Juggling Campaign and Foreign Policy, Biden Sends Complicated Messages

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden just signed a bill that could ban himself from using TikTok. But Biden plans to keep using TikTok until his new law forces him off it.

His political team in Wilmington, Delaware, after all, considers TikTok a vital tool to reach young voters who could be crucial to his chances of winning reelection this fall. The problem is that his national security team in Washington considers the Chinese-owned social media site a threat to America that should be banned if it is not sold.

Reconciling those two imperatives left Biden’s government and campaign advisers laboring Wednesday to explain the competing rationales. But it is not the only time that Campaign Joe and Foreign Policy Joe have been at odds in recent months. Campaign Joe tells stories on the trail that Foreign Policy Joe’s staff then has to clean up — or try to ignore as best as possible. Campaign Joe prefers blunt talk. Foreign Policy Joe has to worry about diplomacy.

The disconnect is hardly unprecedented in an election year. Every president seeking a second term finds himself juggling two different jobs with two different imperatives at the same time: running the country and running for office. A candidate is focused on firing up supporters and tearing down the other side. A commander in chief has to worry about what might be best for the nation even if it is not necessarily best for his electoral chances.

Still, the disparity between Wilmington and Washington has been on display lately. When former President Donald Trump hosted Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate and club, Biden’s Delaware-based campaign assailed Orban as “a dictator.” The White House, however, refused to use that term for a NATO ally.

Just last week, Biden told two campaign audiences that after being shot down during World War II, his uncle might have been eaten by cannibals in Papua New Guinea. Unsurprisingly, that rather peeved the island nation’s leaders at a time when the president has been courting them as part of his Indo-Pacific strategy.

“Like most effective incumbent presidents, President Biden can navigate doing two things at once: being commander in chief, and barnstorming the battlegrounds, taking his popular and historic agenda to the voters who will decide this election,” Kevin Munoz, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement. “It’s a stark contrast to Trump, who couldn’t manage the day job when he was in office and can’t seem to wake up to the fact that he’s running on a deeply toxic agenda that will lose him the election again this November.”

Problematic offhand remarks have long been a challenge for Biden, who once called himself “a gaffe machine.” Campaigns result in more opportunities to go off script than speaking off a teleprompter in the East Room, so the White House cleanup squad invariably has a surge in business at this point in the electoral cycle.

It was at a campaign fundraiser last year that Biden referred to President Xi Jinping of China as “a dictator” — just a day after Secretary of State Antony Blinken had met with Xi in Beijing in an effort to smooth over friction in the U.S.-Chinese relationship. When Biden was later asked at a news conference if he would still call Xi a dictator, he said, “Well, look — he is,” and Blinken, sitting nearby, appeared to wince.

Not that anyone in Washington would privately dispute that Xi is a dictator. But as a matter of timing, saying it out loud complicated Blinken’s diplomacy. As it happens, Blinken seems to have remarkable timing when it comes to these things. Where was the secretary Wednesday when Biden signed the TikTok legislation? He had just landed in Beijing for more talks with Chinese leaders.

Orban is another leader widely considered a dictator in Washington. But because he leads a treaty ally of the United States, official criticism of his policies cracking down on democracy is usually more measured.

Not so when Orban met with Trump last month. “Donald Trump is kicking off the general election” by welcoming rogues like “Hungarian dictator Viktor Orban,” the Biden campaign said in an emailed statement. Biden himself, at a later campaign stop, did not go quite that far but referred to Orban as someone “looking for dictatorship.”

The statements prompted outrage in Budapest, where Orban’s government summoned the U.S. ambassador to protest. “We are not obliged to tolerate such lies from anyone, even if that person happens to be the president of the United States of America,” Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto complained at a news conference.

That left Jake Sullivan, the president’s national security adviser, in the awkward position of declining to say whether Orban is a dictator. “I’m not going to speak on behalf of the Biden campaign,” he told reporters at a briefing. “You should direct those questions to the campaign.” He did express “our deep concerns about Hungary’s assault on democratic institutions.”

Heather Conley, the president of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a research group that promotes democracy, noted that Orban had injected himself into America’s politics, attending the Conservative Political Action Conference and declaring after his Mar-a-Lago visit that it would be “better for Hungary” if Trump returned to power.

“Tragically, Hungary has become both a foreign policy and a campaign issue,” she said. Still, she added, calling Orban a dictator has concrete foreign policy implications. “Should a NATO member, head of state, government be declared a ‘dictator,’ the country would be placed in a special penalty box until the dictatorship is over,” she said, recalling the military junta that took over Greece from 1967 to 1974.

Last week’s presidential cannibal storytelling provoked a backlash of its own. Biden was talking about his uncle’s death in World War II. “He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea,” he said at one stop.

Never mind that the story does not even appear to be true. According to Pentagon records, his uncle, 2nd Lt. Ambrose Finnegan, was a passenger on a military plane that crashed in the Pacific off the northern coast of what was then the territory of New Guinea on May 14, 1944, after its engines failed. Finnegan and two crew members disappeared and were presumed dead, but the report does not indicate that the plane was shot down, much less that anyone encountered cannibals.

The president’s comments did not go over well in Papua New Guinea, with whom Biden has been trying to strengthen relations as part of his effort to counter Chinese aggression in the region. “President Biden’s remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such,” Prime Minister James Marape said.

Gordon Peake, an expert in the region at the United States Institute of Peace, said the flap was a reminder that comments could have unintended consequences. “Papua New Guinea and the wider Pacific, traditionally a bit of a diplomatic backwater for the major powers, is now something of a seller’s market as competition ramps up,” he said. “So words are mattering now more than ever.”

The new TikTok law was part of a $95 billion foreign aid measure to provide arms to Ukraine and Israel for their ongoing wars and to bolster Taiwan against possible Chinese aggression. Under the law, TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, has to sell within 270 days, or about nine months, or shut down operations in the United States because of concerns over sensitive privacy information and propaganda. The president can extend that deadline to a year.

That means that Biden’s campaign can continue to use TikTok through the November election. Sullivan, the national security adviser, declined to say whether the campaign should leave the platform in the meantime. “I’m going to let campaigns decide for themselves what they’re going to do,” he told reporters Wednesday.

Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, emphasized that TikTok did not necessarily face a ban if it could find a buyer. “We want to see a divestment,” she said. “We want to see it being sold, and we do not seek a ban.”

She added that the White House was not urging anyone to leave the platform in the interim. “We’re not saying that we do not want Americans to use TikTok,” she said. “We want to make sure it’s done in a way that we protect our national security and we protect Americans.”

But in fact, the Biden administration has told some Americans not to use TikTok, or at least limited how they use it. Last year, it banned federal employees from having TikTok on their government devices, a rule that applied to federal contractors and any personal devices used for federal work.

The bill that Biden signed Wednesday exemplified the conflict between foreign policy and electoral considerations. Not only did he risk alienating millions of young people who use TikTok, but the measure also included billions of dollars in arms for Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, even though his support for Israel has cost him support among young progressives outraged by the civilian casualty toll.

In his comments on signing the bill, Biden emphasized that it included money for humanitarian relief in Gaza. But he made no mention of TikTok.

About three hours later, his campaign posted its latest video on TikTok attacking Trump.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.