Trump’s TikTok flip raises concerns over billionaire clout

After he spent much of the last year of his presidency trying to ban TikTok, Donald Trump’s abrupt effort to defend the Chinese-owned app late last week caught many in Washington by surprise.

But for people who’ve been watching Trump’s TikTok policies closely, it was part of a pattern: Changing course when an interested billionaire donor was in the mix.

“It’s a mirror image of 2020,” said Nu Wexler, a former spokesperson for several top tech firms in the nation’s capital and an alumnus of Democratic congressional offices. “He tried...