Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to block a federal law’s imminent ban on TikTok in the United States if the popular app’s Chinese parent company doesn’t sell it by next month’s deadline.
The nation’s highest court will hear arguments in the case on January 10.
In a filing with the Supreme Court on Friday, Trump’s attorney D. John Sauer — who is also Trump’s nominee for U.S. solicitor general — said the president-elect doesn’t take any position on the challenge, but he is asking the justices to pause the law to allow his incoming administration “the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case.”
A federal appeals court this month turned down TikTok’s challenge of a quickly approaching forced sale or nationwide ban, teeing up the Supreme Court challenge.
TikTok argued that the ban infringes on its users’ First Amendment protections, but a three-judge appellate panel agreed that the government “offered persuasive evidence” that a law passed by Congress to potentially ban the app is “narrowly tailored to protect national security.”
President Joe Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act into law earlier this year after bipartisan passage in Congress, which set a deadline of January 19 — one day before Trump’s inauguration — for ByteDance to divest from the platform to an American company, or face a ban.
TikTok said in a statement this month that the ban was jammed through Congress using “flawed and hypothetical information, resulting in outright censorship of the American people.”
On the campaign trail, Trump appeared to change his tune around the app, which he had previously supported banning. He had issued an executive order banning the platform in 2020 during his first stint in office but the company successfully challenged the order in court.
“I was at the point where I could have gotten it done if I wanted to,” he told MSNBC’s Squawk Box on March 11. “There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users.”
A few months later, Trump launched his own TikTok account.
Trump also met with TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew this month after telling reporters at a Mar-a-Lago press conference he has a “warm spot” for the app, as he falsely claimed that he “won youth” by “34 points.”
“There are those that say that TikTok has something to do with it,” he said. (Trump gained some ground with young voters but lost by roughly 10 percentage points among voters aged 18 to 29.)
“President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the Government — concerns which President Trump himself has acknowledged,” Sauer told the Supreme Court.
Members of Congress and federal law enforcement agencies have argued that the app presents a national security threat that could allow the Chinese government to mine data from its millions of users and show manipulative content.
Several Republican-led states have also banned TikTok from government devices, while the state of Montana banned the app altogether, though that law was blocked in federal court.
