"TikTok is moving along, we'll see what happens. It'll either be closed up or they'll sell it," Trump told reporters on the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews on Thursday as he prepared to fly to a political rally in Michigan.
"So we'll either close up TikTok in this country for security reasons, or it'll be sold," he said. "I'm not extending deadlines, no. It's September 15. There'll be no extension of the TikTok deadline."
Last month, Trump ordered TikTok's parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, to sell its American business or the popular video app would be banned in the US, claiming it was a threat to national security. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has claimed the app and others, such as WeChat, are "feeding data directly to the Chinese Communist Party, their national security apparatus."
ByteDance has filed several lawsuits against the executive order, and the Chinese government has denied it has access to, or control over, data on ByteDance apps such as TikTok.
The Trump administration has also blacklisted several other Chinese tech giants, including Huawei and ZTE, barring them from selling their goods in the US except to licensed purchasers for much the same reason as TikTok.
