Trump Wants The TikTok Deal To Pour $5 Billion Into 'real History' Education. It's Not That Simple

That seems to have taken TikTok’s Chinese language guardian firm ByteDance without warning, and created much more confusion about how the finer factors of an already complicated deal will work in observe.

Trump talked about the fund at a rally in North Carolina on Saturday, as he signaled his approval of a deal between ByteDance, Oracle (ORCL) and Walmart (WMT).

The deal — which might briefly avert a ban on TikTok in US app stores — would see Walmart and Oracle take a stake of as much as 20% in a newly created US-based entity, TikTok World. Beijing-based ByteDance says it is going to retain 80%.

As a part of the deal, Trump mentioned he requested the businesses to “do me a favor” by placing “$5 billion right into a fund for training, so we are able to educate individuals as to [the] actual historical past of our nation — the true historical past, not the pretend historical past.”

ByteDance unaware

This is not the primary time Trump has floated the concept a TikTok deal ought to embrace some sort of financial reward for the US authorities. He beforehand expressed a need for the businesses concerned with the deal to give money to the US Treasury, however final week mentioned he was shocked when he was instructed such an association can be unlawful.

Trump’s newest remarks have completed little to make clear how an training fund would work, creating much more confusion.

It isn’t simply observers who’re scratching their heads. ByteDance mentioned Sunday that it was unaware {that a} multibillion greenback training fund can be tied to the TikTok deal.

“Some information media reported that TikTok will arrange a $5 billion training fund in the USA,” ByteDance mentioned in an announcement posted Sunday on Chinese language social media. “We want to make clear that it was additionally our first time listening to concerning the information.”

The corporate added that it “has been dedicated to investing within the training discipline, and plans to work with companions and international shareholders to launch on-line classroom tasks primarily based on AI [artificial intelligence] and video expertise for college students world wide.”

A slew of different statements launched by ByteDance, Oracle and Walmart over the previous couple of days might shed some mild on what Trump may bear in mind.

Whereas Walmart and Oracle didn’t point out something about an training fund in an announcement launched over the weekend, they did say that the brand new TikTok World entity “can pay greater than 5 billion in new tax {dollars} to the US Treasury.”

In an announcement Monday, ByteDance described the “so-called tax fee” as “an estimation of the company earnings tax and different working taxes that TikTok might want to pay for its enterprise growth within the subsequent few years.”

Trump’s training agenda

There’s one other doable clarification for Trump’s remarks: The president seems to be attempting to get some further mileage out of the proposed TikTok deal by tying it collectively together with his assaults on what he has known as “the liberal indoctrination of America’s youth.” For weeks, he has been waging battles on interpretations of historical past that he claims are un-American, together with The New York Times’ 1619 Project.

In a Constitution Day speech final week, Trump known as the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1619 Undertaking “poisonous propaganda.” The challenge reframes American historical past across the yr when the primary slave ship arrived on the nation’s shores.

Trump additionally tweeted earlier this month that the Division of Schooling was trying into studies that California colleges would educate the challenge in colleges, including that “If that’s the case, they won’t be funded!” (It is not likely clear how widespread this phenomenon is. Some colleges have mentioned they may undertake the 1619 Undertaking into their classes, however how many isn’t known.)

— Brian Fung and Sherisse Pham contributed to this report.

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