While this is true (to some degree anyway), it seems qualitatively different from Congress (and then backed up by SCOTUS) explicitly banning a specific company (and explicitly banning other companies from doing specific things related to that company) and then being completely ignored by an incoming president who just says "wut? no worries, carry on tiktok".

this is not a debate about just what the intelligence community can and cannot do, or what level of enforcement and in what communities is appropriate for a given law. it is a point blank statement "i am the president, and you (tiktok) and you (google, apple) can ignore the law", made in public, without any possible national security justification (whatever level of BS that might normally come with).

Biden refused to enforce the law as well.

Edit: you all are out here downvoting provable facts.

I'm not denying what Biden did (or did not do).

I'm noting that there is a qualititive difference in Trump's behavior with respect to this law compared with ... well, anything anyone has been comparing it to.

It's somewhat different to not enforce a general law against a multitude of possible targets and enforcing a law literally imposed against a single target.

A lot of people don't get fined for jaywalking and it's not a big deal because it's understood that it's a lot of work to actually cite all of them everywhere, so the difference between the normal level of not enforcing everything and intentionally not enforcing isn't 0 vs 100.

This is passing a law that John Smith should go to jail and then deciding you don't actually want to send him to jail. Why did you bother passing the law if you didn't care. Trump literally started all this TikTok banning stuff and now is against it, but isn't actually repealing the law. Congress seems to have just given up too. It's fully lawless.

He is a servant of chaos to use fantasy terminology (due to lifelong mental imbalances that were glaringly obvious way before he got power). Maybe chaotic neutral after all + and - will eventually be summarised, but for now, for most of the world he veers towards evil scale.

Maybe something good will come out of this like Europe finally waking up, even now in 2025 here on HN I got attacked for warmongering if I dare say that we should increase defense (literally in our case) budgets.

Elephant in the porcelaine shop will make a room for new products for sure but thats not the most important thing that happens.

The law went into effect on the last day of the Biden administration. If you are going to traffic in provable facts, “Biden declined to implement enforcement of a new law on his final day in office” is a more descriptive provable fact to share.

No, we're downvoting a bad-faith argument. Typical Trump-supporter nonsense, trying to equate Biden's and Trump's actions when they are qualitatively and quantitatively completely different.

That's a very good point. There are certainly more examples of laws that go un-enforced to reinforce your point. For example jaywalking laws are routinely flouted with little enforcement. Likewise buggery laws are routinely ignored by law enforcement.

Along that axis, you are certainly right that it is basically the same as the president unilaterally choosing to exempt a specific multibillion dollar company controlled by a powerful foreign adversary from laws passed by congress with the intent of shoring up national security.

This insight is well received by me and I'm sure others.

Yeah, *whatabout* the other guys - they did this too!

The executive branch is explicitly granted the power to choose which drugs are or aren't scheduled. The law already having provisions to allow the executive to choose which drugs to ban or not makes the choice not to enforce very different qualitatively.