President Donald Trump credited the Chinese-owned app TikTok with helping him win the presidency in last year’s election despite having once branded the same app as a national security threat during his first term in office.
Speaking alongside Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer during a joint press conference Thursday at the end of his second state visit to the United Kingdom, Trump was asked if the agreement his administration has reached with Chinese negotiators to allow the sale of TikTok’s American operations to a U.S.-owned ownership group.
Trump replied that he’s speaking with Chinese president Xi Jinping about the proposed agreement on Friday “because there is tremendous value” in the controversial application.
He added: “I like TikTok. It helped get me elected.”
Continuing, the president credited the slain Republican activist Charlie Kirk with recommending that his 2024 campaign join the app and use it to reach young voters during last year’s election.
“We did unbelievably well with youth, like at a level that no Republican has ever even dreamt of. And in what, you know, look, I think we won it for a lot of reasons, but that was a reason we won the election by such a big number,” he said.
The president’s attitude towards the video sharing application marks a staunch reversal from his position in 2020, when he signed an executive order which threatened to shut down TikTok if the app’s Chinese owners, ByteDance, did not divest its American operations. At the time, Trumps and others in his first-term administration described the application as a national security threat, citing its’ opaque algorithm and the potential for China to use the application to spy on Americans through their mobile phones.
Trump’s Thursday comments came days after he issued an order directing the Department of Justice to continue putting off enforcement of a 2024 law banning the popular video-sharing app while negotiations continue over a deal that would place control of the platform in American hands. The order delays enforcement of the law, which would ban the application in the U.S., until December 16.
The president’s joint appearance with Starmer was filled with lies and changing of positions – including Trump continuing to claim that he won the 2020 election, which he lost to his successor turned predecessor, Joe Biden.
After he was asked about what advice he’d offer to Starmer for stemming the tide of illegal migrants coming to the U.K. in small boats, Trump claimed illegal migration to the U.S. was one of the reasons that motivated his decision to mount a third campaign for the presidency after having lost in 2020.
But rather than concede that he’d lost that election five years ago, Trump said: “We won in 2020, big.”
He also claimed to not know Lord Peter Mandelson, the former British ambassador to Washington who was recalled and fired last week over newly-discovered links with deceased pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has described the clamor for information from case files about the late sex offender, who died in a New York jail cell in 2019, as a “hoax” perpetuated by Democrats even through he maintained a years-long friendship with Epstein.
Asked if he has any sympathy for Mandelson given the circumstances, he replied: “I don’t know him” and turned the floor over to Starmer to explain the decision to oust the Labour Party grandee.
Yet despite his claim not to know Mandelson, the former ambassador was photographed shaking the president’s hand as he and Starmer (via telephone) announced an Anglo-American trade deal earlier this year.
