When Donald Trump sat down for his latest interview with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo, the president, unprompted, boasted, “We have a buyer for TikTok, by the way.” When the host asked who the buyer is, the Republican replied, “I’ll tell you in about two weeks.”
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Link to tweet

....With this in mind, it becomes all the more important to not forget — and note that the president vowed to update the public about this four weeks ago. It was against this backdrop that Variety reported late last week:

Howard Lutnick, President Trump’s Commerce Secretary, said TikTok will go dark for the video app’s millions of American users unless China agrees by a Sept. 17 deadline to a deal that will give the U.S. owners majority control over the app. ‘We’ve made the decision. You can’t have Chinese control and have something on 100 million American phones,’ Lutnick said Thursday on CNBC’s ‘Squawk on the Street.’ If China doesn’t approve the deal, ‘then TikTok is going to go dark.’

I won’t pretend to know whether the administration intends to follow through on such a threat, though Lutnick's on-air comments did not suggest that the president was telling the truth about having already lined up new ownership for the app.....

Even some congressional Republicans, who are generally inclined to act like Trump’s lapdogs, have started to express some concerns about the administration repeatedly delaying implementation of federal law.

I won’t pretend to know what might happen next, but for now, an American president is allowing a Chinese-owned company to operate illegally in the U.S., at least in part because he thinks it helped his 2024 candidacy. The public is entitled to some kind of explanation for this — and Trump’s latest two-week deadline expired two weeks ago.