Donald Trump

Trump’s DOJ is not falling for Sam Bankman-Fried’s MAGA makeover on X

alameda, Cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency exchange, Donald Trump, fraud, FTX, money laundering, Policy, sam bankman-fried / Paul Patrick / March 12, 2026

Filed under “random probably bad ideas”

SBF is still twisting facts to hide FTX crypto losses, DOJ says to block new trial.

Ever since Donald Trump took office and declared himself a “pro-crypto president,” FTX’s disgraced founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, has been working to convince the administration that he’s a Republican now.

The former Democratic megadonor apparently hopes that a right-wing pivot might help him escape a 25-year prison sentence ordered after Joe Biden’s Department of Justice proved he stole more than $8 billion from customers of his cryptocurrency exchange.

These days, Bankman-Fried frequently praises Trump’s policies and quotes his Truth Social posts on X, where his bio confirms that posts are: “SBF’s words. Posted through a proxy.” He also regularly rants against Democrats, including Biden officials who, he claimed in a motion for a new trial, intimidated FTX employees into lying on the stand or refusing to testify in order to take down Bankman-Fried as a political foe.

However, Trump has yet to signal that he’s considering pardoning Bankman-Fried in light of this new fealty, despite similar pardons for other crypto figures like Binance founder Changpeng “CZ” Zhao and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht. Quite the opposite. Just last month, the White House told Fortune that “Trump has no intention of pardoning Bankman-Fried.”

On the back of that disappointment, Trump’s DOJ has now confirmed that it’s also not falling for Bankman-Fried’s MAGA makeover. In a motion urging the court to deny Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial, an attorney for the government, Sean Buckley, slammed the FTX founder for his “incoherent” attempt to claim “political victimhood.”

Pointing out that Bankman-Fried was “one of the largest donors to President Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign,” Buckley alleged that Bankman-Fried’s abrupt party-swapping was “a political strategy the defendant pre-planned and committed to in writing before he was convicted, and one he is now executing from prison in an insincere attempt to obtain leniency.”

Bankman-Fried’s plan to reinvent himself as a Republican, Buckley noted, was detailed in a Google Document that the court reviewed before convicting Bankman-Fried in 2024.

Buckley said the document showed how, “in the aftermath of FTX’s collapse,” Bankman-Fried “mapped out a rehabilitation and pardon campaign.” Attached to an email from Bankman-Fried’s account, the Google Doc was marked “confidential” and started with a note that emphasized that “these are all random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted.”

However, many of the ideas were executed as planned, Buckley wrote. For example, Bankman-Fried planned to “come out as Republican” in an interview with Tucker Carlson, which happened.

“In March 2025, the defendant gave an interview to Tucker Carlson in which he portrayed himself as a disaffected Democrat who had become sympathetic to Republicans before his arrest” and “suggested his political reorientation contributed to his prosecution,” Buckley wrote.

Bankman-Fried also, in his document, considered using X to “come out against the woke agenda” and push the narrative that he had hidden Republican donations, which also happened.

“That checklist is being executed with near-perfect fidelity,” Buckley alleged. However, the plan isn’t working, and Bankman-Fried’s X posts aren’t causing Trump officials to warm to him, he said. “Evidence, not politics, drove the Government’s prosecution of the defendant,” Buckley insisted.

“Contrary to his claim that he has been targeted for his politics, the public record establishes unambiguously that the defendant was a major, publicly identified financial supporter of Democratic causes,” Buckley wrote. Later, he emphasized, “The motion’s suggestion that he was somehow prosecuted because of his party affiliation inverts the factual reality: he was a major donor, not a political adversary.”

DOJ rejects SBF’s math, as X users troll SBF

Ars could not immediately reach Bankman-Fried for comment. It seems that the FTX founder has dropped his lawyers and plans to defend himself, at least at this stage. Last month, his lawyer mother, Barbara Fried, submitted his pro se motion for the new trial, which Bankman-Fried signed from the federal corrections facility where he is being held in California.

According to Bankman-Fried, he deserves a new trial not only because the government supposedly threatened his colleagues to push an allegedly fake narrative, but also because it was “false” to say he’d stolen from FTX customers.

Those who were harmed have since been repaid between 119 and 143 percent of the value of their lost cryptocurrency holdings, Bankman-Fried claimed.

The DOJ clearly found this argument more offensive than Bankman-Fried’s posturing as a Republican. Likening Bankman-Fried to a “bank robber” who wants to be acquitted because stolen funds were eventually recovered, Buckley singled out that argument as Bankman-Fried’s most aggressively misleading claim.

It’s “factually wrong” to claim that FTX customers have been made whole, Buckley said, since no one got their cryptocurrency back.

Receiving the cash value for crypto holdings at the time of FTX’s collapse is not the same as returning cryptocurrencies that, if held today, would be much higher in value, Buckley noted. For example, Bitcoin was trading at approximately $16,871 when FTX went bankrupt, but now it’s trading above $70,000.

Depending on which tokens customers were holding, the actual reality is that FTX customers only received “between approximately 10 and 50 percent of the value of the assets they deposited,” Buckley argued. Also, Bankman-Fried appears not to have considered any of FTX’s customers who couldn’t wait for bankruptcy proceedings before selling billions of claims “on the secondary market at steep discounts.”

“Those customers received neither the nominal 119–143 percent nor anything approaching the actual value of the cryptocurrency they deposited,” Buckley wrote.

Further, Bankman-Fried cannot rely on a multi-year recovery effort to repay FTX customers to excuse his crimes, Buckley argued, while noting elsewhere that Bankman-Fried’s arguments in his motion continue his “history of lying about the reason for FTX’s shortfall.”

“A defendant who misappropriates property and whose victim is later compensated from unrelated sources has nonetheless committed the underlying offense,” Buckley wrote.

Reminding the court that the evidence against Bankman-Fried was “overwhelming,” Buckley urged the court to deny his bid for a new trial in its entirety.

A grand jury unanimously convicted Bankman-Fried after only five hours of deliberation, Buckley emphasized. And Bankman-Fried offered “no credible reason” to believe that “any prosecutorial decision—from the first grand jury subpoena to the last argument at the trial—was influenced by politics, that any evidentiary ruling reflected political motivation, or that the conduct of the trial deviated in any respect from the ordinary adversarial process.”

“The notion he was targeted for his Democratic politics by the prior presidential administration is fanciful,” Buckley wrote.

On X, Bankman-Fried seems to also be struggling to sell himself as a Republican to the platform’s right-leaning users. Top comments on his recent posts are full of memes and haters mocking Bankman-Fried’s failed comeback.

On one post praising a Trump health care policy that had nothing to do with cryptocurrency, X users even appeared to arbitrarily add a community note to remind anyone who saw the post that “Sam Bankman-Fried is currently serving a 25 year prison sentence after being convicted in November 2023 on 7 counts of fraud and conspiracy. He misappropriated billions in FTX customer deposits.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump’s DOJ is not falling for Sam Bankman-Fried’s MAGA makeover on X Read More »

Binance sues WSJ, panicked by gov’t probes into sanctioned crypto transfers

Binance, Cryptocurrency, cryptocurrency exchange, Donald Trump, Iran sanctions, Policy, world liberty financial / Tim Belzer / March 11, 2026

WSJ reports include Binance comments

It also seems worth noting that Binance’s complaint claimed that the Journal made no changes to its report to include statements from the company; however, the report has clearly been edited.

For example, Binance’s lawsuit protests a subheading on the article that said, “Weeks after Trump pardoned Binance’s founder, the company dismantled [the] probe and suspended the investigators.” A current reading of that article, however, shows the subheading now includes a note that “Binance denied inquiry ended or staff fired for the concerns.” An archived version of the article suggests that an update was made on the day the article was published.

Additionally, a subsequent WSJ report, out today—confirming a Justice Department probe into Binance—includes many, if not all, of the statements that Binance accused the Journal of refusing to put on record.

For Binance, the lawsuit seems unlikely to stall government probes, particularly since critics like Blumenthal continue to closely monitor the exchange’s alleged attempts to influence the Trump administration.

After Donald Trump controversially pardoned Binance founder Zhao for his 2023 crypto crimes, the president admitted that “I don’t know who he is.” Alarmed by the pardon, some lawmakers like Blumenthal are concerned that “instead of actually preventing illicit use, Binance has sought to evade accountability and influence the White House through lobbying and a financial partnership with World Liberty Financial (WLFI), the cryptocurrency firm owned by the sons of President Trump and his special envoy Steve Witkoff.”

According to Blumenthal, Binance is now a “vital engine” of Trump’s family business, as “about 85 percent of WLFI’s stablecoins (USD1) are held in Binance accounts.”

To ensure that Binance isn’t using its potential influence to dodge accountability for its role in allowing “the illicit use of cryptocurrencies, including by Iranian and Russian entities, to bypass US sanctions,” Blumenthal is seeking a wide range of records. Despite shedding some light on why Binance claims it fired its compliance staff, Binance’s complaint, which seems to depend on the court making the same inferences from WSJ’s report as the exchange does, most likely will not satisfy the senator’s inquiry.

Binance sues WSJ, panicked by gov’t probes into sanctioned crypto transfers Read More »

Nintendo sues to prevent Trump from dodging full tariff refunds

Donald Trump, ieepa tariffs, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, Policy, switch 2, tariff refunds, tariffs / Mike M. / March 9, 2026

Nintendo may face pressure to share refunds with gamers who helped pay tariffs.

Last Friday, Nintendo joined thousands of companies suing the Trump administration to secure full refunds, plus interest, for billions in unlawful tariffs collected under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA).

In its complaint, Nintendo insisted that the Trump administration has already conceded that more than $200 billion in refunds are owed to hundreds of thousands of importers who paid tariffs, regardless of liquidation status.

However, Nintendo fears that the Trump administration may try to avoid paying refunds to certain companies whose tariff payments have already been liquidated, which means that the duties owed were finalized. The government has continually argued that it will only follow through on refunding all importers if a court directly orders refunds to be repaid in a way that requires reliquidation. Such an order would force officials to void all finalized tariffs and come as a relief to many companies in Nintendo’s position that remain uncertain if all their tariff payments can be clawed back.

Ultimately, Nintendo argued, it increasingly seems like the government plans to delay refunds until the court steps in. That leaves it up to the Court of International Trade to order Trump officials to do the right thing, Nintendo said. And in the gaming giant’s view, that’s to proceed with prompt refunds to make all importers whole.

As Nintendo explained, the company regularly imports goods and paid unlawful tariffs throughout 2025. Notably absent in Nintendo’s complaint was the amount of tariffs the company wants refunded. However, Nintendo seemingly has a lot of liquidated duties at stake. The company argued that without a ruling barring the government “from arguing that liquidation prevents the Court from ordering refunds,” the company will “suffer imminent irreparable harm.”

“All liquidated entries including IEEPA Duties must be reliquidated,” Nintendo argued. “This Court has the authority to reliquidate entries subject to the IEEPA duties.”

According to Nintendo, the Trump administration has no plans to oppose such a court order, and all that’s needed is the rubber stamp.

The company asked the court to order prompt refunds for all companies that were harmed by Trump’s unlawful key trade policy. To ensure that tariff refund delay chaos doesn’t worsen as courts weigh the right path forward, Nintendo also wants the court to block officials from continuing to liquidate tariff payments and to order the reliquidation of any liquidated entries.

Gamers may want Nintendo to share refunds

Nintendo of America declined to comment on whether the company has estimated the total tariff refund owed or to share any public financial documents that estimate total tariffs paid, so it’s hard to know exactly how big the company’s refund could be.

“We can confirm that we filed a request,” Nintendo of America said, regarding the lawsuit. “We have nothing else to share on this topic.”

It’s possible that Nintendo is uncomfortable sharing an estimate for its tariff refunds publicly, because the company has gotten some backlash over both ordinary and tariff-related price increases in the past year. Sharing an estimate of tariff refunds owed could risk reviving the backlash from customers, who may push for Nintendo to find a way to pass partial refunds on to customers who helped pay the tariffs.

For Nintendo, Trump’s IEEPA tariffs had particularly terrible timing. They took effect last April, just as Nintendo was gearing up to release the Switch 2. The sudden tariffs caused delays for preorders, but the console launched as planned, as Nintendo refused to let tariffs disrupt the official rollout.

For gamers, the Switch 2 already had a higher price tag than expected, at $450. Lashing out over the sticker shock, a swarm of disgruntled online protesters urged Nintendo to “drop the price.”

There was speculation that the price hike was linked to tariffs. But Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser told The Verge that the jump from the Switch’s debut price of $300 was not directly due to tariffs. Instead, it seemed that Nintendo had joined other game companies in raising console prices to historic highs, an Ars review found. But Bowser acknowledged that Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were still “fresh” at that moment, telling The Verge that, “like many companies right now,” Nintendo was “actively assessing what the impact may be.” Understandably, gamers braced for more price increases.

It only took a month before Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa foreshadowed tariff-linked price increases, a game industry news site closely monitoring Nintendo’s tariff moves reported. In May, Furukawa conceded that software wasn’t as impacted, but “hardware involves special factors such as tariffs,” which Nintendo must take into account, “while conducting careful and repeated deliberations when determining price.”

However, Furukawa said that the overall calculus for Nintendo weighed against increasing the Switch 2 price even more to cover tariffs, because seemingly Nintendo feared a higher price point would rob Switch 2 of sales and its games of exposure. As he explained:

Our basic policy is that for any country or region, if tariffs are imposed, we recognize them as part of the cost and incorporate them into the price. However, this year marks our first new dedicated video game system launch in eight years, so given our unique situation, our priority is to maintain the momentum of our platforms, which is extremely important for our dedicated video game platform business. Consequently, if the assumptions on tariffs change, we will consider what kind of price adjustments would be appropriate, taking into account various factors such as the market conditions.

By August, the Switch 2 price remained stable, but Nintendo had increased prices on the original Switch, as well as Switch 2 accessories, citing “market conditions.”

And it wasn’t just Nintendo forced to make adjustments that riled its fans, suggesting that many major players in the gaming industry may face demands from frustrated consumers to share refunds.

Nintendo may get creative to avoid backlash

Early on during Trump’s IEEPA tariff regime—which randomly raised and decreased tariffs on products from all major US trading partners—the Entertainment Software Association warned that the entire game industry could be harmed by unchecked tariffs.

And the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), which has long opposed IEEPA tariffs, forecasted before Trump took office that his tariff threats risked harming consumers by immediately increasing game console prices by 25 percent.

That forecast only got darker as 2025 dragged on. In May, when China and Trump were still embroiled in tit-for-tat retaliations, and China appeared to have the upper hand, CTA warned that an estimate showed only 1 percent of game consoles are produced in the US. If IEEPA tariffs weren’t changed to exempt consoles from tariffs, consoles could soon cost more than $1,000 on average, up by about 69 percent, CTA estimated.

It remains unclear how much Nintendo and other gaming companies paid in tariffs or how much their customers paid in tariff-related price increases, and for the latter at least, it will likely stay that way. No courts are currently weighing whether customers who helped importers pay for tariffs should get refunds, too.

A technology, media, and telecommunications leader for PwC, which advises big firms on tax questions, Dallas Dolen, told Ars that most companies are laser-focused right now on securing refunds. However, once they have that money, some companies that are worried about reputational harm may come up with “creative” ways to reimburse customers, such as offering discounts.

Ed Brzytwa, CTA’s vice president of international trade, told Ars that it was obvious that consumer backlash to price increases was one of the biggest tariff burdens for consumer tech firms like gaming companies.

“The main point that we’ve made over and over and over again is that this impacts consumers in the form of potentially higher costs for products,” Brzytwa told Ars.

Last month, libertarian think tank the Cato Institute published calculations showing that “tariff costs have generally been borne by US-based companies and consumers.”

“Americans are bearing most of the tariffs’ economic burden, including through higher retail prices,” the Cato Institute reported. In a chart tracking analysis that included measuring costs passed on to consumers, they cited a Goldman Sachs study that predicted by the end of 2025 that the amount of the “tariff burden” borne by consumers “would shift to 55 percent.” The most recent analysis cited, a Yale Budget Lab study, found that costs of tariffs passed on to companies and consumers increased over time.

There’s no telling yet whether any companies that passed on tariff costs will pass on relief to consumers or if it will simply help them keep prices stable as new tariffs come.

For Nintendo and other consumer tech companies, refunds may provide a reprieve but don’t actually provide relief from tariff hell, experts agreed. As Trump looks to replace struck-down IEEPA tariffs with tariffs that could shake up supply chains further by targeting semiconductors or other currently exempt tech products or materials, Dolen told Ars that tech companies “don’t feel better that there might be some, quote, win here because the supply chain still feels overwhelming.” That could mean that the best Americans can hope for is that prices don’t increase more as Trump tries to keep his tariff regime alive.

One glimmer of hope for American consumers—who largely oppose Trump’s tariffs across the board and are already frustrated to be missing out on tariff refunds—is that Trump is likely very well aware that threats of additional tariff-related price increases will likely not be tolerated ahead of the midterm elections, experts suggested.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Nintendo sues to prevent Trump from dodging full tariff refunds Read More »

Supreme Court blocks Trump’s emergency tariffs, billions in refunds may be owed

Donald Trump, Policy, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs / Rejus Almole / February 21, 2026

Economists estimated more than $175 billion may need to be refunded.

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that Donald Trump was not authorized to implement emergency tariffs to ostensibly block illegal drug flows and offset trade deficits.

It’s not immediately clear what the ruling may mean for businesses that paid various “reciprocal” tariffs that Trump changed frequently, raising and lowering rates at will during tense negotiations with the United States’ biggest trade partners.

Divided 6-3, Supreme Court justices remanded the cases to lower courts, concluding that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) does not give Trump power to impose tariffs.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion and was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. They concluded that Trump could not exclusively rely on IEEPA to impose tariffs “of unlimited amount and duration, on any product from any country” during peacetime.

Only Congress has the power of the purse, Roberts wrote, and the few exceptions to that are bound by “explicit terms and subject to strict limits.”

“Against that backdrop of clear and limited delegations, the Government reads IEEPA to give the President power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs and change them at will,” Roberts wrote. “That view would represent a transformative expansion of the President’s authority over tariff policy. It is also telling that in IEEPA’s half century of existence, no President has invoked the statute to impose any tariffs, let alone tariffs of this magnitude and scope. That ‘lack of historical precedent,’ coupled with ‘the breadth of authority’ that the President now claims, suggests that the tariffs extend beyond the President’s ‘legitimate reach.’”

Back in November, analysts suggested that the Supreme Court ruling against Trump could force the government to issue refunds of up to $1 trillion. This morning, a new estimate from economists reduced that number, Reuters reported, estimating that more than $175 billion could be “at risk of having to be refunded.”

Ruling disrupts Trump plan to collect $900 billion

Trump lost primarily because IEEPA does not explicitly reference “tariffs” or “duties,” instead only giving Trump power to “regulate” “importation”—the two words in the statute that Trump tried to argue showed that Congress clearly authorized his power to impose tariffs.

But the court did not agree that Congress intended to give the president “the independent power to impose tariffs on imports from any country, of any product, at any rate, for any amount of time,” Roberts wrote. “Those words cannot bear such weight,” particularly in peacetime. “The United States, after all, is not at war with every nation in the world.”

Specifically, Trump failed to “identify any statute in which the power to regulate includes the power to tax,” Roberts wrote. And the majority of justices remained “skeptical” that in “IEEPA alone,” Congress intended to hide “a delegation of its birth-right power to tax within the quotidian power to ‘regulate.’”

“A contrary reading would render IEEPA partly unconstitutional,” Roberts wrote.

According to the majority, siding with Trump would free the president to “issue a dizzying array of modifications” to tariffs at will, “unconstrained by the significant procedural limitations in other tariff statutes.” The only check to that unprecedented power grab, the court suggested, would be a “veto-proof majority in Congress.”

Trump has yet to comment on the ruling. Ahead of it, he claimed the tariffs were “common sense,” NBC News reported. Speaking at a steel manufacturing factory in northwest Georgia, Trump claimed that IEEPA tariffs were projected to bring in $900 billion “next year.” Not only could he now be forced to refund tariffs, but the Supreme Court ruling could also undo trade deals in which Trump used so-called reciprocal tariffs as leverage. Undoing tariffs will likely be a “mess,” Barrett said last year.

“Until now, no President has read IEEPA to confer such power,” Roberts wrote, while noting that the court claims “no special competence in matters of economics or foreign affairs.”

Gorsuch seems to troll Trump

In a concurring opinion, Gorsuch slammed Trump as trying to expand the president’s authority in a way that would make it hard for Congress to ever retrieve lost powers. He claimed that Trump was seeking to secure a path forward where any president could declare a national emergency—a decision that would be “unreviewable”—to justify imposing “tariffs on nearly any goods he wishes, in any amount he wishes, based on emergencies he himself has declared.”

“Just ask yourself: What President would willingly give up that kind of power?” Gorsuch wrote.

Gorsuch further questioned if Trump was “seeking to exploit questionable statutory language to aggrandize his own power.” And he warned that accepting the dissenting view would allow Trump to randomly impose tariffs as low as 1 percent or as high as 1,000,000 percent on any product or country he wanted at any time.

Gorsuch criticized justices with dissenting views, who disagreed that Congress’ intent in the statute was unclear and defended Trump’s claim that “IEEPA provides the clear statement needed to sustain the President’s tariffs.” Those justices argued that presidents have long been granted authority to impose tariffs and accused the majority of putting a “thumb on the scale” by requiring a strict reading of the statute. Instead, they argued for a special exception requiring a more general interpretation of statutes whenever presidents seek to regulate matters of foreign affairs.

If that view was accepted, Gorsuch warned, presidents could seize even more power from Congress. Many other legislative powers “could be passed wholesale to the executive branch in a few loose statutory terms, no matter what domestic ramifications might follow. And, as we have seen, Congress would often find these powers nearly impossible to retrieve.”

As a final note, Gorsuch took some time to sympathize with Trump supporters:

For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day.

Kavanaugh questions other Trump tariff authority

Under IEEPA, the majority ruled, Trump has the power to “impose penalties, restrictions, or controls on foreign commerce,” Barrett wrote. But he does not have the power to impose emergency tariffs, unless Congress updates laws to explicitly grant such authority.

In his dissent, justice Brett Kavanaugh insisted that it should not be up to courts to settle these “policy debates.” He defended Trump’s view that IEEPA granting power to “regulate” “importation” generally included tariffs, while arguing that Trump wasn’t seeking to expand his presidential authority at all. Many feared that the more conservative Supreme Court would side with Trump, and Kavanaugh’s opinion offered a peek at what that alternate reality could have looked like.

“Importantly, IEEPA’s authorization for the President to impose tariffs did not grant the President any new substantive power,” Kavanaugh wrote. Instead, “IEEPA merely allows the President to impose tariffs somewhat more efficiently to deal with foreign threats during national emergencies.” He further claimed it was an “odd distinction” that the majority would interpret IEEPA as giving Trump authority to “block all imports from China” but not to “order even a $1 tariff on goods imported from China.”

Downplaying the ruling’s significance, Kavanaugh echoed the Trump administration’s claims that the Supreme Court ruling won’t really affect Trump’s key policy of imposing tariffs to renegotiate trade deals or address other concerns.

“The decision might not substantially constrain a President’s ability to order tariffs going forward,” Kavanugh wrote, pointing to “numerous other federal statutes” that “authorize the President to impose tariffs.”

However, a footnote in the majority’s opinion emphasized that all of the options that Kavanaugh cited “contain various combinations of procedural prerequisites, required agency determinations, and limits on the duration, amount, and scope of the tariffs they authorize.” It was precisely constraints like those that Trump’s broad reading of IEEPA lacked, the majority found.

Kavanaugh acknowledged that the ruling would stop Trump from imposing tariffs at will, writing that other statutes require “a few additional procedural steps that IEEPA, as an emergency statute, does not require.”

Winding down his arguments, Kavanaugh joined Trump administration officials in groaning that the “United States may be required to refund billions of dollars to importers who paid the IEEPA tariffs, even though some importers may have already passed on costs to consumers or others.”

Kavanaugh makes a frequently overlooked point there in this argument, which is that IEEPA tariffs may have harmed consumers without any immediate remedy. It seems unlikely that consumers will get any relief in the short-term, no matter what remedies the Supreme Court’s ruling triggers. For businesses, the primary relief will likely not be from refunds but from the small amount of certainty they will have going forward that tariffs won’t be suddenly changed or imposed overnight.

Kavanaugh conceded that Trump’s tariffs “may or may not be wise policy.” But he fretted that Trump’s trade deals “worth trillions of dollars” could be undone by the ruling, while claiming the ruling has only generated more uncertainty on a global scale, including with America’s biggest rival, China.

Interestingly, Kavanaugh also suggested that the ruling may put at legal risk the reading of another statute that Trump will likely rely on more heavily moving forward to impose tariffs.

“One might think that the Court’s opinion would also mean that tariffs cannot be imposed under Section 232, which authorizes the President to ‘adjust the imports,’” Kavanaugh suggested.

This story was updated to include views from Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Supreme Court blocks Trump’s emergency tariffs, billions in refunds may be owed Read More »

TikTok users “absolutely justified” for fearing MAGA makeover, experts say

censorship, Donald Trump, First Amendment, Jeffrey Epstein, Policy, tiktok / Paul Patrick / January 27, 2026

Spectacular coincidence or obvious censorship?

TikTok’s tech issues abound as censorship fears drive users to delete app.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

TikTok wants users to believe that errors blocking uploads of anti-ICE videos or direct messages mentioning Jeffrey Epstein are due to technical errors—not the platform seemingly shifting to censor content critical of Donald Trump after he hand-picked the US owners who took over the app last week.

However, experts say that TikTok users’ censorship fears are justified, whether the bugs are to blame or not.

Ioana Literat, an associate professor of technology, media, and learning at Teachers College, Columbia University, has studied TikTok’s politics since the app first shot to popularity in the US in 2018. She told Ars that “users’ fears are absolutely justified” and explained why the “bugs” explanation is “insufficient.”

“Even if these are technical glitches, the pattern of what’s being suppressed reveals something significant,” Literat told Ars. “When your ‘bug’ consistently affects anti-Trump content, Epstein references, and anti-ICE videos, you’re looking at either spectacular coincidence or systems that have been designed—whether intentionally or through embedded biases—to flag and suppress specific political content.”

TikTok users are savvy, Literat noted, and what’s being cast as “paranoia” about the app’s bugs actually stems from their “digital literacy,” she suggested.

“They’ve watched Instagram suppress Palestine content, they’ve seen Twitter’s transformation under Musk, they’ve experienced shadow-banning and algorithmic suppression, including on TikTok prior to this,” Literat said. “So, their pattern recognition isn’t paranoia, but rather digital literacy.”

Casey Fiesler, an associate professor of technology ethics and internet law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, agreed that TikTok’s “bugs” explanation wasn’t enough to address users’ fears. She told CNN that TikTok risks losing users’ trust the longer that errors damage the perception of the app.

“Even if this isn’t purposeful censorship, does it matter? In terms of perception and trust, maybe,” Fiesler told CNN.

Some users are already choosing to leave TikTok. A quick glance at the TikTok subreddit shows many users grieving while vowing to delete the app, Literat pointed out, though some are reportedly struggling to delete accounts due to technical issues. Even with some users blocked from abandoning their accounts, however, “the daily average of TikTok uninstalls are up nearly 150 percent in the last five days compared to the last three months,” data analysis firm Sensor Tower told CNN.

A TikTok USDS spokesperson told Ars that US owners have not yet made any changes to the algorithm or content moderation policies. So far, the only changes have been to the US app’s terms of use and privacy policy, which impacted what location data is collected, how ads are targeted, and how AI interactions are monitored.

For TikTok, the top priority appears to be fixing the bugs, which were attributed to a power outage at a US data center. A TikTok USDS spokesperson told NPR that TikTok is also investigating the issue where some users can’t talk about Epstein in DMs.

“We don’t have rules against sharing the name ‘Epstein’ in direct messages and are investigating why some users are experiencing issues,” TikTok’s spokesperson said.

TikTok’s response came after California governor Gavin Newsom declared on X that “it’s time to investigate” TikTok.

“I am launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content,” Newsom said. His post quote-tweeted an X user who shared a screenshot of the error message TikTok displayed when some users referenced Epstein and joked, “so the agreement for TikTok to sell its US business to GOP-backed investors was finalized a few days ago,” and “now you can’t mention Epstein lmao.”

As of Tuesday afternoon, the results of TikTok’s investigation into the “Epstein” issue were not publicly available, but TikTok may post an update here as technical issues are resolved.

“We’ve made significant progress in recovering our US infrastructure with our US data center partner,” TikTok USDS’s latest statement said. “However, the US user experience may still have some technical issues, including when posting new content. We’re committed to bringing TikTok back to its full capacity as soon as possible. We’ll continue to provide updates.”

TikTokers will notice subtle changes, expert says

For TikTok’s new owners, the tech issues risk confirming fears that Trump wasn’t joking when he said he’d like to see TikTok be tweaked to be “100 percent MAGA.”

Because of this bumpy transition, it seems likely that TikTok will continue to be heavily scrutinized once the USDS joint venture officially starts retraining the app on US data. As the algorithm undergoes tweaks, frequent TikTok users will likely be the first to pick up on subtle changes, especially if content unaligned with their political views suddenly starts appearing in their feeds when it never did before, Literat suggested.

Literat has researched both left- and right-leaning TikTok content. She told Ars that although left-leaning young users have for years loudly used the app to promote progressive views on topics like racial justice, gun reforms, or climate change, TikTok has never leaned one way or the other on the political spectrum.

Consider Christian or tradwife TikTok, Literat suggested, which grew huge platforms on TikTok alongside leftist bubbles advocating for LGBTQ+ rights or Palestine solidarity.

“Political life on TikTok is organized into overlapping sub-communities, each with its own norms, humor, and tolerance for disagreement,” Literat said, adding that “the algorithm creates bubbles, so people experience very different TikToks.”

Literat told Ars that she wasn’t surprised when Trump suggested that TikTok would be better if it were more right-wing. But what concerned her most was the implication that Trump viewed TikTok “as a potential propaganda apparatus” and “a tool for political capture rather than a space for authentic expression and connection.”

“The historical irony is thick: we went from ‘TikTok is dangerous because it’s controlled by the Chinese government and might manipulate American users’ to ‘TikTok should be controlled by American interests and explicitly aligned with a particular political agenda,’” Literat said. “The concern was never really about foreign influence or manipulation per se—it was about who gets to do the influencing.”

David Greene, senior counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which fought the TikTok ban law, told Ars that users are justified in feeling concerned. However, technical errors or content moderation mistakes are nearly always the most likely explanations for issues, and there’s no way to know “what’s actually happening.” He noted that lawmakers have shaped how some TikTok users view the app after insisting that they accept that China was influencing the algorithm without providing evidence.

“For years, TikTok users were being told that they just needed to follow these assumptions the government was making about the dangers of TikTok,” Greene said. And “now they’re doing the same thing, making these assumptions that it’s now maybe some content policy is being done either to please the Trump administration or being controlled by it. We conditioned TikTok users to basically to not have trust in the way decisions were made with the app.”

MAGA tweaks risks TikTok’s “death by a thousand cuts”

TikTok USDS likely wants to distance itself from Trump’s comments about making the app more MAGA. But new owners have deep ties with Trump, including Larry Ellison, the chief technology officer of Oracle, whom some critics suggest has benefited more than anyone else from Trump’s presidency. Greene noted that Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is a key investor in Silver Lake. Both firms now have a 15 percent stake in the TikTok USDS joint venture, as well as MGX, which also seems to have Trump ties. CNBC reported MGX used the Trump family cryptocurrency, World Liberty Financial, to invest $2 billion in Binance shortly before Trump pardoned Binance’s CEO from money laundering charges, which some viewed as a possible quid pro quo.

Greene said that EFF warned during the Supreme Court fight over the TikTok divest-or-ban law that “all you were doing was substituting concerns for Chinese propaganda, for concerns for US propaganda. That it was highly likely that if you force a sale and the sale is up to the approval of the president, it’s going to be sold to President’s lackeys.”

“I don’t see how it’d be good for users or for democracy, for TikTok to have an editorial policy that would make Trump happy,” Greene said.

If suddenly, the app were tweaked to push more MAGA content into more feeds, young users who are critical of Trump wouldn’t all be brainwashed, Literat said. They would adapt, perhaps eventually finding other apps for activism.

However, TikTok may be hard to leave behind at a time when other popular apps seem to carry their own threats of political suppression, she suggested. Beyond the video-editing features that made TikTok a behemoth of social media, perhaps the biggest sticking point keeping users glued to TikTok is “fundamentally social,” Literat said.

“TikTok is where their communities are, where they’ve built audiences, where the conversations they care about are happening,” Literat said.

Rather than a mass exodus, Literat expects that TikTok’s fate could be “gradual erosion” or “death by a thousand cuts,” as users “likely develop workarounds, shift to other platforms for political content while keeping TikTok for entertainment, or create coded languages and aesthetic strategies to evade detection.”

CNN reported that one TikTok user already found that she could finally post an anti-ICE video after claiming to be a “fashion influencer” and speaking in code throughout the video, which criticized ICE for detaining a 5-year-old named Liam Conejo Ramos.

“Fashion influencing is in my blood,” she said in the video, which featured “a photo of Liam behind her,” CNN reported. “And even a company with bad customer service won’t keep me from doing my fashion review.”

Short-term, Literat thinks that longtime TikTok users experiencing inconsistent moderation will continue testing boundaries, documenting issues, and critiquing the app. That discussion will perhaps chill more speech on the platform, possibly even affecting the overall content mix appearing in feeds.

Long-term, however, TikTok’s changes under US owners “could fundamentally reshape TikTok’s role in political discourse.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised, unfortunately, if it suffers the fate of Twitter/X,” Literat said.

Literat told Ars that her TikTok research was initially sparked by a desire to monitor the “kind of authentic political expression the platform once enabled.” She worries that because user trust is now “damaged,” TikTok will never be the same.

“The tragedy is that TikTok genuinely was a space where young people—especially those from marginalized communities—could shape political conversations in ways that felt authentic and powerful,” Literat said. “I’m sad to say, I think that’s been irretrievably broken.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

TikTok users “absolutely justified” for fearing MAGA makeover, experts say Read More »

TikTok deal is done; Trump wants praise while users fear MAGA tweaks

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, Policy, tiktok, us-china trade war / Kris Guyer / January 23, 2026

US will soon retrain TikTok

“I am so happy”: Trump closes deal that hands TikTok US to his allies.

The TikTok deal is done, and Donald Trump is claiming a win, although it remains unclear if the joint venture he arranged with ByteDance and the Chinese government actually resolves Congress’ national security concerns.

In a press release Thursday, TikTok announced the “TikTok USDS Joint Venture LLC,” an entity established to keep TikTok operating in the US.

Giving Americans majority ownership, ByteDance retains 19.9 percent of the joint venture, the release said, which has been valued at $14 billion. Three managing investors—Silver Lake, Oracle, and MGX—each hold 15 percent, while other investors, including Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell’s investment firm, Dell Family Office, hold smaller, undisclosed stakes.

Americans will also have majority control over the joint venture’s seven-member board. TikTok CEO Shou Chew holds ByteDance’s only seat. Finalizing the deal was a “great move,” Chew told TikTok employees in an internal memo, The New York Times reported.

Two former TikTok employees will lead the joint venture. Adam Presser, who previously served as TikTok’s global head of Operations and Trust & Safety, has been named CEO. And Kim Farrell, TikTok’s former global head of Business Operations Protection, will serve as chief security officer.

Trump has claimed the deal meets requirements for “qualified divestiture” to avoid a TikTok ban otherwise required under the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. However, questions remain, as lawmakers have not yet analyzed the terms of the deal to determine whether that’s true.

The law requires the divestment “to end any ‘operational relationship’ between ByteDance and TikTok in the United States,” critics told the NYT. That could be a problem, since TikTok’s release makes it clear that ByteDance will maintain some control over the TikTok US app’s operations.

For example, while the US owners will retrain the algorithm and manage data security, ByteDance owns the algorithm and “will manage global product interoperability and certain commercial activities, including e-commerce, advertising, and marketing.” The Trump administration seemingly agreed to these terms to ensure that the US TikTok isn’t cut off from the rest of the world on the app.

“Interoperability enables the Joint Venture to provide US users with a global TikTok experience, ensuring US creators can be discovered and businesses can operate on a global scale,” the release said.

Perhaps also concerning to Congress, Slate noted, while ByteDance may be a minority owner, it remains the largest individual shareholder.

Michael Sobolik, an expert on US-China policy and senior fellow at the right-leaning think tank the Hudson Institute, told the NYT that the Trump administration “may have saved TikTok, but the national security concerns are still going to continue.”

Some critics, including Republicans, have vowed to scrutinize the deal.

On Thursday, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass.) complained that the White House had repeatedly denied requests for information about the deal. They’ve provided “virtually no details about this agreement, including whether TikTok’s algorithm is truly free of Chinese influence,” Markey said.

“This lack of transparency reeks,” Markey said. “Congress has a responsibility to investigate this deal, demand transparency, and ensure that any arrangement truly protects national security while keeping TikTok online.”

In December, Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, said that he wants to hold a hearing with TikTok leadership to discuss how the deal addresses national security concerns. On Thursday, Moolenaar said he “has two specific questions for TikTok’s new American owners,” Punchbowl News reported.

“Can we ensure that the algorithm is not influenced by the Chinese Communist Party?” Moolenaar said. “And two, can we ensure that the data of Americans is secure?”

Moolenaar may be satisfied by the terms, as the NYT suggested that China hawks in Washington appeared to trust that Trump’s arrangement is a qualified divestiture. TikTok’s release said that Oracle will protect US user data in a secure US cloud data environment that will regularly be audited by third-party cybersecurity experts. The algorithm will be licensed from ByteDance and retrained on US user data, the release said, and Vice President JD Vance has confirmed that the joint venture “will have control over how the algorithm pushes content to users.”

Last September, a spokesperson for the House China Committee told Politico that “any agreement must comply with the historic bipartisan law passed last year to protect the American people, including the complete divestment of ByteDance control and a fully decoupled algorithm.”

Users brace for MAGA tweaks to algorithm

“I am so happy to have helped in saving TikTok!” Trump said on Truth Social after the deal was finalized. “It will now be owned by a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World, and will be an important Voice.”

However, it’s unclear to TikTokers how the app might change as Trump allies take control of the addictive algorithm that drew millions to the app. Lawmakers had feared the Chinese Communist Party could influence the algorithm to target US users with propaganda, and Trump’s deal was supposed to mitigate that.

Not only do critics worry that if ByteDance maintains ownership of the algorithm, it could allow the company to continue to influence content, but there is now concern that the app’s recommendations could take a right-leaning slant under US control.

Trump has already said that he’d like to see TikTok go “100 percent MAGA,” and his allies will now be in charge of “deciding which posts to leave up and which to take down,” the NYT noted. Anupam Chander, a law and technology professor at Georgetown University, told the NYT that the TikTok deal offered Trump and his allies “more theoretical room for one side’s views to get a greater airing.”

“My worry all along is that we may have traded fears of foreign propaganda for the reality of domestic propaganda,” Chander said.

For business owners who rely on the app, there’s also the potential that the app could be glitchy after US owners start porting data and retraining the algorithm.

Trump clearly hopes the deal will endear him to TikTok users. He sought praise on Truth Social, writing, “I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok.”

China “played” Trump, expert says

So far, the Chinese government has not commented on the deal’s finalization, but Trump thanked Chinese President Xi Jinping in his Truth Social post “for working with us and, ultimately, approving the Deal.”

“He could have gone the other way, but didn’t, and is appreciated for his decision,” Trump said.

Experts have suggested that China benefits from the deal by keeping the most lucrative part of TikTok while the world watches it export its technology to the US.

When Trump first announced the deal in September, critics immediately attacked him for letting China keep the algorithm. One US advisor close to the deal told the Financial Times that “Trump always chickens out,” noting that “after all this, China keeps the algorithm.”

On Thursday, Sobolik told Politico that Trump “got played” by Xi after taking “terrible advice from his staff” during trade negotiations that some critics said gave China the upper hand.

Trump sees things differently, writing on Truth Social that the TikTok deal came to “a very dramatic, final, and beautiful conclusion.”

Whether the deal is “dramatic,” “final,” or “beautiful” depends on who you ask, though, as it could face legal challenges and disrupt TikTok’s beloved content feeds. The NYT suggested that the deal took so long to finalize that TikTokers don’t even care anymore, while several outlets noted that Trump’s deal is very close to the Project Texas arrangement that Joe Biden pushed until it was deemed inadequate to address national security risks.

Through Project Texas, Oracle was supposed to oversee TikTok US user data, auditing for security risks while ByteDance controlled the code. The joint venture’s “USDS” “coinage even originated from Project Texas,” Slate noted.

Lindsay Gorman, a former senior advisor in the Biden administration, told NYT that “we’ve gone round and round and ended up not too far from where we started.”

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

TikTok deal is done; Trump wants praise while users fear MAGA tweaks Read More »

Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers

AI, AI infrastructure, AI training, Amazon, Biz & IT, brad smith, community development, datacenters, Donald Trump, electricity, Google, machine learning, Meta, microsoft, openai, property taxes, skilled trades, water use / Paul Patrick / January 13, 2026

Taking responsibility for power usage

In the Microsoft blog post, Smith acknowledged that residential electricity rates have recently risen in dozens of states, driven partly by inflation, supply chain constraints, and grid upgrades. He wrote that communities “value new jobs and property tax revenue, but not if they come with higher power bills or tighter water supplies.”

Microsoft says it will ask utilities and public commissions to set rates high enough to cover the full electricity costs for its data centers, including infrastructure additions. In Wisconsin, the company is supporting a new rate structure that would charge “Very Large Customers,” including data centers, the cost of the electricity required to serve them.

Smith wrote that while some have suggested the public should help pay for the added electricity needed for AI, Microsoft disagrees. He stated, “Especially when tech companies are so profitable, we believe that it’s both unfair and politically unrealistic for our industry to ask the public to shoulder added electricity costs for AI.”

On water usage for cooling, Microsoft plans a 40 percent improvement in data center water-use intensity by 2030. A recent environmental audit from AI model-maker Mistral found that training and running its Large 2 model over 18 months produced 20.4 kilotons of CO₂ emissions and evaporated enough water to fill 112 Olympic-size swimming pools, illustrating the aggregate environmental impact of AI operations at scale.

To solve some of these issues, Microsoft says it has launched a new AI data center design using a closed-loop system that constantly recirculates cooling liquid, dramatically cutting water usage. In this design, already deployed in Wisconsin and Georgia, potable water is no longer needed for cooling.

On property taxes, Smith stated in the blog post that the company will not ask local municipalities to reduce their rates. The company says it will pay its full share of local property taxes. Smith wrote that Microsoft’s goal is to bring these commitments to life in the first half of 2026. Of course, these are PR-aligned company goals and not realities yet, so we’ll have to check back in later to see whether Microsoft has been following through on its promises.

Microsoft vows to cover full power costs for energy-hungry AI data centers Read More »

Judge: Trump violated Fifth Amendment by ending energy grants in only blue states

department of energy, Donald Trump, Electric vehicles, Fifth Amendment, Policy / Kris Guyer / January 12, 2026

The Trump administration violated the Fifth Amendment when canceling billions of dollars in environmental grants for projects in “blue states” that didn’t vote for him in the last election, a judge ruled Monday.

Trump’s blatant discrimination came on the same day as the government shut down last fall. In total, 315 grants were terminated in October, ending support for 223 projects worth approximately $7.5 billion, the Department of Energy confirmed. All the awardees, except for one, were based in states where Donald Trump lost the majority vote to Kamala Harris in 2024.

Only seven awardees sued, defending projects that helped states with “electric vehicle development, updating building energy codes, and addressing methane emissions.” They accused Trump officials of clearly discriminating against Democratic voters by pointing to their social media posts boasting about punishing blue states.

On X, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, bragged that nearly “$8 billion in Green NewScam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” then listed only states that did not vote for Trump. Meanwhile on Truth Social, Trump confirmed he met with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” during the shutdown.

On Monday, US District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his opinion that the case was “unique” because ordinarily “the mere presence of political considerations in an agency action” does not mean that officials have run “afoul of the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection.”

Judge: Trump violated Fifth Amendment by ending energy grants in only blue states Read More »

DOGE did not find $2T in fraud, but that doesn’t matter, Musk allies say

doge, Donald Trump, elon musk, federal budget, Policy / Kris Guyer / December 30, 2025

Over time, more will be learned about how DOGE operated and what impact DOGE had. But it seems likely that even Musk would agree that DOGE failed to uncover the vast fraud he continues to predict exists in government.

DOGE supposedly served “higher purpose”

While Musk continues to fixate on fraud in the federal budget, his allies in government and Silicon Valley have begun spinning anyone criticizing DOGE’s failure to hit the promised target as missing the “higher purpose” of DOGE, The Guardian reported.

Five allies granted anonymity to discuss DOGE’s goals told The Guardian that the point of DOGE was to “fundamentally” reform government by eradicating “taboos” around hiring and firing, “expanding the use of untested technologies, and lowering resistance to boundary-pushing start-ups seeking federal contracts.” Now, the federal government can operate more like a company, Musk’s allies said.

The libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute, did celebrate DOGE for producing “the largest peacetime workforce cut on record,” even while acknowledging that DOGE had little impact on federal spending.

“It is important to note that DOGE’s target was to reduce the budget in absolute real terms without reference to a baseline projection. DOGE did not cut spending by either standard,” the Cato Institute reported.

Currently, DOGE still exists as a decentralized entity, with DOGE staffers appointed to various agencies to continue cutting alleged waste and finding alleged fraud. While some fear that the White House may choose to “re-empower” DOGE to make more government-wide cuts in the future, Musk has maintained that he would never helm a DOGE-like government effort again and the Cato Institute said that “the evidence supports Musk’s judgment.”

“DOGE had no noticeable effect on the trajectory of spending, but it reduced federal employment at the fastest pace since President Carter, and likely even before,” the Institute reported. “The only possible analogies are demobilization after World War II and the Korean War. Reducing spending is more important, but cutting the federal workforce is nothing to sneeze at, and Musk should look more positively on DOGE’s impact.”

Although the Cato Institute joined allies praising DOGE’s dramatic shrinking of the federal workforce, the director of the Center for Effective Public Management at the Brookings Institution, Elaine Kamarck, told Ars in November that DOGE “cut muscle, not fat” because “they didn’t really know what they were doing.”

DOGE did not find $2T in fraud, but that doesn’t matter, Musk allies say Read More »

Big Tech basically took Trump’s unpredictable trade war lying down

AMD, Apple, bytedance, china, Donald Trump, Features, intel, NVIDIA, Policy, reciprocal tariffs, tariffs, tiktok, trade war / Paul Patrick / December 29, 2025

From Apple gifting a gold statue to the US taking a stake in Intel.

Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images

As the first year of Donald Trump’s chaotic trade war winds down, the tech industry is stuck scratching its head, with no practical way to anticipate what twists and turns to expect in 2026.

Tech companies may have already grown numb to Trump’s unpredictable moves. Back in February, Trump warned Americans to expect “a little pain” after he issued executive orders imposing 10–25 percent tariffs on imports from America’s biggest trading partners, including Canada, China, and Mexico. Immediately, industry associations sounded the alarm, warning that the costs of consumer tech could increase significantly. By April, Trump had ordered tariffs on all US trade partners to correct claimed trade deficits, using odd math that critics suspected came from a chatbot. (Those tariffs bizarrely targeted uninhabited islands that exported nothing and were populated by penguins.)

Costs of tariffs only got higher as the year wore on. But the tech industry has done very little to push back against them. Instead, some of the biggest companies made their own surprising moves after Trump’s trade war put them in deeply uncomfortable positions.

Apple gives Trump a gold statue instead of US-made iPhone

Right from the jump in February, Apple got backed into a corner after Trump threatened a “flat” 60 percent tariff on all Chinese imports, which experts said could have substantially taxed Apple’s business. Moving to appease Trump, Apple promised to invest $500 billion in the US in hopes of avoiding tariffs, but that didn’t take the pressure off for long.

By April, Apple stood by and said nothing as Trump promised the company would make “made in the USA” iPhones. Analysts suggested such a goal was “impossible,” calling the idea “impossible at worst and highly expensive at best.”

Apple’s silence did not spare the company Trump’s scrutiny. The next month, Trump threatened Apple with a 25 percent tariff on any iPhones sold in the US that were not manufactured in America. Experts were baffled by the threat, which appeared to be the first time a US company was threatened directly with tariffs.

Typically, tariffs are imposed on a country or category of goods, like smartphones. It remains unclear if it would even be legal to levy a tariff on an individual company like Apple, but Trump never tested those waters. Instead, Trump stopped demanding the American-made iPhone and withdrew other tariff threats after he was apparently lulled into submission by a gold statue that Apple gifted him in August. The engraved glass disc featured an Apple logo and Tim Cook’s signature above a “Made in USA” stamp, celebrating Donald Trump for his “Apple American Manufacturing Program.”

Trump’s wild deals shake down chipmakers

Around the same time that Trump eased pressure on Apple, he turned his attention to Intel. On social media in August, Trump ordered Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to “resign immediately,” claiming he was “highly conflicted.” In response, Tan did not resign but instead met with Trump and struck a deal that gave the US a 10 percent stake in Intel. Online, Trump bragged that he let Tan “keep his job” while hyping the deal—which The New York Times described as one of the “largest government interventions in a US company since the rescue of the auto industry after the 2008 financial crisis.”

But unlike the auto industry, Intel didn’t need the money. And rather than helping an ailing company survive a tough spot, the deal risked disrupting Intel’s finances in ways that spooked shareholders. It was therefore a relief to no one when Intel detailed everything that could go wrong in an SEC filing, including the possible dilution of investors’ stock due to discounting US shares and other risks of dilution, if certain terms of the deal kick in at some point in the future.

The company also warned of potential lawsuits challenging the legality of the deal, which Intel fears could come from third parties, the US government, or foreign governments. Most ominous, Intel admitted there was no way to predict what other risks may come, both in the short-term and long-term.

Of course, Intel wasn’t the only company Trump sought to control, and not every company caved. He tried to strong-arm the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in September into moving half its chip manufacturing into the US, but TSMC firmly rejected his demand. And in October, when Trump began eyeing stakes in quantum computing firms, several companies were open to negotiating, but with no deals immediately struck, it was hard to ascertain how seriously they were entertaining Trump’s talks.

Trump struck another particularly wild deal the same month as the Intel agreement. That deal found chipmakers Nvidia and AMD agreeing to give 15 percent of revenue to the US from sales to China of advanced computer chips that could be used to fuel frontier AI. By December, Nvidia’s deal only drew more scrutiny, as the chipmaker agreed to give the US an even bigger cut—25 percent—of sales of its second most advanced AI chips, the H200.

Again, experts were confused, noting that export curbs on Nvidia’s H20 chips, for example, were imposed to prevent US technology thefts, maintain US tech dominance, and protect US national security. Those chips are six times less powerful than the H200. To them, it appeared that the Trump administration was taking payments to overlook risks without a clear understanding of how that might give China a leg-up in the AI race. It also did not appear to be legal, since export licenses cannot be sold under existing federal law, but government lawyers have supposedly been researching a new policy that would allow the US to collect the fees.

Trump finally closed TikTok deal

As the end of 2025 nears, the tech company likely sweating Trump’s impulses most may be TikTok owner ByteDance. In October, Trump confirmed that China agreed to a deal that allows the US to take majority ownership of TikTok and license the TikTok algorithm to build a US version of the app.

Trump has been trying to close this deal all year, while ByteDance remained largely quiet. Prior to the start of Trump’s term, the company had expressed resistance to selling TikTok to US owners, and as recently as January, a ByteDance board member floated the idea that Trump could save TikTok without forcing a sale. But China’s approval was needed to proceed with the sale, and near the end of December, ByteDance finally agreed to close the deal, paving the way for Trump’s hand-picked investors to take control in 2026.

It’s unclear how TikTok may change under US control, perhaps shedding users if US owners cave to Trump’s suggestion that he’d like to see the app go “100 percent MAGA” under his hand-picked US owners. It’s possible that the US version of the app could be glitchy, too.

Whether Trump’s deal actually complies with a US law requiring that ByteDance divest control of TikTok or else face a US ban has yet to be seen. Lawmaker scrutiny and possible legal challenges are expected in 2026, likely leaving both TikTok users and ByteDance on the edge of their seats waiting to see how the globally cherished short video app may change.

Trump may owe $1 trillion in tariff refunds

The TikTok deal was once viewed as a meaningful bargaining chip during Trump’s tensest negotiations with China, which has quickly emerged as America’s fiercest rival in the AI race and Trump’s biggest target in his trade war.

But as closing the deal remained elusive for most of the year, analysts suggested that Trump grew “desperate” to end tit-for-tat retaliations that he started, while China appeared more resilient to US curbs than the US was to China’s.

In one obvious example, many Americans’ first tariff pains came when Trump ended a duty-free exemption in February for low-value packages imported from cheap online retailers, like Shein and Temu. Unable to quickly adapt to the policy change, USPS abruptly stopped accepting all inbound packages from Hong Kong and China. After a chaotic 24 hours, USPS started slowly processing parcels again while promising Americans that it would work with customs to “implement an efficient collection mechanism for the new China tariffs to ensure the least disruption to package delivery.”

Trump has several legal tools to impose tariffs, but the most controversial path appears to be his favorite. The Supreme Court is currently weighing whether the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) grants a US president unilateral authority to impose tariffs.

Seizing this authority, Trump imposed so-called “reciprocal tariffs” at whim, the Consumer Technology Association and the Chamber of Commerce told the Supreme Court in a friend-of-the-court brief in which they urged the justices to end the “perfect storm of uncertainty.”

Unlike other paths that would limit how quickly Trump could shift tariff rates or how high the tariff rate could go, under IEEPA, Trump has imposed tariff rates as high as 125 percent. Deferring to Trump will cost US businesses, CTA and CoC warned. CTA CEO Gary Shapiro estimated that Trump has changed these tariff rates 100 times since his trade war began, affecting $223 billion of US exports.

Meanwhile, one of Trump’s biggest stated goals of his trade war—forcing more manufacturing into the US—is utterly failing, many outlets have reported.

Likely due to US companies seeking more stable supply chains, “reshoring progress is nowhere to be seen,” Fortune reported in November. That month, a dismal Bureau of Labor Statistics released a jobs report that an expert summarized as showing that the “US is losing blue-collar jobs for the first time since the pandemic.”

A month earlier, the nonpartisan policy group the Center for American Progress drew on government labor data to conclude that US employers cut 12,000 manufacturing jobs in August, and payrolls for manufacturing jobs had decreased by 42,000 since April.

As tech companies take tech tariffs on the chin, perhaps out of fears that rattling Trump could impact lucrative government contracts, other US companies have taken Trump to court. Most recently, Costco became one of the biggest corporations to sue Trump to ensure that US businesses get refunded if Trump loses the Supreme Court case, Bloomberg reported. Other recognizable companies like Revlon and Kawasaki have also sued, but small businesses have largely driven opposition to Trump’s tariffs, Bloomberg noted.

Should the Supreme Court side with businesses—analysts predict favorable odds—the US could owe up to $1 trillion in refunds. Dozens of economists told SCOTUS that Trump simply doesn’t understand why having trade deficits with certain countries isn’t a threat to US dominance, pointing out that the US “has been running a persistent surplus in trade in services for decades” precisely because the US “has the dominant technology sector in the world.”

Justices seem skeptical that IEEPA grants Trump the authority, ordinarily reserved for Congress, to impose taxes. However, during oral arguments, Justice Amy Coney Barrett fretted that undoing Trump’s tariffs could be “messy.” Countering that, small businesses have argued that it’s possible for Customs and Border Patrol to set up automatic refunds.

While waiting for the SCOTUS verdict (now expected in January), the CTA ended the year by advising tech companies to keep their receipts in case refunds require requests for tariffs line by line—potentially complicated by tariff rates changing so drastically and so often.

Biggest tariff nightmare may come in 2026

Looking into 2026, tech companies cannot breathe a sigh of relief even if the SCOTUS ruling swings their way, though. Under a separate, legally viable authority, Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on semiconductors and any products containing them, a move the semiconductor industry fears could cost $1 billion.

And if Trump continues imposing tariffs on materials used in popular tech products, the CTA told Ars in September that potential “tariff stacking” could become the industry’s biggest nightmare. Should that occur, US manufacturers could end up double-, triple-, or possibly even quadruple-taxed on products that may contain materials subject to individual tariffs, like semiconductors, polysilicon, or copper.

Predicting tariff costs could become so challenging that companies will have no choice but to raise prices, the CTA warned. That could threaten US tech competitiveness if, possibly over the long term, companies lose significant sales on their most popular products.

For many badly bruised by the first year of tariffs, it’s hard to see how tariffs could ever become a winning strategy for US tech dominance, as Trump has long claimed. And Americans continue to feel more than “a little pain,” as Trump forecasted, causing many to shift their views on the president.

Americans banding together to oppose tariffs could help prevent the worst possible outcomes. With prices already rising on certain goods in the US, the president reversed some tariffs as his approval ratings hit record lows. But so far, Big Tech hasn’t shown much interest in joining the fight, instead throwing money at the problem by making generous donations to things like Trump’s inaugural fund or his ballroom.

A bright light for the tech industry could be the midterm elections, which could pressure Trump to ease off aggressive tariff regimes, but that’s not a given. Trump allies have previously noted that the president typically responds to pushback on tariffs by doubling down. And one of Trump’s on-again-off-again allies, Elon Musk, noted in December in an interview that Trump ignored his warnings that tariffs would drive manufacturing out of the US.

“The president has made it clear he loves tariffs,” Musk said.

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Big Tech basically took Trump’s unpredictable trade war lying down Read More »

“Yo what?” LimeWire re-emerges in online rush to share pulled “60 Minutes” segment

CBS News, censorship, Donald Trump, government censorship, LimeWire, peer-to-peer networks, Policy, torrents / Rejus Almole / December 23, 2025

Early 2000s tool LimeWire used to pirate episode

As Americans scrambled to share the “Inside CECOT” story, assuming that CBS would be working in the background to pull down uploads, a once-blacklisted tool from the early 2000s became a reliable way to keep the broadcast online.

On Reddit, users shared links to a LimeWire torrent, prompting chuckles from people surprised to see the peer-to-peer service best known for infecting parents’ computers with viruses in the 2000s suddenly revived in 2025 to skirt feared US government censorship.

“Yo what,” one user joked, highlighting only the word “LimeWire.” Another user, ironically using the LimeWire logo as a profile picture, responded, “man, who knew my nostalgia prof pic would become relevant again, WTF.”

LimeWire was created in 2000 and quickly became one of the Internet’s favorite services for pirating music until record labels won a 2010 injunction that blocked all file-sharing functionality. As the Reddit thread noted, some LimeWire users were personally targeted in lawsuits.

For a while after the injunction, a fraction of users kept the service alive by running older versions of the software that weren’t immediately disabled. New owners took over LimeWire in 2022, officially relaunching the service. The service’s about page currently notes that “millions of individuals and businesses” use the global file-sharing service today, but for some early Internet users, the name remains a blast from the past.

“Bringing back LimeWire to illegally rip copies of reporting suppressed by the government is definitely some cyberpunk shit,” a Bluesky user wrote.

“We need a champion against the darkness,” a Reddit commenter echoed. “I side with LimeWire.”

“Yo what?” LimeWire re-emerges in online rush to share pulled “60 Minutes” segment Read More »

ByteDance confirms TikTok will be controlled by US owners

bytedance, china, Donald Trump, national security, Policy, tiktok, tiktok us / Rejus Almole / December 20, 2025

According to Trump, the deal ensures that TikTok complies with the divest-or-ban law, but the White House is still not providing more details. Instead, the Trump administration “referred questions about the deal to TikTok,” Reuters reported.

If the deal closes as expected on January 22, the new US company will have an estimated value of $14 billion, Vice President JD Vance noted in September.

At that point, the deal will likely face mounting scrutiny from lawmakers, including Republicans, who aren’t yet sure if the US operation resolves all national security concerns. Chinese control of the algorithm was a particular sticking point for critics, who claimed that Trump was giving China exactly what it wanted: international recognition for exporting leading technology to the US.

In September, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R.-Iowa) vowed to take a “hard line” and oppose the deal’s framework if it violates the divest-or-ban law. Already, Representative John Moolenaar (R-Mich.), chair of the House Select Committee on China, is planning to hold a hearing next year with US TikTok leadership.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has accused Trump of handing over “even more control of what you watch to his billionaire buddies,” through the TikTok deal, which she likened to enabling a “billionaire takeover of TikTok.” Many TikTokers likely share her concerns, after Trump suggested he’d like to see his hand-picked investors tweak the algorithm to be “100 percent MAGA.”

Questions remain until the exact terms of the deal become public, Warren said.

ByteDance did not respond to Ars’ request to comment.

With the terms obscured, it’s unclear how quickly TikTok may change in 2026 under US ownership. In July, the Information reported that when approximately 170 million US users get ported over to the new US-owned app, it could be buggy.

ByteDance confirms TikTok will be controlled by US owners Read More »