The inside story of how JD Vance ‘landed the plane’ on Trump’s TikTok deal

In January 2025, the prevailing thought in Washington was that President Donald Trump‘s push to broker a deal to keep TikTok operating in the United States was nothing more than a pipe dream.

The president himself had explored banning the app during his first term, citing the national security threat posed by data sharing conducted by the then-Chinese-owned company. And then former President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that made TikTok go dark, unless parent company ByteDance sold off its top product to non-Chinese owners.

However, senior Trump advisers now say that, apart from the constant public pressure to keep TikTok up and running voiced by the president himself, no one was more responsible for turning the president’s dream into a reality than Vice