Trump's TikTok dealings should've set this GOP toady roaring. His silence speaks volumes

You're not going to believe this, but it appears the cat’s got Josh Hawley’s tongue.

The junior senator from Missouri — known for his unwavering ability to detect Communist infiltration in American tech companies from eight area codes away — has suddenly gone quiet.

Interesting timing, too.

Because on Friday, President Donald Trump announced progress on a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping to block any U.S. sale or ban of TikTok in exchange for vague “national security commitments” that sound suspiciously like business as usual.

That would be the same TikTok that Hawley has passionately demanded be banned, or at least completely removed from Chinese involvement.

“TikTok — and its parent company ByteDance — are threats to American national security,” Hawley wrote in 2023, to then Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. He’s repeated that theme dozens if not hundreds of times as a senator.

So, you can imagine Hawley’s indignation when the Washington Post reported this:

“A ByteDance spokesperson in a statement Friday thanked Trump and Xi and said the company would work 'to ensure TikTok remains available to American users through TikTok U.S.'”

Shockingly, you could hear a pin drop. Hawley — arguably second to none among U.S. politicians in garnering attention and air time on every subject imaginable — has gone dark. No tweets, no press releases, no rushing to Fox News, no nothing.

So in the spirit of filling the void, let’s revisit what Josh Hawley has been screaming from the mountaintops for several years about TikTok — before it became a Trump-friendly enterprise. Here are just a few of his greatest hits:

“TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting our kids and stealing their data!”
— Hawley, 2023
“TikTok is a surveillance tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”
— Hawley, 2022
“Every time you use TikTok, you're giving your information to Beijing.”
— Hawley, 2021
“We are literally subsidizing the destruction of our children’s mental health.”
— Hawley, 2023
“This is mind control by a foreign adversary — and Democrats won’t act.”
— Hawley, 2024

But now that Trump has personally intervened to compromise on TikTok’s Chinese ownership, Hawley apparently no longer thinks it’s all that big a deal, after all.

Just because he authored the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, which was successfully signed into law, and a broader No TikTok on United States Devices Act, doesn’t mean Hawley cannot mind “some TikTok.”

This is the same senator who once told Fox News that Democrats were “kneeling before Chairman Xi” for not banning the app. So what is that Trump’s doing?

Let’s put it this way. If President Joe Biden had done this, Hawley would have demanded a vote by this afternoon on Articles of Impeachment. He would have hosted a special tonight on Fox News.

Now, maybe not so much.

It turns out, according to the Post, sources are saying the deal Trump is working on with Xi would be hugely beneficial to Trump BFF Larry Ellison, “the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, a tech giant that will own a stake in the U.S. spin-off and provide it cloud-computing and technical services.”

Just can’t get wait to see Hawley teeing off in the Senate about this one.

In 2020, an Esquire writer aptly said, “The most dangerous place to stand in Washington D.C. is any place between Senator Josh Hawley and a live microphone.”

That was before we had a dictator.

• Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.