BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP via Getty Images
Remember when TikTok had to find a new owner, or shut down in the United States?
That was in January. TikTok still has the same owner. You can still use it in the United States.
And it looks like things are going to stay that way for a while longer.
The Trump administration confirmed Tuesday that it will extend the deadline for TikTok’s owner, ByteDance, to find a US owner for its American operations. That deadline was supposed to be Thursday.
If that sounds familiar, there’s a good reason: Trump has already announced two other extensions — one in January, and then again in April. If I could bet on it, I would bet on yet another Trump extension, in about 90 days.
That’s because there can’t be a deal to force ByteDance to sell some or all of its US operation without approval from 1) ByteDance, which is based in China, and 2) the government of China, which effectively has approval of any M&A involving any Chinese company.
And while people in Trump’s White House have told reporters there was a deal in place earlier this spring for a consortium of US tech companies and investors to buy about 80% of TikTok’s US operations, as far as I can tell, the Chinese government has yet to weigh in. Which, see above.
And that means we have no idea how any of this will play out. Except that it’s not likely to happen when the US and China are squaring off over tariffs — which is still happening.
But to me, the most fascinating part of the TikTok/Trump/China dance isn’t the particulars of any deal. It’s the part where Congress passed a bill requiring a ban or sale into law last year, the Supreme Court upheld that law in January, and then Trump just … ignored it.
Or to be more specific, Trump issued an executive order in January extending the deadline for the ban or sale, and everyone has more or less acted like that’s fine.
Even though the language in the TikTok sale-or-ban law is quite clear: It allows the president to create a “a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days,” but only if there’s an actual deal in place to make that happen, including “relevant binding legal agreements,” which obviously can’t exist if China hasn’t given its approval for a deal.
When Trump steamrolled over that language back in January, I noted that he hadn’t convinced everyone that he was following the law — including Apple and Google, who wouldn’t put TikTok back into their app stores without at least getting air cover from Attorney General Pam Bondi. But Trump hasn’t gotten any meaningful pushback on this from anyone in Congress — which, again, passed the sale-or-ban bill with an overwhelming majority, supposedly because lawmakers thought TikTok posed a real security threat to the United States.
Maybe it’s because the sale-or-ban bill’s supporters have other things to worry about these days. Maybe it’s because they always assumed the threat of a ban would force a sale, and things would never get to this point. Or maybe they were never very serious about TikTok’s supposed threat to begin with.
It doesn’t matter. TikTok is still in the US. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon.
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