It’s been lost in the broader spectacle of the second Trump administration — and within users’ own still-refreshing feeds — but the story of the TikTok ban remains, so far, one of the more consequential stories of the year. The ban itself, which was passed into law during the Biden administration and upheld by the Supreme Court, represented a significant curtailment of speech rights in the name of national security. The ban’s delay, which took the form of a flurry of letters from the Justice Department promising various liable tech companies that it simply wouldn’t enforce the law, set a genuinely wild precedent, suggesting that the president can simply decide which federal laws are enforced and why.

The unpopular piece of legislation was propelled by incoherent moral panics and polit

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