Donald Trump has given TikTok and Microsoft until September 15 to hammer our a deal to sell American operation the Chinese Video app or it will be shut down.
Negotiation are underway between Microsoft and the company. Trump says that the federal government should be paid a “substantial amount of money” as part of the deal.
“I don’t mind whether it’s Microsoft or someone else, a big company, a secure company, a very American company buys it,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday. “It’ll close down on Sept. 15 unless Microsoft or somebody else is able to buy it and work out a deal, an appropriate deal, so the Treasury of the United States gets a lot of money.”
Trump set off a furious scramble over the fate of the Chinese-owned app on Friday, when he said he would ban the company’s operations through an executive action on Saturday.
The White House has said it’s concerned that TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance Ltd., could be compelled to hand over American users’ data to Beijing or use the app to influence the 165 million Americans, and more than 2 billion users globally, who have downloaded it.
Teenagers opposed to the president have also used the app to disrupt the president’s campaign activities, including signing up for tickets to the president’s first rally since the beginning of the pandemic, in Tulsa. Attendance at the late June event was far below expectations, and Trump hasn’t held another rally since.
Leave a comment