Nice Company You've Got There

Be a shame if anything happened to it. This broke a couple of days ago:

President Donald Trump said TikTok will have to close in the U.S. by Sept. 15 -- unless there’s a deal to sell the social network’s domestic operations to Microsoft Corp. or another U.S. company.

Trump also said the federal government will have to be paid a “substantial amount of money” as part of any deal.

“I don’t mind whether it’s Microsoft or someone else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company buys it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “It’ll close down on Sept. 15 unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it and work out a deal, an appropriate deal, so the Treasury of the United States gets a lot of money.”

Trump really has started to think of himself as the godfather. I can't see how the U.S. government can legally demand a cut of a business deal between two corporations. My own feeling is it's just Trump blowing gas again -- he announced originally, on Friday, that he would ban TikTok's operations in the U.S. on Saturday via his old stand-by, executive order. Nothing happened.

However, the reactions have been, predictably, not positive. The Chinese, in particular, are not pleased:

Chinese state media this week is blasting Washington for what it calls the United States' "nasty" treatment of TikTok — the wildly popular video-sharing app that has become emblematic of worsening US-China relations.

"The US' decoupling from China starts [with] killing China's most competitive companies," wrote the Global Times, a state-run tabloid, in an editorial published Monday. "In the process, Washington ignores rules and is unreasonable."

And as usual, Trump's own people have no idea how this is supposed to happen, if it happens (and that's a big if, but it's the press' latest shiny object):

White House officials on Tuesday could not say how the U.S. government would receive a portion of the proceeds from any sale of TikTok’s U.S. operations, one day after President Donald Trump called for a cut of the money.

“There’s no specific blueprint here,” White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said on Fox Business Network on Tuesday.

“It may be that the president was thinking, because the Treasury has had to do so much work on this, there are a lot of options here. I’m not sure it’s a specific concept that will be followed through ... Regarding fees or anything like that, all that remains to be seen,” Kudlow said.

This is revealing of Trump's thinking on this (among other things):

Experts have said the U.S. government generally does not have the authority to take a cut of private business sales. But Trump, a real estate developer and former reality television star who has touted his “art of the deal,” on Monday said “a very substantial portion” of any TikTok sale must go to the U.S. Treasury “because we’re making it possible for this deal to happen.”

That's a stretch, at best -- the only possible way we "allowed this to happen" is if it requires an OK from the Commerce Department, or DoJ, on anti-monopoly grounds, which wouldn't apply here.

The man's an idiot.

Oh, and if you're wondering why Trump is going after TikTok in particular, aside from the fact that it's a Chinese company, note this, from the Bloomberg story:

Teenagers opposed to Trump have also used the app to disrupt the president’s campaign activities, including signing up for tickets to his first rally since the beginning of the pandemic, in Tulsa. Attendance at the late June event was far below expectations, and Trump hasn’t held another rally since.

Bottom line: they're being mean to him.

All via Joe.My.God.