TikTok spent 75 days living on borrowed time. ByteDance, the company that controls the platform, now has another 75 days to go before it has to comply with congressional legislation demanding that it lose its Chinese ownership or face a US ban. And this, thanks to President Trump, who appears determined to shield the app from legal pressure in America. Yet the way he has gone about doing this can only height fears that America is on a gradual slide to becoming a banana republic.
When Trump assumed office on Jan. 20 and tossed the company a life raft, he did so by issuing an executive order that overrode duly enacted legislation, which had been upheld by the Supreme Court days earlier. By this Saturday, TikTok was supposed to have been sold or shut down in the United States.
Instead, Trump on Friday told his followers that a deal his administration has been hammering out “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed, which is why I am signing an Executive Order to keep TikTok up and running for an additional 75 days.”
He added: “We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs (Necessary for Fair and Balanced Trade between China and the USA!). This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security! We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark’. We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
ByteDance called the government’s bluff and briefly shut down ahead of Trump’s January decision, rather than sell TikTok to an American company. The firm’s unflinching obstinacy, perhaps, explains why everyone just shrugged at the first executive order and hoped for the best — and why they’re doing the same now too. Trump set investors scrambling, China hawks seething, and constitutional lawyers questioning how the move comported with the president’s stated ambition of restoring the separation of powers.
TikTok knows it has the cards. Whether ByteDance is at all interested in ultimately going through with a deal is a fair question: plenty of lucrative offers from US investors have been on the table. According to CBS News, a source said Trump was set “to sign an order initiating a 120-day period for closing the deal, allowing time to finish paperwork and secure financing”, but that “China backed out once Trump imposed the global import taxes”. Tariffs are a believable excuse, but it’s not impossible China is like Lucy with the football to Trump’s Charlie Brown.
TikTok is a major bargaining chip in a grave geopolitical struggle. Given the data users have always sent to Beijing, it’s been a bargaining chip ever since it arrived on America’s digital shores. For Trump, though, it’s not exactly his chip to bargain with: Congress already determined the American course of action. The mystery is why nobody seems to mind Trump delaying its execution — or at least, why nobody is complaining publicly.
With Trump’s 5 April deadline looming, I set out in March to query Trump-friendly conservatives on the legitimacy of his executive order. Several requests went unanswered, despite repeated efforts, while one group politely declined to comment over concerns about the sensitivity of the subject matter.
In reaching out to experts, I’d asked specifically about a summary of the executive order from Jim Geraghty of National Review. “Trump just didn’t want to enforce the law, even though it was constitutional. Nothing in the law’s text said the president could suspend it for 75 days”, Geraghty wrote. “The president and the executive branch cannot just ignore a law that was passed by the legislature and upheld by the judicial branch. It doesn’t matter if you love Trump or hate Trump, the president doesn’t get to pick and choose which laws are enforced”.
Was that accurate, I wondered, and if so did it undermine Trump’s plan to champion the “unitary executive theory” in the name of checks and balances?
On the one hand, ensuring the proper scope of executive power is so important to the Right that Trump is firing commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission and members of the National Labor Relations Board to restore presidential authority. On the other, he’s flagrantly ignoring Congress to improperly assert executive authority by almost any fair evaluation of the law.
It’s an important dynamic to scrutinise because Trump is — right now — claiming executive authority to override Congress on TikTok while also arguing forcefully for the “unitary executive theory” upon which the DOGE “revolution” hinges. What explains the Right’s hesitation to publicly advocate against this radical expansion of power, even as the GOP seeks to wrest presidential authority back from cabinet agencies and contain the Beijing regime?
Shortly after Trump confirmed his decision in January, a couple of brave souls pointed out the obvious problems. “For constitutional conservatives: the law requiring the shutdown or qualified divestiture by ByteDance of TikTok, provides no statutory basis for the president to suspend enforcement. This is an illegal order. The bill uses ‘shall’ not ‘may’ in section 2(d) outlining enforcement”, posted tech writer Mike Brock.
Conservative John Hasson argued: “Per the TikTok law, Trump can only extend the window if he certifies to Congress that TikTok has ‘binding legal agreements to enable [its] execution’ of a ‘qualified divestiture’. Seeing as TikTok has no such agreement in place … Trump can’t do this”.
Flash-forward to Deadline Week and the Associated Press published a story with the headline, “Why no one is challenging Trump’s executive order that keeps TikTok running”.
The AP noted that few members of the bipartisan coalition that passed the bill put up much of a protest over the 75-day extension, which “the law does not permit”, according to an expert quoted in the piece. As Sarah Kreps of Cornell University asked, “who’s the constituency [for challenging Trump’s extensions]? You have 170 million Americans using the app, and they’re pretty happy to see this continue to be available to them”.
And that’s probably where the mystery stops. TikTok is a substantial part of most teenagers’ daily lives, used by most people under 30, woven deeply into the fabric of popular culture, and a big chunk of the economy. If Trump can broker a deal, why rock the boat over a 75-day extension?
TikTok critic Hal Brands of Johns Hopkins and the American Enterprise Institute told me in mid-March that “if the pause results in the sale of TikTok, in a way that meaningfully addresses the underlying security, intelligence, and propaganda, concerns, then I think the administration will have a decent argument that the pause served its purpose”.
“The problem”, he added, “is that President Trump has consistently signalled that his real goal is to strike some sort of a deal on this issue with China. Leaving aside the merits of any such bargain, the problem here is that this sends the signal that everything in the US-China relationship is transactional. The proper message would be that, if TikTok really does pose a threat to US national security, as President Trump once believed, and a bipartisan majority of senators and representatives concluded last year, then a ban or divestiture should not be negotiable. It should be a necessary step taken to protect America’s position in a high stakes competition”.
At the centre of this conflict is data and, at risk of sounding dramatic, some measure of mind control. Whether you buy claims that China manipulated the TikTok algorithm to turn young Americans against Israel, there is something discomfiting about a Chinese firm retaining significant control over the US operations of an app used by millions of Americans. And the potential for surveillance and predatory data mining are bad enough without allegations of political mind control. ByteDance, of course, has repeatedly denied it’s engaged in any such activities.
“At the centre of this conflict is data and, at risk of sounding dramatic, some measure of mind control.”
But that is, of course, why a robust bipartisan coalition of American policymakers is also eager to get TikTok in the hands of entities stateside — both to wrest these powers for China and potentially use them for domestic purposes.
Trump’s motives here are not difficult to parse, and the bill in question is legitimately problematic. He’s popular on TikTok, and close to one of the company’s major investors. Conservatives have bigger fish to fry than what seems like a losing battle against the app, and most know they need to pick their public battles carefully when it comes to challenging this White House. And with the whole world seemingly allied against the president, his sensitives and loyalty tests aren’t entirely unreasonable this time around.
On this and other bold decisions from Trump, his defenders repeatedly cite the need to fight fire with fire and push back against Democrats’ perceived lawlessness, rather than fight with one hand tied behind their back. They point to Biden’s policy on student loan debt. “I promised to ease student debt for millions of folks”, Biden posted on X. “The Supreme Court blocked me, but it didn’t stop me”.
Back in 2021, Aaron Blake criticised Biden’s COVID-era eviction moratorium policy in the Washington Post, summarising the president’s attitude as, “It might not be legal, but even if it’s not, we’ll get some good done in the meantime”.
Both parties can play the blame game all day, arguing until they’re blue in the face about who started all of this — at least in modern US history. But that’s the point. As talking heads have spent recent weeks shouting at one another about Trump’s explicit challenges to the status quo on deportations and federal workers, his TikTok policy faded into the background. In the shadow of scrutiny, Republicans and Democrats hoping for a deal that benefits the United States may have forfeited a principle they claim to be fighting for bitterly in other theatres.
The proof is Trump’s flippant 75-day extension of his first 75-day extension. As fallout continued from his tariff bombshell — including the legitimacy of his emergency authority to implement the new rates — barely anyone batted an eye at TikTok getting another dubious bailout.
