One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was to order his Attorney General to withhold enforcement of the ban on TikTok for over two months. Trump has said he wants an agreement with 50% American ownership of the popular video-sharing app.
The executive order instructs Trump’s pick for Attorney General, Pam Bondi, “I hereby order the Attorney General not to take any action on behalf of the United States to enforce the Act for 75 days from the date of this order, to permit my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course of action with respect to TikTok.”
In March, Biden signed a bill that ordered TikTok’s Chinese owner, ByteDance, to divest its shares from the company within six months or face an effective ban in the US. The deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok was Sunday.
TikTok was briefly unavailable, but Trump pledged to issue the executive order, and the platform quickly became available again to its 170 million American users. Trump plans to use the 75-day period to negotiate a partial sale of TikTok to American ownership.
In his post on Truth Social, Trump demanded a 50% US ownership of TikTok. “I would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture. By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to stay up. Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok,” he wrote. “With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars – maybe trillions.”
On Friday, President-elect Trump spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping. He described the call as “very good” and said they discussed a range of issues including TikTok.
At the end of Trump’s first term in office, he was a vocal advocate of banning TikTok, claiming the Chinese ownership of TikTok’s parent company presented a national security threat.
However, Capitol Hill lacked the political will to pass a bill banning TikTok until 2024. Congress was only motivated to pass a TikTok ban after the content on the platform was overwhelming pro-Palestinian during the Israeli onslaught in Gaza.
