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Donald Trump has asked the US Supreme Court to delay a legislative deadline that would force a sale or ban of TikTok to allow for a “political resolution” once he is sworn in as president next month.
Under a bill Congress approved in April, Chinese parent ByteDance must divest TikTok by January 19 2025 — the day before Trump is inaugurated as president — or face a countrywide ban.
The legislation came after US officials warned the platform posed national security risks, partly because ByteDance could be compelled to share the personal information of the 170mn Americans who use the video app with Beijing under Chinese law.
But Trump has asked the top court to put the deadline on hold while it considers the merits of the case in order to give his incoming administration “the opportunity to pursue a political resolution of the questions at issue in the case”, according to a brief filed on Friday.
On the campaign trail before his re-election, Trump said he opposed the platform’s ban and promised to “save” the app.
Efforts to do so represent a U-turn from 2020, when then-president Trump issued an executive order to block the app in the US and gave ByteDance 90 days to divest from its American assets and any data that TikTok had collected in the US. That order was blocked by the courts and ultimately revoked by US President Joe Biden, who later signed the law at the heart of the case.
The briefing said: “President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns expressed by the government — concerns which president Trump himself has acknowledged.”
The filing added Trump “takes no position on the underlying merits of this dispute”.
TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The request throws Trump, who as president would not have authority over the Supreme Court, in the middle of fraught legal proceedings that will decide the fate of the popular app in the US.
The top court has scheduled oral arguments in the case for January 10.
The brief comes after the Supreme Court earlier this month decided to hear TikTok’s appeal against a lower-court ruling that rejected its challenge to the law, as well as its subsequent request to halt the measure pending further court proceedings.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit earlier this month upheld the law, rejecting TikTok’s claim that it was unconstitutional and violated First Amendment protections for free speech.