President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a 90-day extension for TikTok to separate from its Chinese owner or face a ban, marking the fourth time the president has postponed the deadline imposed by Congress last year.
Trump issued an executive order Tuesday afternoon, setting a new Dec. 16 deadline for the app’s Chinese parent company — ByteDance — to divest TikTok’s U.S. business or be banned in the country.
Meanwhile, hordes of TikTok users have posted content on the app justifying or even celebrating the murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, who was shot and killed while speaking to students on Wednesday at Utah Valley University. Among them, a high school teacher in Rhode Island who reportedly posted a video saying he had no sympathy for Kirk and is now facing an investigation.
Tiktoker justifies and celebrates Charlie Kirk’s ass*ssination. “What do you think we’re gonna do?! He had it coming!” pic.twitter.com/SuDxjRSg6V
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 11, 2025
Trump’s order comes just two days after the president announced on Truth Social that the U.S. and China had reached a deal regarding “a ‘certain’ company that young people in our Country very much wanted to save.” Under the framework being finalized, TikTok’s U.S. operations would be controlled by an investor consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake and Andreessen Horowitz, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.
Congress passed a law in April 2024 requiring TikTok to be sold to a non-Chinese owner within a year or face shutdown, citing national security risks. The Supreme Court upheld the law in January.
Trump has already extended the deadline in January, April and June, and the White House even launched an official TikTok account in August.
China hawks, however, have urged the president to shut down the Chinese-owned app.
“President Trump should enforce the law and just ban TikTok. If he does not ban the app, he will be reinforcing Beijing’s notion that Trump has acknowledged his submission to China,” China expert and author Gordon Chang told the Daily Caller News Foundation in late August. “Trump certainly does not feel he has submitted to the Chinese, but it does not matter what Trump thinks. What matters is what the Chinese think, because what they think determines how they act.”
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