The Supreme Court did not grant TikTok a last-minute stay.
If the popular social media is going to continue to work in the US, it will have to be saved by politicians or businessmen, not judges.
And policymakers — pressed to balance national concerns about China with TikTok's massive American user base — are taking note. This includes the future president, who is both a politician and a businessman.
Shortly after the Supreme Court's decision, President-elect Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that he would review the situation, but everyone should respect the Supreme Court's decision.
“My decision on TikTok will be made in the not-too-distant future, but I need to have time to review the situation. Stay tuned!” he said.
Trump's legal team has already stepped in during the Supreme Court hearing of that case, asking the justices to delay the ruling to give him time to find a solution.
“Only President Trump has the perfect deal-making experience, electoral mandate and political will to negotiate a solution to save the platform,” the brief said.
They didn't get their wish, but several of Trump's aides have since raised the possibility of a presidential executive order on Monday afternoon that would delay implementation of the ban. Trump also spoke with Chinese President Xi Jinping and the topic of TikTok came up.
Trump is stocking his foreign policy team with China hawks like Marco Rubio and Michael Waltz — who represent the popular view on the right that the Chinese Communists are more than an economic rival, they are a geopolitical adversary.
But Trump has also spent the past year campaigning for the support of social media influencers — and their young followers — many of whom are TikTok devotees.
If the president-elect can ultimately find a way to satisfy national security concerns while keeping TikTok operating in the U.S., it would give him an opportunity to score an early political victory in his second term and be celebrated by loyal TikTok users.
The Biden administration, for its part, seemed happy to leave the TikTok situation in the president-elect's lap.
A statement was quickly issued in response to the court's ruling, emphasizing that the law's purpose was not to ban TikTok, but to force its sale to American property. As predicted, however, the outgoing Democratic president pushed the ban on Donald Trump, who will become president at noon on Monday.
The Supreme Court, in its unsigned opinion without controversy, avoided getting involved in this kind of political calculation. The judges sided with a lower court that upheld the constitutionality of the law, which could ban the popular social media service if it is not sold by midnight on Sunday.
While the court's opinion was limited — the justices acknowledged the time pressure they were under to issue this ruling — it firmly found that the constitutional protections of free speech contained in the First Amendment to the US Constitution do not save TikTok .
Indeed, the judges found that the TikTok ban, which Congress justified on the basis of protecting national security by preventing an adversary from collecting reams of data on tens of millions of American users, had a lower bar to clear than laws that directly regulate speech content.
The court sidestepped other tough questions — such as whether concerns about Chinese influence over TikTok's algorithm warranted a ban. But expect it to come up in future policy debates in Congress.
With the court's decision, TikTok has exhausted its last legal opportunity to avoid the ban taking effect. For Trump, however, the TikTok ban is his first presidential crisis — but also his first political opportunity.