As Trump explores options to save TikTok, can he really undo Biden’s action against Chinese app?

As the ban on TikTok in the US is nearing, president-elect Donald Trump is reportedly exploring options to temporarily suspend TikTok ban-or-sale ruling for 60 to 90 days through presidential executive order to find an alternative solution.

Trump will be sworn in as the US president on January 20, a day after the legal deadline for TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to sell off the popular video-sharing app’s US operations.

After the US Justice Department expressed concerns that the Chinese government could covertly use TikTok’s data to spy on Americans, a law was signed last year by outgoing President Joe Biden calling ByteDance to sell the app by January 19 or face an immediate nation-wide ban.

Trump last month said he has a “warm spot” in his heart for TikTok. This came as a change of stance by Trump on the Chinese app following his successful presidential campaign.

Now, a report by The Washington Post cited two people familiar with the deliberations to say that Trump has been considering ways to save TikTok from facing ban in the US, talking through unconventional dealmaking and legal maneuvers including an executive order that would unravel the law passed by the Congress last year with bipartisan support.

Cinematic flourish

The report quoted one of the sources as saying that Trump is eager to be seen as “making a deal” and signing an executive order soon after the deadline’s passing would give the proceedings a “cinematic flourish”.

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Will Trump’s executive order save TikTok from US ban

Legal experts, meanwhile, argued that an executive order issued by a US president can’t entirely overcome a law that Congress has approved with overwhelming bipartisan support.

The Washington Post report quoted Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department, as saying that executive orders “are not magical documents. They’re just press releases with nicer stationery."

“TikTok will still be banned, and it will still be illegal for Apple and Google to do business with them. But it will make the president’s intention not to enforce the law that much more official,” Rozenshtein said.

According to the provisions of the law, it is illegal for marketplace entities (such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store) as well as cloud service providers (like Oracle) to “distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application”.

Trump’s ‘change of heart’

In his first presidential term, Trump tried to ban TikTok by issuing an executive order which was overturned by several federal courts, but in recent days, it appears that he has had a change of heart.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump, earlier this month said, “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?”

In December last year, chief of TikTok, Shou Zi Chew, visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence. Shortly after the meeting with Chew, the incoming US President shared data revealing that videos posted on TikTok from his team garnered four billion more views than Kamala Harris – his rival and the Democratic presidential nominee who lost in the 2024 US presidential elections.

Also Read: Will Musk now own TikTok? China mulls selling short-video app to Tesla CEO, says report

Earlier this week, a report by Bloomberg said officials in the Chinese government had discussed with Tesla and X CEO Elon Musk to purchase TikTok’s US operations. The report, however, was rejected by TikTok as “pure fiction”.