FILE PHOTO: A woman poses with her smartphone displaying the @realdonaldtrump TikTok page, in Washington, U.S. January 19, 2025. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton/File Photo
President Donald Trump is weighing a new proposal on how to get short-form video social media platform TikTok in compliance with a federal law requiring it to divest from Chinese ownership or face an effective ban in the United States, CNN's Kayla Tausche reported on Wednesday.
Trump, who originally tried to force the divestiture of TikTok in the first place in his first term, later turned against the plan after a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed the mandate under former President Joe Biden — with some speculating it might be because prominent billionaire GOP megadonor Jeff Yass now holds a stake in TikTok. After taking office, Trump pushed back the date the ban would take effect to wrangle more time for a deal, and his advisers, including Vice President JD Vance, are proposing a group of tech companies and Republican-held private equity firms jointly take ownership of the platform.
According to Tausche, Trump's tariffs on China may be used as leverage to make a deal happen.
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Administration officials "believe that that having this infusion of capital, offsetting that Chinese ownership in what's frankly, being described as a fairly complex transaction, is going to be the one that wins the day," said Tausche. "And we know that the Vance camp is confident that President Trump will sign off, and other interest that's been registered from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft to acquire the whole of Tiktok are ... seen more or less as nonstarters here."
"So if Trump, you know, agrees to the Vance plan, they settle on a plan, then, is it a done deal then?" asked anchor Brianna Keilar.
"No," said Tausche. "The wildcard is President Xi in China, who has been a roadblock to the deal in the past. We know in 2020 that there were very high-stakes negotiations between the U.S. and China over what a potential deal would look like, whether China would allow the valuable algorithm to be sold with TikTok's U.S. operations, whether the U.S. would even find that passable from a national security standpoint. And in talking to advisers and people who are involved in this process, they believe that this type of structure is one that potentially could get President Xi on board."
"We've heard that President Trump himself wants a grand bargain of sorts, perhaps proposing to roll back some of the tariffs on China if they agree to this deal, and keeping some of those tariffs that he'll announce today as more or less of a bargaining chip," she added.
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