On April 4, President Donald Trump delivered the news everyone was dreading. The TikTok ban, which was supposed to come into effect on Jan. 19, was once again delayed.
It was later confirmed by Trump himself that the deal fell through as a result of the tariff situation with China, which involved Trump raising tariffs on imported goods to 104%. While the deal was already on the table and ready to be announced, the tariff increase stopped China in its tracks, and led to the country pulling out of the deal.
Since then, news about the future of TikTok has been scarce. However, Trump finally issued an update on April 17. In conversation with Shelby Talcott, White House correspondent at, Trump said that he would “just delay” the TikTok deal “until this thing works out.”
“I guess we’ll spend five minutes to talk about TikTok [during tariff negotiations],” he added. “It wouldn’t take very long.”
As reported by The Information, the proposed TikTok deal would’ve seen Trump make a new company called ‘TikTok America.’ It would have involved TikTok collaborating with Oracle, a cloud-based platform that already stores US TikTok users’ data as part of Project Texas. ByteDance would have had a 19.99% stake in the business.
However, the possibility of this deal becoming a reality is looking more and more unlikely.
