President Donald Trump said on Friday he will extend the timeline for a TikTok ban by an additional 75 days, keeping the app available despite the law requiring its Chinese parent company to sell it or be blocked in the U.S.
“The Deal 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,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
The president didn’t offer any details of what the deal would entail but credited his tariffs for the progress.
“This proves that Tariffs are the most powerful Economic tool, and very important to our National Security!” Trump wrote. “We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.”
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The order means that Trump is once again declining to enforce the law Congress passed requiring TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell or face a ban. But ahead of the executive order, even the most outspoken proponents of the divestiture efforts say that their options are limited to force the administration to follow the law.
“We passed the law. I mean, we don’t have any enforcement power of our own. And that’s the drawback of being Article 1,” Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS. “But other agencies have enforcement power. And I hope they’ll either sell it or enforce it.”
For months, GOP senators have repeatedly told NOTUS that Trump — no matter his commitment to keeping TikTok available to U.S. users — must follow the law banning TikTok from the U.S. over ByteDance’s alleged ties to the Chinese government. Trump has attempted to strip independence from agencies like the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission that could bring a challenge to a further extension or a deal that might run afoul of the law.
Republicans told NOTUS the statute of the law is clear: For TikTok to stay available in America, ByteDance cannot maintain any links, ownership, or collaboration with the app. This includes TikTok’s algorithm, which is the strongest selling point of the app.
The White House’s vision for a deal, which is being negotiated by Vice President JD Vance, has not been nearly as clear-cut.
The negotiations have mostly been kept under wraps, even from Republicans on the Hill. But the White House has floated multiple outcomes, from a shared ownership agreement proposed by Trump on his first day in office to a leasing contract where Oracle would be able to license TikTok’s algorithm from ByteDance and make it available to the hypothetical app owned by another corporation.
“The law says: No Communist Party control at the end of the day,” Sen. Dan Sullivan, one of the legislators behind the bill, told NOTUS.
When asked what Republicans can do to pressure the administration to follow the law, Sullivan said: “I mean, I just made a statement on it.”
When asked the same question, Sen. James Lankford told NOTUS he “would rather have just the law stand for itself.”
Other GOP senators told NOTUS this week that as long as the president reaches a deal that respects the underlying goals of the law — eliminating Chinese Communist Party alleged access or control over the algorithm — they are open to discussing what the White House brings to the table.
“What we care about is whether or not the Chinese Communist Party has access to the data that’s being collected on American families,” Sen. Mike Rounds said. “That’s what we care about.”
“As long as we can be assured that ByteDance doesn’t have that information, then I have an interest in looking at their proposal,” Rounds said.
Michel Sobolik, a fellow at Hudson Institute and a former congressional foreign policy adviser, said that any deal that allows ByteDance to keep control over TikTok’s algorithm not only violates the statute of the law but also the spirit of the legislation, which is to eliminate all possible Chinese government links with TikTok.
“If this new TikTok America company is leasing the algorithm, that means they do not own the algorithm, which means they can’t control it,” Sobolik told NOTUS. “It would still be under the control of the CCP and it would fail to comply with what the legislation spells out as a qualified divestiture.”
Chinese law regulates the sale of intellectual property to foreign owners, therefore, TikTok’s algorithm cannot be easily sold overseas without approval from the Chinese government. After Trump extended the deadline for a deal on Friday, a spokesperson for ByteDance told media outlets “There are key matters to be resolved.”
“Any agreement will be subject to approval under Chinese law,” the spokesperson said.
While there have been plenty of bids to buy TikTok since Trump first proposed to ban the app in 2020, none have come close to a concrete alternative. A last-minute bid by Amazon to buy the app reportedly was not taken seriously by the White House.
On his first day in office in his second term, Trump also dismissed the threat of Chinese government influence or data gathering to national security.
“I’d like to see Tiktok remain alive,” Trump said on Sunday. More recently, Trump said that the tariffs imposed on China could help the U.S. reach a deal to divest TikTok.
“China will probably say: ‘We’ll approve a deal, but will you do something on the tariffs?’” Trump said about TikTok on Wednesday. “We could use tariffs to get something in return.”
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Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
This story has been updated with news of the executive order extending the deadline and a comment from ByteDance.
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