The number of followers of US presidential candidate Donald Trump’s TikTok account exceeded 1.3 million followers on Sunday, within hours of joining the social media platform that he tried to ban when he was president for national security reasons.
This step, which Trump took on Saturday, would help him reach young voters during his third attempt to win a presidential term.
Trump is locked in a tight race with Democratic President Joe Biden before the presidential elections scheduled for November 5.
Biden’s election campaign already has an account on TikTok, despite Biden signing a bill that would ban the application if the Chinese company “ByteDance” that owns it does not withdraw its investments from it.
About 170 million Americans use the application, according to Reuters.
Trump posted a video clip on his TikTok account, on Saturday evening, in which he appeared greeting the fans in a martial arts tournament match in Newark, New Jersey.
Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung said the campaign would leave no front unturned and contested.
“This represents the continued outreach to a younger audience consuming pro-Trump and anti-Biden content,” he added.
ByteDance is waging a legal battle against an American law that requires it to sell TikTok by January or face a ban. The White House says it wants to end the company’s ownership of the platform for national security reasons.
TikTok says it will not share American users’ data with the Chinese government and that it has taken strong measures to protect the privacy of its users.
The courts blocked Trump’s attempt in 2020 to ban TikTok, while he was president.
Trump already has an active presence on other social media platforms, as he has more than 87 million followers on X and more than seven million on his own platform (Truth Social), on which he posts almost daily.
Turning point
In another development, the former US president warned, following his historic criminal trial, that issuing a prison sentence against him would be a “turning point” for his supporters.
Trump said in an interview broadcast on the American Fox network on Sunday that he “accepts the matter, but is not confident that public opinion will accept it.”
“I’m OK with it.” But “I think it’d be tough for the public to take” a prison sentence, he added, adding, “at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”
He also confirmed that his criminal trial was extremely harsh on his wife, Melania, the most prominent absentee from attending the sessions that ended with his conviction.
Earlier, Stormy Daniels, the former pornographic film actress who was at the heart of the case that led to Trump’s criminal conviction, called on the American judiciary to imprison the Republican candidate, who, she said, had become disconnected from reality.
“Jail him now,” Daniels, a porn star (45 years old) said on the website of the British newspaper Daily Mirror in her first interview since the ruling was issued by the New York court.
At the end of two days of deliberations, a jury comprising 12 citizens of New York declared, on Thursday, unanimously convicting Trump of all thirty-four charges against him in the case of falsifying accounting documents, with the aim of concealing a sum of money he paid to buy Daniels’ silence in order to avoid a sex scandal before the 2016 elections, which he ran against Hillary Clinton.
The former porn actress confirms that she had a sexual relationship with Donald Trump 10 years ago, an incident that Trump strongly denies.
