TikTok appealed in court, Trump wavered, and the banning order ran out of time before Trump left the White House, defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 US presidential election. Back then, the former US President was bullish on the podium – using TikTok as a useful scapegoat for a presidential campaign trail without a real opponent, because Biden stayed at home during Covid – but turned out to be a chicken at the finish line. It was a prescient example of the phenomenon which gave us the acronym “TACO”: “Trump Always Chickens Out”.
You know the story by now: when September comes around, the same thing will likely happen again. Trump will chicken out.
The whole thing stems from Trump looking to eke out more leverage, either from the voters in 2020 as he sought a political punching bag to look strong for re-election, or, in 2025, from the Chinese over a tetchy trade war that threatens US tech supremacy in the world of AI.
If any US politician, Trump included, really worries about the risks of Chinese-founded tech products hoovering up our data and handing it over to the Chinese state to try and sway public opinion – a major allegation that has never been proved – then an AI platform would be a prime suspect.
Large language models like ChatGPT and DeepSeek can infer far more from a user’s text inputs than a video-scrolling algorithm ever could, and their outputs can be stealthily tuned to nudge opinions at scale.
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DeepSeek’s rise, and the fact that it’s still available for the American public to download more than six months on from it changing the world, exposes the hollowness of the original TikTok panic and any subsequent fear that we’re being nudged by tech from hostile states.
Beyond that, Washington wasted half a decade it could have spent beefing up comprehensive data privacy rules, boosting algorithmic transparency across all platforms, and investing in homegrown digital infrastructure.
And this is the problem. Trump might forget what he said yesterday, but the public doesn’t. National security strategy can’t be a reality TV cliffhanger, no matter how much Trump thought it would help his poll ratings in 2020. It means we don’t take his warnings of Chinese data dominance seriously – or his threats to ban any apps either.
That isn’t a concern when we’re talking about TikTok. It might not even be a worry around DeepSeek. But when the real risk does appear, the world will have wearied of taking Trump at his word – and trust him very little.
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