It's Chief Executive Safra Catz served on Trump's 2016 transition team.įrom afar, Trump's TikTok deal could look like nothing more than a shakedown that ended with a business, that is aligned with the president, winning a lucrative stake in one of the most successful apps in the world right now. Larry Ellison, Oracle's Chairman and founder, is an ardent supporter of Trump and has raised money for the president. Oracle has close ties to the president, and some say it's one reason why it beat out a deep-pocketed and well-positioned rival such as Microsoft. ![]() It's a win for Trump supporter: Oracle founder Larry Ellison "It's not any of the various options the administration floated over time." "I'm a little surprised at how far they were willing to go to settle," said former State Department official Jim Lewis, who studies technology policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank. Yet the most serious one seems to have been made by the White House, despite the president's proclamations, experts say. The newly-formed TikTok Global will have an ownership structure where software company Oracle and Walmart will jointly command 20% and 80% stays in ByteDance's grip.īoth sides made concessions. The agreement, however, does not remedy the Chinese-ownership problem. and "will have nothing to do with China," the president said. A new company would be incorporated in the U.S. And so, a review of TikTok's data privacy and security appeared reasonable.īut on Saturday a striking thing happened: Trump took a victory lap for signing off on a last-ditch deal to rescue TikTok, boasting that the China problem had been solved. But national security experts on both sides of the aisle in Washington agreed that China's authoritarian regime is untrustworthy and has almost unfettered access to private business in the country. The White House never offered any real proof to support its fear that TikTok is a Chinese surveillance tool. So the president repeatedly declared that TikTok needs to free itself from ByteDance's control, or be shut down in the U.S. Trump's logic went something like this: Since TikTok's corporate parent company ByteDance is headquartered in Beijing, TikTok could be used as an arm of the Chinese Communist Party to spy on American citizens or cause other mischief. Since July, President Trump has turned a wildly successful viral video app TikTok into his favorite punching bag. Sheldon Cooper/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images companies Oracle and Walmart to keep TikTok alive, but the agreement does not accomplish what the president sought to achieve. It’s not even a good deal.President Trump said he approved a deal struck with U.S. And he did it all a) at the start of the negotiating process and b) against the wishes of the Republican leadership – and the desires of the GOP rank and file. Trump didn’t extract anything from Democrats that they didn’t want to give up. ( Bonus Trump “deal” tweet: “‘Leverage: don’t make deals without it.’ – The Art of the Deal”) Not only does it set up a massively fraught end of the year in Washington, but also all of the leverage now sits with Democrats. This deal is not reflective of anything close to the best-case scenario for Republicans – most particularly the conservative end of the GOP conference. They might not love everything he said or did, but he had been very successful in his deals and in his career. The appeal of Trump for lots and lots of voters – especially Republicans – was that he had, quite literally, written the book on deal-making. “I cannot believe the Republicans are extending the debt ceiling-I am a Republican & I am embarrassed!,” he tweeted. In 2013, Trump himself voiced his opposition to the GOP accepting a bad deal on a debt ceiling increase. ![]() “My style of deal-making is quite simple and straightforward,” Trump wrote in “The Art of the Deal.” “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing and pushing to get what I’m after.” That the politicians had no idea how to negotiate – and, as a result, they always got screwed. Why does this matter so much? Because the entire premise of Trump’s campaign was that he knew how to cut the best deals. Ben Sasse, a frequent Trump critic, summed up the general GOP sentiment nicely in a brief statement: “The Pelosi-Schumer-Trump deal is bad.” Trump bucks GOP leadership, backs Democratic deal on debt ceiling, funding government (Alex Wong/Getty Images) Alex Wong/Getty Images ![]() President Trump is traveling to North Dakota for a tax reform event with workers from the energy sector. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) (L) makes a point to President Donald Trump in the Oval Office prior to his departure from the White House Septemin Washington, DC.
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