I think that's what this is really about. Trump and the various neocons filling his cabinet have decided to try and do to TikTok what China has done to many US companies through its onerous censorship requirements and preferential treatment of domestic technology companies. This is a case of blatant tit-for-tat. What this boils down to is conservatives in the executive branch not wanting Chinese technology companies to be able to do business in the US. There is an argument that this is justified given the protectionism China has demonstrated towards its own tech sector. Ultimately though this escalation is probably bad for Chinese-US relations and the Internet as a whole.

It's possible for this to completely backfire though. Suppose Microsoft pays tens of billions to ByteDance to acquire TikTok's US operations and then the app tanks in popularity or fails to reach profitability. This seems especially possible given how new TikTok is and the faddish rise and fall of many other video-based platforms (Vine, HQTrivia, Pariscope, etc.)