Trump Is Defying the Law to Keep TikTok Alive
June 24, 2025
Amid a flurry of controversial decisions, one of the Trump administration’s clearest violations of the rule of law has attracted relatively little public outcry: TikTok’s continued operation in the United States.
On June 19, the Trump administration unilaterally decided — for the third time — to suspend enforcement of a federal law requiring TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, or face a nationwide ban. That law, which passed with bipartisan support in April 2024 and was unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court in January 2025, mandates that a ByteDance-owned TikTok must cease operations in the US within 270 days, with a single, one-time 90-day extension permitted if the president submits evidence to Congress of “significant progress” toward a qualified divestiture.
The original 270-day deadline expired on January 19. President Trump issued the one allowable extension the next day, on January 20 — pushing the deadline to April 5. That should have been the end of the story.
And yet TikTok remains widely available in US app stores, with an estimated 170 million Americans using the app daily. This continued operation is only possible because the Trump administration has issued two additional deadline extensions via executive order — without submitting the legally required evidence to Congress that “significant progress” is being made toward a qualified divestiture. The administration justifies its actions as a legitimate exercise of prosecutorial discretion, arguing that the law vests exclusive authority on the Attorney General to enforce the ban and that “attempted enforcement by the States or private parties represents an encroachment on the powers of the Executive.”
I am no fan of the TikTok ban and have previously raised concerns about its legitimacy under international human rights standards. Less restrictive measures could achieve the law’s objectives without infringing on users’ freedom of expression or their right to gain access to information on TikTok’s platform. But this is not a debate about whether the law is wise — it is about whether the president is obligated to enforce it. The TikTok ban is the law of the land. Unless the new Congress decides to repeal it, President Trump has a constitutional duty to uphold it.
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