Op-ed: If Trump reverses TikTok ban, donors win and U.S. national security loses
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump was early to warn about the national security dangers posed by TikTok during his first term in office, with rhetoric and policy discussions that framed the social media app within his aggressive anti-China stance. But during the 2024 campaign, Trump seemed to do an about-face.
In an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” last March, Trump said banning TikTok would make young people “go crazy” and would also benefit Meta Platforms‘ Facebook.
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” Trump said. “But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media.”
Trump’s transition team hasn’t commented on TikTok specifically, but has said the election results give the president a mandate to follow through on the promises he made on the campaign trail, and there are some big deadlines coming up related to TikTok’s fate.
Before Trump is even president, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is expected to issue a ruling by Friday on a challenge to the new law requiring ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, to divest its U.S. operations by January 19. This case has broad implications, touching on national security concerns, constitutional questions about free speech, and the future of foreign-owned tech platforms in the U.S.
Courts generally defer to the executive and legislative branches on national security matters, but the outcome may depend on whether the court frames the issue solely as a national security question or also considers First Amendment concerns. The balance likely favors the government given Congress’s clear constitutional authority to regulate foreign commerce, which supports the legislation requiring ByteDance divestment. Regardless, this case is likely headed to the Supreme Court.
As of now, with Trump to be sworn in on Jan. 20, one day after the federal ban on TikTok is scheduled to begin, Trump’s comments have intensified deep concerns about the influence that major donors will have in a second Trump administration and the extent to which private financial interests will be prioritized over national security and public welfare. In fact, it may be the first major decision made by Trump that tells us just how far his administration is willing to go in prioritizing the donor wish list.
At the center of this controversy is Jeff Yass, a major Republican donor with significant financial ties to ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company. Yass, who contributed over $46 million to Republican causes during the 2024 election cycle, reportedly met with Trump in March, though the details of their conversation remain unclear. What is clear, however, is that Yass’s ownership stake in ByteDance has fueled concerns in Washington about whether Trump’s reversal was influenced by donor priorities rather than a pure devotion to market competition.
The Wall Street Journal recently reported that TikTok’s CEO has been personally lobbying Elon Musk, who now has a close relationship with the President-Elect, on his company’s behalf. Meanwhile, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago last week.
The optics of a TikTok ban reversal are troubling. Imagine the backlash if a prominent Democratic donor like George Soros — frequently vilified by Republicans — had similarly positioned himself to influence major policy decisions tied to his personal financial interests. The accusations of corruption and undue influence, if not worse, would be deafening. Yet figures like Yass and particularly Elon Musk — who has duct-taped himself, and his entangled financial interests to Trump’s transition team and many of their personnel and policy decisions — face little scrutiny from the same critics who level conspiracy theories against Soros.
This selective outrage underscores a systemic problem: a political system where major donors wield significant influence over policymaking, often without bipartisan expressions of concern or actions that force transparency or accountability.
TikTok’s weaponized influence
Concerns about donor influence are amplified when considering the risks associated with TikTok itself. The app’s meteoric rise has sparked bipartisan alarm over its ties to the Chinese government. Lawmakers and intelligence officials have consistently warned about its potential for data harvesting, espionage, and propaganda. These concerns are not abstract. During the last congressional push to ban TikTok, the app demonstrated its ability to weaponize its platform by rapidly mobilizing its user base to flood lawmakers with calls and emails opposing the ban.
This real-time demonstration of TikTok’s ability to influence public sentiment, amplify social narratives, and pressure lawmakers underscores its unparalleled capacity as a tool for shaping public policy and national opinions. When coupled with ByteDance’s links to the Chinese government, TikTok’s potential for misuse or mischief is alarming.
Another concern around a TikTok ban reversal is the fact that there is already a law addressing TikTok: the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA), enacted in April 2024 as part of Public Law 118-50. This bipartisan legislation mandates that foreign adversary-controlled applications, like TikTok, must be divested or face a U.S. ban. As federal law, PAFACA cannot simply be reversed by presidential decree. A U.S. president cannot legally bypass Congress to nullify or override an existing law. Laws passed by Congress remain binding until they are repealed or amended by Congress or struck down by the courts.
Instead of bypassing Congress or undermining existing law, any changes to TikTok’s status should be addressed through the framework that PAFACA provides. Such a transparent process would ensure that decisions are made in public and on behalf of the public interest, not in the backrooms at Mar-a-Lago. With Republicans controlling both the House and Senate during the newly elected Congress, they have the power to amend or repeal PAFACA. However, doing so would require navigating a highly involved legislative process that would inevitably bring more scrutiny to Yass.
Trump’s options
Given Trump’s dominance of the federal courts at the highest level, he could use this route, but short of the courts, the president’s authority in this context is limited. Any Trump effort to unilaterally overturn a TikTok ban as president would be difficult to execute based on how the system is supposed to work.
Two options Trump would have are enforcement discretion and executive orders. The president has considerable discretion in how federal laws are enforced. For instance, executive agencies might prioritize certain aspects of a law over others, effectively scaling down enforcement in particular areas. While executive orders cannot override existing laws, they can guide how the executive branch implements them, potentially narrowing their scope. Presidents have historically used enforcement discretion to achieve policy objectives without openly violating the law.
But addressing TikTok through the existing legal framework already established by PAFACA would allow for the consideration of balanced alternatives, such as requiring stricter data security measures, local data storage, or divestiture that places TikTok’s operations under U.S. ownership. These options could protect users’ access to the app while addressing legitimate security risks.
Many of these alternatives have been explored in public discussions and through proposals like “Project Texas,” and some have found their way into law. They have also been subject to criticism and challenges, largely about insufficient follow-through or the perception that these efforts are not thorough, would never be agreed to by the Chinese government, or are just incomplete or inadequate to address security concerns. But consideration of these remedies should continue — to date, the execution has been nonexistent rather than the proposals being outright failures.
The broader implications of donor-driven policy
Trump’s March comments on TikTok get one thing right. It is important to acknowledge that TikTok’s immense popularity creates another unique dilemma. With over 150 million users in the U.S., the app is more than just a platform for entertainment — it has become a key tool for creativity, connection, and commerce, particularly among younger Americans and small businesses. This widespread use complicates the conversation, as any decision about TikTok’s future will inevitably affect millions of people who rely on it for various purposes.
However, the app’s popularity should not outweigh the national security concerns it poses, particularly given its ties to the Chinese government. ByteDance’s well-documented connections to the Chinese government have heightened fears in Washington about the potential misuse of TikTok’s data collection capabilities. These risks are not speculative — they reflect patterns of behavior consistent with Chinese state-sponsored cyber activities. Allowing donor-driven priorities to eclipse these legitimate security concerns undermines public trust in the policymaking process and erodes confidence in government institutions.
This situation raises a critical question: What other national priorities might be sacrificed to appease donors with outsized influence? If decisions about TikTok — an app that elicits bipartisan concerns about its national security implications — can be swayed, what does this mean for other pressing issues like energy policy, defense, or trade? The stakes are far too high to let financial interests dictate public policy outcomes.
Americans deserve a government that treats national security as a top priority and not one that is negotiable or secondary to the interests of private wealthy donors.
—By Dewardric McNeal, managing director & senior policy analyst at Longview Global and CNBC contributor, who served as an Asia policy specialist at the Defense Department during the Obama administration.
Technology
‘Robotaxi has reached a tipping point’: Baidu, Nvidia leaders see momentum as competition rises
Chinese tech company Baidu announced Monday it can sell some robotaxi rides without any human staff in the vehicles.
Baidu
BEIJING — Chinese robotaxi companies are expanding abroad at a faster clip than U.S. rivals Waymo and Tesla — at a time when industry leaders say autonomous driving is finally near an inflection point.
“I think robotaxi has reached a tipping point, both here in China and in the U.S.,” Baidu CEO Robin Li said Tuesday on an earnings call, according to a FactSet transcript.
“There are enough people who have [had the] chance to experience driverless rides, and the word of mouth has created positive social media feedback,” he said, noting that the wider public exposure could speed up regulatory approval.
His comments echoed similar notes of optimism in the last few weeks from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Xpeng Co-President Brian Gu — who reversed his previously cautious stance after faster-than-anticipated tech advances. Xpeng is launching robotaxis in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou next year.
It’s a global market with significant growth potential, likely worth more than $25 billion by 2030, according to Goldman Sachs’ estimates in May.
To seize that opportunity, Chinese companies are aggressively expanding overseas and claim they are close to making robotaxis a viable business, rather than simply burning cash to grab market share.
In the last 18 months, Baidu, Pony.ai and WeRide landed partnerships with Uber that allow users of the ride-hailing app to order a robotaxi in specific locations, starting in the Middle East.
Such tie-ups “will be critical to success” as they enable robotaxi companies to operate more efficiently and reach profitability more quickly, said Counterpoint Senior Analyst Murtuza Ali.
Once we can generate profit for every single car in a second-tier city [like Wuhan] in mainland China, we can generate profits in lots of cities across the world.
Halton Niu
General manager for Apollo Go’s overseas business
Expanding on experience at home
Baidu says that since late last year, its Apollo Go robotaxi unit has reached per-vehicle profitability in Wuhan, where the company has operated over 1,000 vehicles in its largest deployment in China.
That means ridership is enough to offset a Wuhan taxi fare that’s 30% cheaper than in Beijing or Shanghai, and far below prices in the U.S. or Europe. Besides developing autonomous driving systems, Baidu has also produced electrically-powered robotaxi vehicles — without relying on a third-party manufacturer — that are 50% cheaper.
“Once we can generate profit for every single car in a second-tier city [like Wuhan] in mainland China, we can generate profits in lots of cities across the world,” Halton Niu, general manager for Apollo Go’s overseas business, told CNBC.
“Scale matters,” he said. “If you only deploy, for example, 100 to 200 cars in a single city, if you only cover a small area of the city, you can never become profitable.”
How U.S. rivals stack up
Scale remains the dividing line. In the U.S., Alphabet-owned Waymo operates more than 2,500 vehicles and is expanding rapidly from major cities in California to Texas and Florida, with plans to enter London next year, following its first overseas venture in Tokyo.
Tesla sells its electric cars in China, and reportedly showed off its Cybercab in Shanghai this month. But it began testing its robotaxis in Texas only in June, and this week obtained a permit to operate in Arizona.
Amazon’s Zoox is also ramping up its expansion in the U.S., but has not released overseas plans.
The three companies have not disclosed plans to break even on their robotaxis.
Baidu Apollo Go’s Niu did not rule out an expansion into the U.S. But for now, the robotaxi operator plans to enter Europe with trials in parts of Switzerland next month, following their expansion in the Middle East this year.
Abu Dhabi last week gave Apollo Go a permit to charge fares to the public for fully driverless robotaxi rides, which are operated locally under the AutoGo brand, eight months after local trials began in parts of the city.
But Chinese startup WeRide said it received a similar permit on Oct. 31 to charge fares for its fully driverless robotaxi rides in Abu Dhabi, and claimed that removing human staff from the cars would allow it to make a profit on each vehicle.
That puts Pony.ai furthest from profitability among the three major Chinese robotaxi operators. Its CFO Leo Haojun Wang told The Wall Street Journal in mid-September that the company aimed to make a profit on each car by the end of this year or early next year.
Pony.ai plans to launch a fully autonomous commercial robotaxi business in Dubai in 2026, after receiving a testing permit in late September. The company plans to roll out in Europe in the coming months and has also outlined an expansion into Singapore.
Pony.ai and WeRide are set to release quarterly earnings early next week.
“Currently, companies like Waymo, Baidu, WeRide and Pony.ai are leading in terms of fleet size, which positions them advantageously in the race for profitability,” said Yuqian Ding, head of China Autos Research at HSBC.
Scale and safety
Fleet size is becoming a competitive marker. Pony.ai reportedly said it plans to release 1,000 robotaxis in the Middle East by 2028, while WeRide aims to operate a fleet of 1,000 robotaxis in the region by the end of next year.
Niu said Apollo Go operates around 100 robotaxis in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and plans to double its vehicle fleet in the next few months.
“Apollo Go has had a head start with significantly more test rides than the other two,” Kai Wang, Asia equity market strategist at Morningstar, said in an email. “The more testing and data you can collect from trips taken, the more likely the AI sensors are able to recognize the objects on the road, which means better safety as well.”
He cautioned that despite some initial progress, the robotaxi race remains uncertain as “no one has truly had mass adoption for their vehicles.”
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Coverage remains limited. Even in China, robotaxis are only allowed to operate in selected zones, though Pony.ai recently became the first to win regulatory approval to operate its robotaxis across all of Shenzhen, dubbed China’s Silicon Valley. In Beijing, self-driving taxis are mostly limited to a suburb called Yizhuang.
Anecdotally, CNBC tests have found Pony.ai offered a smoother ride than Apollo Go, which was prone to hard braking.
As for safety — which is critical for regulatory approval — none of the six operators has reported fatalities or major injuries caused by the robotaxis so far. But Apollo Go and Waymo have begun advertising low airbag deployment rates.
Even if that’s not enough to convince regulators worldwide, Beijing is expected to ramp up support at home.
HSBC’s Ding predicts the number of robotaxis on China’s roads could multiply from a few thousand to tens of thousands between the end of this year and 2026, a shift that would give operators more proof that their model works.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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