President Donald Trump’s plans to enable a US acquisition of TikTok have been thwarted by Trump’s plans to tariff the shit out of China.
According to The Verge, the new global tariffs imposed on China and dozens of other nations “seemingly torpedoed” plans for candidates — mostly like Oracle — to take over the ByteDance-owned app. The White House was reportedly “only seriously considering an Oracle-led consortium,” which proposed licensing the algorithm, controlling data collection and software updates, but allowing ByteDance and minority stake in the company. This was “set to be announced” amidst the then-looming TikTok ban deadline (which has been delayed again).
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However, “[Trump’s] tariff announcement on Wednesday torched any immediate chance of the TikTok proposal being blessed by the Chinese government,” said The Verge’s Alex Heath. A 34 percent tariff imposed on US imports from China obliterated any good faith efforts to negotiate a deal.
The Associated Press corroborated this: “ByteDance representatives called the White House to indicate that China would no longer approve the deal until there could be negotiations about trade and tariffs.”
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It’s unclear whether Trump was hoping to use the steep tariff as a bargaining chip to broker a TikTok deal in exchange for lowering the tariff, but China is playing hardball. Instead, it imposed its own 34 percent tariff on US goods imported to China.
On Friday, Trump announced on Truth Social that the deadline to divest TikTok from China or ban the app in the US had been extended for 75 days. However, the legality of this extension is being questioned—one member of the Senate Intelligence Committee told The Verge that it is “against the law.”
The president stated that while “tremendous progress” has been made, additional time is needed to finalize a deal.
So that’s global politics right now.
