Donald Trump’s TikTok Plan Faces Potential Hurdles

President-elect Donald Trump’s plan to save TikTok in the U.S. could face potential hurdles, according to a legal analyst.

Jonathan Turley, an attorney and law professor who has defended Trump in the past, said Trump’s plan to pause the ban by executive order on his first day in office may not be possible since the ban went into effect before then.

Newsweek has contacted Turley and a Trump spokesperson for comment via email.

Why It Matters

TikTok went dark in the U.S. in response to a federal law that required its China-based parent company ByteDance to cut ties with the platform’s U.S. operations by Sunday.

The platform restored service to U.S. users hours later, after Trump said in a post on Truth Social that he would issue an executive order to pause the ban after taking office on Monday.

He said the order that would “extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect” and “confirm that there will be no liability for any company that helped keep TikTok from going dark before my order.”

The Biden Administration said in recent days that it did not intend to enforce the ban.

What To Know

“President Trump’s statements indicate that he may issue a 90-day extension for TikTok after he is sworn in on January 20th,” Turley wrote on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday.

He said there is a “possible problem” with that, given the language of the law.

“The Act refers to a 270-day period from the date of enactment for a foreign adversary controlled application. If period ends on Jan. 19th, it is not clear that the 90-day extension is an option,” he wrote in another post.

“Moreover, even with a 90-day period, that is not a lot of runway for a corporate sale or a legislative fix. Any way this goes, the status of the company will exist in a weird Zombie statutory state of being among the living dead.”

Trump told NBC News on Saturday that he was considering granting ByteDance a 90-day extension to sell.

ByteDance has said it would not sell TikTok, even though investors have made some offers.

Trump said in his Truth Social post that he would like the U.S. to have a 50 percent ownership stake in TikTok.

“By doing this, we save TikTok, keep it in good hands and allow it to stay up. Without U.S. approval, there is no TikTok. With our approval, it is worth hundreds of billions of dollars—maybe trillions.”

What People Are Saying

TikTok CEO Shou Chew said in a video on the platform: “On behalf of everyone at TikTok and all our users across the country, I want to thank President Trump for his commitment to work with us to find a solution that keeps TikTok available in the United States.

“This is a strong stand for the First Amendment and against arbitrary censorship.”

He added: “We are grateful and pleased to have the support of a president who truly understands our platform.”

Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Newsweek last week: “President Trump has repeatedly expressed his desire to save TikTok, and there’s no better deal maker than President Trump.”

House Speaker Mike Johnson said on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday: “When President Trump issued the Truth [Social] post and said, ‘Save TikTok,’ the way we read that is that he’s going to try to force along a true divestiture, changing of the hands, the ownership.

“It’s not the platform that members of Congress are concerned about. It’s the Chinese Communist Party and their manipulation of the algorithms.”

GOP Senators Tom Cotton and Pete Ricketts said in a joint statement on Sunday: “Now that the law has taken effect, there’s no legal basis for any kind of ‘extension’ of its effective date.”

What’s Next

Trump is set to be sworn in for a second term on Monday and issue the executive order later in the day.

But it’s not clear how Trump’s plan will fare from a legal standpoint, given the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the ban on Friday. For now, U.S. users can access and use TikTok, but questions about the app’s future remain.