Trump takes break from warmongering to give TikTok another 90 days

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.