What Has Trump’s TikTok Drama Achieved?
Concerns about the Chinese video-sharing app are understandable. The president’s haphazard approach is not.
Okay now?
Photographer: Hollie Adams/Bloomberg
America’s oversharing teenagers can breathe a bit easier this week. TikTok, the wildly popular Chinese-owned ridiculous-video app, has been granted a reprieve by President Donald Trump’s administration. To what end? That’s hard to say.
On Friday, the Commerce Department announced a suite of new prohibitions targeting TikTok and the WeChat messaging-and-payments app, effectively seeking to shut both down. Then on Saturday, Trump said that he had given his “blessing” to a tentative deal in which Oracle Corp. and Walmart Inc. would take a minority stake in TikTok’s U.S. operations, while a federal judge temporarily halted the WeChat ban. By Monday, the president seemed to be cooling on the deal he had just touted.