The Dictatorship

Trump says China’s Xi has approved of proposed deal putting TikTok under US ownership

Published

9 months ago

September 27, 2025

Trump says China’s Xi has approved of proposed deal putting TikTok under US ownership

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday that he says will allow TikTok to continue operating in the United States in a way that meets national security concerns.

Trump’s order will enable an American-led of group of investors to buy the app from China’s ByteDance, though the deal is not yet finalized and also requires China’s approval.

Much is still unknown about the actual deal in the works, but Trump said at a White House signing ceremony Thursday that Chinese leader Xi Jinping has agreed to move forward with it.

Vice President JD Vance added that “there was some resistance on the Chinese side, but the fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish is that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected Americans’ data privacy as required by law.”

The Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to an Associated Press inquiry seeking confirmation of China’s approval.

President Joe Biden signed legislation passed by Congress last year that would ban TikTok unless ByteDance sold its U.S. assets to an American company by early this year. Trump has repeatedly signed orders that have allowed TikTok to keep operating in the U.S. as his administration tries to reach an agreement for the sale of the company.

The executive order itself is a declaration by the president that the proposed deal meets the security concerns laid out in that law. And it gives all negotiating parties an additional 120-day reprieve in order to finalize it.

Young people especially “really wanted this to happen,” Trump said.

Any major change to the popular video platform could have a huge impact on how Americans — particularly young adults and teenagers — consume information online.

About 43% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 say they regularly get news from TikTok, higher than any other social media app including YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, according to a Pew Research Center report published Thursday.

The TikTok logo is pictured in Tokyo, Sept. 28, 2020. (AP Photo/Kiichiro Sato, File)

Asked if he’d want a U.S.-owned TikTok algorithm to suggest more content promoting his Make America Great Again movement, Trump said he’d make it “100% MAGA” if he felt he could, but he intends for “every philosophy, every policy” to be “treated right.”

Vance said the deal ensures that “American investors will actually control the algorithm” that determines the content seen on the social media app. He said more information about the deal will be revealed in the coming weeks.

Who will control the new TikTok venture

?

Under the terms of the deal that have so far been revealed by the White House, the app will be spun off into a new U.S. joint venture owned by a consortium of American investors — including tech giant Oracle and investment firm Silver Lake Partners.

Though the details have yet to be finalized, the investment group’s controlling stake in the new venture would be around 80%. While ByteDance is expected to have a stake in the new venture, it would be less than 20% — a portion of the ownership reserved for foreign investors. The board running the new platform would be controlled by U.S. investors. ByteDance will be represented by one person on the board, but that individual will be excluded from any security-related matters.

The exterior of Oracle Corp. headquarters is pictured in Redwood City, Calif., June 26, 2007. (AP Photo/Paul Sakuma, File)

TikTok’s new owners include many whose business or political interests are tied to Trump, including Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison and Rupert Murdoch, raising questions about whether political influence will be exerted into the platform.

Although he stepped down as Oracle’s CEO more than a decade ago, Ellison remains heavily involved as chairman and chief technology officer. Now 81, he could be in line to become a behind-the-scenes media power player, having already helped finance Skydance’s recently completed merger with Paramounta deal engineered by his son, David.

Trump said Dell founder Michael Dell will also be an investor in the new venture.

TikTok users could now “get the editorial policies of the people who now have control of the company,” said David Greene, civil liberties director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. ”It won’t be 100% MAGA. The question is how it will treat criticism of him and people he likes.”

What we know about the algorithm powering t

he platform

The recommendation algorithm that has steered millions of users into an endless stream of video shorts has been central in the security debate over TikTok. China previously maintained the algorithm must remain under Chinese control by law. But a U.S. regulation that Congress passed with bipartisan support said any divestment of TikTok must mean the platform cut ties with ByteDance.

American officials previously warned the algorithm — which is a complex system of rules and calculations that platforms use to deliver content to your feed — is vulnerable to manipulation by Chinese authorities, but no evidence has ever been presented by U.S. officials showing that China has attempted to do so.

Trump’s order says that a licensed copy of ByteDance’s algorithm — “retrained” solely with U.S. data — will power the new U.S. version of the app. The joint venture will control and monitor the code and all content-moderation decisions. Administration officials say the retraining will nullify any risk of Chinese interference and influence.

It’s not clear if the U.S. version of TikTok would be a different experience than what users in the rest of the world are used to. Any noticeable changes made to a social media platform’s service raises the risk of alienating its audience, said Jasmine Enberg, an analyst for the research firm eMarketer.

In a prime example of how a change of control can reshape a once-popular social media platform, billionaire Elon Musk triggered an almost immediate backlash after he completed his takeover of Twitter nearly three years ago.

But Musk made extremely visible changes, including changing its name to X, pulling back on its content moderation and adding exclusive features for paid subscribers. The changes that gradually occur while different data is fed into the U.S. copy of TikTok’s algorithm could be unnoticeable to most of its audience.

“Social media is just as much about the culture as it is the technology, and how users will take to new ownership and potentially a new version of the app is still an open question,” Enberg said.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order regarding TikTok in the Oval Office at the White House, Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025, in Washington, as Attorney General Pam Bondi and Vice President JD Vance listen. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

What motivated China to make this deal

Beijing once called the demand that TikTok be spun off from its Chinese parent company an act of “robbery,” but Chinese officials changed their tune as the U.S.-China trade war progressed.

A TikTok deal would allow China to keep the ball rolling on trade negotiations, said Sun Yun, director of the China program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center. “TikTok alone does not compare with the importance of amicable U.S.-China relations.”

Dimitar Gueorguiev, associate professor of political science at Syracuse University, argues that Beijing is more interested in retaining access to U.S. technology and s ervices, at least in the short term, so it can build up self-sufficiency in semiconductor, artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing.

“That is the front line of technological competition,” Gueorguiev said. “TikTok, by contrast, is a maturing consumer app with diminishing strategic weight.”

The Dictatorship

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Published

9 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Rep. Julia Letlow wins Louisiana GOP Senate primary runoff

Jun. 27, 2026, 9:51 PM EDT

Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.

Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.

Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.

Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.

In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.

Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)

Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.

Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.

Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.

The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.

Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.

The Dictatorship

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Published

9 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

‘Horrifying’: Pulte’s choice for top spy aide stokes fears of Trump vote tampering

Jun. 28, 2026, 1:36 PM EDT

Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.

“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.

“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”

Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”

The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.

The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”

Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.

“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.

Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”

Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”

Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.

Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.

“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”

David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.

The Dictatorship

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Published

9 hours ago

June 28, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

In Springfield, Ohio, Trump’s rhetoric becomes a grim reality

Jun. 27, 2026, 4:07 PM EDT

Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.

More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.

“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.

“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.

In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.

“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.

Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.

“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.

Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.

“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.

The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.

“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.

That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.

Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”

Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”

Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.

But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.

“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.

Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.

“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”

Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.