Donald Trump has joined the popular video-sharing app TikTok, a platform he once tried to ban while in the White House, and posted from a UFC fight two days after he became the first former president and presumptive major party nominee in US history to be found guilty on felony charges, the AP reports. "It's an honor," Trump said in the TikTok video, which features footage of him waving to fans and posing for selfies at the Ultimate Fighting Championship fight in Newark, New Jersey, on Saturday night. The video ends with Trump telling the camera: "That was a good walk-on, right?" By Sunday, Trump had amassed more than 3 million followers, Reuters reports.
"We will leave no front undefended and this represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content," Trump spokesman Steven Cheung said in a statement about the campaign's decision to join the platform. "There's no place better than a UFC event to launch President Trump's TikTok, where he received a hero's welcome and thousands of fans cheered him on," he added. As president, Trump tried to ban TikTok through an executive order that said "the spread in the United States of mobile applications developed and owned" by Chinese companies was a national security threat. The courts blocked the action after TikTok sued.
The platform was a hot topic of debate during the 2024 GOP primary campaign, with most candidates shunning its use. Trump said earlier this year that he still believes TikTok posed a national security risk, but was opposed to banning it because that would help its rival, Facebook, which he continues to criticize over his 2020 election loss to Biden. President Biden signed legislation in April that could ban TikTok in the US, but his reelection campaign nonetheless uses the app, which it joined the night of the Super Bowl in February. Biden's "bidenhq" account currently has more than 330,000 followers and 4.5 million likes.
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