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www.desitalkchicago.com – that’s all you need to know 4 VIEWPOINT March 29, 2024 Disclaimer:The views and opinions expressed on this page are those of the authors and Parikh Worldwide Media does not officially endorse, and is not responsible or liable for them. The Vote To Ban Tiktok Shows The Republican Party Is Not A Trump Cult E verybody knows that the Republican Party now belongs wholly to Donald Trump and that loyalty to him comes before all of its previously stated views. So why is it that nearly all Repub- licans in the U.S. House ignored him on the TikTok bill? Put another way: A month ago, House Republicans killed a bipartisan immigration deal that Trump had condemned. Why didn’t they follow him this time? The details: When he was president, Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok. He described its potential impact on U.S. security as a “national emergency”: The company’s “data collection threat- ens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information - potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.” Last week, though, Trump reversed himself by say- ing it would be a mistake to “get rid of TikTok.” He later expanded on his thinking in an interview with CNBC. He still considers the company a “national security risk,” but he worries that banning it will mostly help Facebook, “which has been very bad for our country.” A major Republican donor has an ownership stake in TikTok, and many Trump associates have financial ties to the company. Trump’s reversal had no discernible impact on House Republicans. The vast majority of them have just voted to force the company’s Beijing-based owner to sell it. Only 15 House Republicans opposed the bill. Most Democrats backed the legislation as well, although by a less lopsided margin. In a House that has passed very few bills, this one achieved a wide consen- sus. House Republicans might not have thought Trump was serious about his new position. During and after his presidency, Trump has regularly shown a will- ingness to tolerate a lot of disagreement on policy questions. None of the senators who voted against his immigration plan in 2018 ever faced any consequences for it, not even a tweet. Trump recently endorsed the Senate campaign of former Michigan congressman Mike Rogers, whose foreign-policy record places him squarely in the middle of the pre-Trump Republican Party. Rep. Mike Gallagher, theWisconsin Republican who chairs the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, notes that Trump’s statement was itself equivocal, since the legislation bans TikTok only if there is no divestment. “It wasn’t like a full-throated effort to quash our bill,” he told me. “And then he didn’t double down, which was helpful.” Alternatively, House Republicans might have judged that on this issue, the former president was out of step with his own base. To the extent that there re- ally is a political tendency that deserves the label of “Trumpism,” the anti-TikTok bill would seem to be a pure expression of it: It’s an attack on China and its “swamp” lobbyists in defense of U.S. sovereignty. Not even criticism fromTrump, Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson combined could overcome Republican vot- ers’ inclination to support the bill. (By contrast, a lot of Republicans were primed to oppose a bipartisan immigration deal even before Trump opposed it.) Even so, Trump’s stand on behalf of TikTok also seems unlikely to dim any of his supporters’ enthusi- asm for him. When you’ve defined yourself as a strong leader, they’ll let you flip-flop. Trump’s ineffectual intervention in the TikTok de- bate sheds light on how another presidential term for him would go. Different groups have tried to outline a Trumpist agenda to guide him if he returns to power, and there has been widespread speculation that he will surround himself with true believers instead of conventional Republicans. Knowing more of how gov- ernment works, he will supposedly be less susceptible to agreeing with whoever last spoke to him. Maybe. But his stance on TikTok suggests that Trump remains more mercu- rial than an “America First” ideologue - and that when he tells congressional Republi- cans to jump, sometimes they will just tune him out. Ramesh Ponnuru, a contribut- ing columnist for the Washington Post, is the editor of National Re- view and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. -Special to TheWashington Post By Ramesh Ponnuru Photo:TheWashington Post Voters Of Color Are Shifting Right. Are Democrats Doomed? A re so many voters of color becoming Repub- licans that U.S. politics is on the verge of a dramatic change? Maybe. The Financial Times’s John Burn-Murdoch wrote a thread on X last week that went viral, with charts showing increased Republican support with voters of color. He also published an article with the headline, “American politics is undergoing a racial realignment.” Burn-Murdoch isn’t the only person noticing these trends. And he’s right - something important is hap- pening. In 2020, many more Latino Americans voted for Donald Trump (about 37 percent), compared with Mitt Romney (29 percent) eight years earlier. Twenty- five percent of Asian, Black and Latino voters com- bined backed Donald Trump in 2020, according to the left-leaning data firm Catalist, while 73 percent favored Joe Biden. That was a big increase from the 17 percent of voters of color who supported Romney in 2012, compared with 81 percent for Barack Obama. In the 2022 congressional elections, about 41 per- cent of Asian Americans voted for a Republican, up from 33 percent in 2020. And at least based on early polling in this year’s race between Biden and Trump, the only question is how many more voters of color will turn to the Republi- cans in November. Around 10 percent of Black voters have supported the Republican candidate in recent presidential elections. But several surveys have shown Trump doing much better than that, including a New York Times/Siena College poll where 21 percent of African Americans were backing him (compared with about 70 percent for Biden). If 21 percent of Black voters end up supporting Trump, it would historic. Since exit polls started being conducted in 1972, the highest Black support for a Re- publican candidate was Richard M. Nixon’s 18 percent that same year. In another sign that Black voters are swinging to the right, Gallup recently released data showing that 19 percent of Black Americans identified themselves as Republicans in 2023, compared with 11 percent on average from 1999 to 2022. In that NewYork Times/Siena poll, 46 percent of La- tinos supported Trump, compared with 43 percent for Biden. No Republican presidential candidate has ever finished ahead of the Democratic candidate in the exit polls. The estimated 44 percent of Latinos who voted for GeorgeW. Bush in 2004 was the previous high. Put all that together and it’s possible this year that Trump wins 20 percent of the Black vote and half of both the Asian and Latino vote. That would put him at around 38 percent among voters of color, doubling Romney’s number from 12 years ago. Big. Right?Well, kind of. Even if the Republicans made those gains among all three groups, they would still be winning only about 50 percent of the total national vote. Black (about 12 percent), Latino (12 percent) and Asian (5 percent) Americans are small parts of the electorate, so even substantial shifts in their voting patterns don’t have outsize results. After all, despite all of the talk about voters of color shifting right, Biden was elected in 2020, Republicans only very narrowly won the House two years ago and Biden and Trump are very close in most polls of the 2024 race. U.S. politics would really be reshaped if Latinos started voting overwhelmingly Republican. Then, they would have real clout within a party, the way African Americans do among Democrats and southernWhites among Republicans. And the Republican Party would be dominant in the Southwest. Alternatively, if 40 percent or half of African Ameri- cans started voting Republican, Black people would be a much smaller bloc within the Democratic Party and therefore less influential. Purple states such as Georgia and North Carolina with large Black populations would be even harder for Democrats to win. (This is assuming the majority ofWhite Americans in most states kept voting Republican.) In his column, Burn-Murdoch suggested that Ameri- can politics might be moving to an era in which racial identities aren’t that connected to voting patterns. That would also be a big change. Perhaps it’s coming. But I’m somewhat skeptical that racial politics are changing that dramatically. First of all, the current racial-party coalitions reflect policy and material dif- ferences. The Democratic Party is generally trying to By Perry Bacon Jr. Photo:REUTERS - Continued On Page 6