President Donald Trump officially retaliated against TikTok on Thursday by announcing an executive order barring the purchase of the social media app by anyone after 45 days.

Trump has been furious with TikTok after users bought up all of his Tulsa rally tickets and didn’t show up, leaving him with a really small crowd and a bruised ego after he had bragged about giving away over a million tickets.

Well, Trump decided to target TikTok because it is owned by a Chinese company known as ByteDance. Trump seems to think that China is spying on the United States via the app, which is a video sharing service that does not require much info to sign up for, certainly not enough to get worked up about.

But Trump has repeatedly threatened to ban the app anyway even though he can’t actually do that.

American company Microsoft has expressed interest in purchasing TikTok, which would obviously eliminate Trump’s stated reason for attacking the app, thus sabotaging his scheme to retaliate against it and all the users who trolled him.

That’s why he just declared the app a “national emergency” and is banning the sale of TikTok.

“Specifically, the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned by companies in the People’s Republic of China (China) continues to threaten the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” Trump supposedly wrote in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). “At this time, the order takes action to address one mobile application, in particular, TikTok.”

“To deal with this threat, the order prohibits, beginning 45 days after the date of this order, to the extent permitted under applicable law, any transaction by any person, or with respect to any property, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, with ByteDance Ltd. (a.k.a. Zìjié Tiàodòng), Beijing, China, or its subsidiaries, in which any such company has any interest, as identified by the Secretary of Commerce,” he continued.

This order would kill the possibility of any deal for Microsoft to purchase the app. That means Trump is directly interfering with the free market that Republicans love to tout so much. Letting Microsoft buy the app would get it out of China. Problem solved, even if it is an imaginary one.

And that’s the point. Trump is only using the fact that China owns TikTok as his reason to attack it because the real reason is that he’s holding a grudge against millions of teenagers who schooled him. Of course, if Trump takes away their TikTok, many of them can retaliate against him by voting in November.

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