Trump’s TikTok Deal Is Still an Unresolved Mess
On Saturday, President Donald Trump declared that his months-long drama with TikTok had ended in success, calling an agreement made between the social media company, Oracle, and Walmart a “great deal for America.” Within 48 hours, Trump had reversed course. TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, still says it’s adamant about retaining majority control of the app—an arrangement the president had previously indicated would be unacceptable. During an appearance on Fox News on Monday morning, he announced that the deal wouldn’t be approved unless ByteDance had “nothing to do with it.” In other words, Trump’s TikTok soap opera remains an unresolved, confusing mess.
And it’s not even Trump’s only tech concern to run into trouble this weekend. On Sunday, a federal judge blocked the president’s proposed ban on WeChat, a messaging app used by millions of Americans to keep in touch with Chinese contacts. Judge Laurel Beeler issued a preliminary injunction on the president’s action right before it was set to take effect, siding with a group of WeChat users who filed a lawsuit arguing the ban violated their First Amendment rights. Trump previously said he wanted to ban WeChat to protect national security, but the judge wrote that his administration “has put in scant evidence” that blocking the app “addresses those concerns.”
It all goes to show how chaotic and politicized the Trump administration’s crusade against WeChat and TikTok has been, after Trump signed two executive orders labeling the apps national security threats on August 6. Nearly two months later, TikTok and WeChat are as popular as ever. TikTok has 100 million users in the US, and WeChat was downloaded 29,000 times in the country on Sunday, a single-day record, according to the analytics firm Apptopia, which began collecting data in 2015.
