Trump becomes instant TikTok hit after previously trying to ban the app

Days after his criminal conviction, Donald Trump has joined TikTok after claiming he was going to ban the platform.

On Thursday (30 May), Trump made history becoming the first person to hold that position to be criminally charged with a crime, after he was found guilty and convicted of 34 charges for falsifying business accounts.

Despite now possessing a criminal record, the controversial former US president is continuing in his bid to become re-elected in the November presidential election and has even now joined TikTok to help rally support.

Since the account was created, he has gained 3.5 million followers, at the time of writing.

In his first post on the platform, UFC president Dana White stood next to Trump and said: “The (former) president is now on TikTok.”

While Trump replied, “It’s my honour”, that has not always been his view, as he threatened to ban the social media platform back when he was in the White House.

In 2020, TikTok seemed to take off during the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic. However, the Chinese-owned app soon became an issue for Trump, who unsuccessfully sought to ban it in the US.

On 6 August 2020, he issued an executive order, in which he wrote, “action must be taken to address the threat posed by one mobile application in particular, TikTok”.

However, when the Biden administration took actual steps to get the law on a TikTok ban passed, Trump appeared to change his mind, claiming that banning TikTok would only benefit Facebook, which he described as the “true Enemy of the People”.

“There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok, but the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you’re going to make Facebook bigger, and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people, along with a lot of the media,” Trump told CNBC.

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