Trump’s sensational last-minute plan to save TikTok from a nationwide ban revealed

President-elect Donald Trump could issue an executive order that would suspend the TikTok ban, which takes effect on Sunday.

The move would prevent U.S. officials from enforcing the law for 60 to 90 days, two anonymous sources familiar with the deliberations told the Washington Post.

Trump’s inauguration is next Monday, a day after the nationwide ban is expected to be made official.

Sunday is the deadline for TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, to sell its U.S. assets or be removed from U.S. app stores over concerns about the app’s ties to the communist Chinese government.

Under that ban, Americans would still be able to use the app, but new downloads would be blocked and the software would slowly deteriorate over time due to lack of updates.

This isn’t the first time Trump has expressed interest in overturning the ban, which President Joe Biden signed into law last April.

The law requires TikTok’s parent company, Chinese tech company ByteDance, to sell its US assets by January 19, 2025 or face a nationwide ban.

The Supreme Court heard TikTok’s appeal against the ban last week, but is expected to allow the law to go ahead as planned on Sunday.

Trump has repeatedly told the more than 14 million followers of his own TikTok account that he plans to “save” the app once he comes to power.

But experts have said an executive order may not be an effective way to overturn the ban because it cannot completely circumvent a law that passed Congress by a wide margin and has support from both sides of the aisle.

Executive orders “are not magical documents. They’re just press releases with nicer stationery,” former Justice Department national security adviser Alan Rozenshtein told the newspaper. Washingtonpost.

“TikTok will still be banned, and it will still be illegal for Apple and Google to do business with them. But it will make the president’s intention not to enforce the law much more official,” he added.

There are other options the president-elect could take to reverse the ban.

The most direct way for Trump to try to reverse the policy would be to repeal the law that created the ban.

But a repeal would have to pass both the Senate and the House of Representatives before Trump could put it into effect.

So he would still face the challenge of gaining congressional support.

Trump could also try to prevent the Justice Department from actually enforcing the law, which requires distributors like Apple and Google to stop offering TikTok in their app stores and requires service providers like Oracle to back up the infrastructure that powers the app. keep.

Companies that violate these terms may be subject to a fine of $5,000 per user using TikTok.

But if Trump’s Justice Department doesn’t issue these fines, tech companies can continue to provide access to TikTok without fear of fines.

However, companies may choose to comply with the ban anyway to avoid legal consequences if the Trump administration reverses its approach.

Sources revealed on Wednesday that TikTok threatens to close its app to US users next Sunday if: federal ban goes into effect.

During the shutdown, people who try to open the app will see a pop-up message directing them to a website with information about the ban, sources told Reuters.

The company also plans to give users the option to download all their data so they can capture their personal information, they said.

Shutting down such services would not require extended planning, the source said, noting that most operations will continue as normal from this week.

If the ban is later reversed, TikTok could restore service to U.S. users in a relatively short time, the source said.