Trump’s TikTok Takeover

It’s coming down to the wire—again.

With TikTok facing another divest-or-ban deadline on Saturday, there’s a flurry of last-minute activity to rescue the ByteDance-owned app. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon had submitted a surprise bid to acquire the popular short-form video app. Other potential investors floated over the last several months include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and "Shark Tank" star Kevin O’Leary, who has said he’s assembling a consortium to purchase the company’s U.S. operations. And reports emerged that the administration is weighing a proposal to lease the app’s algorithm from ByteDance—a move that would leave it in Beijing-based company’s hands.

Rupert vs Rupert: Which one is it, Rupert? On Wednesday, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire spoke out of both sides of its mouth—again. Over on Fox News, his stable of MAGA propagandists hailed Donald Trump’s sweeping new tariffs on all imported goods as a triumph—despite the fact it will raise prices across the board and threatens to push the country into economic turmoil. "It is liberation day in America," Sean Hannity declared at the top of his program, parroting Trump's talking points that the U.S. has supposedly been "ripped off by countries all over the world for decades." Hannity, who claimed that the tariffs will be a positive for the country (a view the vast majority of economists do not share), celebrated that the days in which the U.S. doesn't impose tariffs on such goods "are thankfully now, as of tonight, over." Of course, Hannity's commentary was not an anomaly on Fox News—it was the standard fare.

But at Murdoch's other outlets, the tone couldn’t have been more different. The New York Post’s Thursday front page headline reads: “WORLD WAR FEE.” And The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board published a blistering piece warning that the tariffs will have catastrophic consequences for the country and world. The board noted that "tariffs are taxes" and will "harm American exports," lead to a "bigger Washington swamp," and "end U.S. economic leadership" across the world, with China ironically being given an opportunity to fill the void. "In the worst case, the world trading system could devolve into beggar-thy-neighbor policies as in the 1930s," the board warned, adding that "the cost in lost American influence will be considerable."