Trump weighs options to suspend law banning TikTok for 60 to 90 days: Report

Trump will be sworn into office on January 20, a day after the legal deadline for TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance to sell off the popular app’s US operations.

However, legal experts have questioned whether an executive order issued by a US president can overcome a law.

Executive orders “are not magical documents. They’re just press releases with nicer stationery,” Alan Rozenshtein, a former national security adviser to the Justice Department, was quoted as saying.

“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 that much more official,” he said.

As per the provisions of the law, it is illegal for marketplace entities (such as Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store) as well as cloud service providers (like Oracle) to “distribute, maintain, or update (or enable the distribution, maintenance, or updating of) a foreign adversary controlled application.”

During his first term as president, Trump sought to ban TikTok by issuing an executive order that was overturned by multiple federal courts.

But the businessman-turned-politician appears to have had a change of heart since then.

“I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok,” Trump said last month. His lawyers even asked the US Supreme Court to pause the divest-or-ban law so that he would have time to “resolve the dispute through political means.”

Shou Zi Chew, the chief of TikTok, visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in December last year. Shortly after the meeting with Chew, Trump shared data revealing that videos posted on TikTok from his team garnered four billion more views than Kamala Harris – the Democratic nominee who went up against Trump and lost in the 2024 US presidential elections.

“Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?” Trump said in another post on his own social media app Truth Social this month.