[ad_1]
Former President Donald Trump’s politics have focused primarily on himself rather than ideology, but this week two notable developments regarding Social Security and TikTok are spotlighting something new.
President Trump and President Joe Biden will likely try to sell their policy positions as they face a rematch in the general election. For example, Biden has pivoted on border policy. This is a calculated shift to address the crisis and shift support away from Trump.. But President Trump’s comments about TikTok and Social Security in a free interview on CNBC suggest confusion about Social Security and ambivalence about TikTok, rather than calculation.
About social security: Mr. Trump spent much of his primary campaign and political career promising to protect benefits at all costs, a switch for Republicans who have long warned about deficit spending.
It is not immediately clear what exactly President Trump’s position is. In a meandering, ad-libbed answer in a phone interview broadcast on CNBC, President Trump seemed to suggest he was open to cutting Social Security. But Trump campaign spokeswoman Caroline Leavitt insisted that the president was “clearly talking about waste reduction, not rights.”
On TikTok: As president, he issued an executive order forcing TikTok’s China-affiliated parent company ByteDance to sell the popular social media app, part of a larger anti-China campaign during his time in the White House. At the end of his term, the effort was halted by a federal court, but ByteDance has moved to enact what it calls Project Texas, which aims to keep U.S. users’ data away from China.
House Republicans and many Democrats are currently voting on new legislation that would force ByteDance to spin off TikTok within about five months or ban it from U.S. app stores, similar to President Trump’s executive order. But President Trump now says that Facebook, not TikTok, is the “enemy of the people” and is opposed to, or at least doesn’t seem to care about, separating TikTok from ByteDance.
read A complete analysis of President Trump’s policy shift here.
[ad_2]
Source link
