As U.S. consumers face 125% tariffs on all Chinese imports, China hawks in Washington worry that President Donald Trump’s fixation on trade imbalance distracts from solving what they consider to be one of the biggest threats to national security: the Chinese government’s ties to TikTok.
“The big problem with the president is spending way too much time tariffing the rest of the world instead of dealing with an issue that is front and center,” Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi told NOTUS. “We gotta do our work and get this deal done right now.”
Trump pushed back a deadline for ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to sell the app or else face a law banning it from the U.S. over the potential for the Chinese government to use it for spying or data gathering. Now, some of the original brokers of the law worry that the same tariff policies that Trump says will help the U.S. stay ahead of its primary foreign adversary will block the way for a TikTok deal.
“We’ve got to make sure that [the TikTok sale deal] complies with the law so we get the CCP out of there. The delay means that we are not saving TikTok,” said Krishnamoorthi, the ranking member of the House Select Committee on the CCP and one of the original proponents of the TikTok divestiture efforts.
The administration says it’s working to broker a deal for the sale.
“The Administration has made great progress on the TikTok deal, and we are working a deal that would save the app for its 170 million American users and first and foremost protect American national security and user data,” Taylor Van Kirk, Vance’s press secretary, told NOTUS in a statement.
In the meantime, China hawks want to ensure leaders don’t lose focus on the alleged threat from TikTok, which has about 170 million users in the U.S.
“We know that ByteDance is required by law to report all that data to CCP without disclosing it, and that’s a prohibitive national security risk that Donald Trump seems comfortable ignoring,” Rep. Ritchie Torres told NOTUS.
Republican lawmakers would not go as far as directly challenging Donald Trump on enforcing a TikTok ban, but insist the administration needs to come up with a deal sooner than later.
“Congress has already spoken and we’ve said that if the Chinese Communist Party is involved, then TikTok has got to be eliminated from the United States; it’s a national security threat,” Sen. Mike Rounds said.
Lawmakers say that banning TikTok in the U.S. was never the goal; instead, it was meant to be a point of leverage to force the sale despite opposition from the Chinese government.
When Trump announced last week that he would push back the sale deadline, he pointed to tariffs as a point of major leverage to force China to greenlight a deal for ByteDance to sell TikTok.
But the tariffs announced on “Liberation Day” became a roadblock to the divestiture negotiations led by Vance, the AP reported. The Chinese government, which regulates the sale of intellectual property to foreign investors, put a stop to the deal in direct retaliation to Trump’s wide-ranging import tariffs, according to the report.
While an extension was always a possibility — the TikTok divestiture law provides a one-time 90-day extension to allow the administration to finalize a divestiture deal in case more time is required — Trump has now issued two 75-day extensions, amounting to 150 days, breaching the period originally conceived in the law.
“It telegraphs weakness to China,” said Michael Sobolik, a fellow at the conservative think tank Hudson Institute and a former GOP China policy congressional adviser. “Trump is willing to leave American users on TikTok exposed to a Chinese Communist Party-controlled algorithm for an indefinite period of time in violation of U.S. law.”
A White House official told NOTUS that the administration rejects the notion that the tariffs are a sign of weakness. The official said that the president is attempting to rebalance the trading relationship with its trading partners and is looking to reshore American manufacturing.
Keeping TikTok widely available in the U.S. is a definitive setback if what Trump intends is to prevent China from replacing the U.S. as a global power broker, a former defense China policy adviser told NOTUS.
“Competition with China is a comprehensive, full-spectrum, all of the above proposition. It is not a pick-and-choose kind of thing,” the former official said, requesting anonymity because his current position forbids him from speaking to the press. “China seeks to compete with the United States in every way, everywhere all the time, all at once. And you are either on the competitive side of that or you’re not,” the former official said.
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Samuel Larreal is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.