The death knell for American TikTok should have been on March 13th, 2024, when Congress voted on an overwhelmingly bipartisan basis to force its parent company to sell the app or face an outright ban. Rarely do you ever see Republicans and Democrats in agreement over anything, but both sides saw the app as a national security threat and worried that the Chinese government would use it to sow misinformation and secretly harvest its users’ personal data. After the bill was signed into law by President Joe Biden and negotiations with ByteDance dragged on, a ban seemed inevitable, even if his adversary Donald Trump won.

After all, MAGA had always been consistent about hating two things that happen to proliferate on TikTok: the Chinese Communist Party, whom they believed were secretly bankrolling the Bidens; and people who openly support Palestine. And in 2020, Trump signed an executive order attempting to ban TikTok, partially after seeing how TikTok was boosting support for his then-rival Joe Biden.

But months after the law officially kicked in, Trump sits in the Oval Office, TikTok remains online under Chinese ownership, and its fate hinges on whether the US and China can come to an agreement that would end an international trade war that’s already wiped out over $5 trillion. Trump has repeatedly extended a (dubiously legal) pause on enforcing the ban, which could well be pushed back even farther. And this time, you really can blame the kids for this one.

Every old elected official has an army of younger, ambitious staffers supporting them — drafting the bills, filling their schedules, and staying up late to run files up and down the halls. And the day that bill passed, the Republican Hill staffers were glued to the app, binging on aspirational content from right-wing TikTokers as their bosses railed about threats to national security next door. It was those younger, ambitious staffers who eventually got in Trump’s ear as he conducted his alternative media blitz to the White House.

It had taken a few years for them to come around, but young MAGA influencers were less inclined to see the app as a Chinese psy-ops machine. One of the final blows came when a 2022 Washington Post investigation revealed that Meta, a company they widely loathed for its content moderation policies and meddlesome CEO, had been paying a Republican comms firm called Targeted Victory to push a narrative tying TikTok to the CCP. (If there’s anything they hate more than Big Tech, it’s GOP establishment consultants working in cahoots with Big Tech.)

Any lingering hesitations on Trump’s part vanished weeks after the law’s passage. The New York Times reported in May of 2024 that TikTok’s internal metrics revealed users vastly preferred Trump over Biden: there had been 1.29 million pro-Trump posts versus 651,000 pro-Biden posts since November 2023.

“That was a big wake-up call for a lot of us, when we saw that Gen Z was really supportive of President Trump,” a Republican digital operative familiar with the campaign’s strategy told The Verge. Trump soon launched his own account, TikTokers soon started reposting his content, and as the operative put it: “His account just crushed.”

One reelection and 100 days later — after his collabs were served into the feeds of Logan Paul and Aiden Ross’s followers outside the right-wing media ecosystem, after viral trends turned his awkward old-man dances into NFL touchdown celebration fodder, and after he promised to keep TikTok alive in the US in defiance of the Republican olds — Trump’s TikTok presence is now his crucial lifeline to the zoomers, who would have dismissed him as a boomer if he hadn’t packaged his attacks on the press and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants into an account speaking in their language of deep-fried 4Chan memes, aggressive use of emoji in captions, AI-generated images of Trump heroically protecting the border, and pro-Trump content hopping on the latest trending songs. (But in a based and red-pilled way, not a cringe way).

Over its roughly one-year lifetime, according to journalist Kyle Tharp, the campaign account @TeamTrump has garnered 2.8 billion views, the most of any campaign or politician on the platform. In contrast, the Democrats’ TikTok account has roughly 670 million views, while @KamalaHQ, the official account of Kamala Harris’s campaign, has been inactive since December. The momentum has carried past the election, too: since January 1st, @TeamTrump has gained a staggering 230 million views and 16 million likes. That month, Trump posted an infographic on Truth Social showing his performance on the platform and asked: “Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?”

Trump is best known as an all-caps microblogger, and he’s several decades older than the vast majority of TikTok’s users. (Roughly 70 percent of American TikTok users are between 18 and 34.) But ever since the 1980s, Trump’s spent his entire adult life shamelessly feeding outrageous quotes and juicy, scandalous stories about himself to New York City tabloids and reality television, two voracious media ecosystems where all attention is good attention. Trump is basically doing the same thing in 2025, just with some technology involved. As a new media consultant might put it, he’s generating nonstop, attention-grabbing content for a social media platform — one that rewards creators who consistently upload content that viewers find engaging enough, whether out of entertainment or anger, to watch for more than two seconds. “TikTok is primarily an entertainment app,” noted the digital operative, “and our usage of it was just significantly more savvy than [the Democrats].”

Say what you will about geopolitical security and trade wars: if your goal is to convince enough Americans that you are a good president, it is absolutely worth keeping TikTok around for that reach alone. (Perhaps in a show of gratitude for swaying Trump and saving their company, TikTok sponsored a glitzy DC party on the eve of the inauguration in honor of MAGA’s biggest content creators.)

America has a long history of right-wing demagogues who grow their power via mass communication, from Father Coughlin on the radio in the 1930s, to Roger Ailes on cable television in the 2000s. The MAGA social media influencers are their digital descendants. They’re building a massive audience, holding their attention, and getting them to vote a certain way or boycott a certain thing — a political skill, no matter how you cut it, just like knocking on doors and kissing babies.

Granted, they were not the first to the game: Barack Obama famously used Twitter to reach out to younger voters, raise hundreds of millions of dollars, and bypass traditional media. But the Democrats were never able to replicate his success, whereas the Republicans paid attention, studied his tactics, and launched training camps to create their own digital influencer army. By the time of the 2024 Republican primaries, their power was such that Ron DeSantis was actively trying to draft influencers to serve as his online surrogates, and Trump had stacked his war room with his own influencers, who ultimately persuaded him to get on TikTok.

MAGA influencers also view TikTok as a relatively reliable platform to publish pro-Trump content without fear that their accounts will get demonetized, restricted, or worse, deactivated. After the events of January 6th, the MAGA influencer-industrial complex faced an existential crisis when tech companies began clamping down on their accounts: AWS booted the right-wing social media network Parler from its servers, while Facebook and Twitter shut down the accounts of election-denying content creators and influencers — including the ones that belonged to the President of the United States — causing them to suddenly lose their massive follower counts, and in some cases, their livelihoods.

TikTok had adopted the industry’s content moderation best practices at the time, removing QAnon content, vaccine conspiracies, and covid misinformation. Its broader policies around violence and sexually suggestive words helped inspire the rise of self-censoring “algospeak.” But it escaped right-wing scrutiny at the time — there largely were no high-profile MAGA accounts, much less any as high-profile as the President, to deplatform.

This left the door open for pro-Trump influencers to have a fresh start on TikTok, albeit with tempered expectations. The benefits of reaching a new audience began to override suspicions of Chinese interference. “It was a slow burn,” Vish Burra, the executive secretary of the New York Young Republicans Club who’s previously served as a communications adviser for Matt Gaetz and George Santos, told The Verge. “People on the right, especially young people, were appreciative of TikTok for being around and not canceling people and still paying people out.” They also realized that TikTok content could be uploaded to other platforms, whether on purpose or whether it just happened naturally. All good viral TikToks eventually end up on Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts — a trend the Trump campaign leaned into by reposting its favorite pro-Trump TikToks to its X account.

Many MAGA creators don’t believe that TikTok labels their political views (regressive as they may be) as hate speech violating its terms of service agreements. “Maybe they take your video down, but they don’t, like, crush your whole channel,” says Burra.

Giving the MAGA influencers access to the app preserves their ability to push Trump’s message to a Gen Z audience, and in turn, gives him more momentum to steamroll over Republicans’ traditional third-rail issues: the China hawks, the pro-Israel officials who believe the app serves up too much pro-Palestine content, the evangelicals who think the app is turning the children into enbies, the business lobby terrified that a fight over an entertainment app for young people could prolong a trade war. It also fits into his biggest brand attribute: being good at deals. (In a Supreme Court filing opposing the ban, the administration bragged about Trump’s “consummate dealmaking expertise” and mentioned, without any specifics, that his first term was “highlighted by a series of policy triumphs achieved through historic deals.”)

None of this has translated into actual trust that TikTok will remain friendly, however. Due to its foreign ownership, MAGA users feel the algorithm and content moderation policies are somewhat insulated from American political changes. But given that whoever’s in the White House directly controls whether Google and Apple can keep it on their app stores, that insulation looks threadbare. And TikTok is still theoretically looking to sell to a US owner. Over the past several months, these users have watched tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos (who are far less legally vulnerable than TikTok) rapidly restructure their companies’ core values — cutting DEI programs, eliminating content moderation policies, even turning a legacy newspaper into a “free market” mouthpiece — hoping to appease Trump and get tariff exemptions in return. And if a tech CEO can turn MAGA overnight for business purposes, they believe, there’s nothing stopping them from flipping back if a Democrat becomes president.

“The moment a Democrat is in, these fucking people are worthless, and you can’t trust them,” Burra says. “[The CEOs] will just start fucking canceling people and tweaking algorithms once the Democrats come and say, ‘We’re gonna fucking regulate you if you don’t.’”

But TikTok posing a national security threat — the reason that MAGA initially wanted a ban — now seems to be a nonissue. Besides, Burra says, he and his peers grew up under the assumption that some mysterious entity somewhere was already spying on them: a corporation, the CIA, China, whatever. “Everyone has my data except me. At least can’t I enjoy it? Can’t I make some money?”