Many countries have seen the exit of the extremely famous yet controversial platform TikTok and America could be next. Its security breach fiasco tarnished the image of the widely popular app and it looks like the Supreme Court is all set to ban the application on January 19, 2025. This is just one day before Donald Trump, who now seems to be opposing this ban, takes office.
The President-elect has rallied against the app for years on end but has suddenly changed his stance and is now requesting the court for some time to reach a negotiated resolution. But can Donald Trump save TikTok from being banned? Let’s find out!
Former Justice Department attorney Alan Rozenshtein told Vox about the many ways Trump can attempt to reverse the ban, should he wish to do so. Firstly, he suggested that the President-elect could convince Congress to repeal the law. Rozenshtein, however, explains that this could lead to failure as it would require Congress to vote against their law which was passed with a “broad bipartisan consensus” not even a year ago. But he thinks that Trump would not want to spend the first 100 days of his presidency working on a task as hectic as this.
The second way that Rozenshtein proposed is for Donald Trump to direct his attorney general to not enforce the law. He explains,
“The law works by penalizing the app stores and cloud service providers who work with TikTok up to $5,000 per user, and he could just direct [prospective] Attorney General Pam Bondi to not enforce the law. That sort of thing is his constitutional prerogative. But the problem there is that the law would still be in effect, and these companies will still be violating it.”
The third way to go about this is simply declaring that the law does not exist or apply. Rozenshtein explains that this can be done through the provision of the law which defines qualified divestiture. In simpler terms, it means that the foreign adversary application is no longer controlled by the foreign adversary. This can either be achieved through the partial sale of assets or simply by announcing that the app is not controlled by China and its parent company, ByteDance.
Lastly, Rozenshtein told the outlet that Donald Trump can facilitate a sale. Rozenshtein emphasizes this by explaining that the problem is not with the demand as many Americans would happily rush to buy TikTok. However, the problem lies on the supply end.
“Will the Chinese government permit ByteDance to sell TikTok with or without the algorithm? So I think it would really be Trump as a diplomat going and trying to strike a deal with [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping. The thing is, I don’t know if Trump can do it. I don’t know if he wants to do it.”
The change of heart in Trump for the foreign application has occurred only recently. Removing his former ambiguity, Trump now loves the app because it helped him campaign a lot and reach a new wave of youngsters. He has over 14 million followers on the application and many believe that he doesn’t want to lose that kind of power.
In the past, Trump was anti-TikTok simply because he was angry at China for how they handled the coronavirus pandemic. Now that the app has helped his motive, the only thing left to see is if he would fight this ban or not.