Within hours of his inauguration on Monday, Trump postponed a deadline requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to sell its stake in the app or face a ban in the country. Trump argued that the US “should be entitled to get half of TikTok ” if the app continued operating beyond that cut-off and that he could “certainly” impose tariffs on China if it rejected a deal,

The Capitol Hill Republicans who pushed aggressively to ban TikTok have gone almost totally silent on President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision not to enforce the ban. Asked directly by POLITICO about Trump’s executive order to grant TikTok a reprieve in defiance of the law passed by Congress,