'Fundamentally asinine': Ex-legislator rips Trump's plan to revive TikTok

CNN's Bakari Sellers ripped Donald Trump's plan to revive the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, which Congress has banned as a national security threat.

The president-elect has pledged to restore access in the U.S. through an executive order after he's sworn in Monday, but he called for the government to take a 50-percent ownership position in a joint venture to prevent American users' data from being misused, and Sellers flagged that proposal as "fundamentally asinine."

"[Democrats] just lost ground with our base, which are young voters, Black voters, brown voters, women," said Sellers, a former South Carolina state representative. "We lost ground across the board. Yeah, if anybody doesn't acknowledge there is rebuilding and intentionality that needs to go into this, their head is in the sand. TikTok, for me, is a basic lesson in just civics. For example, an executive order cannot usurp law. It was a law passed by the House, it was a law passed by the Senate, it was affirmed 9- 0 by this Supreme Court, which doesn't do anything unanimously, so a pen is not going to do anything else."

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"Last night he talked about nationalizing TikTok," Sellers added. "Do you know how absurd it is to nationalize TikTok and defund NPR and PBS? This is the new Republican Party. I think it is part of a larger cultural shift that Republicans are undertaking under the veil of free speech, which is like this anti-intellectualism. I really think they're doing their best with disinformation, misinformation, to dumb down the electorate. You say, look, it's in our national interest, we're going to nationalize and spend resources to bring in TikTok under the banner of our American investment, the little investment committee that we have, but we're going to defund NPR. That on its face is fundamentally asinine. I want to see a Republican come on set and be able to explain to me why you think it is in the best interest for NPR and PBS to be defunded, yet you think it is okay for TikTok."

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