Trump’s Threat of TikTok Shutdown Delivered Deal

“Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the threat of allowing the social media app TikTok to go dark in the US was what ultimately sealed a framework deal in Madrid that would see the American iteration of the platform enter US hands — severing connections with its Chinese parent company ByteDance,” Bloomberg reports.

Said Bessent: “The Chinese came in with a big list of asks — they described it as compensation — for TikTok. With the leverage that President Trump had given Ambassador Greer and myself, we were able to disabuse them of the notion that we had room for big gives.”