While it was President Joe Biden who signed the law that would force ByteDance to sell its stake in TikTok or face a ban, it’s his successor, Donald Trump, who has yet to fulfill his promise of arranging a deal to keep TikTok running, legally, in the United States. The current deadline for a deal is September 17th. Still, it hasn’t stopped Trump’s administration from creating @WhiteHouse on TikTok, which published its first post on Tuesday night: a video celebrating Trump’s accomplishments.
While Trump tried to ban TikTok in 2020, his stance softened during his re-election campaign once his team learned how many supporters Trump had on the platform. In 2024, the Trump campaign launched its own official account, @TeamTrump, and quickly dominated the platform, getting more followers and views on their content than former Vice President Kamala Harris’s now-dormant campaign account — 2.8 billion to 2.2 billion, according to journalist Kyle Tharp. A Republican digital operative close to the campaign heavily credited Trump, a former reality TV star, for his ability to generate attention-grabbing moments that could be transformed into viral content. “TikTok is primarily an entertainment app,” he previously told The Verge, “and our usage of it was just significantly more savvy than [the Democrats].”
Although the legality of and ulterior motives behind a TikTok ban remain a serious question, the Trump administration, for now, appears to find utility in maintaining an account on the platform. “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?” Trump said on Truth Social in January, sharing a post about the billions of views his campaign account continued to rack up. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt repeated this stance after the government account was launched. “President Trump’s message dominated TikTok during his presidential campaign,” she said in a statement to The Verge, “and we’re excited to build upon those successes and communicate in a way no other administration has before.”
