We’ve come to expect nothing but shenanigans, dumpster fires, and tone-deaf sound bites from Trump on a daily basis, yet the big orange baby somehow managed outdo himself today as he not only mispronounced “Thailand” during a campaign event, he also followed up on his bluff to ban TikTok in America with a poorly worded executive order.
Speaking of Trump and his ban on TikTok, the GOAT team talk about the massive social media shake up as of late on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For… ‘ below:
Let’s start with Trump mispronouncing “Thailand” first because that’s just too funny not to mention right away. The big orange baby was in Ohio for a campaign event, where he delivered one of his trademark rambling speeches that made no sense.
Part way through, Trump inexplicably mispronounced “Thailand” as “thigh-land” before quickly correcting his gaffe and continuing on with whatever he was droning on about. Needless to say that the internet had an absolute field day with the big orange baby’s little gaffe as users flooded social media with great pun after great pun.
Trump mispronouncing “Thailand” as “thigh-land” is far from the first gaffe he’s made during a speech. Just the other day he somehow managed to repeatedly mispronounce “Yosemite” as “yo-semites” and never thought to correct himself.
But Trump’s inability to read or speak coherently was quickly overshadowed by his signing of two executive orders (as per ABC News) that will effectively ban “transactions” with ByteDance and Tencent, the Chinese owners of TikTok and WeChat respectively, in 45 days at the time of writing.
In simple terms, Trump has signed in a TikTok and WeChat ban for the United States.
Now this seems to be a pretty straightforward signing on the surface, but this is Trump we’re talking about and the reality is that these two executive orders banning TikTok and WeChat from the U.S. is filled with several potential landmines due to the incredibly ambiguous wording.
There were initial worries that Trump may have also inadvertently declared war on the video games industry in America with his TikTok ban as Tencent is a company that has its hands in several major gaming companies, such as Riot (League Of Legends), Epic Games (Fortnite), and Activision Blizzard (Call Of Duty), as well as a big esports presence.
However, this apparently won’t be the case as the White House confirmed to the LA Times that the executive order will only block transactions related to WeChat. Having said that, this is the Trump White House we’re talking about and their word is as good as mud on the best of days so we’ll have to see where this goes.
But the other potential big hurdle presented by Trump signing these executive orders banning transactions with Tencent and ByteDance is the huge impact it could have on several major sports leagues in America.
The NBA, NFL, NHL, and MLB all have big media deals (to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year) to distribute content across China, and Trump’s TikTok ban may well throw a massive spanner in all this.
So in other words, Trump has yet again dived headfirst into something that he thinks will make him money, or because he’s being petty, only to later realise that his plan will land him in an even worse position than before. Then again, that’s par for the course for Trump throughout his life and “presidency.”
So what happens next exactly with Trump’s ridiculous TikTok/WeChat ban? Well who friggin’ knows at this point. The executive orders are so ambiguously worded that several interpretations can be derived from them during the inevitable legal challenges that will be launched.
Then there’s also the thing of Trump trying to strong-arm Microsoft into buying TikTok from ByteDance (so he can get a slice of the profits, which is clearly a conflict of interest) or face the outright ban.
Guess we’ll find out what will happen in 45 days time.
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