FCC Chair Brendan Carr told me back in August 2022 that he didn’t think TikTok’s presence in the U.S. was long for this world. “The tide is moving out on TikTok,” is how he put it to me at the time.
This feels a little ironic in hindsight, because not only is President Trump — the man who appointed Carr to lead the FCC — scrambling to try and save the app from the implementation of a U.S. ban, but now the Trump White House has just opened its own TikTok account, with 153,000 followers as of this writing, exactly five years to the month after Trump during his first term signed an executive order banning the app on national security grounds.
I suppose the moral of the story is, spend enough time in politics and you’ll eventually… go to war with yourself? In all seriousness, don’t waste your time trying to find a consistent intellectual throughline in the TikTok ban saga of the past several years. Here’s a quick recap, below, of how we got to this point.
The White House makes its TikTok debut
The Trump White House launched its TikTok account on Tuesday afternoon. The verified account @whitehouse picked up tens of thousands of followers within hours, introducing itself with the tagline: “Welcome to the Golden Age of America.” The debut video features a montage of President Trump at rallies and high-profile appearances, paired with a voice-over declaring: “Every day, I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation. I am your voice.”
It’s a striking shift when you remember this is the same president who, in 2020, tried to ban the app unless its U.S. operations were sold to an American buyer. That order never stuck, but the national security debate around TikTok didn’t go away. In fact, under President Biden, Congress passed legislation demanding that TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance divest its U.S. business or face removal from app stores.
Now, in a twist only 2025 politics could deliver, Trump is among the app’s most high-profile users while also arguably holding its fate in his hands. He launched his personal TikTok account last summer, which immediately went viral and helped fuel his campaign with younger voters. His granddaughter Kai Trump has also built a massive following on the app, regularly posting behind-the-scenes glimpses from the White House.
For all the talk of bans, divestitures, and looming deadlines, the White House’s arrival on TikTok shows just how central the app has become to American political life. Five years ago, TikTok was supposedly on its way out. Today, it’s where the president is asking Americans to tune in.
