Where were Democrats during TikTok’s fake shutdown?
The social app invited Donald Trump to play a starring role as the savior in its comeback story, while only a few members from the left offered an alternative narrative.

👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! Welcome back to Once Upon a Hill. Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. It’s official: Donald Trump is president again. What a wild statement to write four years and a week after he was impeached a second time for inciting an insurrection on the very building where he took the oath of office. (ICYMI, while you spent Friday glued to TikTok binging videos before the ban, Trump announced at the last minute that he was moving his swearing-in ceremony to the Capitol Rotunda due to the bone-chilling temps that befell the nation’s capital.)
A quick programming note: You may have noticed the newsletter has arrived in your inbox on weekday evenings instead of mornings this year. With Trump and his unpredictable governing style back in office, I hope an end-of-day briefing can better help you process the signal from the noise in the years ahead. At the top of each issue, a free news-and-notes column will top each edition to contextualize the action from Capitol Hill and beyond followed by an additional paid-subscriber-only daily report to deepen your understanding of how congressional leaders are navigating politics and power during Trump 2.0. If you’re interested in each evening’s full issue but still on the free plan, upgrade your subscription for less than $1.50 per week.
In tonight’s edition: How Democrats botched the politics of TikTok’s demise and resurrection, leaving Trump and TikTok to shape the public narrative with next to no rhetorical pushback.
But let’s start with more on Inauguration Day. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump attended an early morning church service and St. John’s Episcopal Church before meeting former President Joe Biden and former First Lady Dr. Jill Biden for tea at the White House. The four carpooled together to the Capitol, where Trump took the oath of office and gave a bleak campaign-style speech about all the ways he would stoke the culture wars. He’ll do it mostly through executive orders because his congressional allies can barely fulfill their basic constitutional duties let alone a president’s partisan legislative priorities outside of tax cuts and judicial confirmations.
Immigration will be a huge focus of the executive orders. He announced intentions to end asylum for migrants and declared a national emergency to fund stricter enforcement measures and border wall construction without Congress. Trump announced his administration wouldn’t recognize birthright citizenship, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. Additionally, designated drug cartels as global terrorists.
Trump also said he would end remote work policies and require many federal agencies to return to in-office work four to five days a week. On gender and diversity issues, he plans to reinstate the gender binary for federal workers and Title IX guidance in schools, while rolling back protections for transgender people in federal prisons and US custody.
Trade and tariffs are also a priority. Trump will order the federal government to investigate unfair trade practices andreview trade agreements and also establish the “External Revenue Service” to handle tariff collection.
Trump’s energy and environmental proposals would shift focus from Biden’s pursuit of a clean energy economy toward domestic fossil fuel production. He declared a national energy emergency and said he would streamline permitting for pipelines and power plants while opening more of Alaska’s wilderness to oil and gas drilling. Additionally, he said he would roll back several environmental regulations, including limits on tailpipe pollution, energy-efficiency standards for appliances and programs protecting low-income communities from harmful pollution.
After his inauguration speech, Trump joined members of Congress for lunch at the Capitol. The president then made his way to Capitol One Arena for a rally in front of 20,000 rapturous supporters, who were unable to attend the swearing-in ceremony after it was moved indoors. The president and Mrs. Trump then returned to the White House before attending a series of inauguration balls.
In one of Biden’s final acts as president, he issued several preemptive pardons to targets of potential revenge from the Trump administration, including the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and chief medical advisor to the president Dr. Anthony Fauci, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley and the members and staff of the Jan. 6 committee.
House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar (Calif.), who served on the committee, told reporters last week that he had not sought a pardon or talked to anyone in the Biden White House about a preemptive pardon.
“I stand by the work that we did. We didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t think a pardon is necessary,” Aguilar said. “We committed to do a process together to shine light on exactly what happened on Jan. 6 and the lead-up and the president’s role in thwarting a peaceful transfer of power. That’s exactly what we did.”
Moments before his term expired, he preemptively pardoned five family members: Brother James Biden and his wife Sara Jones Biden, sister Valerie Biden Owens and her husband John Owens, and brother Frank Biden. Biden has set the record for the most individual pardons and commutations issued during a presidency, including a pardon for his son Hunter for all federal offenses committed during a 10-year window ending in 2024—even potential crimes that have yet to be discovered.
The inauguration won’t be the only action at the Capitol today. The Senate is in and will vote on the final passage of the Laken Riley Act. 20 Democrats who voted days earlier to open debate on the bill voted last Friday morning against advancing it to this evening’s vote. Many expressed disappointment that more than just three of the 78 proposed amendments were considered. The bill still lacks protections for Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status recipients, which some Democrats described as a red line for their support.
But the 10 Democrats who voted to end debate on the bill were enough to clear the 60-vote threshold required to overcome the opposition from their colleagues. Four of those senators are up for reelection in 2026 when immigration is sure to still be a hot-button issue (Jon Ossoff of Georgia, Gary Peters of Michigan, Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire and Mark Warner of Virginia), four senators hail from border states (Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada and Ruben Gallego and Mark Kelly of Arizona), and the final two serve on the Homeland Security Committee, which has jurisdiction over the executive department that would be responsible for enforcing the law (Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan).
The House will have to vote again to match the Senate’s version before Trump can sign it into law since the Senate added an amendment to its bill to require undocumented immigrants who attack police officers to be detained. 48 Democrats voted for the bill the first time around. It will be interesting how many do so now that the bill is more expansive than the version they approved earlier this month.
On a related note, the House is back tomorrow. The Rules Committee will meet Tuesday afternoon to prep for floor consideration later this week the Fix Our Forests Act, a bill aimed at improving forest management and reducing the threat of the types of wildfires that have devastated California in recent weeks. House Republican leadership is also expected to schedule votes on the Senate version of the Laken Riley Act and the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, a measure that would criminalize health care providers who fail to give care to an infant who survives an attempted abortion even though they’re already required by law to do so.
The Senate will focus on advancing and confirming Trump’s cabinet nominees and passing its own version of the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act.
Back to TikTok. Trump did not mention today his intention to sign an executive order delaying a law forcing the social app’s parent company to sell it or face exile from US app stores. The ban was supposed to go into effect yesterday.
Well, the ban did sorta kinda go into effect after the Biden administration signaled it would not take action to either enforce it or facilitate negotiations serious enough to allow the former president to extend the effective date.
During this entire ordeal TikTok positioned itself—and its users by proxy—as victims of unfair government overreach and that the app had no choice but to block those users from accessing their profiles.
Trump, whose political instincts aren’t respected enough by his critics, enjoys nothing more than receiving credit for popular outcomes—even those he doesn’t engineer. TikTok, which has been in self-preservation mode for the past several years it’s been in Congress’s crosshairs, recognized this and invited Trump to play a starring role as the savior in TikTok’s comeback story. Just hours after it went dark, TikTok said it would restore its services early Sunday after receiving assurances from the Trump camp that the incoming president would keep it online.
“As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the US,” the app said in a message to users.
Moments later, in a separate post on his Truth Social app, Trump said he would issue an executive order to delay the ban’s effective date so that the app’s parent company could make a deal. Trump prefers that the US own 50 percent of the app in a joint venture.
But what I was most fascinated by was the radio silence emanating from the Democratic Party, which ceded political terrain to Trump and TikTok to plant the seeds of a narrative that undoubtedly be exploited later in a moment when Democrats’ top priority should be reaching out to disengaged and low-information voters and consumers who are susceptible to misinformation that pours out of the president’s mouth and flourishes on apps such as TikTok. TikTok’s manufactured shutdown allowed it to further align itself with US users as the protectors of free speech and creative expression against a government that wants to shut down the app because they’re unwilling to innovate a better user experience.
I spent the hours before the two NFL divisional playoff games checking in with Hill Democrats and I can confidently categorize the sources I spoke to into three groups.