TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app set to be banned in the United States in two and a half months, is hoping that President-elect Donald J. Trump will find a way to rescue it after a smattering of promises to that effect on the campaign trail this year.
Mr. Trump’s team says he will “deliver” on those promises — though the details are hazy.
“The American people re-elected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance’s transition team, said in a statement. “He will deliver.”
Mr. Trump’s support for TikTok would be a stunning reversal from 2020, when he tried to block the app in the United States and force its sale to American companies because of its ownership by ByteDance, the Chinese tech giant.
TikTok, which has 170 million U.S. users, has faced a possible ban since a new law was signed in April. The law says that the app must be sold to a non-Chinese company by Jan. 19 — a day before Mr. Trump’s inauguration — or face a ban in the United States.
The company has challenged the law in courts in something of a Hail Mary, saying that a sale is impossible, partly because of restrictions from the Chinese government, and that a subsequent ban would represent an unconstitutional breach of the First Amendment.
But the law passed with wide bipartisan support, and many experts believe a federal court in Washington will side with the U.S. government.
The Trump team’s comments follow a significant effort by TikTok to forge inroads with Mr. Trump’s campaign this year. Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman did not address whether he would let ByteDance continue to own TikTok. The company declined to comment for this article.
Mr. Trump publicly changed his stance on TikTok in March. Around that time, he met with Jeff Yass, a billionaire investor and Republican megadonor who owns a significant share of ByteDance, though Mr. Trump has said that they did not discuss the company. Mr. Yass, who is the co-founder of the trading firm Susquehanna International Group, is one of the biggest supporters of the anti-tax lobbying group Club for Growth, which hired Kellyanne Conway, a former senior counselor to Mr. Trump, to lobby for the app in Washington.
TikTok has also sought a line into Republicans and the Trump campaign through Tony Sayegh, a former Treasury official in Mr. Trump’s administration, according to two people familiar with the meetings who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mr. Sayegh, who leads public affairs for Susquehanna, has been viewed as friendly with the Trump family and was a core part of the Trump campaign’s decision to join TikTok this summer, the people said. Mr. Trump was an instant hit on TikTok, where he now has 14.4 million followers. (The pop star Olivia Rodrigo has 22.8 million followers while NBC News has 5.9 million followers.) Several of his family members, including Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr. and his granddaughter Kai Trump, have also joined the app.
Mr. Sayegh regularly joined weekly strategy calls this year to advise Shou Chew, TikTok’s chief executive; Zenia Mucha, its head of communications; and Michael Beckerman, its head of public policy for the Americas, according to the two people. He was also part of an April meeting in New York with a group that included those executives to discuss the app’s future, right around the time that President Biden signed the new law. Executives inside the company saw Mr. Sayegh’s counsel as crucial to the company’s relationship with Mr. Trump, they said. Mr. Sayegh declined to comment.
The app courted Democrats, too. Former Democratic strategists also worked for the company, including David Plouffe, who left to work for the Harris campaign, the people said. And the prowess of the Harris campaign on TikTok, where the vice president amassed more than nine million followers, was widely lauded.
Inside TikTok, there has been little acknowledgment that the company might soon be banned in the United States, despite its thousands of employees here, according to four former employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing nondisclosure agreements. Executives have, at times, made light of the possible ban, suggesting in one all-hands meeting that it would one day be the subject of a Hollywood film, three of the employees said.
Still, many experts and former employees are uncertain about how a Trump administration could actually alter TikTok’s trajectory based on the text and fast-approaching deadline of the law — especially as the transition team announces new appointees who are hawkish on China. It would take an act of Congress to repeal the law itself, they said.
“Trump being elected improves the conditions for TikTok a little bit,” said Ian Tang, an analyst at Capstone, a policy research firm. “It’s still an uphill battle and there will have to be some structural change for it to remain operating in the U.S.”
Mr. Trump could potentially ask his new attorney general to refrain from enforcing the law, said Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department and an associate professor at the University of Minnesota Law School. But that would put technology companies like Apple and Google in a tricky position. The law penalizes companies for distributing or updating TikTok on app stores, so the tech giants would have to put a lot of faith in the Trump administration’s promise of nonenforcement.
Mr. Rozenshtein said that — and a repeal from Congress — were both unlikely scenarios.
The area where Mr. Trump could most likely intervene would involve the part of the law that gives the president the authority to determine whether ByteDance has done enough to remove TikTok from Chinese control, Mr. Rozenshtein said. ByteDance could make some changes that would offer Mr. Trump cover to declare that those demands were met, he said. Under the law, Mr. Trump might also be able to extend the law’s deadline by three months if his administration believed there was “significant progress” toward a sale.
Jacob Helberg, a senior adviser to Palantir who promoted the law targeting TikTok and supports Mr. Trump, said he was confident that Mr. Trump would find a way to address the concerns around the Chinese ownership of TikTok while keeping the app operating in the United States.
“President Trump is going to bring a fresh approach to pursuing a divestiture,” Mr. Helberg said, adding that he was an “out-of-the-box” thinker.
The U.S. government has argued that TikTok’s ownership makes it a national security threat, because the Chinese government could use the app to retrieve sensitive information about Americans, or to spread propaganda. The government has not offered public evidence that TikTok has made content decisions in the United States at the behest of Beijing.
The most immediate test for TikTok is its legal effort to overturn the ban, which is awaiting a decision from a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Both TikTok and the Biden administration are expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court if it doesn’t go their way, which could affect the Jan. 19 deadline. There is no guarantee, however, that the justices would take the case.
“It’s still very uncertain for TikTok, but this is certainly the best outcome they could have hoped for,” Mr. Rozenshtein said.
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