Trump considers executive order to ‘save TikTok’ from ban or sale under U.S. law

President-elect Donald Trump is considering an executive order once in office that would suspend enforcement of the TikTok ban-or-sale law for 60 to 90 days, a legally questionable effort to win a brief reprieve for the Chinese-owned app now scheduled to be banned on Sunday nationwide.

Trump has been mulling ways to save the day for the wildly popular video app, talking through unconventional dealmaking and legal maneuvers such as an executive order that would unravel the law passed by Congress last year with bipartisan support, according to two people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks.

Trump has expressed a keen interest in being seen as rescuing a platform on which he’s been told he’s widely admired, leading political aides and business allies to scramble for options that would allow him to deliver on his campaign promise to “save TikTok,” as he has said repeatedly on his more than 14 million-follower TikTok account.

“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” Trump said last month.

The main question is how. A law signed by President Joe Biden last year calls for the app’s owner, the Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance, to sell the app by Jan. 19 or face an immediate ban.

The Supreme Court, which considered TikTok’s challenge of the law last week, is expected to allow the law to proceed as planned but has not yet issued a ruling. The law is aimed at addressing Justice Department concerns that the Chinese government could covertly use the app to spy on Americans or broadcast propaganda.

Trump, one of the people said, is eager to be seen as “making a deal” and signing an executive order soon after the deadline’s passing - just one day before his inauguration - would give the proceedings a cinematic flourish.

But the strategy of using an executive order - the kind of presidential decree that Trump dashed off in rapid fashion at the start of his first presidential term - has fueled doubts among some legal observers, who argue the president’s word can’t entirely overcome a law that Congress approved with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Executive orders “are not magical documents. They’re just press releases with nicer stationery,” said Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department now at the University of Minnesota. “TikTok will still be banned, and it will still be illegal for Apple and Google to do business with them. But it will make the president’s intention not to enforce the law that much more official.”

Trump’s political allies have worked to build him up as the lone man qualified to rescue TikTok, saying in a filing to the Supreme Court that he “alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform.”

Though he tried to ban TikTok during his first presidential term, Trump has in recent years celebrated the app as a way to undercut tech companies he despised, such as Meta, and reach young voters at viral speed. He was shadowed during the campaign by a young TikTok specialist who made videos for the app.

TikTok chief Shou Zi Chew, who lives in Singapore, flew to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach last month as part of the company’s last-ditch attempt to save the app in the U.S. Shortly after, Trump posted to his social media platform Truth Social a collection of data showing that Trump is a star on the platform, with TikTok videos from Trump and his campaign having been viewed nearly 4 billion times - more than Kamala Harris, Fox News and Taylor Swift.

“Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?” Trump said in a separate Truth Social post this month. Trump transition officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

To undermine the law, Trump could push Congress to repeal it - a tough proposal, given it was one of Capitol Hill’s few bipartisan points of agreement last year. He could also direct his attorney general not to enforce it, effectively pretending it doesn’t exist; Pam Bondi, his pick for the job, declined to commit to enforcing the law during her confirmation hearing Wednesday.

But some in Trump’s orbit have floated options that would involve carving off pieces of the company for sale to satisfy the law, give American companies a slice of the business and let him take credit for sealing the deal. The law says the app will not be banned if its foreign owner executes a “qualified divestiture,” a type of transaction that it gives the president broad leeway to define.

Some suitors have made the case that Trump should help them take over the company and run it as an American enterprise. During Trump’s first term, he pushed to force the sale of a large stake in the company to corporate giants such as Oracle and Walmart, as long as the U.S. Treasury got a cut of the proceeds, and one of the people involved in the recent discussions suggested Trump may pursue a similar option during his second term.

But one of the people familiar with the discussions said such a sale is extremely unlikely, given the political risks and the stratospheric price tag, which analysts estimate at around $50 billion. Some have also questioned whether TikTok remains as attractive of an asset as it did four years ago, given the flurry of short-video copycats from companies like Instagram and YouTube, and the fact that the few buyers and investors who could afford the costs may also face antitrust scrutiny or legal risks.

Bloomberg reported this week that Chinese government officials had discussed Elon Musk buying TikTok’s U.S. operations, but TikTok has rejected the report as “pure fiction.” The multi-business billionaire already faces heavy debts from his last purchase of the social network now called X. One person familiar with ByteDance’s thinking dismissed the Musk proposal but said that the idea TikTok “could be part of a big bargain or a big negotiation” between the U.S. and China was “legitimate.”

Kevin O’Leary, the Canadian businessman known from ABC’s “Shark Tank” who posted a selfie Sunday with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and the former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt have said they’ve crafted what they’re calling the “People’s Bid” to take over the app without its underlying recommendation algorithm, which China has blocked from being sold.

Both O’Leary and McCourt have tried to reach Trump through media interviews praising his dealmaking prowess, and O’Leary recently said the president-elect could use TikTok as a “negotiating tool” for his discussions over broader trade issues with China.

But “in the end, TikTok is Trump’s deal,” O’Leary told Fox News on Monday. “He’s not giving it to anybody else.” A person familiar with TikTok’s thinking said O’Leary’s proposal was a “nonstarter” and a “fairy tale.”

To resolve lingering security concerns, Trump allies have also floated the idea of reviving Project Texas, the $1.5 billion corporate-reform package that TikTok unsuccessfully offered to the Biden administration in exchange for staying afloat, one of the people said.

The proposal would have given the U.S. government insight and veto power over TikTok’s hires and programming decisions, as well as a kill switch if federal officials determined the app had crossed a line. But Biden’s Justice Department declined the offer, saying it would not satisfy the app’s “serious national security risks.”

Several of the high-profile China hawks Trump named to his Cabinet and the administration at large have a long history of panning TikTok as a threat to national security. But some of them have more recently recast their views to match Trump’s friendlier stance.

His secretary of state pick, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida), who introduced a law in 2022 to ban the “(Chinese Communist Party) puppet” app that is “collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” deferred to Trump when asked last week about his efforts to save the app: “If I’m confirmed … I’ll work for the president.”

Trump’s pro-TikTok allies have worked to frame the issue as one in which he can further undermine Biden’s regulatory legacy and take credit for eradicating an increasingly unpopular ban effort. The share of Americans who support a TikTok ban plunged from 50 percent in 2023 to 32 percent last summer, a Pew Research Center survey said.

Kellyanne Conway, who served in the first Trump White House and now advocates for TikTok, told The Washington Post in November that “Trump recognized early on that Democrats are the party of bans … and to let them own that draconian, anti-personal-choice space.”

Further complicating matters is that ByteDance has said TikTok is not for sale, with some officials inside the company dismissing such talk as hot air. The uncertainty has demoralized employees inside TikTok’s U.S. headquarters in Culver City, California, where company executives have shared little firm details about the coming days except that they are “planning for various scenarios.” In an email obtained by The Post, the company said the offices will remain open “even if this situation hasn’t been resolved.”

One employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly, said most colleagues expected they’d continue working even if the app dropped off the app stores, but that no one really knew for sure.

After Trump pushed to force TikTok’s sale in 2020, China added TikTok’s core recommendation algorithm to its export-control list, effectively blocking any sale of the app’s technical backbone. But some observers suspect the U.S. and China could use the app as a bargaining chip to extract concessions on other big issues, such as tariffs or international trade.

Locked in a competition with Washington over cutting-edge technology, Beijing has “little incentive” to open doors to the transfer of TikTok’s core algorithms to the U.S. side unless “higher-level officials from both sides come to an agreement” as part of a broader thaw in bilateral relations, said Dong Yizhi, a finance and compliance lawyer of Shanghai Joint-Win Law Firm.

“If senior officials from China can get the talks started after Trump’s inauguration, then maybe there is a chance,” he added. “But that’s a big ‘if.’”

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Lyric Li contributed to this report.