Treasury Secretary announces a 'framework' for a TikTok deal; China has not announced one.

Hon. Monday morning. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent comes out of a meeting in Madrid and announces that the United States and China have reached a framework for a deal that will keep TikTok from going dark in the United States. He says it standing next to the microphones. He uses the word framework. He uses it twice.

The deadline for ByteDance to sell TikTok or have the app banned in the United States, per the law that the Supreme Court already upheld, is Friday. Four days away. The President has, by my count, extended the deadline four times since taking office. Each extension was an executive order saying he would not enforce the law for another ninety days while the deal got done.

Bessent’s framework is, on the day he describes it, not signed. Not announced from the Chinese side. Not officially confirmed by the State Council in Beijing. Not corroborated by ByteDance, which is the entity that would, in the framework, divest. The Chinese foreign ministry, when asked the same day, declined to comment.

Look. I am not a banker. I have not been in the room. But I have been a waitress for thirty years, and I will tell you something. When the one side of a deal walks out and tells the cameras the deal is frameworked and the other side declines to comment, the frameworked side is announcing the deal it wants the other side to confirm by Friday.

The President will, per the announcement, get on the phone with Xi Jinping later in the week. The phone call will, per the announcement, finalize the framework. The deal terms, as floated, give Oracle and a handful of American investors, including Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, and Lachlan Murdoch, an 80 percent stake in TikTok’s American operations. ByteDance gets to keep less than 20 percent.

You ever notice how the framework always seems to require exactly the people in the President’s social circle owning the American version of the foreign company.

Funny how that works.