Introducing Endless Mode: A New Games & Anime Site from Paste
Donald Trump is having a busy week, but somehow, between bailing on the G7 summit, threatening Iranian civilians, and babbling about flag poles, he managed to find time to give TikTok another 90 days. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Tuesday that the president would sign yet another executive order delaying the sell-or-ban law this week, per CBS News. This will mark the third time TikTok’s death has been delayed since Trump took office in January; now, the app’s 170 million U.S. users will be able to keep dancing at least through mid-September (and likely longer).
While all of this hullabaloo seems largely irrelevant now, TikTok was first put on the executioner’s block by a law that went into effect right before Trump’s inauguration. That ruling, which passed with bipartisan support over concerns for national security, stated that the app had to find a U.S. buyer and divest from Chinese parent company ByteDance, or be banned within the United States. The law does not include any language permitting a sitting president to postpone its enforcement, Variety points out, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from going ahead and doing it anyway.
“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” Leavitt said in a statement, conveniently leaving out the fact that it was Trump himself who started this ball rolling during his first term. “This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”
Trump had reportedly almost finalized a deal to spin off TikTok’s U.S. business into a new company under U.S. ownership, but flubbed it with his antagonistic tariffs. That’s the art of the deal for you! Now, he has at least three months to come up with a new one.
