This week in Bidenomics: The TikTok head fake

If you want to see Joe Biden having fun, check out his presidential campaign’s TikTok account.

The account’s avatar is “Dark Brandon,” Biden as a superhero mockup with laser-beam eyes. In short videos, Biden and his surrogates troll Donald Trump using images that make the former president look overweight, sweaty, and pallid. Other clips show Biden in heartwarming encounters with ordinary people that aren’t testy enough to make it onto cable news.

Biden is clearly trying to connect with young Americans who constitute a big chunk of TikTok’s 170 million American users. Yet he also said recently he'd sign a bill working its way through Congress that would ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese owners don’t sell to a non-Chinese entity. So what’s going on?

It would be thoroughly self-damaging for Biden if he were the man to sign the bill that put TikTok out of commission. He could easily alienate enough people, including millions of small-business operators who rely on TikTok, to give his opponent Donald Trump the edge in the 2024 presidential election. Biden is courting every tiny voting bloc that might break his way, so would he really commit political suicide by enraging millions of voters in one fell swoop?

The answer is obviously no, which suggests Biden knows something he’s not saying: that TikTok will be alive and well come Election Day and probably long after that.

Biden is serious about the underlying problems unique to TikTok, which mainly have to do with a Chinese company’s ownership of the app and the potential for Chinese hacking, propaganda, or abuse. But electoral politics and legal realities will save Biden from being the TikTok killer, at least in 2024.