Trump Tariffs tank TikTok deal
New executive order delays shutdown for another 75 days
The deal to spin TikTok off from Chinese owned ByteDance was hours from close last week, with Amazon reportedly entering the fray, when China pulled the plug, insisting on tariff negotiations first.
The White House was hours away from announcing a proposal this week to spin off TikTok when the Chinese government walked away from the deal after President Trump’s tariff announcement on Wednesday.
Trump unveiled a series of tariffs on Wednesday, including a 34 percent tariff on Chinese imports. China responded on Friday announcing a reciprocal tariff on American imports.
The White House and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance had agreed to a proposed deal by Wednesday and were preparing to announce it Thursday when the company told administration officials that China insisted on tariff negotiations first, according to several people familiar with the negotiations. Reports on Thursday suggested that Amazon had made a last-minute bid for the company.
The eleventh-hour deal collapse led Trump to announce on Friday that he was signing another executive order which would extend the deadline for TikTok’s nationwide ban another 75 days.
Trump said his administration had made “tremendous progress” toward a deal to “save TikTok” from a legally mandated ban which was scheduled to take effect this weekend. He said that the deal proposal needed “more work to ensure all necessary approvals are signed.”
“We hope to continue working in Good Faith with China, who I understand are not very happy about our Reciprocal Tariffs,” Trump said on social media. “We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark.’ We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.”
ByteDance kept its statement to a bare minimum, simply stating that an agreement had not been reached and that there were key matters to be resolved.
President Trump cannot simply overturn the TikTok ban by means of executive order. A large bipartisan majority in Congress voted last year to force a sale of TikTok or ban it for all 170 million US users. The US Supreme Court upheld the ruling earlier this year.
TikTok did briefly go dark as the administration transferred from President Biden to Trump, but Trump, who credits TikTok with helping his message reach the plurality of voters necessary to get him over the line in November, signed an executive order telling the Justice Department to let TikTok stay operational for 75 days so his administration could “pursue a resolution” beyond a ban.
The TikTok deal is just one casualty of the Trump tariffs. The tariffs, which have shocked the corporate and financial world despite Trump campaigning on them and signposting them clearly since he took office, have triggered a collapse in stock markets. At the time of writing the FTSE 100 is plummeting, along with the retirement hopes of a generation, and putting the relationships between the US and its former allies and trading partners under immense strain.