How Trump’s Team Got The TikTok Deal Done

WASHINGTON—Shortly after President Donald Trump’s second term began, Vice President JD Vance was given a job: figure out how to fulfill the president’s promise to save TikTok.

That deal was reached late last week, but work started a year ago when the vice president convened a series of “late night meetings” to dissect the unique challenges of convincing ByteDance, the Chinese company that owns the social media network, to sell to an American company. Congress passed a law during the Biden administration to ban TikTok unless it was sold to an American company, but Trump delayed enforcement as his team worked towards a deal to avert it.

Alex Bruesewitz, the trusted Trump advisor and X Strategies CEO, explained that Vance’s history in Silicon Valley, tech literacy, and rolodex in the business world made him the obvious choice to spearhead the initiative.

“The president trusted him with that because the president knows that not only is JD a capable politician, but he also has tremendous business acumen,” Bruesewitz said. “He knows a lot of the guys who were involved, and so, it was very easy for the president to task JD with this, and JD didn’t disappoint.”

Vance’s role in the deal was “crucial” from the very beginning, Bruesewitz said, noting that though there were some concerns about the platform, they were addressed and ironed out in the new deal. Vance was a major part of that.

“Like the president, the vice president understood the importance of making sure that TikTok stayed alive,” he said. “It’s such an incredible platform to reach the the youth in our country. It’s also an incredible platform for small businesses in our country, and it’s actually the most pro-Trump platform out there.”

Vance’s negotiating tactics included pushing Google and Apple to put TikTok back into their app stores, and speaking regularly with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company. He kept Trump looped in on all those ongoing conversations, “including the importance of securing a deal that would first and foremost address our national security and data privacy concerns,” according to Bruesewitz.

Throughout the spring of 2025, the vice president was working to firm up a deal — and that deal was ready to be signed, The Daily Wire has learned, until China back out of it due to the Liberation Day tariffs. Vance kept pushing for the deal, negotiating with investors and ByteDance throughout the summer. In August, he began pushing for more direct engagement with China.

By September, Vance was leading the planning for a meeting in Madrid between Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, U.S. Trade Representaive Jamieson Greer, Chinese officials, and Vance’s own counsel, which “played a significant role directly negotiating the final terms on behalf of Vance.” Both Vance and Trump joined some of those negotiating meetings over the phone, and threatened China with “serious consequences” if the deal was not made by the end of the Madrid trip.

Photographer: Yuri Gripas/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images

The deal was closed by the end of the trip. Vance, according to a source familiar, “opened the door” for Trump to close the deal. And Trump signed an executive order advancing the TikTok deal on September 25, 2025.

Under the terms of that new deal, TikTok US will be owned and operated by an entity that is majority United States-owned and United States-based. ByteDance now owns less than 20% of TikTok, as is required by United States law.

“[TikTok United States Data Security] Joint Venture’s mandate is to secure U.S. user data, apps and the algorithm through comprehensive data privacy and cybersecurity measures,” TikTok said in a release. “It will safeguard the U.S. content ecosystem through robust trust and safety policies and content moderation while ensuring continuous accountability through transparency reporting and third-party certifications.”

TikTok US has three managing investors: the tech giant Oracle, investment firm MGX, and private equity firm Silver Lake, which each own 15% stakes. Other investors include Dell Family Office, Vastmere Strategic Investments, Alpha Wave Partners, Revolution, Merritt Way, LLC, and Via Nova.

Trump described these entities as “a group of Great American Patriots and Investors, the Biggest in the World,” noting that TikTok “will be an important Voice” in a Truth Social post late last week. He specifically thanked Vance for helping to bring about the deal and it’s “very dramatic, final, and beautiful conclusion.”

“Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and Vice President Vance, the Administration has successfully made good on yet another campaign promise and saved TikTok for its hundreds of millions of American users,” a spokesman for the vice president told The Daily Wire. “With this new entity under the control of U.S. investors, Americans can continue to enjoy TikTok safely and securely with their data protected in the United States.”

Bruesewitz pointed to internal analysis conducted in 2024, when President Joe Biden was still in the race for the 2024 election, which found that Trump was far more popular than Biden on the platform: the analysis found almost twice as many pro-Trump posts on TikTok as pro-Biden ones.

That’s a point that Trump has repeatedly emphasized, suggesting that TikTok was responsible for his performance “with the Youth Vote in the 2024 Presidential Election.”

“I only hope that long into the future I will be remembered by those who use and love TikTok,” the president said last week.

Democrats who used to support the app, despite Republican concerns about national security issues, flipped on TikTok once they realized how much pro-Trump sentiment was being shared on the app, Bruesewitz said.

“That’s when the Democrats switch happened,” Bruesewitz added. “The Democrats used to want to protect TikTok and then they said, OK, we want to ban it, when they realized that they weren’t very popular on that platform with the youth.”