Donald Trump speaks with Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. | Photo: Peter Kramer / NBC via Getty Images
President-elect Donald Trump gave a murky answer when NBC’s Kristen Welker asked whether he would protect TikTok from its impending ban during a Meet the Press interview on Sunday. He didn’t say he would save the app from its ban but did seem to imply that ByteDance should sell it.
After its argument that the ban is unconstitutional came up short in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals last week, ByteDance is requesting an injunction to stop the ban from taking effect until the Supreme Court can hear its appeal, and it now faces an uphill legal battle. If ByteDance’s motion isn’t granted, it has to sell TikTok by January 19th or face its expulsion from the US.
Welker asked Trump what he would do after ByteDance’s failed appeal of the ban:
This week a federal court upheld a law that could result in TikTok being banned. You said you’re going to rescue TikTok when you get into office. Are you going to take steps to protect it?
Trump’s response praised his campaign’s use of the platform before deflecting the question:
I used TikTok very successfully in my campaign. I have a man named TikTok Jack, he was very effective, obviously, because I won youth by 30 percent. All Republicans lose youth. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s changing. And last time we were down 30 percent with youth. This time we were up 35 percent with youth.
And I used TikTok, so I can’t really, you know, I can’t totally hate it. It was very effective. But I will say this, if you do do that, something else is going to come along and take its place. And maybe that’s not fair. And really, what the judge actually said was that you can’t have Chinese companies. In other words, they have the right to ban it if you can prove that Chinese companies own it. That’s what the judge actually said.
Pressed again on if he would “protect TikTok” once he’s in office, Trump responded:
I’m going to try and make it so that other companies don’t become an even bigger monopoly.
A TikTok sale to an American company would be one way to achieve that.
Trump’s position has been murky since he started positioning himself opposite of the Biden administration’s support of a ban — something Trump pushed for during his last term. Over the last several months, that’s included his Truth Social video urging people who “want to save TikTok” to vote for him and told CNBC in March that getting rid of the platform would only benefit Facebook, which he called an “enemy of the people.”