At midnight on Sunday, it was illegal for the Communist Chinese social media application TikTok to operate in the United States. The shutdown was required by Public Law 118-50, one section of which is the ‘‘Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act.” However, President Trump threw the legal requirement into confusion with a social media post promising an Executive Order on Monday to give TikTok a 90-day grace period from closure and guaranteeing to hold harmless US companies who cooperated in keeping TikTok running; see TikTok Comes Back From the Dark After Trump Vows Executive Order – RedState.
His goal is not a ban on TikTok, but a partnership with the Chinese government.
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 say up. Without U.S. approval, there is no Tik Tok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars – maybe trillions.
Therefore, my initial thought is a joint venture between the current owners and/or new owners whereby the U.S. gets a 50% ownership in a joint venture set up between the U.S. and whichever purchase we so choose.
The history of this act is important. It goes back to a 2019 Executive Order by President Trump restricting TikTok’s US operations; that order was subsequently struck down in court. Trump tried again with a divestment order issued under the auspices of the Defense Production Act. Before that order could be litigated, Joey Softserve arrived on the scene and, true to form, undid Trump’s work. By March 2024, Trump had reversed course and supported allowing TikTok to continue US operations. The congressional ban on TikTok sailed to healthy victory with bipartisan majorities in both houses; It’s Happening: US House Passes Landmark TikTok Ban Amid Rising Data Security Concerns – RedState.
In response to the social media posting, it seems like TikTok is resuming operations.
Less than a day after the popular social media platform TikTok went offline for users across the United States, the company says it has now restored service.
“Thanks for your patience and support,” a message read Sunday when users opened the app. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S..!”
The big question is whether Trump has the legal authority to stop enforcing the federal law that was supposed to shutter TikTok.
Trump invokes a 90-day extension, but the law places some pretty clear guardrails on the prerequisites for that action; see page 956 of the link.
(3) EXTENSION.—With respect to a foreign adversary con trolled application, the President may grant a 1-time extension of not more than 90 days with respect to the date on which this subsection would otherwise apply to such application pursuant to paragraph (2), if the President certifies to Congress that—
(A) a path to executing a qualified divestiture has been identified with respect to such application;
(B) evidence of significant progress toward executing such qualified divestiture has been produced with respect to such application; and
(C) there are in place the relevant binding legal agreements to enable execution of such qualified divestiture during the period of such extension.
There is no “path to executing a qualified divestiture.” There is no progress towards achieving divestiture with TikTok; in fact, TikTok said Friday that it will shut down if the law is enforced. There are no “relevant binding legal agreements” in place. More importantly, Trump’s proposed solution, the US getting an equity stake and becoming partners with ByteDance, flies in the face of the law’s stated purpose, which is to require ByteDance to divest the platform.
Even the members of Congress most supportive of Trump say this ploy requires a change to the law. Jim Jordan made that point Sunday on CNN:
“It seems to me, if you’re going to do something short of someone else purchasing TikTok and ByteDance no longer owning it, you’re going to have to have a change in the law. And if that’s what’s warranted, then I think the Congress will look at that with the leadership from President Trump,” Jordan said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” with Dana Bash.
Jordan’s voice is sounding fairly lonely at this point. Mike Johnson was very clear:
Speaker Mike Johnson on Sunday dispelled the notion that President-elect Donald Trump would bring TikTok back early in his second term without the company’s willingness to sell to a U.S.-based owner.
“I think we will enforce the law,” Johnson told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” on Sunday, a day after Trump told NBC News that he would “most likely” give TikTok a 90-day extension to operate in the U.S.
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Tom Cotton, and Nebraska Senator Pete Ricketts issued a joint statement that pointedly did not mention Trump but equally pointedly took issue with his proposal:
“We commend Amazon, Apple, Google, and Microsoft for following the law and halting operations with ByteDance and TikTok, and we encourage other companies to do the same. The law, after all, risks ruinous bankruptcy for any company who violates it. Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date [my italics}. For TikTok to come back online in the future, ByteDance must agree to a sale that satisfies the law’s qualified-divestiture requirements by severing all ties between TikTok and Communist China. Only then will Americans be protected from the grave threat posed to their privacy and security by a communist-controlled TikTok.”
Quite honestly, I don’t see the case for not grinding ByteDance’s commie face in the gravel. It has already said divestiture is off the table. If it would let TikTok, which is worth billions of dollars, die rather than sell it, that tells you the real purpose was never to make money. It is equally difficult to see how a company that Trump castigated this way in 2020:
“TikTok automatically captures vast swaths of information from its users, including Internet and other network activity information such as location data and browsing and search histories. This data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information — potentially allowing China to track the locations of Federal employees and contractors, build dossiers of personal information for blackmail, and conduct corporate espionage.”
becomes better without changing the underlying problem; see To TikTok, or Not to TikTok? For Conservatives, the Answer Is Clear – RedState.
Trump may be able to rescue the Chinese Communist Party on this issue, but with razor-thin majorities, particularly in the Senate, it is hard to see how the law banning TikTok gets amended in the next 90 days when there is real business to accomplish…or even why he’d want to try.
