President Donald Trump on June 19 signed an executive order to extend the deadline for the sale of TikTok for another 90 days.
ByteDance, a Chinese company with ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), was nearing a June 19 deadline to sell TikTok’s U.S. operations and assets under a national security law that was upheld by the Supreme Court earlier this year.
“I’ve just signed the Executive Order extending the Deadline for the TikTok closing for 90 days (September 17, 2025),” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on June 19.
The president did not provide further comment on the order.
The text of the executive order was included in Trump’s post, which instructed the Justice Department not to take any action to enforce laws against TikTok or ByteDance over the next three months.
It means that if Trump doesn’t issue a new extension, TikTok would go dark in the United States in about mid-September.
Trump had already twice granted a reprieve from enforcement of a law regarding TikTok that was supposed to take effect in January.
Trump said last month that he would extend the June 19 deadline, noting that the video-sharing platform helped him win younger voters during the 2024 election. On June 17, he told reporters on Air Force One that he expected to again extend the deadline.
“Probably, yeah,” Trump told reporters on June 17 regarding extending the deadline. “Probably have to get China approval, but I think we’ll get it.
“I think President Xi will ultimately approve it,” he said, referring to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“President Trump will sign an additional Executive Order this week to keep TikTok up and running,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to media outlets this week. “As he has said many times, President Trump does not want TikTok to go dark.”
In March, the president said he would be willing to reduce tariffs on China in a bid to encourage ByteDance to sell the short-video app, which is estimated to be used by 170 million Americans.
A deal had been in the works in the spring to spin off TikTok’s U.S. operations into a new U.S.-based firm, majority-owned and operated by U.S. investors, but it was put on hold after the Chinese regime indicated that it would not approve it following Trump’s April announcements of tariffs on Chinese goods.
“We had a deal pretty much for TikTok—not a deal but pretty close—and then China changed the deal because of the tariffs,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One on April 6. “If I gave a little cut in tariffs, they’d approve that deal in 15 minutes, which shows you the power of tariffs.”
Ahead of Trump’s latest executive order, some Republican lawmakers signaled that they don’t believe that he should extend the deadline again.
“I’m not overly delighted,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), Senate Armed Services chair, told Axios about the delay on June 18. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
“That’s not my favorite thing,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) told Axios about Trump’s decision on TikTok. “I’m fine with him trying to sell it—that’s fine—but I think at a certain point we’ve got to enforce this law.”
And Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) told the outlet on June 18 that the CCP has “used TikTok for espionage and propaganda” in the United States, noting that the legislation that was passed was done so to force the CCP to divest of TikTok.
Democratic senators, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), have argued that the president has no legal authority to extend the deadline, and they’ve suggested that the deal under consideration would not meet legal requirements.