Five years ago today, on 6 August 2020, Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13942. It vowed to kick TikTok out of the United States unless its Chinese parent, ByteDance, sold up fast. The order invoked the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, framed the short-form video app as a national security menace, and set a 45-day countdown clock that, strangely, never quite expired.
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”.
Five years on, Trump keeps on chickening out. He’s still recycling the same talking points he did in 2020 about a purported – but unproven – national security risk, and yet TikTok survives. A 2024 law forcing parent company ByteDance to divest from its stake in the US has stalled in court, and Trump has since extended a delay to a supposed ban of the app, which was meant to come into effect in April, into mid-September.
You know the story by now: when September comes around, the same thing will likely happen again. Trump will chicken out.
It’ll be kicked further down the road, and the reason is simple: no one has yet shown a public indication of what those national security risks are – perhaps because they didn’t exist.
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.
And the success of one AI company highlights how pointless all this is. DeepSeek, a Chinese generative AI platform that’s seen as a competitor to US firm OpenAI’s ChatGPT, shot to the top of the app stores earlier this year and upended the stock market when it appeared out of nowhere.
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.
Indeed, the White House is looking into DeepSeek, while the US Navy has banned its staff from downloading the app. Earlier this summer, US lawmakers came together across political divides to propose a law that would ban the federal government from using any Chinese-made AI systems. For good reason: while nothing has been proven, if TikTok once worried policymakers about collecting location and viewing habits, then an AI chatbot that ingests business plans, medical queries, and draft patents should ring louder alarm bells.
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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Whether that would ever happen is a huge question, though we have seen Russian state-sponsored entities trying to poison the training data used by AI models, in order to shape outputs which reflect the Kremlin’s view of the world.
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.
Five years ago, Trump’s grandstanding – then chickening out – also signalled to the public that this is a boy willing to cry wolf. That’s damaging, because if an issue were ever to occur, any warnings are now cheapened by the confected hype around TikTok in 2020, and the running saga that continues today.
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.
Trump’s first threatened ban achieved none of those goals. Instead, it sparked alarmist headlines, confused creators, and ultimately left the American public no more or less safe.
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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