TikTok took on President Trump and won big

In the summer of 2020, President Donald Trump developed a bizarre obsession with TikTok. Amid a pandemic, historic unemployment and racial unrest subsuming the country, the daily flood of headlines turned to the Chinese-owned social media app.

Episode six of Foundering: The TikTok Story begins during a moment of fraught relations between the U.S. and China. Trump had waged a years-long trade war and blamed China for the coronavirus outbreak. In August 2020, in an attempt to deal another blow to Beijing, Trump issued a pair of executive orders banning TikTok unless the app’s U.S. business was sold to an American technology company.