In less than three days, Donald Trump’s TikTok account has far surpassed the Biden campaign — an early indication of the strength of the former president’s brand on the Gen Z-friendly social media platform.
Trump’s TikTok account has about 5 million followers and 5.2 million likes, compared to the Biden campaign’s roughly 355,000 followers and 4.6 million likes.
Trump debuted his TikTok account on Saturday night video MMA highlights its presence at UFC 302, a pay-per-view event in Newark, New Jersey. Within a day, the page surpassed the Biden campaign’s follower count, and by Monday morning had 10 times the number of followers the Biden campaign had.
Trump’s debut post garnered a staggering 63 million views — six times the views of his debut post four months ago, due to the Biden campaign’s first Super Bowl and the Super Bowl coinciding with the Super Bowl. President Joe Biden showed up answers questions about football.
Trump’s embrace of TikTok could reportedly help his campaign to appeal to younger Generation Z voters. Biden gets mad.
The former president’s re-election campaign has already signaled his big debut on a platform that has proven to lure younger voters than Biden, who won 60% of voters under the age of 30 in 2020. NBC News exit poll data.
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign called the former president’s popularity on this program “evidence of growing support and momentum for President Trump across the country right now.”
Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung said: “Team Trump will leave no front undefended and President Trump’s viral TikTok account is another step in our continued engagement with the American people, especially young voters, where he has gained significant ground against Crooked Joe Biden.”
Harry Sisson, a pro-Biden TikTok creator and self-described “Gen Z activist“with almost a million followers, downplayed the importance of Trump’s following, pointing to the different nature of Trump’s and Biden’s accounts.
“Trump uses [username] Everyone knows this from various social media platforms, realDonaldTrump, while @BidenHQ is something most Americans don’t know about,” Sisson said. “If Biden had opened a personal account where Biden himself was posting content, it would be a different story now.”
While Biden has personal social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, he does not have a personal page on TikTok, instead using his campaign’s BidenHQ account to post content on the app.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby during the Biden campaign’s TikTok launch told reporters He said the administration still has “national security concerns” about the use of TikTok.
Sisson also said Trump’s massive TikTok following would be better served to win over younger, Generation Z voters this November, suggesting many of the former president’s 4.5 million followers are already die-hard fans.
“These aren’t, you know, your constituents in Pennsylvania worried about their reproductive rights or the college kid in Wisconsin who wants to know what the government is going to do about loans,” he said.
But even before joining TikTok, Trump dominated the platform. The New York Times recently reported An internal analysis within TikTok “found nearly twice as many pro-Trump posts as pro-Biden posts on the platform since November.”
TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s embrace of TikTok comes five months after the election marks a sharp turn Not only a fierce critic of the platform, but also for a former president who tried to ban the app in his first term.
Three months before the 2020 election, while young voters were mobilizing in favor of Biden on the platform, Trump issued an executive order banning TikTok in the US, citing national security concerns, which was eventually blocked by the courts.
But four years later, Trump has emerged as Biden’s chief critic as the US prepares to sign similar legislation that could lead to a ban on the practice. Posts on Truth Social In April, young voters should “remember” that “Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok” and that he is “doing it to help his Facebook friends get richer and more dominant.”
Trump has a tumultuous history on major social media platforms. It stopped working in January 2021 Facebook and Twitter (now X) following his posts prior to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Since the actions on his accounts, Trump has almost exclusively used his personal social media platform, Truth Social, to post content.
But Trump has been like that for the last two years allowed back above platforms. On the eve of the November elections, Trump started posting regularly on Facebook. He has only posted once on X since his recovery.
The latest information makes clear Trump’s motivation for joining TikTok. 11% of all voters in A NBC News survey Those between the ages of 18 and 34, released earlier this year, said they use TikTok at least once a day. Although this cohort disproportionately identifies as Democratic (47% Democrats vs. 30% Republicans), in a hypothetical general election contest, Democratic-leaning young voters narrowly beat Trump over Biden, 44% to 42%.
The Biden campaign has tried to reverse some of that trend by increasing its presence on the app. Since the page launched in February, the campaign has posted more than 200 videos, several of which feature both Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris speaking directly to the camera.
Before Trump joined the program, the Biden campaign page was among the largest of any presidential candidate, just behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s TikTok account, but well ahead of the account run by a pro-Trump super PAC.
However, Trump’s presence on the app has already affected the reception of content from the Biden campaign.
A New post by Biden campaign on TikTok account strengthening the claim An allegation by a former producer on “The Apprentice” that Trump once used a racial slur to refer to a black contestant garnered more than 1.2 million views in less than 12 hours and was the campaign’s most-viewed TikTok post for more than a month.
But most of the comments below the post are numerical numbers “3.2M”, “3.5M” and “3.7M” Trump supporters point out that the number of followers of his TikTok account is increasing.
according to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chewthe app has 170 million active users in the US, with an average age of 30+.