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President-elect Donald Trump is asking the Supreme Court to let him negotiate a deal to save TikTok from an impending US ban.
In one short friend presented to the court, Trump says that he “seeks the ability to solve the problems at hand through political means once he takes office,” and that he “only possesses the consummate skill of negotiation, the mandate electoral and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform”.
Last week, the Supreme Court agreed to hear arguments that a bill passed by Congress banning TikTok for national security reasons violates the First Amendment. The bill gives the president wide latitude to delay its application if progress is made toward an agreement that ensures TikTok is not fully controlled by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
But the deadline for this determination is January 19, which is one day before Trump is sworn in.
In his filing with the Supreme Court, Trump is asking that the bill’s January 19 deadline be suspended, arguing that the deal he will negotiate “would avoid the need for this Court to decide the historically challenging question of the First Amendment presented here on the current, very accelerated basis.”
He did not offer details on what the agreement would be, although it would probably involve ByteDance selling a significant part of its ownership in TikTok to an American company.
Trump argues that having more than 14 million followers on TikTok, along with his ownership of Truth Social, gives him a unique ability to “assess the importance of TikTok as a unique medium for freedom of expression, including the core political discourse”. He also quotes The temporary ban from Brazil of Elon Musk’s X as an example of “the historic dangers presented” by a government banning a social media platform.
However, there is still a lot of political pressure to enforce a ban on TikTok. A group of senators and congressmen, including Mitch McConnell and Ro Khanna, filed petitions on Fridayjoined by 22 US states and former FCC chairman Ajit Pai, urged the Supreme Court to reject TikTok’s appeal.
