President Donald Trump has tapped Vice President J.D. Vance to broker a potential sale of TikTok to a U.S.-based entity before the most recent ban extension elapses in April, according to two people familiar with the arrangement.
In the latest chapter of the TikTok saga — which began in 2020 with Trump and culminated in the app going dark for a few hours last month — the president selected Vance, along with National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, to oversee a congressionally mandated potential deal between Chinese-based owner ByteDance and an American entity.
The White House negotiators will have their work cut out for themselves. It remains to be seen what type of arrangement, if any, ByteDance and China will agree to. Trump recently floated the idea of 50/50 American and Chinese joint ownership, but the situation remains fluid. It’s also uncertain whether such a split would satisfy the ongoing U.S. national security concerns that spurred the ban in the first place.
In the meantime, a number of U.S.-based suitors are vying for the popular social media app.
TikTok, which has always maintained that it does not share its U.S.-based users’ data with the Chinese government, was initially set to be banned in Jan. 19 following the passage of a bipartisan law signed by then-President Joe Biden. TikTok challenged that measure, but the Supreme Court upheld it in the final days of the Biden administration.
On Jan. 18, the app briefly went dark in the U.S., only to return roughly 12 hours later after Trump signaled he would review the ban and wouldn’t penalize the app or the stores carrying it. On Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration, TikTok sent out a push notification crediting him for its resurrection.
The president signed an executive order on his first day in office “instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans.”
The move came after a number of TikTok users had downloaded a similar Chinese app called RedNote in protest of the ban, raising further security and censorship concerns in the U.S.
Now that Trump has slapped China with an additional 10% tariff on top of those already in place, ByteDance may be less eager to negotiate with the U.S. government.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), ranking member of the Select Committee on Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, told NBC News that ByteDance may be more open to selling now that it has exhausted all its options to maintain control of the app.
“There’s only so much they can try to do to change the law, it all failed. And so now they have to fight with the law,” Krishnamoorthi said.
Krishnamoorthi said prospective American buyers, from the YouTuber Jimmy Donaldson, who’s widely known as MrBeast, to the billionaire Frank McCourt, have been “lining up” to buy TikTok.
Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.) said it was important that TikTok remain accessible to American users but wanted the app divested from ByteDance.
“I’m a father. I’ve heard from my kids, my teenage kids, about this a lot. I understand that it’s important to a lot of folks. They use it for businesses. I get that, but I also am a member who focuses a lot on national security,” he said.
Crow, who backed the legislation that mandated divestment, said “we structured it that way because we don’t want to end the platform.”
During TikTok’s 75-day reprieve, users who kept it on their phones have been able to access the app, upload content and use it as they did before, but Google and Apple are not currently offering TikTok in their respective app stores.
A Trump administration official said the Department of Justice as well as Trump’s executive order have made it clear that Google and Apple won’t face penalties should they offer TikTok for download, adding that the White House won’t tell private companies what they can and can’t offer.
“No action to enforce the Act or impose any penalties against any entity for any noncompliance with the Act, including for distributing, maintaining, or updating (or enabling the distribution, maintenance, or updating) of any foreign adversary controlled application as defined in the Act,” the executive order reads.
