President Donald Trump said he had almost reached a deal with China on a TikTok sale, but Beijing changed its mind after he announced his new tariffs.
“We had a deal pretty much for TikTok — not a deal but pretty close — and then China changed the deal because of the tariffs,” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One on Sunday, heading back to Washington after a weekend of golfing in Florida.
“If I gave a little cut in tariffs, they’d approve that deal in 15 minutes, which shows you the power of tariffs,” he added.
Trump’s comments on Air Force One come after he announced on Friday that he planned to extend the deadline for TikTok’s sale.
On Truth Social, Trump said he would sign an executive order giving ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese owner, 75 more days to sell its stake in the app or be banned in the US.
“We do not want TikTok to ‘go dark,'” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Friday. “We look forward to working with TikTok and China to close the Deal.”
Trump has been using tariffs as a bargaining chip against China to pressure it into caving on a TikTok deal.
On Thursday, the day after he imposed a baseline 10% tariff on imports from all countries and increased China’s tariff rate to 54%, he said he would be open to cutting deals with countries over the tariffs only if they were willing to give the US “something that’s so phenomenal.”
“For instance, with TikTok as an example, we have the situation with TikTok, where China will probably say, ‘We’ll approve a deal, but will you do something on the tariff?'” Trump said to reporters on Air Force One.
Before that, on March 26, he said he might give China a “little reduction in tariffs” to “get it done.”
In response to the US’s 34% additional tariffs, China retaliated with its own set of 34% tariffs on all US goods on Friday.
Responding to Trump’s increased tariffs on Wednesday, China’s Commerce Ministry said in a statement it would “resolutely take countermeasures to safeguard its own rights and interests.”
Trump first extended the deadline in January when he entered office, giving ByteDance until April 5 to figure out its game plan. The app went dark briefly for its US users on January 18 before restoring its service.
Several parties have expressed interest in buying TikTok, including Trump’s former treasury secretary, Steve Mnuchin, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, former Los Angeles Dodgers owner Frank McCourt, and YouTuber MrBeast.
Representatives for TikTok, the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C., and Trump did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.
