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 President JD Vance.
TikTok completed the Vance-brokered deal earlier this week, after both Washington and Beijing signed off on the framework late last year.
The agreement will see TikTok’s U.S. operations spun off into a new American joint venture, responsible for operating “under defined safeguards that protect national security through comprehensive data protections, algorithm security, content moderation, and software assurances for U.S. users,” according to a press release from the company.
Just over 80% of the joint venture will be owned by American interests, including 15% stakes each for a managing investor group comprising tech giant Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake, and investment firm MGX. ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, will maintain a minority stake of 19.9% but have no operational oversight regarding U.S. operations. Oracle will lease the existing TikTok algorithm from ByteDance, retrain it for U.S. markets, and be responsible for housing its code and servers.
That’s a lot of moving parts to manage, many of which had existing, competing business interests with each other. Multiple Trumpworld insiders told the Washington Examiner that Vance was the “glue” that held them together, even as Trump was forced to issue a series of executive orders last year that repeatedly delayed the banning of the app while the deal was slowly finalized.
Alex Bruesewitz, a Republican operative and social media guru for the president’s political arm, noted that the vice president, who cut his teeth in the venture capital world before turning to politics, “has a great understanding of, not just the political end of things, but also business and deal structure because that’s his background.”
“JD took this very seriously because he knew what was at stake,” Bruesewitz, a driving force behind the 2024 Trump campaign’s wildly successful podcast strategy, said in an interview Friday. “He also understood the complex issues at hand, the security concerns with Chinese influence, and he came to the table with complex solutions. He’s also younger than a lot of the other people on the negotiating team, and I think that helps big time. He’s more in touch with the youth than other members of the Republican Party.”
Bruesewitz continued, “A lot of Republicans in Washington really don’t do that. They’re really out of touch with young people in this country. And so not only did he go in there with negotiating the president’s interests in mind, America’s interest in mind, but he really knows what was important to young people, and so he played. I don’t think the deal would’ve gotten done without his commitment.”
One former Trump White House official told the Washington Examiner that Vance himself offered to the president before even entering office to take point on the deal. Other sources familiar with the negotiations added that, just two weeks after Trump’s inauguration, the vice president had begun hosting after-hours meetings with staff and private industry stakeholders on crafting their initial strategy, with the first item of business being convincing both Apple and Google to relist TikTok on their app stores.
According to those people, Vance served as Trump‘s unofficial intermediary in talks with ByteDance leadership and the Chinese government. The Washington Examiner previously reported that, by the spring of 2025, Vance had actually cobbled together a phase-one divestment offer that had earned the initial approval of ByteDance and Beijing, which backed out of the deal after Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariff slate in April.
Though talks stalled over the summer, given the icy trade relations between the U.S. and China, Vance led another push to re-engage Chinese officials in August. Sources say that, while Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer got the glory for productive September trade talks with their Chinese counterparts in Madrid, it was Vance who personally briefed the Cabinet officials and built out the strategy that placed TikTok back on the negotiating table. That strategy included threatening additional trade penalties for China should the parties fail to reach some kind of agreement by the conclusion of the Madrid meeting.
“It felt a little like he was shooting from the hip at the time, considering the threats Beijing was already lobbing back at us,” one senior White House official explained. “But it actually worked. The vice president was able to bridge that divide and really get, not only the governments, but the U.S. investors themselves to buy in.”
Jason Miller, a longtime, out-of-government adviser to the president, scoffed at the idea of Vance serving as a bridge, suggesting the characterization “makes it sound a lot easier than it was.”
“I would say that this was peak diplomacy,” he told the Washington Examiner over the phone while waiting to depart Switzerland following the World Economic Forum. “It took someone who definitely had the government experience, the Silicon Valley VC experience — having been around a number of complex deals — but also having the stature of being the sitting vice president to be able to pull this off.”
“What I mean by that is you’re dealing with a number of very prominent investors, you’re dealing with a foreign government, you’re dealing with a lot of people in the public policy space who have very formed opinions about what this should look like,” Miller continued. “Ultimately, you have the fact that this was a big priority for President Trump, and he wanted this to get done, so he put his No. 1 in charge of going to do that, and the vice president landed the plane.”
READ IN FULL: VICE PRESIDENT JD VANCE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
A Vance spokesperson told the Washington Examiner, “Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and Vice President Vance, the Administration has successfully made good on yet another campaign promise and saved TikTok for its hundreds of millions of American users.
“With this new entity under the control of U.S. investors, Americans can continue to enjoy TikTok safely and securely with their data protected in the United States.”