Former President Trump has joined TikTok, the embattled Chinese-owned social media platform that he once tried to ban during his years in the White House.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s first post on TikTok was a launch video on Saturday night on a verified account – @realDonaldTrump – showing him waving to fans at an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fight in Newark, New Jersey, that he attended a couple of hours earlier. 

“The president is now on TikTok,” UFC CEO and Trump friend Dana White said as he introduced the former president in the video.

“It’s my honor,” Trump responded in the video. The song “American Bad A–” by Kid Rock can be heard in the background.

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The move appears to be an effort to connect with younger voters who frequent the app, as Trump faces off with President Biden in the 2024 election rematch. The main super PAC supporting Trump, MAGA Inc., joined TikTok a couple of weeks ago. The site has roughly 170 million users in the U.S.

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The app appears to be friendly ground for the former president, with roughly twice as many pro-Trump posts compared to pro-Biden posts on the site, according to recent reports from the New York Times and Puck, which cited internal analysis from TikTok.

Biden’s 2024 re-election campaign joined TikTok in February, but the president signed a law in April forcing TikTok’s Chinese owner to sell the app within a year or face a ban in the U.S.

Donald Trump waves to the crowd at the UFC 302 event at Prudential Center on June 1, 2024 in Newark. (Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

Trump, in 2020 during his last year as president, tried to ban the app in the U.S. market over national security concerns. His executive order was eventually blocked in federal court.

Trump changed his mind this year, and came out in opposition to Biden’s potential ban on TikTok.

Some former top Trump advisers – including former senior adviser Kellyanne Conway and David Urban – have been speaking out in favor of TikTok on Capitol Hill.

Regardless, many Republicans continue to criticize the popular app and urge its Chinese-based parent company to divest.

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

America, we have a(nother) constitutional crisis on our hands.

Amid all the well-warranted attention to Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who refuses to recuse himself from Jan. 6 cases despite reasonable doubt about his impartiality, spare some also for his equally ethics-challenged colleague Clarence Thomas, who’s stiffed similar recusal demands for more than two years.

Within weeks, the Supreme Court will decide two cases related to the unsuccessful 2021 insurrection and to Donald Trump’s role in events. No matter how the court decides, the outcomes will be widely questioned — because of the polluting participation of Alito and Thomas, the court’s most far-right members. And that’s a problem for a court whose public approval rating is already at historical lows in polls.

We now know that both justices’ spouses — the flag-loving Martha-Ann Alito and “Stop the Steal” foot soldier Ginni Thomas — have amply demonstrated their pro-Trump bias in ways that could not, and surely did not, go unnoticed by their husbands. Consequently, Justices Alito’s and Thomas’ “impartiality might reasonably be questioned” — the standard for recusal under toothless federal law — in cases involving Trump.

The objectivity of the full court, with its 6-3 right-wing supermajority, is suspect as well. In one of the two pending cases, the one involving Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution, the court has dragged matters out so long that he almost certainly won’t be tried before the 2024 election for trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.

That makes the court complicit — in appearance and probably in fact — in Trump’s unsubtle legal strategy: delay, delay, delay. How much of that foot dragging owes to Alito and Thomas? We can’t know, because of the court’s secretive inner workings. But we can reasonably question.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is doing his part to maintain the court’s opacity. On Thursday he wrote to Sens. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, the chairmen of the Senate Judiciary Committee and its subcommittee on federal courts, respectively, rejecting their request to meet about court ethics. Roberts cited judicial independence and the separation of powers.

The chief can’t claim the high ground when his colleagues keep digging from below.

First, consider Alito, the scofflaw of the moment. The New York Times has reported that separate flags associated with groups that attacked the Capitol flew over his home outside Washington and at a beach getaway in New Jersey. Alito blames his wife, leaving more bus tracks on her back each time he addresses the matter, and absolves himself.

“No involvement whatsoever,” he said in a brief email to the New York Times, for its first story on the upside-down U.S. flag that waved at his house for days in January 2021, after the attack on the Capitol. Alito gave no response to the newspaper for its second story about a flag favored by pro-Trump Christian nationalists that fluttered at his beach house last summer. Yet he gave friendly Fox News an interview, and claimed his wife was provoked by a venomous spat with an anti-Trump couple on their block — an account that couple contradicted in a third New York Times story that was partly corroborated by neighbors, contemporaneous texts and a police report.

When Alito wrote to Durbin and Whitehouse, rejecting their request that he recuse from 2020 election cases, he said he’d asked his wife for several days to remove the inverted flag, but she refused. He emphasized his wife’s autonomy, her co-ownership of their house and her constitutional rights — and his own impotence: “There were no additional steps I could have taken to have the flag taken down more promptly.” Are justices so used to being catered to that Alito couldn’t take it down himself?

Now a brief refresher on Ginni Thomas’ shenanigans, which similarly elicited professions of cluelessness, powerlessness and respect for her independence from her hubby.

For weeks after Biden’s election, Ginni Thomas texted White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, forwarding conspiracy theories and imploring him to keep up the fight for Trump: “Do not concede. It takes time for the army who is gathering for his back.” She contacted Arizona Republicans to promote the fake electors scheme. On Jan. 6 she wrote on Facebook, “LOVE MAGA people!!!!” She joined in damning the House Jan. 6 committee as a “political persecution” of “citizens who have done nothing wrong.” And she condemned then-Vice President Mike Pence for certifying Biden’s election.

What did Clarence Thomas do? He repeatedly participated in Jan. 6-related cases and invariably sided with the pro-Trump parties.

Together the Thomas and Alito scandals underscore the revolting sense of impunity at the court among its life-tenured justices. Most public figures, those answerable to the voters, show some humility and remorse in the face of evident wrongdoing or embarrassment (at least they used to). Not these justices.

Part and parcel of their impunity is a petulant refusal to be accountable for their partners’ actions, when those activities cast the justices’ own fairness into doubt. Journalists can throw this stone: Reporters enter their careers accepting that they can’t sport political bumper stickers, lapel buttons, yard signs or flags, and they certainly can’t work for political causes. It’s not ethical. If a spouse works in politics, the reporter avoids covering stories their partner is involved in. I still live by the limits though I became an opinion columnist several years ago. In the decades I reported on Congress, the White House and campaigns, those in my household respected them as well.

It’s not too much to expect that justices demand their spouses do the same.

Alito and Thomas disagree. And so they, with Roberts, bring disgrace on the court. When the court soon rules on the Jan. 6 cases, its decisions will be historic not only for the substance but for the fact that two such conflicted justices took part. Shame on them.

@jackiekcalmes

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis addressed an audience at Sarasota’s New College of Florida Saturday in a speech that touted the state’s educational accomplishments and reforms and bashed the “woke” stranglehold on academia.

“In the last 5½ years, there’s been no state that has done more to reform and improve education. … We took on school choice. We made sure schools were open during COVID, battling school unions, all this stuff. So it was really, really good.”

New College of Florida, the state’s liberal arts honors college, has been the site of a contentious power struggle between the previous school administration and the governor, which has seen DeSantis seek to remake the institution in the image of Michigan’s Hillsdale College. 

In January 2023, DeSantis appointed a new slate of six board members, including outspoken activist and DEI and critical race theory critic Christopher Rufo.

RON DESANTIS SHAKES UP LIBERAL UNIVERSITY, APPOINTS SIX MEMBERS TO THE NEW COLLEGE OF FLORIDA

DeSantis praised the school makeover, arguing “it was so much about ideology. You know, no accountability, no grades, none of this other stuff. … This is a public institution. And we have, not only a right, we have an obligation to make sure that our public institutions are serving the best interests of the state of Florida.”

The governor aimed his fire at using public resources for what he construes as ideological indoctrination.

“If you want to go be on some Marxist commune, if that’s what you want to do with your life, who am I to say? But I don’t want the taxpayers of Florida funding that. So, we made some big changes. … What’s in the best interest of the state of Florida. And I think what you’ve seen, I don’t think you’ve seen more dramatic improvement at any other institution.”

DeSantis argued the new vision for the school is akin to the educational philosophy of the nation’s great writers and thinkers at the dawn of American democracy.

“The mission is, we want a liberal arts education that is rooted in the Western tradition — a classical education similar to what our Founding Fathers had when they went to universities. That is something that I think will attract people not just throughout Florida, but throughout the country. 

“I think there are a lot of parents, especially with what you see going on in some of these other university campuses. … Now, the insanity in universities is not new, but … since [the Hamas attack on Israel on] Oct. 7,” people see “how insane this has become.”

FLORIDA EDUCATION COMMISSIONER SAYS STATES NEED TO BE MORE ‘AGGRESSIVE’ WITH POLICY, GO BACK TO BASICS

Governors Gavin Newsom and Ron DeSantis  (Getty Images)

Referencing the nationwide campus protests over the war in Gaza, DeSantis contrasted Florida’s public education system with perceived Ivy League permissiveness and promised to deal with disruptions with a firm hand.

“Letting the inmates run the asylum doesn’t work. So, you’ve seen a sickness in these universities. … I’ve talked to people who are very, very high up in finance and all these other things. But [with respect to education] you’re better off in Florida than Columbia or Harvard. … Now they’re saying that, people.”

DeSantis has been a leading critic of left-wing bias on university campuses and has frequently butted heads with the state’s educational establishment.

“What you’re seeing in academia is what happens when leftist ideology infects an institution. It corrupts the institution. … You know, the problem is, the left infects corporate America,” DeSantis said. “It corrupts when it infects academia. It corrupts when it infects the medical [establishment]. … When it affects corporate media, it corrupts.

“Now you have the BLM riots — remember a few years ago? — and you have a reporter from CNN standing in front of buildings burning saying that it’s a mostly peaceful protest. So, the facts are totally out the window. It’s ideology.” 

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis speaks to members of the media after an event July 27, 2023, in Chariton, Iowa. (Sergio Flores for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

The governor then pivoted to the state’s pandemic policies, castigating the nation’s medical establishment for corruption and following a political agenda rather than science.

“[During the pandemic], ideology had trumped evidence-based science. … There was an agenda, and they were playing on a team. And you saw the corruption in that. You saw … the mutilation of minors. That is not consistent with the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, cut off somebody’s private parts who is 14 years old. … And not very many Western countries have indulged in this. Only here you see this … corruption of the medical establishment.”

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Finally, the governor credited Florida’s COVID policies with sparking a massive influx of people and investment in the state as blue state residents tired of bigger government, lockdowns and higher taxes.

“Of course, we bucked the consensus on COVID. And, you know, Florida, when COVID started, we were doing well as a state. Most people would prefer to live in Florida than with the governments of California, New York, Illinois then, for sure. But the contrast with how we handled COVID versus them is it sparked a massive infusion of people, investment, businesses, unlike what really any state has ever seen.”