Last week, I wrote about how Donald Trump forcing the sale of TikTok’s U.S. business to what appears to be a consortium of his friends at Oracle and Walmart could be payback for the Chinese–owned company’s users’ attempt to sabotage his June Tulsa rally. Trump has also threatened to restrict the wildly popular social video app in America if the sale doesn’t happen, or doesn’t happen the way Trump wants it to happen. On Sunday, TikTok managed to avoid a ban on new downloads.
This unprecedented meddling in an M&A deal by a sitting president has raised eyebrows across Wall Street, which is used to having to worry about whether the price of a deal will appeal to shareholders or whether it will pass muster with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, or the Federal Communications Commission, among others. Dealmakers have even come to terms with having to appease, if necessary, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, known as CFIUS. But what makes Wall Street bankers and lawyers nuts is having to confront the mercurial vicissitudes of a disrupter-in-chief who gets off on making other people crazy. “The whole thing is a crock,” billionaire media mogul and dealmaker Barry Diller told CNBC.
One highly experienced M&A deal guy I spoke with for my earlier piece told me he thought that Trump had three motivations: one, getting back at TikTok for the Tulsa-rally-attendance fiasco; two, helping his buddies Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, and Doug McMillon, the CEO of Walmart, get some incremental business out of a TikTok deal plus a payday from owning stock if TikTok goes public; and three, helping out his friend Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, who does not like having TikTok as a competitor in the war for America’s attention span.
But what if TikTok and its users weren’t solely responsible for making Trump look like an idiot at the Tulsa rally? What if a mid-level employee at Facebook dreamed up the idea instead? Would Trump still be directing his anger at TikTok and forcing its sale? And how would Zuckerberg react to the theory that one of his own employees was involved in messing up Trump’s first rally held after months of the president being holed up in the White House on COVID watch?
Enter Jarrod Jenkins, who, according to his LinkedIn, has been a mid-level product policy manager at Facebook since July 2017. Jenkins, a graduate of the University of North Carolina and the University of Georgia School of Law, is one of the people at Facebook who decides whether users should be blocked from the platform based on the content they post. According to an April profile of Jenkins in the San José Spotlight, he “develops policy for how the public and advertisers use the social media network, where his background in law and social media monetization strategies came back full circle,” and “works on Facebook’s community standards, defining restrictions on nudity, hate speech, obscenity and terrorism.” In the article, he’s pictured on his couch, laptop open. There is a Yang 2020 sticker on the top of his Apple computer. He told the Spotlight he “loves having a role where he feels he’s making a difference.”
If his social media posts are to be believed, he seems to have made quite a difference in disrupting Trump’s Tulsa rally. According to a June 12 public post on his Facebook account—viewable by all of his Facebook colleagues—he wrote, “I just grabbed two tickets to Trump’s Juneteenth rally in Tulsa. Tickets are first come, first serve, so let’s ensure he shows up to an empty event. The only real info you need to provide is a phone number.” The next day on Twitter, where he describes himself as doing “product policy” at Facebook and as a “Christ Follower, Husband, Feminist, [and] Urbanist” to his 667 followers, Jenkins wrote, “What if I told you that I orchestrated a viral campaign to troll the President by getting friends to sign up for the Juneteenth rally so it would be empty?” On June 14, Jenkins wrote again, “300,000 PEOPLE signed up for Trump’s Juneteenth rally in Tulsa, not necessarily SUPPORTERS. The real story is our effort to snag tickets, so he’d show up to an empty arena,” which he punctuated with a wink emoji. (He directed the second tweet to Tal Axelrod, a staff writer at The Hill. Axelrod wrote at least one story about the Tulsa rally but did not mention Jenkins or the idea that the rally’s attendance had been sabotaged.)