Will TikTok Be Banned Again on April 5? How Trump Could Sink—or Save—the Social Media Behemoth

Just hours after being sworn into office in January, Donald Trump got straight to work on a foreign policy issue that was dominating dinner table conversations across America: What to do about TikTok.

In the days before his inauguration, eulogies poured in for the app, which was facing a congressionally mandated deadline to either split off from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or be effectively banned from the United States. In a stunt just before the deadline, TikTok briefly went dark, before restoring service a few hours later with a ring-kissing alert crediting “President Trump’s efforts” to stave off the ban (though he was not yet president). Trump rewarded TikTok’s public display of gratitude with an executive order on his first day in office, extending the divest-or-ban deadline for 75 days. That extension runs out Saturday.

Now, with just days to go, Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and other senior U.S. officials are reportedly meeting to iron out the broad contours of a deal, which could see TikTok sold off to a group of investors, including Oracle and Blackstone. The catch? The company’s Chinese owners still have to agree to it.

Negotiations over TikTok’s future come at a particularly dicey time. The U.S. has imposed 20% tariffs on all imports from China, kicking off a series of retaliatory measures from Beijing. According to The Wall Street Journal, government officials in China are waiting to see what further tariffs the Trump administration announces Wednesday—a day Trump is touting as “Liberation Day”—to determine how TikTok negotiations will play out.

It’s worth remembering that the first time Trump became president, he was the one calling to ban the app unless ByteDance agreed to sell it off to an American company, like Oracle. So there’s a bizarre sort of symmetry to the idea that Trump could now be cast as TikTok’s savior for setting in motion a plan that, during his first term, TikTok’s leaders suggested would destroy it.

The thing about the extension, of course, is that legal experts say Trump technically didn’t have the power to issue one under the law passed by Congress. That law forbid app stores or internet hosting services in the U.S. from doing business with TikTok after the initial January deadline—restrictions that would make TikTok more or less inoperable. As legal scholars have noted, the law only gave the president the power to extend the January deadline if there was already a divestment deal in progress, which there wasn’t.

That means Trump’s executive order on TikTok effectively amounted to a presidential pinky-swear that his administration wouldn’t enforce the law. And that means that however negotiations go before Saturday’s deadline, there’s not much stopping Trump from doing it again.