Since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration as the 47th president of the United States on January 20th, he has enacted a number of policies that clearly define his stances on domestic and foreign affairs. Alongside focusing on tightening immigration laws, withdrawing from environmental regulatory agreements, and implementing strict trade policies, President Trump has also been involved in the controversy surrounding TikTok, the world-famous video-sharing platform, and its potential ban due to national security concerns.
On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order declaring that TikTok would be granted a 75-day delay for its ban in the United States, a policy that was initially signed by former President Joe Biden. According to USAToday, Trump stated that he would use this 75-day period to fully analyze and address the national security concerns regarding the app. This move enforced by Trump was one of the first acts he had instructed after returning to office, but since this decision, his policies surrounding TikTok have remained vague.
Everything traces back to Trump’s first term as U.S. president in 2020, when he was largely in favor of banning TikTok and largely denounced the app, stating that it was a threat to America’s national security. On August 6, 2020, Trump signed an executive order that banned any transactions between TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, and U.S. citizens, stating that the ban would occur 45 days after the executive order was signed. This sanction was an effort by the Trump administration to put pressure on ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American-owned company, eliminating any potential national security threats that many had feared. The cause of President Trump’s anger at TikTok, however, seemed to be not only the concerns over national security, but rather his animosity toward China during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to The New York Times, Trump had revealed in an interview with Bloomberg that he was considering the ban because he believed that “what happened to China with this virus … is disgraceful.”
Moving forward to April of 2024, then-President Joe Biden urged for and signed a similar law that would call for ByteDance to sell TikTok to a non-Chinese company or face a total ban of the app across the United States. The Biden administration, much like the Trump administration’s argument in 2020, argued that the amount of user data that was collected by TikTok possibly posed a threat to U.S. security, and thus needed to be addressed. While controversies loaded around the public calling for Biden to repeal the signing, the presidential elections soon rolled around, and the Biden administration’s say on the issue gradually faded away. In the end, Biden and his administration stated that they would not take any more action regarding the TikTok ban, and that the matter would be left to the Trump administration, as reported by ABC News.
This was around the same time that Trump’s stance on the issue seems to have changed, as he suddenly condemned the Biden administration for their proposal of the bill banning TikTok, as well as Congress for agreeing to push such a bill. While this condemnation was largely hypocritical on his part, it seemed quite transparent that Trump was pushing for such an argument to win favor for his presidential campaign. While conceding that TikTok remained a threat to America’s national security, Trump maintained that “a lot of young kids would go crazy without it,” as he told CNBC in March of 2024, according to Fox Business.
Fast forward to 2025, after the presidential elections, and it seems that President Trump has come full circle with his views to now claim himself as the savior of TikTok. He has become increasingly vocal about his desires to “save” the platform, becoming more reserved in his stance on advocating against the ban. In the past few weeks, Trump has continued to look for ways in which an American-based company could purchase TikTok, speaking positively with CEOs Elon Musk and Larry Ellison, as well as even looking for a new sovereign wealth fund.
President Donald Trump, recognized as one of the most vibrant and peculiar presidents that the United States has ever had, is once again displaying his persona through his ever-so-changing stance on TikTok. With TikTok’s future remaining uncertain in the United States, who knows? Perhaps Trump’s stance on the app is far from being fixed.
