Mallory Wilson | July 25, 2025

(The Washington Times) — The White House has said nothing about TikTok for nearly a month since President Trump announced he had buyers for the social media app.

On July 4, Mr. Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One that the U.S. “pretty much has a deal” to be discussed the following week.

Last month, the president granted a 90-day extension to the Chinese-owned app, giving parent company ByteDance until mid-September to find an American buyer or face a U.S. ban.

In an interview with Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, he hinted at a wealthy group of buyers, but no one has taken credit. He also said he thought the app’s sale would need Chinese approval.

The June extension was the third of his administration for the short-video app. In April 2024, President Biden signed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, which effectively required ByteDance to sell TikTok within a year or face a ban in the United States.

The justification for the ban was that TikTok threatened national security, as the app’s Chinese owners collected data from U.S. users. The Supreme Court upheld the law.

Mr. Trump withdrew his full support for a ban in the name of national security after young people, the largest population on the app, voted for him in November.

A Pew Research survey in December found that a third of U.S. adults use TikTok, including 59% of those younger than 30.

William Akoto, a professor of foreign policy and global security at American University, said the only thing that changed since the Biden-era ban was Mr. Trump’s realization that TikTok was useful to him.

“Some people earn their entire livelihoods on this app, and so I think it’s just sort of a calculation that the Trump administration has made that it is much more popular to keep the app rather than try to ban it,” Mr. Akoto said.

A study released by Oxford Economics and TikTok in March 2024 found that more than 7 million businesses were among the app’s 170 million active users in the U.S. The report found that business use of TikTok contributed more than $24 billion to the gross domestic product in 2023.

On his first day in office in January, Mr. Trump extended the April deadline for 75 days. He announced another extension in April.

“As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement after the third extension. “This extension will last 90 days, which the Administration will spend working to ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”

TikTok celebrated the extension in a statement: “We are grateful for President Trump’s leadership and support in ensuring that TikTok continues to be available for more than 170 million American users and 7.5 million U.S. businesses that rely on the platform.”

These continuous extensions leave the sale of TikTok and U.S. national security in limbo.

Mr. Akoto argued that selling TikTok to an American company wouldn’t solve the fundamental issue of national security being at risk. The sale would ensure that the Chinese government doesn’t gather American data from the app, but Beijing could use other avenues, such as purchasing the data from different firms.

“A sale is not really going to do much to improve national security in any real sense,” he said, and the best avenue to solve the problem is increased scrutiny over the kind of data that apps can collect from users.

One way is to examine what data apps need from their users to function and set guidelines for what they can collect and how they can use it.

“There needs to be very strict regulations about how that data is stored, who has access to that data, where that data is stored, and under what conditions that data can be released to a third party,” he said.

Mr. Akoto said implementing such regulations would be difficult because social media companies lobby lawmakers to prevent them.

“So again, we are back in this scenario where they have a lot of data on us, there’s no real clarity on how the data is stored or who has access to it, and we end up in this situation where we can then cite that as a national security issue.”