• by Colin Kirkland , Yesterday

Using a legally dubious executive order, President Donald Trump has extended the selloff/ban of video-sharing app TikTok for the third time since the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act in January.

According to an announcement issued by the Trump administration on Thursday, the executive order will push the deadline to sell or ban TikTok in the U.S. for another 90 days, until mid-September.

Referencing the initial concerns over TikTok's potential connection to the Chinese government, Trump’s press secretary said the administration will work to “ensure this deal is closed so that the American people can continue to use TikTok with the assurance that their data is safe and secure.”

The third executive order from Trump follows earlier promises from the president and Vice President J.D. Vance that the White House would reach a selloff deal at the start of April.

However, the business interests from a handful of companies did not materialize due to steep widespread tariffs Trump imposed on China days before a deal was reportedly close to being made.

Because the president continues to implement executive orders -- not official acts, such as the proposed Extend the TikTok Deadline Act that lawmakers urged Trump to support in February -- the delays to the law are not legally sound.

In April, Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chair Mark Warner said the president's actions were “against the law.”

Still, no one in the Republican-run Congress has yet to challenge the president's actions.

Interrupting the law could also have major legal implications for companies that continue to host the app on their app stores.

Before the second extension, a group of Democratic senators told Trump that “any further extensions of the TikTok deadline will require Oracle, Apple, Google, and other companies to continue risking ruinous liability, a difficult decision to justify in perpetuity.”

While the administration says it is dedicated to championing a deal for the purchase of TikTok by a U.S. buyer, the platform's owner, ByteDance, has remained quiet regarding the allowance of a selloff.

Prior to the tariffs, when President Trump was seemingly close to signing a deal, ByteDance never said that it was willing to relinquish TikTok's powerful algorithm to another owner.