Now, several weeks later — and amid a constellation of interests exerting pressure on the issue from different sides — Trump, who once called for banning TikTok, has reversed course. He has offered a few different explanations, including that undercutting the app would only help Meta, the social media company he loathes.

But Trump has hinted at another reason for his reversal: young people are obsessed with TikTok. And to McLaughlin and other Trump allies, that is a relevant political point.

While acknowledging “there are national security concerns” and risks related to the app’s use among youth, the pollster said that because it’s so popular with young voters, “it has value.”

Trump’s reversal adds the TikTok debate to the long list of opportunistic Trump pivots — sudden pronouncements that capture the momentum of the moment, but which leave many conservatives bewildered and grasping for a response.

But to some of Trump’s allies, the political opportunity is clear. President Joe Biden has vowed to sign a bipartisan law divesting TikTok from its Beijing-based parent company ByteDance that could spell the end of an app that is wildly popular with millions of people under 30 — and create an opening for Trump.

“I think it is foolish to go after TikTok in an election year,” said Alex Bruesewitz, a Trump ally and Republican social media consultant. He said Trump isn’t defending TikTok, but noted that it “has a lot of popularity, especially with younger voters.”

Polls have indicated a tight race between Biden and Trump among young voters who supported Biden in 2020, but have broken with the president over issues ranging from the Israel-Hamas war to climate change. A ban on TikTok, which currently has over 170 million users with almost half of them under the age of 30, could be added to the list.

It’s a political reality Trump seemed to recognize earlier this week, during an interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box. “There are a lot of people who love it,” he said. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users.”

House leadership has scheduled a vote on the TikTok bill for Wednesday. A person close to Trump and granted anonymity to speak freely said the former president had no plans to pressure lawmakers to vote against the bill and would let Congress decide.

But some Republicans believe he stands to gain politically regardless of the vote’s outcome. His opposition to banning TikTok, said Giancarlo Sopo, a media strategist who led Trump’s Hispanic advertising in 2020, “showcases his populism.”

“Policy arguments aside, given TikTok’s popularity among Gen Z voters — a group that President Biden has not consolidated — it makes little political sense for Trump to endorse a ban that could alienate a key voting bloc,” Sopo said.

Back when he was president, Trump called TikTok a national security risk, and his administration tried to ban the app via executive order that was ultimately blocked by federal courts. More recently, when Trump reversed course on TikTok, he said it was because its removal from American phones would ultimately help Meta, the owner of Facebook, the social media company that suspended him from its platform for two years following the riot at the Capitol in 2021.

“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” Trump said on CNBC. “But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”

Trump’s reversal frustrated China hawks who supported the former president’s push to get rid of the popular, Chinese-owned video app as president. And it provided fodder to critics who accused him of bending to special interests. His reversal came as the prominent Club for Growth and a former senior adviser to Trump, Kellyanne Conway, have advocated in support of TikTok on Capitol Hill.

Trump also recently met with Jeff Yass, a Club for Growth donor and billionaire hedge fund manager who has a $33 billion stake in the app. Steve Bannon, a former Trump campaign strategist and “War Room” podcast host, accused Trump of being influenced by the prospect of Yass funding. He wrote on social media last week, “Simple: Yass Coin.”

Trump said on CNBC he did not talk with Yass about TikTok during a short meeting with the investor and his wife Janine Coslett on the sidelines of a Club for Growth event. Instead, he said they discussed education and school choice, issues that the couple have publicly supported.

Trump “makes up his own mind,” said Conway, who is lobbying for the app but said she has not had conversations with Trump about recent legislation. Conway has conducted polling on behalf of Club for Growth on TikTok that showed almost half of independents, and 40 percent of Republicans, would not vote for a candidate who supported a ban on TikTok.

She noted Trump “has a point” on Meta standing to benefit from the TikTok legislation.

“I wonder how many in Congress have considered it for themselves and not just for the presidential race. If Zuckerberg owns Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, we might as well not even launch a campaign,” Conway said. “Countless communities have been formed organically. People rely on TikTok not just for entertainment, but for education, information, connection and commercial purposes.”

Republicans on the Hill are certainly aware of Trump’s comments criticizing a ban on TikTok for both outraging its millions of users and benefiting Facebook. But Trump does not appear to be actively trying to kill the bill, possibly because even he might not be able to stop it at this point.

“He’s not calling anybody, not to my knowledge,” said one Republican member of Congress, granted anonymity to speak freely. “I’m sure if he were calling House members and actively discouraging them it would get out very quickly.”

The legislation is expected to pass the House with broad support and could easily be slipped into a must-pass bill, or potentially come to the Senate floor for a standalone vote.

Still, there’s handwringing on both sides of the aisle in the Senate, with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) vowing to thwart any move to quickly pass the bill.

That doesn’t mean, however, that even Trump’s closest Hill allies are totally swayed against it. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) recalled pushing Trump to ban the app four years ago and said “I liked his position then. I think it made a lot of sense. That’s the one I would stick with.”

Trump’s “making a good point here, which is: you can’t just be worried about TikTok,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio). “At the same time I think TikTok is a problem. So it’s this point where I agree with him but I still think we need to focus on TikTok.”

There are political implications beyond a congressional vote. Paul has warned that young voters will be outraged if Congress moves to crackdown on the app, whether it’s to force ByteDance to divest its control of it or otherwise move to ban it.

“I’m worried about the data flowing to the communist party. I don’t know if we should force a sale, but I don’t want the app to go away if we can prevent it because a lot of people enjoy it,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who plans to talk to Trump about it. “If you just eliminate TikTok totally, then I think Meta has almost a monopoly. You don’t want that.”

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, said Trump this week on CNBC made clear that he sees “Chinese ownership of TikTok as a national security threat, while at the same time appreciating it is an app used and liked by millions of Americans.”

“That’s why the President took strong action in 2020 to protect the privacy and data of American users of TikTok as well as establish a framework for Congress to follow to protect Americans from the threats posed by Chinese-owned technology companies operating in the United States,” Cheung said in a statement to POLITICO. “The President also shares concerns about Facebook, which we know has been used to manipulate millions of users and interfere in the 2020 Election.”

He said Trump wants Congress to act to protect American users’ security and privacy “on all social media platforms.”

A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.

Potential donor benefits and an opportunity with young voters aside, much of Trump’s opposition to the app seems personal.

Trump remains bitter about being banned from the social media sites owned by Meta, and in the CNBC interview, Trump pointed to the $300 million donation Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan made in the 2020 election to help drive turnout and provide coronavirus protections.

Their funding has been criticized by conservatives — and was featured in documentaries by Citizens United president David Bossie and right wing activist Dinesh D’Souza that premiered at Mar-a-Lago — who claim that their funds benefited Democrats and unfairly influenced the election. The Federal Election Commission found no evidence laws were broken.

“If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better. They are a true Enemy of the People!” Trump posted to Truth Social on Thursday.

“He’s right, that if you ban TikTok and put them out of business that you’re just going to empower Facebook and other social media platforms that have hardly given conservatives a fair voice,” said Stephen Moore, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity. “I don’t think government regulation of the Internet and social media is going to be a positive thing.”

Another Republican who has Trump’s ear on tech issues, according to a person close to him and granted anonymity to speak freely, is Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech entrepreneur whose presidential campaign received $4.9 million from Yass. Ramaswamy, who opposed TikTok during his campaign but then opened a TikTok account in the final weeks of campaign, recently reversed his position and said the focus should be on data sharing with China.

Ramaswamy also said Republicans should consider joining the app, like he did, to reach more voters and counter progressive and Democrat accounts.

Republicans remain split on the TikTok issue, including high profile conservative groups that are aligned with Trump. While the Club for Growth has paid Conway to lobby against the TikTok ban, on Monday, Heritage Action for America on Monday urged members of Congress to support the legislation.

Ryan Walker, Heritage Action’s executive vice president, slammed TikTok’s “mass social manipulation tactics” and called the app “a dangerous tool used by the CCP to spy on, exploit, and mislead the American people.”

Meanwhile, the libertarian advocacy group FreedomWorks, which has received funding from Yass, is opposing the bill. When asked about Yass’ donations to the group and whether Yass drove FreedomWorks’ opposition to the ban, its president Adam Brandon said he had neither received money from Yass to work on this issue nor talked with him about it. His group is working on a pivot to focusing on millennials and swing voters, and TikTok is particularly popular with the generation that FreedomWorks is trying to reach, he added.

“Signaling to that community that we’re trying to protect their favorite app, that just makes a lot of smart business sense that lines up with ... the philosophy that we think,” he said.

Adam Wren and Hailey Fuchs contributed to this report.