By Jack Phillips
Contributing Writer
President Donald Trump on Thursday signed an executive order to extend the deadline for the sale of TikTok for another 90 days.
ByteDance, a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, was nearing a deadline to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations and assets under a national security law that was upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
“I’ve just signed the executive order extending the deadline for the TikTok closing for 90 days (Sept. 17, 2025),” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Thursday.
The president did not provide further comment on the order.
Text of the executive order was included in Trump’s post, which instructed the Department of Justice not to take any action to enforce laws against TikTok or ByteDance over the next three months.
It means that if Trump doesn’t issue a new extension, TikTok would go dark in the United States around mid-September.
Trump had already twice granted a reprieve from enforcement of a law on TikTok that was supposed to take effect in January.
Trump said last month that he would extend the June 19 deadline, noting that the video-sharing platform helped him win younger voters during the 2024 election. Earlier on Tuesday, he had told reporters on Air Force One that he expected to again extend the deadline.
“Probably, yeah,” Trump told reporters Tuesday regarding extending the deadline. “Probably have to get China approval, but I think we’ll get it. I think President Xi will ultimately approve it,” he said, referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to media outlets this week. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark.”
In March, the president said he would be willing to reduce tariffs on China in a bid to encourage ByteDance to sell the short video app, which is estimated to be used by 170 million Americans.
A deal had been in the works this spring that would spin off TikTok’s U.S. operations into a new U.S.-based firm, majority-owned and operated by U.S. investors, but it was put on hold after the Chinese regime indicated it would not approve it following Trump’s April announcements of tariffs on Chinese goods.
“We had a deal pretty much for TikTok — not a deal but pretty close — and then China changed the deal because of the tariffs,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on April 6. “If I gave a little cut in tariffs, they’d approve that deal in 15 minutes, which shows you the power of tariffs.”
Ahead of Trump’s latest executive order, some Republican lawmakers signaled they don’t believe he should extend the deadline again.
“I’m not overly delighted,” Senate Armed Services Chair Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., told Axios about the delay on Wednesday. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“That’s not my favorite thing,” Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., told Axios about Trump’s decision on TikTok. “I’m fine with him trying to sell it, that’s fine, but I think at a certain point we’ve got to enforce this law.”
And Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told the outlet Wednesday that the CCP has “used TikTok for espionage and propaganda” in the United States, noting that the legislation that was passed was done so to force the CCP to divest in TikTok.
Democratic senators, including Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have argued that the president has no legal authority to extend the deadline, and they’ve suggested that the deal under consideration would not meet legal requirements.
Reuters contributed to this report.
