Donald Trump appears to support TikTok and doesn’t plan on banning it if he gets into office. This change of heart comes as no surprise when you consider that one of the big investors of the app is also a mega-donor for Trump, the man really needs something to give younger voters, and the platform has become a haven for pro-Trump content in recent months.
In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Trump said he no longer plans on banning TikTok. His reasoning is that he doesn’t to reward his new favorite punching bag who he already threatened with prison time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Now [that] I’m thinking about it, I’m for TikTok, because you need competition,” Trump told Bloomberg Businessweek in an interview conducted back in June and published on Tuesday. “If you don’t have TikTok, you have Facebook and Instagram—and that’s, you know, that’s Zuckerberg.”
The former president started to vocalize his support of TikTok in March, after spending much of his time in office trying to ban the app. He used an executive order in 2020 to ban the social video platform, but it was quickly shot down by the courts.
President Biden, however, appears to have completed the job, or at least, laid the groundwork for some changes with TikTok. In April, he signed a law that would require the divestment of TikTok, meaning the China-based owner Bytedance would have to sell the app to a U.S.-based company or else see the platform banned from the country. The deadline for this divestment is Jan. 19, 2025, which just happens to be the day before the inauguration of the next president of the United States. TikTok already sued the federal government over the ban back in May, and the company has said repeatedly that it doesn’t plan on selling the platform to another entity.
