TikTok Schadenfreude 

I’ll admit, I have not followed all of the legal developments in Trump 2.0 carefully. During the first administration, I closely tracked nearly every policy and district court ruling. It was exhausting. This time around, I’ve triaged. If I’ve written about something, it means I am following the issue. If I haven’t written about it, that means I am not following the issue. Please do not take my silence on an issue as a reflection on whether I agree or disagree with any particular position.

One such issue that I’ve let go is TikTok. I wrote about the Supreme Court’s (quickly forgotten) decision, President Biden’s outgoing order, and President Trump’s incoming order. But since then, I haven’t tracked the issue.

Recently, Charlie Savage published an article in the Times titled “Trump Claims Sweeping Power to Nullify Laws, Letters on TikTok Ban Show.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi told tech companies that they could lawfully violate a statute barring American companies from supporting TikTok based on a sweeping claim that President Trump has the constitutional power to set aside laws, newly disclosed documents show.

In letters to companies like Apple and Google, Ms. Bondi wrote that Mr. Trump had decided that shutting down TikTok would interfere with his “constitutional duties,” so the law banning the social media app must give way to his “core presidential national security and foreign affairs powers.”

The letters, which became public on Thursday via Freedom of Information Act lawsuits, portrayed Mr. Trump as having nullified the legal effects of a statute that Congress passed by large bipartisan majorities in 2024 and that the Supreme Court unanimously upheld.

My reaction? Schadenfreude.

For more than a decade, I’ve written about how the Obama Administration nullified the Affordable Care Act’s mandates, as well as immigration law through policies like DAPA and DACA. I’m sure smart lawyers can draw distinctions between the Obama orders and Trump’s orders. But I’m not sure those distinctions matter. President Obama found ways to disregard laws he didn’t like through hyper-creative means, but since those laws accomplished “positive” goals, everyone looked the other way. It might be true that Trump has leveled up with his most recent actions, but none of this would have been conceivable without precedents more than a decade ago.

Perhaps the greatest Schadenfreude comes from the aftermath: no one has standing to challenge the suspension of the laws. The OLC opinion announcing DAPA boasted about this fact. Here too, Trump’s latest order does not seem susceptible to a challenge. Then again, people like to scroll through TikTok videos, so there is no appetite to stop it.

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