President Donald Trump delivered a widely-maligned speech on Thursday night claiming without evidence that China had stolen the 2020 election for Joe Biden. Even as he attempts to use this to justify having the Department of Homeland Security order states as to who can vote, a Wall Street Journal columnist argues that his spreading of the China lie promotes a double standard that undermines his administration in other ways.
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“President Trump during his prime-night speech on Thursday broke the non-news that China has sought to interfere in U.S. elections,” Wall Street Journal columnist Allysia Finley wrote on Sunday, referring to the fact that it has long been widely known that nations like China and Russia have tried to alter presidential election results. “Xi Jinping must have chuckled at the president’s professed outrage.”
From there, Finley pointed out that Trump’s actions as president are not those of a man who views China as a threat to US security.
“On his first day in office, Mr. Trump gave the Chinese Communist Party a license to spy on Americans and meddle in U.S. elections when he issued an executive order that suspended enforcement of a law requiring TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent, ByteDance, or be banned in the U.S,” Finely wrote. “The TikTok reprieve may be the biggest blunder of Mr. Trump’s presidency, and it is coming back to bite him as the platform fuels the rise of socialism and opposition to the war in Iran.”
She added, “A recent study found that TikTok’s algorithm systemically suppressed pro-U.S. content on the war and amplified anti-U.S content. Odds of such a skew occurring by chance are about 1 in 6.5 million. Is this Beijing’s invisible hand at work? It’s impossible to know, which is the problem.”
As one example, Finley described how TikTok seemed to help the candidacy of a Colorado Democrat running for Congress, Melat Kiros, who defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in part because of Kiros’ popular TikTok video. At the same time, Finely did not attribute possible amplification of Kiros to the Democrat being associated with the political left, noting that TikTok also seemed to boost Trump’s content during the 2024 presidential election.
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“Mr. Trump granted TikTok a reprieve, convinced that the platform helped him win the election,” Finley argued. “He may be right. A study found that TikTok’s algorithms favored Republican content during the campaign. Might TikTok engineers have tweaked the algorithms to help Mr. Trump in hope that he would suspend its death sentence?”
She added, “Mr. Trump charged Vice President JD Vance with brokering a deal to save TikTok through a sale to U.S. investors. The ultimate deal was as lousy as Mr. Vance’s memorandum of understanding with Iran. lt allowed ByteDance to retain a 19.9 [percent] stake in TikTok—the largest of any investor—and control over TikTok’s algorithms.”
Overall, Finley concluded that Trump’s own actions regarding TikTok undercut his claims to be alarmed at Chinese influence over American politics.
“It’s no small irony that Mr. Trump’s TikTok reprieve has helped socialists like Zohran Mamdani, whose 2025 campaign for New York mayor caught fire on the platform, where his videos received 307 million views,” Finely argued. “You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to wonder whether Chinese Communist Party wizards behind the screen abetted his success.”
She added, “Beijing wants nothing more than to poison American politics by fomenting discord and distrust in its institutions, including its capitalist system. Could the Communist Party be covertly amplifying the rancorous voices like Mr. Mamdani and Tucker Carlson? It deserves investigating.”
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