If I do the deal, it’s worth maybe a trillion dollars.”

If you’re confused, you should be. The purpose of forcing ByteDance’s divestment of TikTok is to prevent the Chinese Communist Party from controlling one of the largest U.S. media platforms and the data of its American users, not to confiscate some share of the equity. The purpose of imposing tariffs on China is to move supply chains out of the country, not to extort a social media company.

And then of course there’s what the law actually says, which, you know, kind of should be determinative on all these questions. This is not really a difficult issue. Whether the administration can gets its act together here will be a good early test of its ability to execute on the much more difficult challenges ahead.

Continue reading at Understanding America
Oren Cass
Oren Cass is chief economist at American Compass.
@oren_cass
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