President Trump said the Chinese app TikTok has “a lot of potential buyers” in the U.S. as the deadline looms to find a new owner or be banned here.
“We’re working on TikTok. We have a lot of potential buyers. There’s tremendous interest in TikTok,” Mr. Trump told reporters late Sunday aboard Air Force One. “The decision is going to be my decision, as you know, through Congress, and they’ve given me the power to make the decision, and we have a great team of people essentially taking bids.”
The app has an April 5 deadline to find a buyer, but Mr. Trump has said he would have no problem extending the deadline. He has already extended the deadline by 75 days.
“We’re dealing with China also on it, because they may have something to do with it. And we’ll see how that goes,” Mr. Trump said, adding that he’d like to see the social media app “remain alive.”
He went on to tout the votes he received from the younger generations as a reason why he wants to keep the app operating in the U.S.
“Republicans generally don’t do very well with the young crowd, and I think a lot of it could have been TikTok, it could have been Joe Rogan, and it could have been a lot of things. But it was also TikTok. There’ll be a deal with TikTok,” he said.
There have been some U.S. contenders who have said they’re open to buying TikTok, including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, YouTuber James Donaldson, known as MrBeast, and billionaire Frank McCourt, among others.
Last April, then-President Biden signed into law the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act mandating that Chinese-owned company ByteDance sell the app by Jan. 19 or be banned in the U.S. He argued that the country’s national security was at risk because the app is Chinese-owned.
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump signed an executive order delaying the ban for 75 days.
But, Mr. Trump has changed his tune on Tiktok ever since getting the youth vote — the biggest demographic on the app — in the November election. Previously he agreed with Mr. Biden that the app was a threat to national security.
