President Donald Trump was TikTok's original political antagonist. Now he's positioned himself as the beleaguered video app's savior. In a Day 1 executive order, Trump declared that a law effectively banning TikTok should not be enforced.
This is good news for TikTok and its users—for now, at least. But it might not be good for constitutional order broadly, to the extent that it represents a president declaring a law passed by Congress to be impotent simply because he says so.
It could ultimately be bad for free speech, too, given Trump's ideas about how to proceed from here. On Truth Social and in the Oval Office, he's been floating the idea of giving the U.S. government partial ownership of TikTok.
