President Donald Trump on Tuesday extended the deadline to enforce a ban on TikTok for a fourth time, pushing the period to reach a sale to December — in spite of a U.S. law that required the app’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, to sell TikTok by January of this year.
This extension comes hours after Trump said that his administration had reached a deal with China to sell TikTok. Trump also said he would meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping later this week to “confirm everything up.”
“We have a group of very big companies that want to buy it. The kids wanted it so badly. I had parents calling me up,” Trump told reporters Tuesday. “They say, ‘If I don’t get it done, they’re in big trouble with their kids.’ I think it’s great. I hate to see value like that thrown out the window.”
On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that China and the U.S. had reached an agreement on a framework to sell TikTok.
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So far, the Trump administration has shared few details about what such a deal would look like.
“We were very focused on TikTok and making sure that it was a deal that is fair for the Chinese and completely respects U.S. national security concerns, and that’s the deal we reached,” Bessent said in Madrid, where the U.S. held conversations with China over the weekend.
Last year, Congress passed a law that forced ByteDance to sell the popular video platform, or else the app would be banned in the U.S. The law designated an initial 270-day period to finalize a sale, which expired on Jan. 19, a day before Trump took office.
At the start of his administration, Trump signed an extension of the sale deadline. However, his trade war with China has been a major obstacle toward reaching a sale.
This latest extension is outside the original 270-day window. A number of congressional Republicans have grown tired of Trump’s extensions, but have given the president little pushback for not following the law when it comes to TikTok.
“I don’t love the extensions,” Rep. Dusty Johnson told NOTUS. “This is not how we’d like to be doing business, but I understand what the administration is trying to do, they are trying to get a deal done — but I’m not sure I understand the legal basis for the extension.”
Rep. John Moolenaar, chair of the select committee on the Chinese Communist Party, told NOTUS he would wait until Friday to make a judgment.
“I’m looking forward to see what the president’s going to talk with Xi Jinping on Friday, and we’ll see what comes out of that,” Moolenaar said. “e’re on wait-and-see on that.”
Johnson told NOTUS the administration has not shared any information about the deal that hasn’t been made public yet. However, “as long as the purchaser is somebody that’s not controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, it’s a lot easier for me to feel good about” the deal.
This article has been updated with comments from Rep. Dusty Johnson.
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