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The Trump administration is optimistic about avoiding a third extension of the deadline for TikTok’s Beijing-based owners to divest — but the rhetoric over the popular app only got hotter on Tuesday.
President Donald Trump said twice in the days leading up to his steep new tariffs on China that he’s open to reducing them if Beijing approves the TikTok ownership deal that got scuttled after the levies were announced. Asked whether that remains the case amid ramped-up tensions, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Semafor that Trump remains open to a deal, but China has to initiate it.
“The ball is in China’s court,” Leavitt said in a new Trump statement she read aloud during Tuesday’s briefing. “China needs to make a deal with us. We don’t have to make a deal with them. There’s no difference between China and any other country except they are much larger — and China wants what we have … they need our money.”
Before the tariff-related pullback, Vice President JD Vance and top advisers had worked for months on a TikTok deal that would comply with a bipartisan law Congress passed last year that requires Beijing-based ByteDance to divest or face a US ban on the app. Administration officials remain “bullish” on a deal happening before Trump’s latest extension deadline of June 19, one White House official told Semafor.
A person familiar with the TikTok talks, meanwhile, said the previously agreed-to deal with ByteDance remains on the table for China to accept.
Yet now that Trump’s tariffs on China have taken effect, they further complicate an already-complex deal for exactly the reason the president hinted at: China may want to use TikTok as leverage in future trade negotiations.
“There’s no reason to believe the Chinese government wouldn’t use the TikTok sale as leverage” to extract concessions from the administration on tariffs, said Anna Ashton, an expert on China corporate affairs. “It’s still going to be on the table and it’s still going to be part of negotiations somehow, for the foreseeable future.”
Asked whether Beijing is on board with treating the TikTok negotiations as part of the tariff talks, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington said only that China would handle the issue “in accordance with its own laws and regulations.”
“And we believe that the United States should provide an open, fair, just, and non-discriminatory business environment for Chinese enterprises operating in the US,” the spokesperson, Liu Pengyu, said in a statement to Semafor.
Know More
Trump has now twice signed orders extending the deadline for ByteDance to divest TikTok or face a ban. Though the extensions are regarded by some as legally dubious, no one has sued over Trump’s moves, in part because of the difficulty of any party demonstrating standing.
Those watching from Capitol Hill have grown increasingly pessimistic about the Trump administration’s approach.
“Their main strategy with everything is throwing s–t at the wall and seeing what, if anything, sticks,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who noted there are bidders the administration could move forward with if it wanted to.
While the Trump administration is hoping to close a TikTok deal in the coming weeks, officials — importantly — aren’t ruling out the prospect of Trump signing another extension.
But doing so risks running further afoul of the law, which allowed for a 90-day extension only if the White House could show progress on a deal.
“Legally, these extensions don’t appear consistent with the statute,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. “But even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that the president had the authority to issue both extensions, he still has to demonstrate that there’s meaningful progress toward a divestiture. Right now, that seems implausible.”
That doesn’t mean that the administration is headed for future legal challenges, though. Even if Congress wanted to sue, it couldn’t do so unless it demonstrated that it “suffered a specific and concrete institutional injury,” Kreps said.
And the Trump administration has assured tech companies like Oracle, Google, and Apple that officials will not enforce the ban during the extension.
The View From Hill Republicans
After Trump signed the second extension, Republicans on the House select committee on China issued a statement stressing that any resolution must ensure “that the Chinese Communist Party does not have access to American user data or the ability to manipulate the content consumed by Americans.”
“We remain committed to enforcing the framework established by Congress to safeguard the American people,” they said. “We stand firm in our position and look forward to more details from the administration to ensure that any deal aligns with national security and US law.”
Shelby and Morgan’s View
It’s unclear exactly what the administration is willing to do to get negotiations back on track — especially given Trump’s latest comments.
And even before the tariffs got announced, there were plenty of doubts about the prospects for a deal to divest the social media app that would comply with the law.
Some reports suggested that the deal being pursued by the Trump administration would involve ByteDance retaining control of TikTok’s powerful algorithm while US companies took an ownership stake in the company.
Officials also weighed a plan similar to the ByteDance-proposed initiative Project Texas, which involved US company Oracle maintaining control of the app’s US user data — a setup the Biden administration previously rejected because it did not address national security concerns. It’s questionable whether either solution would meet the requirements of the 2024 divest-or-ban law.
“I can’t imagine the Chinese government being okay” with ByteDance losing control over the algorithm, Ashton said.
Notable
- In keeping with Trump’s latest stance, the US insists it won’t be reaching out to China first to negotiate tariffs, White House officials told CNN. One wrinkle? China seems to be taking the same position.
- The vice president had expressed optimism that there’d be a “high-level” TikTok deal by the now-scuttled April 5 deadline, NBC News reported.