The Department of Labored Content
When the White House announced, last week, that President Donald Trump’s Cabinet members were launching TikTok accounts, it urged users not to “miss a second of the hype” because the Administration was “CRUSHING IT for American Workers and on TikTok.” The Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., declared in his first official post that he was “making TikTok healthy again,” while a montage of him doing pullups and handling snakes played to Boston’s “More Than a Feeling.” The Secretary of Veterans Affairs, Doug Collins, promised to tailor his TikTok to “special and relevant” veterans’ concerns, which has so far brought us a handful of A.I.-generated A.S.M.R. animations and N.F.L. highlights. The Justice Department’s account has featured numerous alarmist posts about cartels and immigrant crime, while positioning the acting Attorney General, Todd Blanche, as a beacon of law and order. Other Trump officials are presenting their arrival on TikTok as a public service, a way to speak directly to voters and spread policy information without the news media muddling the message. As the midterms fast approach, and Trump’s approval ratings hover around forty per cent, the Administration is presumably hoping to flood the algorithm with as much MAGA content as possible, turning to TikTok to reinvigorate a base whose enthusiasm has dwindled in the dying light of Trump’s second and final term in office.
The Administration’s embrace of TikTok follows years of bipartisan attempts to ban the platform over national-security concerns. U.S. officials have long alleged that ByteDance, the Beijing-based company that created TikTok, mined American user data and manipulated content for political influence, in concert with the Chinese government (a charge the company has denied). In January, 2025, after the Supreme Court upheld a law that President Joe Biden had signed requiring ByteDance to divest TikTok’s U.S. operations, the platform went offline in the U.S. for several hours, sending content creators into a panic. For a moment, it seemed like the end of a generation-defining social-media app and an anticlimactic conclusion to a years-long saga. Trump, however, sensed a business opportunity; on his first day back in the White House, he signed an executive order to delay the shutdown and announced that an American-based “joint venture” would soon take fifty per cent ownership of the app. “Essentially, with TikTok, I have the right to sell it or close it,” he said, after signing the order. In the following months, a consortium emerged that included Oracle, the tech-giant co-founded by the conservative billionaire Larry Ellison; the private-equity firm Silver Lake; and M.G.X., an Emirati-backed investment fund with cryptocurrency connections to the Trump family. Anxieties about TikTok’s status as a data-harvesting foreign interloper gave way to a new concern: the app was now under the domain of a Republican mega-donor and private investors with direct ties to Trump. “If I could, I’d make it a hundred per cent MAGA-related,” Trump said, referring to the app’s feed, after TikTok’s new ownership structure was made official.
Although Trump claimed victory in the deal—“I saved TikTok, so you owe me big,” he pronounced, in a celebratory address directed at the “young people of TikTok”—questions remained about ByteDance’s continued involvement in the platform’s operations. It was unclear, for instance, how much influence the Chinese company retained over TikTok’s recommendation algorithm and to what extent it could access U.S. user data. Timothy Edgar, a Harvard Law lecturer and cybersecurity expert, has argued that, since the change in ownership, some national-security risks have been made “even worse.” This development has been compounded by Trump’s decimation of the Federal Trade Commission, which now has little incentive to investigate privacy violations or consumer-protection abuses committed by tech conglomerates, especially those which have pledged allegiance to Trump. And so it goes: the line between government and private interests has blurred beyond distinction during Trump’s second term, the President’s economic policy resembling a system of patronage rather than a rules-based market economy.
Having handpicked TikTok’s new majority ownership, the White House now wants the app’s devoted audience, too. It’s certainly a bet worth taking—the proportion of adults who consume traditional news media has significantly shrunk in the past decade, and social-media sites have become the primary way in which millions of Americans engage with the world of ideas and current events. Political messaging always had a natural home on X and Facebook, whose interfaces invite text-based discourse, evident in comment threads that amplify conflict and extreme perspectives. TikTok entered the ecosystem as a different animal. The app makes it easy to stitch together video clips and overlay them with audio and text, its content optimized for a vertical smartphone screen, the infinite scroll. This is how TikTok became synonymous with dancing and lip-synch routines—a playpen of viral-aspiring remix and reaction videos, comedy sketches and cooking tutorials, makeup reviews and day-in-the-life narratives. Even though TikTok is still strongly associated with Gen Z and youth culture, the app’s audience has expanded well beyond its early demographic, and it now attracts anyone interested in an endless stream of algorithmically personalized short-form videos.
In this sense, Trump and his underlings will find it challenging to compete with the deluge of content on TikTok. The app’s users place a premium on the veneer of authenticity; it is a place where ease is rewarded above all else. The Department of Labor’s account has already produced some of the more “How do you do, fellow-kids?” posts I’ve ever encountered; the acting Secretary, Keith Sonderling, has a smile and a speech pattern woefully ill-suited for success on social media, and his wide-shouldered suits and meticulous combed helmet of hair strain with pretension. Brooke Rollins’s team, at the Department of Agriculture, has perhaps been the most adept at creating a cohesive visual identity, celebrating rodeo culture and cowboy couture in paeans to American exceptionalism. Mostly, though, the Trump Administration’s TikTok presence so far mirrors the aesthetics of Truth Social: machine-automated propaganda and cheap trend mimicry aimed at audiences already attuned to Trump’s dog whistles and sympathetic to his self-flattery. In this world, per one of the Department of Labor’s TikToks, America is all “sunshine and rainbows,” a utopia of possibility and promise, helmed by the last great man on Earth: Trump. Election fraud and immigrants, communism and legacy media, drag queens and trans people—these are the evils the Cabinet warns us of, weaponizing their accounts to parrot the President’s oft-repeated talking points.
During his reëlection campaign, Trump reached younger and politically disengaged voters on social media not merely because his allies amplified his messaging but because influencers and public figures validated and normalized his world view. He golfed with Bryson DeChambeau; he talked football with former N.F.L. players; he told Adin Ross that live streaming was the “new wave.” He was playing with house money, revelling in his resurgent popularity and the renewed cultural cachet it afforded him. But, as the Iran war drags on, his personal wealth soars, and American citizens are killed in the streets by paramilitary agents, he’s had to take drastic measures to insure that he and his party preserve power in the upcoming midterm elections. He has already begun planting the seeds that an unreliable election system and a corrupt Democratic deep state will wrong him and his party at the soonest possible opportunity. He and his Cabinet have turned to TikTok to tell this story, hoping that the algorithm, against all odds, can still work in their favor. ♦