What Trump Wants from a TikTok Deal with China

Friday morning, Donald Trump, during a highly anticipated phone call with the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, was to discuss a range of questions, including the current trade in their two countries, the fate of Taiwan, and a colony of what has become an international drama of several months above Tiktok, the social application of Chinese who was briefly dark in the Tiktok this year. Critics of the platform underline serious concerns, in particular that its use has widespread negative effects on the mental well-being of children and adolescents, that its content promotes pro-Chinese points of view, and that the company could endanger national security, given the giant data of the data it collects on its American users. After the call, towards the end of a typically discursive truth social post, Trump announced, almost outside, that the problem had been approved: “The call was very good, we will blame again by phone, appreciate Tiktok’s approval, and both await APEC!”

Last spring, in recent months of his mandate, President Biden signed a law that would close Tiktok in the United States if operations in the United States of the application were not sold to an American entity on the last day of his presidency. It was the culmination of years of bipartite concerns that Tiktok, which belongs to the Chinese company Bytedance, and its owner algorithm presented a national security threat. Tiktok continued the government and, nine days before the entry into force of the law, during the oral arguments before the Supreme Court, the Brett Kavanaugh judge suggested that the Chinese government could use the information collected by the application to “develop spies, to transform people, to make people sing – people who, a generation from now, work in the FBI or the CIA or in the CIA

The court confirmed the ban and, for only fourteen hours, Tiktok became dark in the United States, but one of the first actions of President Trump on his return to the White House on January 20 – with the CEO of Tiktok, Shou Chew, present in his days. “Essentially, with Tiktok, I have the right to sell it or close it,” Trump said at the time. The Attorney General, Pam Bondi, sent letters to the big technological companies, notably Apple and Google, claiming that Trump had the power to prevail over the terms of a law which had been adopted by the Congress and confirmed by the Supreme Court. “The president previously determined that a brutal closure of the Tiktok platform would interfere with the execution of the president’s constitutional duties to deal with national security and foreign affairs,” Bondi wrote.

The president was going to prolong the break four more times, the last extension to come on September 16. “We have an agreement on Tiktok,” Trump told journalists that day. “We have a group of very large companies who want to buy it.” After Biden signed the law, a wave of potential bidders had surfaced. In January, I wrote on the militant billionaire Internet Frank McCourt and his “popular offer” for Tiktok, which he used to draw attention to his vision of an autonomous data web; Investor Kevin O’Leary, alias M. Wonderful, of “Shark Tank”, had joined the effort. Steven Mnuchin, the secretary of the Treasury during Trump’s first term, reported that he was interested in buying Tiktok with a group of investors, and the Wall Street Journal reported that Bobby Kotick, the former CEO of the Activision video reproach company, was also intrigued. But when I spoke to Kotick last winter, he told me that Elon Musk – the owner of X, Tesla and SpaceX – who was then a close ally of President Trump would make an ideal buyer.

A company, however, has long been associated with a potential Tiktok case: Oracle. During the first Trump administration – when Trump himself tried to ban Tiktok – Oracle was part of a negotiated compromise that allowed Tiktok to continue operating in the United States in a partnership known as the Texas Project, Oracle servers were chosen to host the data of US Tiktok user. Some were skeptical about the fact that the plan attenuated national security problems. In December 2024, the decision of DC Circuit Court, judge Douglas Ginsburg wrote: “Even when Tiktok’s voluntary mitigation measures were fully implemented, the” source code supporting the Tiktok platform, including the recommendation engine, will continue to be developed and maintained by subsidiary employees of Bytedance, including in the United States and China “. “”

After having signed the executive decree delaying the ban, Trump put the vice-president JD Vance responsible for finding a solution. The hypothesis was that Tiktok would make additional American investors would dilute Chinese shares, thus satisfying the requirement of an American owner. In March, Oracle had interviews with the leaders of the Congress of the Agreement. A person aware of the discussions told Politico that the proposal would make the government depend on the security guarantees of Oracle. “If the Oracle agreement advances, you still have this [algorithm] Controlled by the Chinese, “said the person.” This means that everything you do is say “to trust Oracle” to disseminate the data and guarantee that there is no “rear door” on the data “. Amazon has entered the scrum with a last -minute offer.