The deal is said to involve private parties and may be announced after a scheduled phone call Friday between Trump and Xi Jinping.
In an earlier post today, I recalled the blind eye the Republican Congress has turned to President Trump’s lawless refusal to enforce the TikTok divestment statute, which requires relinquishment of control of the social media platform by an agent of the Communist Chinese regime (Byte Dance). Congress, led by Republicans, enacted the TikTok law, and the Supreme Court unanimously upheld it in TikTok v. Garland, just three days before Trump took office.
In between sessions of talks in Madrid with Chinese officials, Trump Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced that the administration had reached a “framework” of an agreement with Beijing, the New York Times reports. Secretary Bessent did not provide details.
It’s not clear what “framework” is necessary. The law is very clear that if TikTok’s ownership includes agents of China, then TikTok may not operate in the United States. (All Chinese businesses are required by China’s laws to assist the regime as directed, including with data collection.)
In his first term, the president rightly regarded TikTok as a profound national security challenge because it is the most successful mass intelligence-gathering operation ever conducted against our country (among others) by a hostile regime. Hence, the enactment of the law. But Trump has since convinced himself that TikTok helped him win the 2024 election. He has consequently refused to faithfully execute the law, fretting about the political heat he would take if TikTok — which has been downloaded over 200 million times in the U.S., according to estimates — is shut down. Of course, the law does not require that TikTok be shut down; it can continue operating as long as China is out of the picture. The fact that China has adamantly resisted getting out of the picture may be the most persuasive evidence of how highly valuable the intelligence-gathering operation is to the anti-American regime.
The president’s latest illegal extension of the law lapses on Wednesday, at which point, in theory, a TikTok ban would go into effect. But that’s unlikely. Bessent has indicated that the deal will be confirmed in (and presumably explained after) a scheduled phone call between Trump and Xi Jinping on Friday.
We can hope that unacceptable schemes, such as a potential U.S. government stake in TikTok, have been abandoned. The Wall Street Journal quotes Bessent as saying that the deal is “between two private parties.” There is reason to believe China’s public announcement this weekend that it is escalating its antitrust and other pressure against U.S. chip giant Nvidia is mainly noise to cover Xi’s capitulation on TikTok; the regime also covets a visit by Trump to China and may, in furtherance of that end, be abandoning its TikTok intransigence.
The WSJ adds that the president tweeted on Truth Social this morning: “I will be speaking to President Xi on Friday. The relationship remains a very strong one!!!”