US President Donald Trump was elected with a mandate to make deals and “drain the swamp”. His TikTok saga reveals just how much he has let down his country. Trump’s demand for a fire sale of TikTok hit a legal wall two weeks ago when a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction . Judge Carl Nichols questioned whether the president had the legal authority to so broadly ban and restrict a “personal communication” and “informational” service such as TikTok on national security grounds. Even without the injunction, Trump’s vaunted deal-making skills have morphed into a horror show. From the beginning, Trump accused TikTok of being a platform for Chinese espionage. The CIA found no evidence of this, however, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation – which traditionally has been critical of China’s internet companies – concluded there was no evidence TikTok was less secure than other Chinese-owned technologies. After months of negotiations, a surprise deal was announced in late September between ByteDance and Oracle in which ByteDance’s operations outside China would be transformed into a new global company headquartered in Texas. After initially giving his “blessings” to the deal, Trump backtracked days later to demand that the core algorithms and AI behind TikTok – designed, owned and controlled by ByteDance – must be sold and handed over, too. The fact TikTok is getting all this attention over data security is unfathomable. TikTok is a video-sharing service for short, fun videos popular among teens, hardly a target for international spying. An email, chatting or cloud storage service would represent far juicier targets for Chinese agents . Furthermore, the United States currently does not have any central federal-level data privacy laws, let alone data security laws. Authorities generally leave it to the marketplace and competition to keep companies in check. Some observers have suggested the real reason for Trump’s attack on TikTok is personal. The idea is he wants vengeance after K-pop fans on TikTok allegedly sabotaged his rally in Tulsa back in June. If so, this would be a major blunder. While the internet is currently dominated by American firms, a strong political backlash against US-based internet companies could rise across the globe. If Trump whips up nationalistic fervour to carve up internet companies on puffed-up national security charges , it will be mostly American companies on the chopping block. Some Americans falsely believe that Trump’s actions constitute long-overdue payback against the Chinese government’s banning of US internet companies. In actuality, Trump’s actions are more destructive than any policy enacted by China. Beijing has always welcomed US internet companies operating in China, provided they follow Chinese laws and respect the government’s concerns over information that could endanger national security. While some companies – such as Facebook, Google and Twitter – have avoided China over censorship concerns, others have done quite well after setting up operations within the country. Today, the Trump administration is trying to make another bogeyman out of China over data security. The real question is whether the US can accept a second generation of globally spanning internet companies that are not American. A recent report by The Wall Street Journal suggested it was Mark Zuckerberg who was pushing national security concerns over TikTok onto Trump. Coincidentally, Zuckerberg’s company, Facebook, owns a service called Reels that has so far competed unsuccessfully with TikTok and would have much to gain from the continued uncertainty at TikTok. The spectre of Larry Ellison – a close friend and supporter of Trump – has also raised eyebrows. While Microsoft was the front-runner to purchase TikTok in August, Ellison’s Oracle ended up as the surprise victor. According to a report by The Washington Post , Microsoft’s deal would have given the United States more control over TikTok’s data and in that sense addressed Trump’s concerns about national security even better. Mixing private and public interests has long been an unfortunate hallmark of the Trump presidency. In targeting TikTok, Trump has boasted that he expected political and financial payback for his efforts. On several occasions, Trump demanded that whoever bought TikTok pay a finder’s fee to the US Treasury. After the Oracle deal was announced, Trump bragged that he had asked that US$5 billion be put into a special education fund to teach American children “the real history of our country”. In an age when Americans are on edge over foreign governments spending money on social media to influence US elections, what should they think about their president soliciting billions from a private firm to support his pet projects? Between TikTok and Trump, who poses the real national security threat to America? Allen Yu is an IP attorney in Silicon Valley, a founding blogger at blog.hiddenharmonies.org and an adjunct fellow at the Chunqiu Institute for Development and Strategic Studies