TikTok CEO meets Trump at Mar-a-Lago in last-ditch effort to thwart U.S. ban

It’s the eleventh hour for TikTok‘s operations in the United States, and the app’s CEO is throwing a hail mary intended for the incoming U.S. leader. Hours after TikTok filed an official appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, top exec Shou Zi Chew met Donald Trump at the president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

According to CNN, the meeting between Chew and Trump was a pre-scheduled affair that gave the pair their first chance to link up since Trump’s electoral win in November. Details from the meeting haven’t yet been made public, but Trump — an unexpected TikTok ally — has made it clear that he wants to overturn the “divest-or-ban” regulation his predecessor signed into law.

During a press conference on Monday, Trump reiterated that he plans to “take a look at TikTok” once he returns to the Oval Office. “I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, because I won youth by 34 points,” he said. “There are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that. TikTok had an impact.” (In truth, Kamala Harris won the 18-t0-29 demographic by 11 percentage points, though Trump did make significant gains among that group compared to 2020.)

For Trump to sustain TikTok’s status quo in the United States, the app will have to make it to his presidency without being pulled from domestic app stores. The law enacted by President Biden, which forces parent company ByteDance to either divest TikTok to a non-Chinese owner or accept a U.S. ban, is set to go into effect on January 19. That’s one day before Trump will be inaugurated for his second term.

TikTok’s attempts to push back or remove that deadline go all the back to May

, just a few days after the law was officially passed. The app appealed to Americans’ First Amendment rights in hopes of striking down the divest-or-ban statute, but that argument recently encountered a major setback thanks to a U.S. Appeals Court decision. A panel of three judges ruled that the U.S. law is not unconstitutional, and its January 19 start date can go ahead as planned.

The reverberations from that decision have been significant. Some U.S.-based TikTokers are steering their followers toward their accounts on other platforms, brands are preparing for a post-TikTok landscape, and lawmakers are warning Apple and Google that they will face penalties if they don’t remove TikTok from their respective app stores on January 19.

If TikTok can find a way to push back that start date, Trump would get a chance to intervene on the app’s behalf. To that end, TikTok has officially petitioned the Supreme Court to delay the divest-or-ban law so that the high court has a chance to rule on it before it goes into effect.

Even if the Court accedes to TikTok’s demands, there’s no guarantee that Trump will be able to save the app on his own, and the president-elect hasn’t specified how exactly he would overturn a law that has already been passed. But TikTok execs like Chew are not in a position where they can be choosy. A national ban would be a significant hit to the app’s status, so Trump’s “concepts of a plan” will have to do for now.