When TikTok pulled down its services early Sunday, it added a politically attuned notice for disappointed users: “We are fortunate that President Trump has indicated that he will work with us on a solution to reinstate TikTok once he takes office.”

TikTok may have over 170 million devotees in the United States, but for these purposes it was talking to only one of them. The ego-stroking message to the man who once famously declared, “I Alone Can Fix It,” was clear. And rarely does a corporate political appeal — especially one as naked as this one — yield such instant results.

By midmorning on Sunday, Mr. Trump declared that he would in fact fix it: “I will issue an executive order on Monday to extend the period of time before the law’s prohibitions take effect, so that we can make a deal to protect our national security.”

Mr. Trump went on to describe, in the vaguest of terms, his newest idea: Reconstitute TikTok as a 50-50 “joint venture” between the existing Chinese owner, ByteDance, and some kind of American entity. It has a surface appeal, though it is not clear it would satisfy the mandate of the law Congress passed and President Biden signed banning the app unless the company and the algorithm are under American control.

Nor is it evident that it would address the national security problem inherent in having TikTok’s algorithms — which monitor the selections of users and pick the next thing shown to them — written in China.

But it was impressive politics on all sides. By shutting down the app for a bit of Saturday night and Sunday morning, TikTok made vivid to its loyal users what the world would be like without the app. (That shouldn’t be hard to imagine: It first came into American’s phones in 2016, just two months before Mr. Trump was elected for the first time.) And it created, for just a few hours, a standoff that Mr. Trump could then leap in and resolve, at least temporarily, on his way to the rally of his supporters in Washington on Sunday afternoon.

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