In less than three days, Donald Trump’s TikTok account has far surpassed that of the Biden campaign — an early indication of the strength of the former president’s brand on the Gen Z-aligned social media platform.
Trump’s TikTok account has gained nearly 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 evening with a video highlighting his presence at UFC 302, an MMA pay-per-view event in Newark, New Jersey. Within a day, the page had surpassed the Biden campaign’s followers, and by Monday morning the page had amassed more than ten times the followers of the Biden campaign.
Trump’s debut post was viewed a whopping 63 million times — six times as many viewers as the Biden campaign’s debut post, which was first posted four months ago to coincide with the Super Bowl and featured President Joe Biden himself answering football-themed questions .
Trump’s embrace of TikTok could help his campaign in its efforts to win over segments of younger Gen Z voters, whom data suggests may be sour on Biden.
The former president’s reelection campaign has already pointed to his sizable debut on the platform as evidence that he has been siphoning younger voters away from Biden, who won 60% of voters under 30 in 2020, according to NBC News exit poll data.
A Trump campaign spokesperson called the former president’s popularity on the app “a testament to the increase in support and momentum for President Trump currently happening across the country.”
“Team Trump will leave no front undefended and President Trump’s viral TikTok account is another step in our continued outreach to the American people, especially the young voters, with whom he has gained significant ground against Crooked Joe Biden,” said Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung.
Harry Sisson, a pro-Biden TikTok creator and a self-described “Gen Z activist” with nearly a million followers, downplayed the significance of Trump’s following and pointed out the different nature of the Trump and Biden accounts.
“Trump uses the [username] which everyone knows from various social media platforms, the realDonaldTrump, while @BidenHQ is something that not many Americans know,” Sisson said. “If Biden were to create a personal account where Biden himself posts content, it would be a different story.”
While Biden has personal social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, he does not have a personal page on TikTok but uses his campaign’s BidenHQ account to release content on the app.
At the time of the Biden campaign’s TikTok launch, National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters that the administration still had “national security concerns” about the use of TikTok.
Sisson also denied the idea that Trump’s large TikTok following suggests he will have better luck winning over younger Gen Z voters in November, speculating that a large portion of the former president’s 4.5 million followers are already die-hard fans.
“These are not the decisive voter in Pennsylvania who is concerned about their reproductive rights, or the student in Wisconsin who wants to know what the government is going to do with their loans,” he said.
But even before joining TikTok, Trump had the upper hand on the platform. The New York Times recently reported that 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 return a request for comment.
Trump’s embrace of TikTok five months after the election marks a sharp turn for the former president, who was not only a vocal critic of the platform but also tried to ban the app during his first term.
Three months before the 2020 election, as young voters mobilized on the platform in favor of Biden, Trump issued an executive order that would have banned TikTok in the United States, citing national security concerns, an effort that ultimately was obstructed by the courts.
But four years later, Trump emerged as one of Biden’s top critics as he prepared to sign similar legislation that could potentially lead to a U.S. ban on the app. In April, he posted on Truth Social that young voters should “remember” that “Crooked Joe Biden is responsible for banning TikTok” and that he is “doing it to help his friends on Facebook become richer and more dominant.”
Trump has had a tumultuous history on mainstream social media platforms. In January 2021, he was suspended from Facebook and Twitter (now X) for his posts leading up to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Following the actions on his accounts, Trump almost exclusively used his own social media platform, Truth Social, to post content.
But over the past two years, Trump has been allowed to return to the platforms. In the run-up to the November election, Trump has resumed posting regularly on Facebook. He only posted once on X after recovering.
Recent data makes clear Trump’s incentive to join TikTok. As many as 11% of all voters in an NBC News poll published earlier this year, who were between the ages of 18 and 34, said they use TikTok at least once a day. Although that cohort was disproportionately identified as Democratic (47% identified as Democrats versus 30% Republicans), those Democratic-leaning young voters in a hypothetical general election matchup narrowly broke for Trump over Biden, 44% to 42%.
The Biden campaign had tried to buck that trend in part by increasing its presence on the app. Since launching the page 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 app, the Biden campaign page was among the largest of any page associated with the presidential candidates, slightly less than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s TikTok account but much larger than any account that launched by a super PAC that supported Trump.
However, Trump’s presence on the app has already affected how the Biden campaign’s content is received.
A new post from the Biden campaign on his TikTok account, amplifying a claim from a former producer on “The Apprentice” that Trump once used a racial slur to refer to a Black contestant, is in viewed more than 1.2 million times in less than 12 hours. it became the campaign’s most viewed TikTok post in more than a month.
But many of the comments below the post are numerical figures “3.2 million,” “3.5 million” and “3.7 million,” as Trump supporters highlight the growing number of followers of his TikTok account.
According to TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew, the app has 170 million active users in the US and their average age is over 30.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
