I woke up this morning with a feeling of dread. For once, it was nothing to do with my health problems. No, I quickly remembered that today is Inauguration Day for President Trump.

What will we have in store for this term? He is an agent of chaos. Completely unpredictable. Anything can happen. I can feel the jitters everywhere - from immigrants, European politicians, Ukrainians, financial markets, you name it.

Just in the last 48 hours, before he has even taken the oath of office, he has already enriched himself by launching a meme coin cryptocurrency, increasing his net worth by many billions. This tells you everything about where his priorities lie.

TikTok

Then there’s the TikTok debacle. For those not paying attention, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA) was signed into law back in April, with bipartisan support, requiring ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, to either divest its holdings to a US buyer or be shut down in the US by the 19th Jan 2025.

Despite what you may hear, the Act may have been written with TikTok in mind but it has a broad scope and can be applied to any app owned by a foreign adversary such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. It just requires a national security review to designate the app as a threat.

In the case of TikTok, behind-doors intelligence briefings were given to the Senate Intelligence Committee and House Committee on Energy and Commerce, which helped shape the legislation and convince them of the risk posed.

Most news articles focus on the risk to data privacy. I think the bigger threat is the potential manipulation of the algorithm.

Social media apps with billions of users have the power to enact social engineering on an enormous scale. There’s a massive social experiment going on right now and we’re all human guinea pigs. This isn’t limited to TikTok. Facebook wrote the book on this stuff.

The particular problem with Chinese-owned apps is all Chinese companies, including foreign subsidiaries, are subject to the National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China (2017). Article 7 requires individuals and organisations to cooperate with state intelligence work, and not disclose to anyone the cooperation. Article 16 gives CCP intelligence agencies broad authority to conduct intelligence oversight of businesses.

We already know that social media can play a significant role in shaping opinions. The algorithm dictates what you see in your feed. It can, and already has, shaped elections. It can foment anger and divisiveness by prioritising content that supports a particular opinion, and downgrading content that supports the opposite opinion.

Traditional news media has done this forever. We all know about Fox News, but let’s take the supposedly impartial BBC as an example. You don’t have to conduct statistical analysis of news posts to know that the BBC prominently published any news that was critical of Brexit, and downranked or failed to publish articles that were supportive of Brexit. The same is happening now with regards to Israel and Gaza. It’s bias by omission, and It’s institutional bias because the editorial teams are human beings.

Many years ago I read ‘My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism’ by Andrew Marr. Published in 2004, Marr stated:

“The BBC is not impartial or neutral. It’s a publicly funded, urban organisation with an abnormally large number of young people, ethnic minorities, and gay people. It has a liberal bias, not so much a party-political bias. It is better expressed as a cultural liberal bias.”

In the case of social media apps, instead of editorial decisions, we have algorithms, written by humans, that have in-built bias. That’s a significant problem when the owners are subject to the objectives of the Chinese Communist Party.

With regards to data privacy, yes that’s an issue, but that ship sailed a long time ago. Vast swathes of everyone’s personal data is already in the hands of data brokers, and the CCP can easily buy the data any time they want.

Back to what happened yesterday. In compliance with the law, and after the Supreme Court upheld the law, TikTok shut down operations in the US. Then, Donald Trump, who isn’t even in office yet, posted on his Truth Social that gave assurance that he would give TikTok a 90 days reprieve. He’s now offering that ByteDance US can be 50% owned by a US company instead of full divestment. TikTok was down for all of 14 hours before they restored services, in violation of US law. As of writing, Google and Apple are not yet playing ball - the apps can’t be downloaded from the Apple App Store of Google Play Store. This doesn’t effect users who have already installed the apps.

TikTok services in the US are hosted by Oracle, and their Content Delivery Network (CDN) is provided by Akamai. Let’s not forget, Larry Ellison, the co-founder and Chairman of Oracle, helped Trump’s best mate Elon Musk buy Twitter. He personally donated $1 billion of the $44 billion purchase price.

Join the dots. This is all a big scam. Trump negotiates behind the scenes. TikTok goes down, then gets restored, and TikTok posts a message on its app thanking their saviour Donald Trump. Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok, is attending the Inauguration. Unlike Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and the rest of the US technocracy, we don’t know if he made any financial contributions to the inauguration committee, because donations by foreign individuals are illegal under US law.

One interesting point amidst all of this is that Senator Tom Cotton, Republican chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, tweeted the following:

“Any company that hosts, distributes, services, or otherwise facilitates communist-controlled TikTok could face hundreds of billions of dollars of ruinous liability under the law, not just from DOJ, but also under securities law, shareholder lawsuits, and state AGs. Think about it."

https://x.com/SenTomCotton/status/1881038993875140640

Perhaps a prediction of what is to come. Maybe Donald Trump will not have it all his own way, despite Republican control of both houses of Congress.

Deciphering Donald Trump is harder than explaining the plot of Tenet to a toddler. He previously supported the TikTok ban. Does he now like TikTok because he believed it helped him win the election? Is he cooking up a scheme to try and get ByteDance to sell Twitter to his mate Elon Musk? Who knows. All that can be said is that whatever decision he makes, his own interests will trump (no pun intended) any national security interests, that’s for sure.

Ominously, In his farewell address on January 15, President Biden expressed deep concerns about the emergence of an oligarchy in the United States. He highlighted the concentration of wealth and power among a small group of ultra-wealthy individuals, stating that this trend poses a significant threat to democracy, basic rights, and freedoms, specifically referring to the “tech-industrial complex”.

Tariffs

Donald Trump thinks the answer to all US problems is tariffs. What he says and does are two different things but he has stated that he will set a 60% tariff on all imports from China, a 25% tariff on goods from Mexico and Canada, and a 10-20% tariffs on imports from everywhere else. He threatened BRICS nations with a 100% tariffs if they dared to set up a reserve currency to challenge the US dollar.

He’s going by 1920’s protectionist policies that aim to roll back globalisation and force companies to increase the industrial base in the US.

The goal of national self-sufficiency is understandable, but economists argue on the impacts of his proposals. At least we have data from his first term. Tariffs raised the prices of components from overseas (there’s many raw components that the US doesn’t produce or is cheaper to buy overseas). Of course, these costs get passed on to the end customer, raising prices. Many countries, including China and the European Union, imposed retaliatory tariffs on U.S. exports, negatively affecting industries such as agriculture and manufacturing. Studies suggest that the tariffs slightly dampened U.S. GDP growth during Trump’s first term, as they disrupted trade flows and increased costs.

This time, he’s promising to go further and harder.

Ukraine

There’s a lot to worry about a Trump second term. The mass deportation of illegal immigrants is probably going to cause chaos, whether you agree with the plans or not. There’s also the unforeseen. It’s clear to me from his handling of COVID and the Black Lives Matter protests that he’s unpredictable and terrible in a crisis.

The thing that most worries me though is Ukraine.

During his election campaign he stated that he would end the Ukraine war in 24 hrs. Obviously that was nonsense and he’s now saying maybe 6 months.

Reports suggest that he’s going to push both sides for a negotiated settlement or ceasefire. The negotiated ceasefire would require Ukraine to give up sovereign territory. Both sides have already rejected a ceasefire on the basis it would just allow their opponents to re-arm.

There’s still a big question around his relationship with President Putin. The new MAGA Republican party seemingly has a love of dictators. This started with Donald Trump’s fondness for Putin, but where does that come from? Is it simply a case that he sees himself as a strongman and so likes leaders with common traits? Or his he compromised, as suggested by the Christopher Steele dossier? The truth is probably somewhere in-between.

We know from the Mueller Investigation that there was collusion between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign that helped him win the 2016 election. This was backed up by the Senate Intelligence Committee Report (2020).

We also know that the first impeachment was due to concerns that he placed pressure on Ukraine to investigate his political rival Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.

We may never get to the bottom of his motivations, we just have to go on what he has said and done.

On the positive, he did broadly support Ukraine during his first term. The Trump Administration provided training to Ukraine and armaments, including Javelin missiles that have played a crucial role in Ukraine’s defence.

On the other hand, he has surrounded himself with loyalists that are openly opposed to providing further military and financial assistance to Ukraine, particularly his Vice-President pick, J.D. Vance.

He is also threatening to pull out of NATO again unless countries increase defence expenditure. This is fair enough but this time he is demanding countries spend 5% of GDP on defence. A figure that most countries, including the UK, has no hope of reaching.

Luckily, Ukraine is in a much stronger position now than it was perhaps a year ago. The Kursk offensive means they have a hold in Russian territory with which to negotiate. They have also massively increased their own domestic armaments production. Significantly, with the investment from allies, Ukraine is now able to domestically produce 96% of its drones on the front line.

The EU has never taken a leading role, in comparison to the US, but at least in October the EU approved a loan of up to €35 billion for Ukraine. So in the case that the US pulls back, maybe the EU will fill the gap. I’m not holding my breath. Especially when you consider what’s going on with the German economy, as well as the efforts of Hungary and Slovakia to actively block any EU assistance.

In the next few hours he has promised a shock and awe of perhaps 200 Executive Orders. He has control of both houses of Congress and a conservative majority on the Supreme Court (who recently ruled that he has immunity against any crimes conducted as President).

Chaos awaits.