President-elect Donald Trump wants to keep TikTok — at least, right now he does.
At AmericaFest, hosted by Turning Point USA and Turning Point Action, on Sunday, Trump said he “did go on TikTok and we had a great response with billions of views.” Trump has 14.7 million followers on the app. While his videos regularly have many millions of views, there doesn’t appear to be any videos on his TikTok page with “billions of views.” The video with the most views is the first he posted, with nearly 179 million views.
“They brought me a chart, and it was a record, and it was so beautiful to see, and as I looked at it, I said, ‘Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,'” he said, according to Reuters. This comes just after Trump met with TikTok’s CEO and said he had a “warm spot” for the app.
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This is the newest approach Trump has taken on the platform, a significant change from his 2020 attempts to ban it.
It comes at a time in which a TikTok ban seems imminent. President Joe Biden signed a bill into law in April that would ban TikTok in the U.S. on Jan. 19 unless ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, divests from the app. A federal appeals court upheld Biden’s law. The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge of the ruling, but the deadline still looms.
It’s unclear what Trump will actually do to stop the ban on TikTok. He doesn’t become president until the day after the ban goes into effect, and the president-elect can’t make any legislative changes — no matter how badly he says he wants to “keep this sucker around.”
