Pa.’s TikTok billionaire, Donald Trump, and ‘The Selling of the President 2024’

It was the movie scene that launched a million journalism careers. Remember that moment in 1976’s All the President’s Men when actor Hal Holbrook, as the mysterious Watergate source “Deep Throat,” meets Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward in a dark Washington, D.C.-area parking garage and tells him what became the mantra of political reporting ever since?

Follow the money.

Nearly a half-century later, with democracy dying in sun-drenched broad daylight, the next generation of Woodwards and Carl Bernsteins doesn’t need to pay $30 to park in some shady downtown lot and track down backroom quid pro quos. “The Selling of the President 2024″ is taking place under blinding Florida sunshine, in dubious dealings that get posted on Elon Musk’s X or — irony alert — TikTok for all the world to see.

Last week, the 45th president who’s now the GOP’s presumptive nominee to become the 47th, Donald Trump, surprised political observers — the ones who aren’t paying close attention, anyway — with a stunning flip-flop on a hot-button issue before Congress: whether to impose restrictions that could effectively ban the wildly popular TikTok app, ostensibly because its ownership by the Chinese firm ByteDance poses a national security risk.

When he was president, Trump not only supported such a crackdown on TikTok but tried to implement one, only for the move to be struck down in the federal courts as an overreach of White House power. Five years later, a bill before Congress that would turn off the app in 165 days after the president’s signature if ByteDance fails to divest its ownership is racing toward passage with broad bipartisan support — or at least it was before the man who turned his political party into an authoritarian cult suddenly reversed course.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck” — that would be TrumpSpeak for Facebook’s billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg — “will double their business,” the candidate posted on his own social media site, Truth Social. “I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!”

Whoa, what just happened here? Trump’s concerns about profit margins at Facebook — which, for anyone who’s forgotten the name Cambridge Analytica, helped elect Trump in 2016 — are about as real as the tears in Katie Britt’s kitchen.

Instead, follow the money.

Just six days before Trump threw on his flip-flops and posted on Truth Social, he staged a very public rapprochement with the richest man in Pennsylvania and one of the wealthiest men in the world, Jeff Yass. A money manager based in Philadelphia’s western suburbs, Yass is worth an estimated $28 billion, and a huge chunk of that is from his personal stake in the large investment by his firm, Susquehanna Investment Group, in TikTok’s owner ByteDance.

Yass is also the largest campaign donor in the United States, investing politically in everything from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to the Texas Legislature. But his main vehicle has been a leveraged takeover of the conservative Club for Growth, to which he’s given at least $61 million since 2010, including $10 million in July. Under Yass’ growing influence, the Club for Growth’s agenda had — until recently — included a) backing pro-TikTok lawmakers (surprise, surprise!) and b) joining other superrich conservatives in seeking an alternative to Trump.

The case of failed GOP White House hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy is a kind of John the Baptist-conversion tale here. Like Trump, Ramaswamy used to be one of TikTok’s fiercest critics, calling the addictive app “digital fentanyl.” Then, Yass donated a whopping $4.9 million to keep Ramaswamy’s now-aborted campaign afloat. After that, Ramaswamy joined TikTok and became its fiercest defender in the Republican Party — at least before last week.

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On March 1, when Trump surprisingly appeared at a Club for Growth retreat in his adopted hometown of Palm Beach, Fla., he was already on the brink of sewing up the GOP nomination. Yass, whose career as a trader started with college dorm poker games, and who knows when to fold ‘em, had invited Trump, who in return had warm words for his host. Quid (support for TikTok), meet quo (Club for Growth’s massive Yass-funded war chest).

The bizarre thing in writing this column is that I actually agree with Trump (!!) that this is a terrible piece of legislation that needs to die — albeit for totally different reasons. I’m on the side of the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil libertarians, which believe there are better ways (such as long-stalled restrictions on all websites from selling your personal data) to address security concerns without this clear assault on the First Amendment — a slippery slope that will be abused beyond recognition if the media-hating Trump returns to the White House. I also wonder how many lawmakers are more offended about what’s being said on TikTok — such as truth-telling about the ongoing slaughter of women and children in Gaza — than by the threat of Chinese spying. I’m also more than irked at President Joe Biden for supporting the bill, not only because it’s bad policy but because he might lose to Trump’s authoritarian nightmare if under-30 voters watch TikTok vanish from their screens this fall.

Those issues are critical, but not as urgent as the real crisis here, which can be called, with apologies to the late Inquirer journalist Joe McGinniss, “The Selling of the President 2024.” Simply put, alleged billionaire Trump faces a cash crunch, both political and personal, and thus a need for emoluments the likes of which the founders could never have anticipated. Like the narrator in Bruce Springsteen’s classic “Johnny 99,” Trump has debts no honest man could pay.

Trump’s campaign and legal needs for dollars are hurtling downward faster than that down escalator at Trump Tower. Despite his nonstop pleas for small money donations, Trump’s campaign ended January badly trailing Team Biden in cash on hand, with $30 million to Biden’s $56 million. Trump’s campaign and his network of so-called super PACs might be in a better place if the candidate’s indictment on 91 felony charges hadn’t created the need to spend at least $50 million, and counting, on legal fees instead of yard signs or TV ads. Of course, Trump is also losing his civil cases, which has meant he’s had to personally scramble to post $91.6 million for adjudicated rape victim E. Jean Carroll, and at least $450 million for his recent financial fraud verdict in New York.

Thus, the personal and political are scrambled as Trump increasingly spends his days among the world’s richest people and multinational corporations, hat in hand. The first example of how this could prove problematic came on Friday when Trump — facing a deadline to come up with $91.6 million as he appeals the Carroll verdict — posted a bond he obtained from Chubb Insurance. Trump likely put up collateral and paid it a 1% to 3% fee.

Chubb is a global powerhouse with political interests all over the world. At the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the firm was a major insurer of Vladimir Putin’s regime’s oil-and-gas infrastructure, including the controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline. The firm’s current relationship with Russia isn’t clear, but then, neither are the details of its arrangement with Trump. The only thing that is clear is that Chubb would have a satisfied customer in the Oval Office if Trump wins in November.

Trump has met with other billionaires as he pitches shares in his potential presidency like a Silicon Valley start-up marketing its IPO, including the richest man on the planet, Elon Musk. Two days after his Club for Growth soiree, Trump welcomed the electric car guru at Mar-a-Lago for a private meeting then leaked to the New York Times. What a tangled web. Musk overpaid $44 billion to buy Twitter and rebrand it as X, and so he also opposes the TikTok bill. But he’s also a major government contractor through his firms such as SpaceX. He’s already echoing Trump’s xenophobic diatribes on immigration. What else is he willing to do for Trump? And vice versa.

A presidency for sale to the highest bidder was the founders’ nightmare and the reason they wrote the emoluments clause of the Constitution. Like so much other lawbreaking, Trump normalized these violations in his first and hopefully last term, when his companies raked in at least $7.8 million from at least 20 foreign countries, mainly from (wait for it) China. But this is not normal, and we should be screaming bloody murder about it — especially with a looming second act that would be much, much worse. For sure, big money has put democracy on life support over the 14 years since the Citizens United v. FEC ruling. But Trump’s emoluments are threatening to pull the plug.

Will Trump’s billionaire pandering shape his potential policies as president? The TikTok flip-flop just showed you that it’s already happening. It’s starting to look like Springsteen’s desperate “Johnny 99,” so named because of the nearly century-long prison sentence he was facing, was nothing compared with the coming tragedy of Donny 91.

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