Four years after Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned video app has become one of the most vital parts of his presidential campaign.
In just two months, the former president has built a TikTok following of nearly 10 million that dwarfs that of his top political rivals. His success on an app beloved by Generation Z has surprised even his own campaign team, whichdebated this spring whether he should join a platform he once called a national security threat. Many Republicans continue to attack TikTok as a Chinese “digital fentanyl” app built to brainwash American teens.
But in a newly competitive presidential race that has seen excitement building around Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump’s team now regards TikTok as a secret weapon for reaching young voters. With less than 100 days until the election, they’re racing to double down on a strategy that will play up Trump as — in the words of one aide — “the biggest celebrity entertainer … on the planet.”
The Republican candidate’s aides hold morning brainstorm sessions and are trying to organize celebrity cameos for the platform. Campaign officials follow Trump around with their iPhones recording, looking for viral moments. The Trump team even hired a TikTok specialist in his early 20s to help make the videos shine.
Like the candidate himself, Trump’s TikTok content doesn’t dive deeply into policy issues, and most of his videos are under 15 seconds long. The objective, members of his TikTok team said, is to craft quick, punchy fly-on-the-wall videos that can help humanize the former president and amplify his off-the-cuff sense of humor and charisma — in TikTok slang, his “aura.”
One of the goals is to show potential voters a lighter, more charming side of Trump, instead of the candidate they have seen screaming, name-calling or appearing for criminal mug shots — and to bypass the traditional news media, which they believe younger voters increasingly avoid.
“He’s made for this kind of content,” one of his team members said.
Trump’s bid to harness TikTok for his campaign shows how the app he once sought to demolish has become a nerve center for American social and political debate. TikTok is one of America’s most popular online platforms, with more than 170 million U.S. accounts. A third of adults between 18 and 29 told Pew Research Center last year that it’s increasingly where they get their news.
But his rise there also reflects how the lines have blurred between political leaders and online influencers, who now must compete for attention and relevance in a social media landscape where viral trends can shift by the day.
“TikTok is one of the only social media platforms that serves political content to people who don’t follow political accounts, and it has an incredibly powerful distribution and discovery engine,” said Kyle Tharp, a former Democratic operative who writesFWIW, a newsletter about digital politics. “In terms of the online battlefield in American politics, TikTok is it.”
Trump’s team has only posted nine videos, and they have done so mostly on the fly, without carving out specific time for shooting footage. Trump’s three-man TikTok team, who spoke on the condition of anonymity under rules set by the campaign, operates in tandem with the campaign’s operations and travel teams to maximize opportunities from his schedule. “We have to try to squeeze in these moments when we can,” one team member said.
Trump has final say over the videos before they are posted, but most of the work is done by his team, as opposed to the tweets on his old Twitter account that he often tapped out on his phone by hand. (He still posts regularly to his two-year-old social network, Truth Social, though his audience there is smaller than on TikTok.)
One of Trump’s TikTok team members worked on his 2015 primary before taking a job at a public relations agency. Another, a member of Generation Z, was hired as a TikTok “industry expert” because of his familiarity with the platform’s mechanics and style.
The team has closely scrutinized the account’s viewership data for clues on how he is being perceived in battleground states. Aides said his account had received half a billion total views.
In a statement, Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said that his TikTok was “the most successful launch in political history” and that “Trump’s charisma and authenticity” was its “secret sauce.” “People love seeing the many sides of President Trump that the Fake News media deliberately refuses to cover,” she said.
Though no congressional Republicans have TikTok accounts, the app is an increasingly popular landing zone for conservative influencers and Trump’s inner circle. Two of Trump’s children, Trump Jr. and Ivanka, have accounts.
This spring, members of Trump’s circle — including advisers Kellyanne Conway and David Urban, who had lobbied for TikTok — began encouraging him to use the app, which they positioned as an untapped wellspring of pro-Trump sentiment online. By April, TikTok had roughly twice as many pro-Trump posts as posts supportive of President Joe Biden, according to a TikTok official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal metrics.
Biden’s campaign had posted more than 300 TikTok videos and gained a paltry 400,000 followers in five months, and like many campaign “war rooms” on social media, it had tried a bit of everything: policy explainers, graphical slide shows and direct-to-camera appeals from the candidate. None of the videos gained much traction, and many of them prompted a flood of angry comments over Biden signing a law that could ban the app nationwide as soon as next year.
On June 1, Trump posted his opening TikTok video, which featured Ultimate Fighting Championship head Dana White announcing the former president’s arrival and video of him entering an arena to great fanfare. “It’s my honor,” Trump said in the clip, which has been viewed nearly 170 million times.
Trump’s account has generally focused on displaying nonpolitical celebrities and colorful moments from the campaign trail. In one June video with 80 million views, Trump shakes hands and promises “no tax on tips” during a campaign stop at a Philadelphia cheesesteak joint. The video ends with him holding a framed photo of himself and promising, “I’m going to save TikTok.”
Within days, Trump’s TikTok had surpassed Biden’s months-old account, and his campaign had started circulating his videos in email blasts to donors and journalists to underscore his popularity. Attention to the former president on TikTok further surged after he survived an assassination attempt: More than 400,000 TikTok videos were made about him in the week after the shooting, racking up billions of views, according to a report from the analytics firm Zelf, which tracks TikTok data.
Trump’s grip on the platform, however, has been challenged by a wave of attention for Harris’s campaign. The vice president, whose TikTok account has gained 4 million followers since launching last month, has been boosted online by an amateur army of video editors and meme makers as well as appearances with celebrities like rapper Megan Thee Stallion, who performed at a Harris rally in Atlanta. Tim Walz, Harris’s running mate, has also been extraordinarily popular on TikTok, with clips of his sound bites cut into viral montages and hip-hop remixes.
In the last week of July, Harris and Trump were both the subject of videos that each received more than a billion collective views. But of the top-performing clips, 89 percent of Harris’s videos were positive and 68 percent of Trump’s were negative, according to Tharp’s review of Zelf data, which analyzed the videos’ tone and content. Many of those videos came from accounts that had otherwise been politically unengaged, according to a report from the social media analytics firm CredoIQ.
Trump’s account has struggled to rekindle the blockbuster viewership of his first two videos, while attention to Harris on the platform has soared. A short Harris video last month featuring N’Sync singer Lance Bass has been viewed about as many times as the last three Trump TikToks combined.
Compared with Trump’s more personality-driven account, other associated TikTok accounts have received a far more tepid response. The campaign’s official Team Trump account and an @maga account, which is managed by the pro-Trump political action committee Make America Great Again and has posted nearly 200 videos, have only gotten about 150,000 followers each.
Both of the accounts have more followers than Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (Ohio), who created a TikTok last week with an opening video featuring the Nelk Boys, a fraternity-like crew of Canadian prank influencers who was hosted on Air Force One by Trump in 2020.
Vance’s account, like the others, threatens to be overshadowed by competing offerings from TikTok’s user base, who occupy a platform with a culture and vibe all its own. A rap remix of Vance saying, “I’m a Never Trump guy” has become a viral dance trend on the app with thousands of videos, some with more than a million views.
Three of Trump’s TikTok videos have featured either wrestler Logan Paul or his brother, boxer Jake Paul, both of whom started as YouTubers before getting into podcasts, energy drinks and combat sports. But even beyond TikTok, Trump has worked to deploy his own kind of star power with help from sports and internet celebrities that his team says could mobilize the young male voters of the Republican base.
Trump played 18 holes at his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., with the 30-year-old pro golfer Bryson DeChambeau for an hour-long video last month that was briefly among the top trending on YouTube, where it has been viewed more than 10 million times.
On Monday, Trump also joined the video game streamer Adin Ross for an interview broadcast live from Mar-a-Lago, the former president’s club in Palm Beach, Fla.
“I love having a young audience,” Trump told Ross as roughly 300,000 people watched online. “My son Barron says hello, by the way. He's a big fan of yours.”
After the interview, Trump and Ross, aged 78 and 23, respectively, danced with each other on camera next to a Tesla Cybertruck wrapped with a photo from the former president’s assassination attempt, which Ross said was his gift to Trump. “We’re going to keep TikTok going. Whereas Biden and Harris, they have no idea what it means,” Trump said to one of the recording phones.
Within minutes of the live stream ending, the video appeared on his TikTok, where it has been viewed 27 million times. “I [don’t] see how anyone can hate this man,” one commenter said.