Trump joins TikTok, the app he once tried to ban

Donald Trump has joined TikTok, a major coup for the app under fire from Washington over its alleged ties to China.

On Saturday night, the former president posted a splashy launch video on a verified account, @realDonaldTrump, showing Trump waving to fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship fight he attended in Newark, New Jersey.

“The president is now on TikTok,” UFC CEO Dana White said, introducing Trump in the video.

“It’s my honor,” Trump replied, as “American Bad Ass” by Kid Rock played in the background.

The move by Trump to join TikTok is in an effort to reach potential voters — especially younger ones — in the run-up to the November election. It comes just as the viral video app faces a potential ban in the U.S. if it doesn’t divest from its Chinese owner ByteDance.

“The campaign is playing on all fields,” said an adviser to Trump’s campaign, granted anonymity to speak freely. “Being able to do outreach on multiple platforms and outlets is important and this is just one of many ways we’re going to reach out to voters. TikTok skews towards a younger audience.”

Trump joining TikTok is another win for the embattled app, which President Joe Biden’s campaign joined in February. It’s a sign that both campaigns see TikTok, with its 170 million users in the United States, as a messaging tool worth pursuing regardless of the controversy surrounding the app.

Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., started using the app last week. He has posted from the inauguration of El Salvador president Nayib Bukele and behind the scenes from the holding room at the Manhattan courtroom where his father’s criminal case — where he was found guilty on 34 counts — was being tried.

The app is particularly attractive to Trump’s campaign given there’s a two-to-one ratio of pro-Trump versus pro-Biden content on the app, said a TikTok official who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The ratio was first reported by Puck News.

TikTok is fighting for its existence in the courts, after Biden signed a law in Aprilforcing its owner ByteDance to sell it within a year or face a ban on U.S. app stores.

Trump hasn’t always been a TikTok supporter. During his presidency, he tried to ban the app in the U.S. market over national security concerns — an effort eventually blocked in the federal courts.

But Trump has recently had a change of heart, opposing the TikTok legislation Biden signed. He said ByteDance is still a national security threat, but that a potential ban would anger young Americans and help Meta, the owner of Facebook, which suspended him from its platform for two years following the riot at the Capitol in 2021.

“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” Trump said earlier this year on CNBC. “But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media.”

Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., joined TikTok recently, and the former president could draw a huge base of MAGA supporters to the app from his own Truth Social platform, where he has some 7 million followers.

Some of Trump’s top former advisers and allies have been advocating for TikTok on Capitol Hill, including Trump’s former senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, on behalf of Club for Growth, and David Urban, a former senior Trump campaign adviser and registered lobbyist for ByteDance.

Steve Bannon, a former Trump campaign strategist and “War Room” podcast host, accused Trump of being influenced in his shifting position on TikTok by billionaire investor and Club for Growth donor Jeff Yass, who holds a 15 percent stake in ByteDance. Bannon wrote on social media, “Simple: Yass Coin.” Trump said that when he met with Yass, they did not talk about the app.

While Trump’s campaign came later to TikTok than Biden’s, the former president has used Biden’s position on the app to hammer him — blaming Biden for potentially banning the popular platform.

“Just so everyone knows, especially the young people, Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok,” Trump posted to Truth Social in May. “He is the one pushing it to close, and doing it to help his friends over at Facebook become richer and more dominant, and able to continue to fight, perhaps illegally, the Republican Party.”