At the end of his presidency in 2020, Donald Trump attempted unsuccessfully to remove TikTok from the top app stores and have its Chinese parent firm divest its stake.
He must feel relieved that the Biden administration retracted those efforts after facing a legal challenge. The former president joined TikTok on Saturday and swiftly racked up 5.2 million followers, surpassing the Biden campaign’s 357,000.
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A Trump campaign official defended the decision to join the app, which Mr. Trump has previously warned had national security implications due to its ties to China, in an interview with The Independent.
“We will leave no front undefended, and this represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” spokeswoman Steven Cheung stated.
The timing of the new account, which came just days after a New York court found Donald Trump guilty of falsifying business records as part of a hush money conspiracy during the 2016 election, made him the first former US president to face criminal charges, was also difficult to ignore.
Mr. Trump stated earlier this week that “there’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad” about TikTok, but that he preferred to join the app since it would mean less focus on Facebook, which he labeled “an enemy of the people.”
“If China demands anything from TikTo, they will provide it, thereby increasing the risk to national security,” he stated in an interview with CNBC. “But, when I think about it, I don’t want to double the size of Facebook. If we ban TikTok, it will significantly benefit Facebook and other platforms, especially Facebook, which has been quite active.
(Facebook, which played a key role in Trump’s 2016 victory, later banned Trump for more than two years following the January 6 insurgency, only to reinstate him in early 2023.)
Despite the fact that both campaigns are already on TikTok, the social media app’s political future in the United States remains uncertain.
The Senate has already enacted legislation to ban the app in the United States if ByteDance does not sell TikTok within the next year, and if the House passes it, the president is expected to sign it.
While Trump is doing well on TikTok, Truth Social, his own social media platform, is faltering.
Its parent business, Trump Media and Technology Group, had its stock fall 6% following the hush money verdict, and TMTG reported a $327.6 million first-quarter loss this month.
