President-elect Donald Trump performed a years-long about-face on the Chinese-owned social media app TikTok, culminating with him being credited for saving the app on Sunday.
Trump’s first administration initially proposed banning the app or forcing its sale to a non-Chinese owner, but the plan never came to fruition until President Biden took office in 2020. A bipartisan group of lawmakers approved the legislation at the time and Biden signed it, setting the ban-or-sell deadline to Jan. 19.
To this point, Trump and other politicians were in agreement that TikTok posed a major national security threat due to its being owned by ByteDance, a company beholden to the Chinese Communist Party.
The app briefly went dark on Sunday as no purchase agreement had been reached, only for Trump to step in and vow to push back the deadline.
As a result, TikTok’s 170 million American …