Trump dangles China tariffs reduction to close TikTok deal
President Donald Trump said he would consider lowering tariff rates on China to get Beijing behind a sale of the U.S. operations of TikTok and avert a ban on the popular app.
“Maybe I’d give them a reduction in tariffs,” Trump told reporters Wednesday in the Oval Office.
A TikTok ban in the U.S. is set to go into effect April 5 if its Chinese owner ByteDance does not cede control to an American company.
Trump predicted he could nail down an outline for a deal for a TikTok sale by next week. He had previously suggested the White-led house talks have made progress in hammering out a deal. Such a deal may spin off the U.S. operations and dilute Chinese ownership to below the 20% threshold required by law.
“We’re going to have a form of a deal, but if it’s not finished, it’s not a big deal. We’ll just extend it,” Trump said.
A new survey from the Pew Research Center found that just over a third of American adults now support a TikTok ban, down from half of adults two years ago.
For a short moment in January, TikTok’s abruptly vanished from app stores and web browsers, marooning over 170 million monthly users who make the wildly addictive short-form video app a central part of their daily lives.