The prevailing sentiment had nothing to do with racism, I recall the more liberal circles of the Internet lambasting his "small government, pro-business" stance while he uses executive orders to clamp down on private businesses.

That doesn't really seem like "tried that" to me.

There was literally an executive order which banned TikTok if the Chinese parent company did not sell the platform[1]. That's a pretty real "tried to ban tiktok".

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Executive_Order_13942

To me an executive order doomed to fail in the courts really isn't a real attempt.

Pray tell what a real attempt looks like to you?

Legislation, a department taking action within their legal powers.

In the US it really does matter how you do things. Just the whim of the president is not enough for it to happen.

Trump had no legal basis for his order. He liked to act like he was doing things with grand strokes, many of them were doomed to fail. I'm not convinced that he or those around him even cared if they did or not.

I don't think you can read much into an amateur hour / foolish attempt.

Are you sure that the head of the executive branch does not have authority to ban federal employees from using an app which potentially poses a national security threat?

I don't think its so clear cut. In any case its hardly the first time that a president made a potentially unconditional to be ruled upon by courts later.

>have authority to ban federal employees from using an app

Not sure what we're talking about at this point. Trump's executive orders about tiktok that were thrown out of court were something different.

Trump or just the department who owns a given device can of course say "don't put X on government phones" and so on, but that's way different than what Trump tried and failed to do with tiktok.

The possibility of failure is inherently involved in "attempting". Otherwise it's just "doing".

If you attempt something knowing full well it has a 100% chance of failure, was it really a meaningful action?

The failure was known the moment Trump took his action. We're talking about a guy who I don't know if he really even cared if it was legal / carried out or not.

Why was it doomed to fail in the courts? Trump banned Huawei with an executive order as well.

The short answer is Trump's order had actual legal grounds to stick as far as Huawei goes.

Regarding Huawei , Trump basically told the Commerce Department to take action, Huawei was already (or was in the process of being) blacklisted by the commerce department, the commerce department does have the legal right to do that given the nature of Huawei's products and sensitivity of communications equipment.

The commerce department doesn't currently (although I believe lawmakers are looking into it) have the authority to simply blanket ban an app like tiktok on a whim / order. They simply can't do that for any old reason the POTUS says.

As I noted in another comment, in the US it does matter HOW you do things, the courts are independent (compared to say China) regardless how "right" someone might be they need to follow the law.

My understanding was that the real teeth behind both EOs is that they prohibited American companies from doing business with Huawei and TikTok. So Huawei would not be able to sell through American retailers, and TikTok wouldn't be available in the Apple store or the Play store, and they couldn't get an American CDN.

I think that's just another facet of what a ban would look like.

But as far as tiktok until someone gives the commerce department or someone else new powers, so far that seems out of reach.

Granted, I believe there are efforts to give them that option.

Those are the only powers that would be necessary to effectively ban TikTok from the US. Without app store access and without CDNs, TikTok would be dead in the US. And from my understanding of the Huawei situation, doing these by prohibiting US companies from doing business with TikTok is within the power of the President.