In early August, President Trump signed an executive order giving TikTok’s parent company a dramatic ultimatum: sell its operation in the United States to an American firm in the next forty-five days, or risk being banned.

Last week, just before the forty-five-day deadline expired, TikTok’s Beijing-based owners, ByteDance, agreed to move forward with a bid from Oracle and Walmart. Except the forced sale wasn’t a sale at all. Instead, Oracle, Walmart, and TikTok agreed to set up a new US-based company that would oversee the video-sharing app’s operation in the United States. Under the deal, Oracle and Walmart would have a combined 20 percent stake in the new entity, called TikTok Global, while ByteDance would hold the remaining 80 percent.

While ByteDance okayed the Oracle-Walmart bid, Trump sounded the alarm bells, declaring last week that he would issue an order for Google and Apple to pull the app. Trump’s strong stance against China made headlines around the world: TikTok is now one of the largest video apps on the planet, with a hundred million US users alone. Now well past the original forty-five-day deadline, TikTok is still unbanned, the company remains in the hands of its original Chinese owners, and Trump is seemingly getting nothing he asked for.