"Knowing Trump responds best to visual stimuli, Kirk had coached the company to spin up four pages of infographics, "Trump on TikTok," showing his campaign's tens of billions of views on the now-threatened app. A chart (shown above) on the first page jumped out at Trump, who had backed a TikTok ban in his first term. "I'm more popular than Taylor Swift," he crowed. Many in Trumpworld heard he quickly called Barron, his youngest son, to savor the stat."
"On Day 1 of his second term, Trump signed an executive order to punt the TikTok ban. Why it matters: The Mar-a-Lago meeting was a pivotal victory in a campaign by several Trump insiders to overcome furious opposition to TikTok from China hawks on the Hill and in his political orbit who had national-security concerns. These insiders helped convince Trump's campaign to launch a TikTok account in June 2024, when he was looking for ways around traditional media."
"How it happened: The campaign was born in early 2024, according to sources familiar with the internal deliberations. Tony Sayegh, a Treasury and White House official in Trump's first term, became a key man in the TikTok triumph. Sayegh was on a ski vacation when he saw President Biden declare in March 2024 that he'd sign a TikTok ban if Congress passed one."
Kirk produced four infographic pages titled "Trump on TikTok" highlighting tens of billions of campaign views, and a chart prompted Trump to boast he was more popular than Taylor Swift and call his son Barron. On Day 1 of his second term, Trump signed an executive order pausing the TikTok ban. Insiders mounted a campaign to overcome national-security opposition, launched a campaign TikTok account in June 2024, and engineered a complex deal selling TikTok's U.S. operations to a joint venture controlled by American investors. Tony Sayegh played a central role in the strategy.
Read at Axios
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]