Trump says he will issue an executive order Monday delaying U.S. TikTok ban

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The law, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court on Friday, leaves the interpretation of a “qualified divestiture” up to the president. In his latest post, Trump seemed to lay out what would satisfy that definition for him.

Trump said he “would like the United States to have a 50% ownership position in a joint venture” and confirmed that the move would “save TikTok.” NBC News has asked the Trump transition team for clarification on whether the president-elect meant ownership should be held by a U.S.-based company or the U.S. government itself.

Even so, ByteDance has never indicated that TikTok is actually for sale and has never revealed a valuation for the platform. Since the company has been reluctant to sell, a 50% joint venture may be more palatable than losing 100% of the ownership of TikTok.

If a qualified divestiture were to take place, it would give TikTok’s service providers much more peace of mind than simply an extended period of nonenforcement.

Trump’s Truth Social post on Sunday also seemingly contradicted what House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., said earlier Sunday when he told NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that he believed Trump’s intention “is that he’s going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of hands, the ownership” of TikTok before it’s allowed back online in the U.S.

“I think we will enforce the law,” the speaker said.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, echoed Johnson during an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” but said he felt comfortable with a 90-day extension for the app.

“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 told CNN.

“How that gets resolved I guess we’re open, open to different scenarios. But right now, the law is the law, and of course, you get these companies abiding by the law of it,” he added.

Also on Sunday, Rep. Mike Waltz, R-Fla., Trump’s incoming national security adviser, told CNN that Trump’s intention was to communicate with the various stakeholders and “to get it back online and buy him some time to” save the app.

“This is about giving the tech companies, the app stores, the providers, the cloud storage and others the confidence that we are going to work toward some type of deal to not make this go dark. And I think that’s what you’re going to see in the upcoming 24 hours,” Waltz said.

He added: “We’re working, literally real time, working with the various tech companies to get it back online and buy [Trump] some time to, one, save it, but protect Americans’ data and protect Americans from any type of foreign interference.”

Trump initially asked the Supreme Court for extra time in December, when he filed an amicus brief to the court in TikTok’s case against the ban.

In that brief, he urged the Supreme Court to hit pause on the ban, which went into effect one day before his inauguration so that he could work with the app to explore ways for it to stay online in the U.S. legally.

On Friday, the court upheld the law, rejecting TikTok’s challenge and Trump’s plea.

Following the court’s decision, White House Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “Given the sheer fact of timing, this Administration recognizes that actions to implement the law simply must fall to the next Administration, which takes office on Monday.”

Still, those assurances were not initially enough for TikTok, which said late Friday that the company would still comply with the ban.

Trump’s support for TikTok is an almost total reversal from the position he held during his first term when he pledged to ban the app.

“As far as TikTok is concerned we’re banning them from the United States,” the then-president told reporters in July 2020. “I can do it with an executive order or that,” he added.

On August 6, 2020, Trump did sign an executive order seeking to ban TikTok after 45 days. The order faced legal challenges and TikTok won an injunction against the executive order in late September of that year. When Biden took office four months later, he reversed Trump’s executive order.

His anti-TikTok rhetoric came after months of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle sharing concerns about privacy and national security related to the app. And in December of the previous year, the U.S. Army and Navy each banned their soldiers from using TikTok on their government-owned devices.

In 2022, House staffers and lawmakers were also barred from having TikTok on their government-issued devices. And just a few weeks before that, the Senate voted to bar all federal employees from using the app on their government-owned devices.

During a March 2024 interview with CNBC, Trump downplayed concerns about TikTok posing threats to national security because of its ties to China, saying that U.S. social media companies posed the same risks.

“We also have that problem with other — you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too. I mean the information, they get plenty of information, and they deal with China, and they’ll do whatever China wants,” Trump said.

“You know, you look at some of our American companies, when you talk about high, highly sophisticated companies that you think are American, they’re not so American. They deal in China and China, if China wants anything from them, they will give it. So that’s a national security risk also,” he added.

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