Donald Trump launches into TikTok, after trying to ban the application

The Republican candidate for the US presidential election quickly gained more than three million subscribers on the ultra-popular video platform.

A surprising turnaround for the former President of the United States. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump created a TikTok account and published his first video on Saturday, June 1, after he tried to ban the platform when he was president.

For a first video, Joe Biden’s opponent kept it brief: a 13-second video, which shows Donald Trump attending an MMA fight in Newark (New Jersey). At his side, the boss of the mixed martial arts organization UFC, Dana White, who announces at the start of the video that “the president is now on TikTok”. “It is an honour for me”replied Donald Trump, found guilty of 34 falsifications of accounting documents in the Stormy Daniels affair on May 31.

Since its surprise launch, the account’s video alone has racked up more than 63 million views, and the @realDonaldTrump account more than 3.7 million followers, as of Monday afternoon. A faster success than that of Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s team, which has been active on TikTok since February 2024 with the account bidenhq, and has accumulated nearly 345,000 subscribers.

In 2020, Donald Trump sought to ban TikTok by decree, citing in particular supposed threats to national security. The measure was challenged by the application in court, then canceled by the Biden administration.

But since then, it is Joe Biden who has taken up this ban project, again for questions of national security, but also of data protection and the mental health of American users. The Democratic president has promulgated a law which plans to ban TikTok in the United States if its Chinese parent company Bytedance does not sell it to a non-Chinese company within 12 months. TikTok and ByteDance filed a lawsuit against the United States in early May, arguing that the law was “unconstitutional”.