A bipartisan bill that would essentially outlaw TikTok in the United States has once again been postponed by President Trump. An agreement to split TikTok from ByteDance, its parent company based in China, has not been reached.
Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary for the White House, announced Tuesday that the president would sign the most recent executive order this week that would postpone the law’s implementation for ninety days. This is the third delay since his inauguration in January.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark. This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure,” Leavitt stated.
Companies such as Apple and Google have been ordered by the Justice Department to refrain from taking any action or enforcing penalties against them for their failure to remove the widely used video-sharing app from their platforms.
Thursday is the last day of the current extension.
According to a source familiar with the plans at the time, Mr. Trump’s administration had reached an agreement that would have spun TikTok’s U.S. operations into a new business that was owned and run by a majority of American investors when he announced the last extension in early April.
However, the source claimed that ByteDance informed the White House that China would not approve the deal until trade and tariff issues were resolved following Mr. Trump’s announcement of broad tariffs.
After the announcement in April, ByteDance stated that a deal had not yet been achieved because important concerns needed to be resolved and that any agreement would require clearance from the Chinese government.
As Mr. Trump admitted to reporters in May, “we’ll probably have to get China’s approval.”
“China’s never easy,” he stated. “I’d like to save TikTok. I mean, TikTok was very good to me.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump stated his belief that China would approve a final agreement, stating, “I think President Xi will ultimately approve it.”
On June 12, highlighting his popularity on the app that he attempted to ban during his first term, the president also reaffirmed his support for TikTok.
On TikTok, I was the most popular user ever. Do you think that’s possible? “It’s true,” Mr. Trump said. “So I guess I like TikTok.”
This month, Mr. Trump had a 90-minute talk with Chinese President Xi Jinping that, according to the U.S. leader, “was focused almost entirely on trade.”
In the call summaries from both nations, TikTok was referenced. Senior trade officials from the United States and China met in London a few days later and came to a “framework deal” to defuse the trade war.
In his June 12 testimony before the Senate Finance Committee following the trade negotiations, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated that TikTok “was not discussed at the meetings in London.”
The law, which was passed by Congress last year with bipartisan support and cited national security concerns, gave ByteDance until January 19 to completely cut its ties with TikTok or risk being banned from U.S. app stores and web hosting services.
Read Also: Thousands Could Die Under Proposed Medicaid Cuts, Researchers Say
Days before the statute went into effect, the Supreme Court affirmed it.
Before the January deadline, TikTok voluntarily and temporarily shut down, but after Mr. Trump, who took office the day after the deadline, promised to act, the app allowed U.S. users to re-enter.
However, after Mr. Trump issued the first executive order, Apple and Google waited almost a month to bring TikTok back to their U.S. app stores.
However, Congress has not done much to stop the Trump administration from breaking the law, even though lawmakers have warned for years that TikTok could be used by China to spy on Americans, gather a lot of their data, or spread propaganda.
Although he pointed out that there haven’t been any consequences, Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa stated on Tuesday that he wasn’t sure if the president had the legal right to disregard the law.
