(TNND) — President Donald Trump extended a lifeline to TikTok in an executive order Monday night, delaying a possible ban on the social media app in the U.S.

Former President Joe Biden signed a law last year as part of a larger foreign aid package that gave TikTok and Chinese parent company ByteDance nine months to sell its U.S. platform to an approved buyer or be banned.

U.S. lawmakers raised concerns over data security and privacy for TikTok users, as well as suspicions of Chinese government influence over TikTok’s content.

That nine-month period was up Sunday, leading to TikTok temporarily going dark this weekend.

The Supreme Court last week unanimously upheld the federal ban.

But the law allows a president to grant a 90-day extension if a sale is in progress.

Trump's order delays a possible ban 75 days, noting the "unfortunate timing" that the deadline arrived one day before he took office and didn't leave him with adequate time to assess the national security implications of the law.

"This timing also interferes with my ability to negotiate a resolution to avoid an abrupt shutdown of the TikTok platform while addressing national security concerns. Accordingly, I am instructing the Attorney General not to take any action to enforce the Act for a period of 75 days from today to allow my Administration an opportunity to determine the appropriate course forward in an orderly way that protects national security while avoiding an abrupt shutdown of a communications platform used by millions of Americans," Trump's order reads.

Trump previously floated the idea of the federal government taking a 50% stake in the new U.S. version of TikTok, whatever that ends up being.

Granting an extension might be a “win-win scenario” for Trump, said Andrew Selepak, a social media expert who teaches at the University of Florida.

If TikTok successfully finds an approved buyer during the extension, then Trump can frame himself as the man who saved TikTok.

If not, Trump can blame his political rival, Biden, for signing the law that led to TikTok’s demise in America.

Todd Belt, the Political Management program director at George Washington University, said this is also an overture to younger voters and could serve as a quick win for Trump on an issue that’s important to a lot of people.

A third of U.S. adults use TikTok, according to the Pew Research Center.

About 60% of adults under 30 use TikTok.

And public support for a government ban on TikTok has been steadily falling.

“This helps him create this image of himself as being the master dealmaker, which is ... how he wants to be known,” Belt said.

Selepak said Trump might also see TikTok as a bargaining chip with China on economic policy, trade, cracking down on fentanyl production, or on any number of other issues.

“So, it could just be part of a larger strategy when it comes to potential negotiations with China,” Selepak said.

Trump might be warm to keeping TikTok alive in the U.S. because he blames Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg in part for his 2020 election defeat, believing Facebook silenced conservative voices.

And Selepak said Trump saw the value of TikTok to him in his 2024 victory.

“While his campaign didn't necessarily post a lot of videos on there, there were a lot of videos about him on there. He has millions of followers on there. His videos that were posted on there received a lot of interaction,” Selepak said. “And he knows that he over-performed with the youth vote and particularly the young male vote and saw that TikTok was a way to reach that audience.”

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Selepak also said Trump is likely hearing from big TikTok investors, private equity companies, that don’t want to see the platform banned.

But, Selepak said, the extension might not ultimately matter.

An executive order alone can't override the law that bans TikTok.

And a few more months isn’t a lot of time to get a deal done.

“You don't have the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, as a really motivated seller,” Selepak said. “And if they even wanted to sell, part of that would probably not be their algorithm, which means that finding a buyer to potentially spend billions upon billions of dollars ... In some ways, it would be a really bad purchase for any company or individual.”

A version of TikTok that’s only for a U.S. audience, segmented from the rest of the world, would limit its value to a buyer, Selepak said.

Trump’s pitch for a U.S. government ownership stake is “pretty unprecedented” and also not without significant challenges, Selepak said.

Government funding for media companies NPR and PBS, which Selepak said would be the nearest equivalent, is certainly contentious.

A government stake in TikTok would surely be challenged in court and by other social media companies, Selepak said.

And Congress controls the purse strings, so the money the government might have to put up for an ownership stake would have to be approved by the same body of lawmakers that approved the ban of TikTok less than a year ago.