President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs threw a big wrench into TikTok’s sale to a group of U.S. investors. It came several weeks after TikTok’s CEO, Shou Zi Chew, was a surprise attendee at Trump’s inauguration in the Capitol rotunda. Chew’s lobbying strategy is clear: persuade the new president to buck the bipartisan conclusion that TikTok’s ownership model is a threat to the one in two Americans who have downloaded the app.
The strategy may have worked. Twice, the president has taken liberty with his mandate under a law passed by former Representative Mike Gallagher, the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, to force TikTok to divest from its Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance. The two 75-day extensions Trump has granted to TikTok, delaying its removal from U.S. app stores, is not a discretionary authority Congress gave to the president in the act.
What to do about TikTok and other foreign adversary apps was one of those rare political unicorns: Gallagher’s bill won the support of the executive branch, big majorities in the House and the Senate, and then was affirmed 9-0 by the Supreme Court on the legal merits.
Democratic and Republican lawmakers who drafted the bill knew that Trump might try to wiggle his way out of its statutory requirements, as he is doing now. After all, Trump came out against passage of the bill as it gathered steam this time last year. But unlike the bipartisan Senate immigration bill, which fizzled after Trump’s proclamation on Truth Social, Trump’s stance did not deter House Republican leaders from pressing ahead.
That rare Republican non-alignment with the president is being put to the test again. That is because any deal short of the Chinese government agreeing to a sale that requires ByteDance to give up the secret sauce of the app – access to the data of hundreds of millions of Americans – would defy a shared understanding of what is needed to address U.S. national security concerns.
Take for instance the law’s “qualified divestiture” language. It says there should be an “interagency process” to sign off on a sale to a new buyer(s). But “interagency process” is not defined. That ambiguity means that TikTok and its prospective U.S. investors know they do not have to persuade the entire U.S. national security apparatus on the merits of a deal: they just need to win over the chief executive. It is possible, for instance, that TikTok has persuaded Trump and his inner circle that Project Texas, its partnership with Oracle to store U.S. user data, is sufficient to protect U.S. data from intrusions directed by the Chinese government.
Or TikTok’s U.S.-based billionaire investors and the Chinese government may extend olive branches. A sweetener could involve a commitment that new, majority U.S. investors will have some type of access to the source code and algorithm developed by ByteDance, but not ownership. TikTok’s new owners could also pledge privately to alter its algorithm to remove content that is unfavorable to Trump or otherwise manipulate its content algorithm to advance White House policy priorities. Indeed, that has reportedly already happened.
In March of last year, witnesses from some of those agencies appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a make-or-break classified hearing for 50 members of Congress. At the hearing, legislators held up screenshots of TikTok’s plea to its U.S. users to call their congressional representatives – an epic public relations self-own. The ploy generated so much ill will that the Committee voted 50-0 to report out the bill to the full House. Days later, Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi mimed a diagonal “Tic-Tac-Toe” on the House floor, signaling that the government had proven its case that there was only one viable legislative means of keeping TikTok online.
That rare political consensus for legislative action could unravel if Congress and the public come to find out that Trump’s “interagency process” was a farce or that the administration capitulated to Beijing on TikTok to advance bigger priorities, like on trade. Trump could follow the decree of multiple branches of government to demand no less than what is required under law; or he could opt for a “compromise” that allows the Chinese government to have its cake and eat it too – by retaining its capacity to target Americans’ location and other sensitive data.
Even a deal that were to follow the letter of the law will replace foreign adversary surveillance with corporate surveillance. The Trump administration could win bipartisan favor if he secured commitments from TikTok’s new U.S. majority ownership that it will not use its platform to collect more user data than is necessary or employ algorithms that harm kids online.
A humbler outcome is that Congress scrutinizes the terms of any future TikTok sale.