President Donald Trump says his TikTok deal is still on the table, even after Chinese officials backed out on account of his tariffs.
Trump said Wednesday a potential deal for ByteDance — TikTok’s Chinese parent company — to divest and keep the app available in the U.S. is “still on the table.” However, several reports earlier this week claimed the deal was derailed by the president’s slew of new tariffs on China.
“We have a deal with some very good people, some very rich companies that would do a great job with it, but we’re going to have to wait and see what’s going to happen with China,” Trump said from the Oval Office. “It’s on the table, very much.”
This week, Trump hiked tariffs on Chinese goods to 125 percent, while Chinese officials retaliated with 84 percent tariffs on American goods. The president announced a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs for all other countries.
Last week, Trump and his team brokered a deal in which new investors would own 50 percent of a new TikTok entity, while Chinese owners would retain less than 20 percent, The New York Times reports.
Beijing was comfortable with the deal, the Times reports, and a draft executive order outlining the deal was circulating by Thursday. But then, ByteDance called the White House and said Beijing is backing out, citing Trump’s tariffs on China, according to the outlet.
As a result, Trump signed an executive order Friday yet again extending the TikTok sale deadline, this time to June 19. At the time, Trump attributed the extension to a row over tariffs: ““The report is that we had a deal, pretty much, for TikTok, not a deal but pretty close, and then China changed the deal because of tariffs.”
He then praised the “tremendous progress” his administration had made on a deal but said it “requires more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed.” However, The Hill reports existing investors, new investors, ByteDance and the White House had all signed off on it before Beijing backed out.
This comes after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said last month that Trump “doesn’t like to ask for extensions” and wants to “get it done in the timeframe that he has.”
Under a bipartisan bill passed and signed by then-President Joe Biden last year, ByteDance must sell TikTok to a U.S.-based company, or the app will be banned from U.S. servers such as the App Store and Google.
Trump signed an executive order giving TikTok’s parent company ByteDance until April 5 to either divest or be banned from American app stores on his first day in office. Trump’s order marked an extension from the original January 19 deadline, which Biden said he wouldn’t enforce as it was his last full day in office.
