On Saturday, U.S. President Donald Trump gave his blessing to a deal that would see Walmart and Oracle buy shares in TikTok Global — as long as the agreement comes with $5 billion in funding for education programs on “the real history of our country,” The Daily Mail reported.
Under the proposed arrangement, Oracle would take a 12.5 percent share in the new TikTok Global and Walmart would take 7.5 percent, according to the publication. While Chinese firm ByteDance would retain approximately 80 percent of the company, TikTok Global would technically have a majority American ownership because it is 40 percent owned by U.S. investors.
“I have given the deal my blessing,” the president said on Saturday, shortly before he departed for a North Carolina campaign rally.
“It will have nothing to do with China,” he added, according to the news source.
“It’ll be totally secure, that’s part of the deal.”
At the rally, Trump told his supporters that the $5 billion fund “for the education of American youth” would go toward teaching “real history, not fake history,” which the publication suggested was a jab at the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which aims to reframe U.S. history around the consequences of slavery.
The purchase would see Texas become the home of TikTok, which, according to the president, could potentially create 25,000 jobs.
However, any arrangement between the video-sharing platform and potential buyers would still need to be signed off by Beijing, the news source noted. Furthermore, authorities in China previously said they would not permit ByteDance to sell TikTok’s algorithms.
As The Daily Mail reported, on Thursday, Trump announced that he was to sign an order tho promote patriotic education through a scheme entitled the “1776 Commission.”
In his speech, which marked the 233rd anniversary of the signing of the Constitution, Trump declared that the panel would encourage teachers to promote “the miracle of American history,” and claimed that the founding of America “set in motion the unstoppable chain of events that abolished slavery.”
Nikole Hannah-Jones — the journalist who founded The New York Times’ 1619 Project — responded to Trump’s remarks on Twitter.
“These are hard days we’re in but I take great satisfaction from knowing that now even Trump’s supporters know the date 1619 and mark it as the beginning American slavery,” she tweeted, according to the publication.
“1619 is part of the national lexicon. That cannot be undone, no matter how hard they try.”
As The Inquisitr covered, earlier in September, Trump announced that both TikTok and WeChat would be banned from U.S. app stores starting Sunday, September 20, unless an American company took over their ownership. The Trump administration had previously accused TikTok of threatening national security due to the fact its privacy settings allow it to collect, store, and share data including users’ location, contacts, age, phone number, and ISP addresses. The app is owned by a Chinese company that agreed to share this data with their government.