President-elect Donald Trump on Friday filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, requesting the justices halt the January 19 ban of the short-form video application TikTok until after he takes office.
The push by Trump to delay the TikTok ban comes as a result of President Joe Biden signing legislation in April 2024 that required TikTok’s Chinese-owned parent company, ByteDance, to sell its U.S.-based TikTok operations by January 19, 2025, over concerns of the Chinese Communist Party influencing or monitoring Americans through the app.
ByteDance sued the federal government, arguing the legislation was illegal. Its lawsuit was unsuccessful in federal court, leading to an appeal to the Supreme Court, which confirmed it would take the case earlier this month.
In Trump’s amicus brief, attorneys noted the January 19 deadline is just one day before the president-elect is scheduled to take office.
“On January 20, 2025, President Trump will assume responsibility for the United States’ national security, foreign policy, and other vital executive functions,” they wrote in the filing. “This case presents an unprecedented, novel, and difficult tension between free-speech rights on one side, and foreign policy and national-security concerns on the other. As the incoming Chief Executive, President Trump has a particularly powerful interest in and responsibility for those national-security and foreign-policy questions, and he is the right constitutional actor to resolve the dispute through political means.”
The brief also noted Trump’s campaign pledge to “protect the free-speech rights of all Americans,” and stated that this includes “the 170 million Americans who use TikTok,” where the incoming president has 14.7 million followers.
Trump specifically did not ask the court to decide in favor of ByteDance, but instead said his administration will negotiate a solution that will make the federal law moot.
The brief confirmed, “President Trump takes no position on the merits of the dispute. Instead, he urges the Court to stay the statute’s effective date to allow his incoming Administration to pursue a negotiated resolution that could prevent a nationwide shutdown of TikTok, thus preserving the First Amendment rights of tens of millions of Americans, while also addressing the government’s national security concerns.”
Trump used TikTok extensively during the campaign, with Forbes reporting the president-elect received more than 63 million views on content related to his campaign stop at a McDonald’s near Philadelphia. Such content was reportedly viewed at least 151 million times prior to Election Day.
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Tom Pappert is the lead reporter for The Tennessee Star, and also reports for The Pennsylvania Daily Star and The Arizona Sun Times. Follow Tom on X/Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].