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President Trump has moved decisively where the last administration hesitated, signing an order to treat a proposed sale and restructuring of TikTok’s U.S. operations as a qualified divestiture and giving the companies time to finalize the deal that would put the app under majority American control. The White House framed the arrangement as one that locks U.S. user data into trusted cloud infrastructure and places American security partners in charge of monitoring code and operations, while the president insists the move protects creators and American prosperity.
What should make patriotic Americans uneasy, however, is how little this plan actually differs in spirit from Project Texas — the ByteDance mitigation package the Biden administration publicly rejected as insufficient. That earlier proposal offered many of the same mitigations: U.S.-based operations, third-party code review, and promises around data isolation, yet Biden’s team walked away insisting only a full divestment would do.
If you listen to the mainstream spin, this is progress. But the substance matters: critics note the new framework still appears to permit operational links or algorithm licensing that echo the very vulnerabilities Project Texas was supposed to cure. That’s not a small technical quibble — it’s the exact loophole Democrats once called a deal-breaker and now seem willing to accept when it lines up with political convenience.
Conservatives should be clear-eyed and grateful that creators, small businesses, and millions of Americans aren’t being deprived of a platform overnight, and yes, saving jobs and revenue is important. Yet patriotic stewardship means demanding real separation from Beijing, not a fancy rebrand and a roster of American names pasted over a structure that still gives China leverage. The White House’s claim about economic upside is real, but it cannot trump national security or the rule of law.
Congress has rightly signaled it will not rubber-stamp a backroom fix; House oversight and the China committee’s renewed scrutiny are essential to ensure this deal isn’t a Trojan horse. Lawmakers from both parties who warned about sham mitigation efforts under Project Texas are demanding documents and hearings — and patriots should insist on transparency until every operational tie to ByteDance and the Chinese state is demonstrably severed.
The Biden White House’s posture last year — rejecting mitigations as inadequate — deserves tough questions now that a similar plan is being blessed by a different administration. America shouldn’t be in the business of letting the same risks come back dressed in new clothes, and conservatives must push for ironclad, enforceable safeguards, not political theater. If the deal truly protects our national security, let it be proven in public, under oath, and enforced by law.
