Trump says he’ll delay TikTok ban, but the platform must be sold

President-elect Donald Trump says he wants service providers like Apple and Google to put TikTok back online in the US, and he proposed creating a joint venture where the US owns 50 percent of the app.

“I’m asking companies not to let TikTok stay dark!” Trump wrote on Truth Social Sunday. “I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security. The order will also confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

Part of the motivation appears to be his own inauguration on Monday, which Trump says “Americans deserve to see.” He called the joint venture idea an “initial thought” and said “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.”

Shortly after the ban took effect, Republican lawmakers poured cold water on the idea that Donald Trump will be able to halt the TikTok ban without a sale of the app when he resumes the presidency Monday. Trump had previously floated exercising a 90-day extension written into the law to lengthen the deadline for a sale and reportedly considered issuing an executive order.

“We will enforce the law,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “When President Trump issued the Truth post and said, ‘save TikTok,’ the way we read that is that he’s going to try to force along a true divestiture.” Johnson added that “the only way to extend that is if there’s an actual deal in the works.”

“Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date,” Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Pete Ricketts (R-NE) said in a statement. “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.”

With Trump’s Republican allies in Congress casting doubt on the idea that a pause on the ban is viable without a bona fide deal that rids TikTok of its foreign adversary ownership, it’s unlikely that service providers like Apple and Google will risk the billions in fines they could face should a court rule that Trump is wrong about his powers to halt the law.

But creating a joint venture where the US owns 50 percent of a speech platform comes with its own potential First Amendment concerns. And Johnson’s comments on Meet the Press about why lawmakers are concerned about the app to begin with further demonstrate that Congress did think about the content on the platform when deciding to pass the law — even though the Supreme Court didn’t see that as reason to find it unconstitutional. “They have been flooding the minds of American children with terrible messages glorifying violence and antisemitism and even suicide and eating disorders,” Johnson says. “It’s a very dangerous thing. The Chinese Communist Party is not our friend, and we have to make sure this changes hands.”