(Preview) A Long Weekend for TikTok, Preparing for Trump and an Era of Upheaval, LeBron James as an iPhone

Reactions to 48 hours of TikTok twists and turns, and what the weekend’s news might tell us about the next several years (or decades) in Washington and beyond. At the end: Facebook tries to market to TikTokers, a question about tech companies as governments unto themselves, and reviewing a tweet about LeBron James as an iPhone.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Ben Thompson?

  And so this is the world we've been living in and there's been talk, is this world ending? Is there a case, a lot of the things about Doge and, and all those bits and pieces are all about, actually, we need to reestablish executive control of the bureaucracy. All this sort, these sorts of things have taken on a life of their own. They're doing what they want and actually it's the executive branch. The executive, i.e. the president should be in charge. And in this sort of sense, this shift, is this sort of what we're getting is Trump kind of acting like a king?

• 0:45Andrew Sharp?

  That's a lot of power in the executive. I'll tell you that much and that's perhaps dangerous as we move forward here.

• 0:52Ben Thompson?

  The American people want TikTok and I want to make deals. And so, yeah, we're going to have some sort of fig leaf and make this attestation for the 90 day thing, or whatever it might be. And what are you going to do? Are you, like, the answer is, like, the legalistic answer is Congress, I would assume, holds him in contempt of Congress, right? Like, and what does that mean?

• 1:19Andrew Sharp?

  Do they? The question, yeah, I don't know whether they do. Tom Cotton seems pretty worked out about it.

• 1:25Ben Thompson?

  Of course they don't. The, like, me saying it.

• 1:28Andrew Sharp?

  They're not going to do that, but are they going to hold Trump accountable and at least publicly attack his posture on some of these issues? That is an open question. At least early on, Tom Cotton doesn't seem like he's, you know, bending over here. He's ready to continue, at least attempting to enforce the law.

• 1:48Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, well, no, I think that that is, yo, this is going to be the conflict to watch, right? It really is, yes, both houses of Congress are controlled by Republicans, but what the oldest fight in Washington is sort of like the legislative prerogative versus the president. And a Republican senator, even though it's the same party, is also a senator. The Senate is in many respects in opposition to the executive. They're the ones that have the purse strings. They they fund the bureaucracy. Who is the president to tell us what what can or cannot be done? And and so, you know, I would, you know, I would say from the Trump perspective, is this the best thing to be? This is my bigger point. This is the outlines of fights that I think are going to be happening.

• 2:32Ben Thompson?

  And is this the one to blow all your political capital on before you're sort of even even in office? And there's a bit where, you know, one thing I think we got very, very right on the last episode was basically saying, actually, ByteDance taking this to the end is extremely logical and the right thing to do. And you're, it's reasonable to interpret this as, oh, China won't allow them to sell. This is proof it's a spy app.

• 3:04Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Ben Thompson?

  That's an understandable position. It's also not necessarily true because from a sort of like this.

• 3:12Andrew Sharp?

  Even if it were just a business, it would make sense to say, look, let's go balls to the wall trying to fight this. And then in the event that we're unable to succeed and TikTok apparently internally really thought they were going to succeed on the First Amendment arguments in court and were pretty shocked that they didn't.

• 3:31Ben Thompson?

  Well, that's just, that's just bad.

• 3:32Andrew Sharp?

  Baffling to me.

• 3:34Ben Thompson?

  The Supreme Court precedent is is pretty clear on.

• 3:37Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, deference to Congress and national security questions is not.

• 3:42Ben Thompson?

  No, you're right. It's like it's like a double whammy. Yeah, like the the First Amendment rights are not absolute. Now, there's different levels of scrutiny. We sort of, you know, talked about that previously, but there is clear precedent in terms of national security. Ken Trump, no pun intended, these sort of concerns. So I don't have a clear take, to be honest, other than to outline that I think this is more interesting for broader reasons than just a TikTok sort of ban. This is, this is a, and that's what I meant about Trump being like, there is a sense where and you think about Trump's base, what does Trump's base want? Trump's base wants Trump to do things for them. They think that this is their vote.

• 4:27Ben Thompson?

  This is their opportunity to contribute to democracy. And the critique is actually, we haven't had democracy for a long time because the bureaucrats are in charge. And the whole, again, that's why I tie it to the Doge sort of idea and all these bits and pieces. Is the president in charge or is he not? And, and this is where the, you know,

• 4:50Ben Thompson?

  laws are laws. They also function, you know, the, the, the idea of the rule law is a broad societal agreement. And it's very easy to take these discussions, particularly people like us that want to be very analytical and sort of retreat into the legalese and lose sight of what's happening at a broader, deeper level. And what you end up doing is being marginalizing yourself because you're talking about something that actually no one cares about. And, and, and, and so, I don't know, I'm not sure if all that makes sense. I'm not giving clear analysis about what's going to happen to TikTok, X, Y, Z.

• 5:32Ben Thompson?

  It's more an observation that I think we're on the leading edge of a really fundamentally different way of thinking about governing and

• 5:41Andrew Sharp?

  Just diving into some uncharted waters here.

• 5:44Ben Thompson?

  Well, this is where the FDR thing is really interesting. Like FDR basically, you know, one, he, a lot of the laws FDR passed were not constitutional according to the commonly held understanding of the constitution in the 1920s. Like just, that's just the fact of the matter. And the Supreme Court started to rule them unconstitutional. And he's like, guess what? There's now going to be like 27 Supreme Court justices are going to go out there. And what'd they do? Like to preserve their sort of legitimacy, they like, oh, actually turns out these are constitutional. And, and you had this real fundamental shift in understanding a lot of the precedents today that undergird the bureaucracy actually come from those cases of the 1930s and 1940s, which again, were 180 degrees different than what came before.

• 6:29Ben Thompson?

  So I would just Counsel people be wary of assuming the precedent and the way things operate and your understanding of the world in the 2010s is going to be operative in the future. We could be the future Andrew Sharps and Ben Thompson's could very well be sitting here in 2090 saying, well, you know, Supreme Court precedent says, and you look at what is the date of those precedents? It's from the 2028 TikTok case XYZ said the president can do XYZ. I don't know.

• 7:00Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah, I mean, I

• 7:02Ben Thompson?

  I like how depressed I just made you look. You're just like, you're so glum now.

• 7:06Andrew Sharp?

  I mean, look, here's the thing with TikTok, because I've been covering this on Sharp China in parallel for two years now. And I will say, this is not that big of a deal. It's not a make or break issue for the future of the country. But if we zoom out, the TikTok law, it was a byproduct of a couple of different things. You had a couple of years of diligent reporting, exposing various TikTok lies, data abuses, and national security concerns. You were part of that. There were others, people at Forbes and BuzzFeed and a number of people were doing really great work on this issue. And then there was bipartisan legislation that responded to all

• 7:49Andrew Sharp?

  those concerns and was drafted really carefully to allow for a divestiture.

• 7:55Ben Thompson?

  To respond to some sort of national security briefing, which no one still has really knows about. But this like bill went from like zero to 100 very quickly. It was, it was, it was also, it was fairly odd. Like, like, why did that happen this year? Why did it happen so quickly?

• 8:13Andrew Sharp?

  Had to be done quietly because TikTok was just showering money all over DC lobbying against any efforts to potentially force a divestiture or ban it in the United States. And so the people who did this bill did it really carefully and really quietly. And they constructed a bill that would make it very hard for ByteDance to just flout the law entirely. And they succeeded. And then we also had a comprehensive judicial review of the law itself. And so, big picture. It was almost a great reminder that the American system can still work and respond to real problems. And so now I'm a little deflated.

• 8:55Andrew Sharp?

  I don't know what future we're inheriting here, but you know, the executive branch is just openly ignoring a law that Congress passed and Trump is taking over and doing a deal and like explicitly endorsing what may be a CCP information weapon as he takes office. It makes us all look pretty ridiculous, but perhaps more will be revealed over the next 90 days and beyond. I don't know. I don't want to get too down here.

• 9:23Ben Thompson?

  No, it's fair to be down. It's fair to be down on the what this says about our system of government. It's fair to be down about the seeming lack of care we have about, you know, sort of China having this tool and this weapon.

• 9:38Andrew Sharp?

  You know, I mean, that was my real take on all of it is I thought to myself on Sunday, I was like, you know, Ben's right. Nobody in America is actually going to get serious about the China threat and start to undertake what needs to be undertaken in response until there are real existential threats like actual, you know, armed conflict elsewhere in the world to motivate everybody. There's just not going to be enough urgency to combat the complacency and greed that exists in the United States.

• 10:11Ben Thompson?

  Well, so this is, this is, this is the, this is the open question, I think.

• 10:15Andrew Sharp?

  All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharp tech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out. And if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharp tech.fm.