The verdicts from the sham trial last week don’t seem to be slowing down the Trump train. In the first 24 hours after the verdicts were announced, Trump raised over $50 million, largely from small donors, a third of which came from first-time donors.
Trump also stopped by UFC 302 over the weekend and got “a huge ovation from the fans at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey,” according to a report from Fox News.
While it’s not particularly surprising that Trump received such a huge welcome, the big news out of the appearance was the announcement that Trump has joined TikTok.
“The president is now on TikTok,” UFC CEO Dana White said while introducing Trump’s first video on the platform.
“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.
While some would argue the move is a smart strategy since polls have shown Trump has been seeing an increase in support from younger voters compared to 2020, the move is also extremely controversial since Trump previously tried to ban the app over national security concerns back in 2020.
“As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States,” Trump said at the time. Trump’s efforts were unsuccessful thanks to first the courts and then Joe Biden, who actively embraced the controversial app by recruiting TikTok influencers to help advance his agenda. Upon Biden taking office, the White House recruited TikTok influencers to help his COVID-19 vaccination push and other policy initiatives.
Even Sen. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, admitted that Trump was right to warn about TikTok’s relationship with the Chinese Communist Party. However, Trump has been signaling for some time that he has been softening his stance
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Biden did eventually sign a bill in April that would force TikTok owner ByteDance to sell the app within a year or face a ban in U.S. app stores, but it’s doubtful that anything substantive will happen with the app.
“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok,” Trump told CNBC earlier this year. “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 still acknowledges that ByteDance is still a national security threat, but that banning the app would anger young Americans, a key voting bloc he’s been trying to make inroads with. Unfortunately, between Biden’s longtime embracing of the app and Trump’s newfound interest in it, it seems unlikely that TikTok will ever actually be banned in the United States, regardless of whether it is sold or who wins the election.
And that’s unfortunate.
