The White House is now on TikTok. This official government account posted on the short-form video-sharing platform for the first time Tuesday night, sharing a 27-second clip featuring excerpts from a speech delivered by President Donald Trump.
“Every day, I wake up determined to deliver a better life for the people all across this nation,” Trump’s voice rings out over shots of the president shaking hands with police officers and workers in hard hats. “I am your voice.” As of Thursday evening, that first video has more than 2 million views, and the official government account has posted 12 more videos since. This comes more than a year after Trump himself reversed his opposition to the service and launched a personal TikTok account. He later called it a “unique medium for freedom of expression.”
But the White House’s foray onto TikTok is remarkable, and troubling, for a fairly straightforward reason: It’s likely in violation of the letter and the spirit of the law.
Strictly speaking, federal law prohibits any app store based in the United States from distributing, maintaining, or updating the TikTok app because of the service’s ownership by a foreign adversary, namely China. That law was passed by an overwhelming bipartisan majority in Congress in April 2024 and upheld as constitutional by the Supreme Court. The law requires the Chinese-controlled corporation ByteDance to sell TikTok before the app can be distributed again by app stores and internet service providers. ByteDance has shown no signs of selling or ridding itself of the elements of the Chinese Communist Party that occupy its board and management.
And why should they? Over the past eight months, the Trump administration has three times delayed its enforcement of the ban, which has allowed TikTok to continue operating in the United States. The most recent executive order issued by Trump in June extended that delay to September 17. Perhaps the president is ready to start enforcing the law after that deadline passes, but there’s little reason to think that the White House would launch its own account on a platform less than a month before it intends to ban the platform.
In the meantime, the White House account will keep posting, but who is doing the posting? While there was a time when Trump himself tweeted all-caps screeds from his phone late at night, the current operation running the White House TikTok account is sophisticated, with high-quality video and audio production. Is there a specific member of the White House communications team who is authorized to publish on TikTok? Is it White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt? White House communications director Steven Cheung?
The White House won’t say much about that, nor about what else is troublesome about an official government account on TikTok: namely, the devices that are being used to access the TikTok platform. There is no publicly available data to indicate where and how White House staffers are accessing and uploading videos to TikTok, but it stands to reason that much of that work is happening on the White House grounds, possibly with government-issued computers and phones, and over a White House network connection.
That would be a problem because it’s against the law, specifically the “No TikTok on Government Devices Act,” a division of a government spending bill passed in December 2022 that explicitly requires the removal of TikTok from any information technology used by executive agencies. Simply put, any network or device employed by an executive agency, including those within the Executive Office of the President, is prohibited from using TikTok.
When I asked the White House a number of questions along these lines—who is posting, and on what devices—I received this statement from Leavitt: “The Trump administration is committed to communicating the historic successes President Trump has delivered to the American people with as many audiences and platforms as possible. President Trump’s message dominated TikTok during his presidential campaign, and we’re excited to build upon those successes and communicate in a way no other administration has before.”
That’s entirely nonresponsive to the important questions about whether White House-issued phones and computers are accessing TikTok. How has the White House’s official account been created and used without being in violation of this law? It’s possible, though not probable, that the White House aides who are publishing on the platform are using private devices and aren’t on government networks. If that’s the case, the White House isn’t saying.
It’s also possible that the White House has authorized use of government IT under the “No TikTok” law’s limited “national security and research exceptions.” The legislation’s carve-out for law enforcement and national-security purposes seems sensible enough, as is the additional requirement that agencies authorizing TikTok use under these exceptions “develop and document risk mitigation actions for such use.”
Again, the White House has nothing to say about its legal authorization of the use of TikTok, though it’s hard to imagine how propaganda videos touting “200 days of winning” or showing Vice President J.D. Vance “roasting” a reporter fulfill even the broadest definition of national security or law enforcement research.
None of these legal limitations should come as a surprise to Trump’s team at the White House. Shortly after the law was passed nearly three years ago, Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget in Joe Biden’s White House, issued a memorandum outlining exactly how all executive departments and agencies should comply, as the law compels the head of OMB to do. (Though it’s worth noting that Biden was hardly principled on the issue. Shortly after he signed the nationwide TikTok ban, which gave ByteDance a nine-month deadline to divest from the app, the Democratic president’s reelection campaign said it would continue to post on the platform.)
“This memorandum fulfills that requirement by directing agencies to remove TikTok from Federal devices and providing instructions and deadlines for that removal,” reads Young’s memo, dated February 27, 2023. It goes on to provide detailed documentation requirements for agencies to provide proof of compliance, as well as further guidelines for exceptions and the review of those exceptions.
If the Trump White House is following any of these or similar guidelines for its use of TikTok, it would be good to know. But given the Trump administration’s view of any legal limits on executive power as more like suggestions, it’s just as easy to believe that there has been nothing—no memos from the White House Counsel’s office, no guidance from the OMB, not even a conversation about whether this new TikTok account was a good idea.
Yes, the Trump administration’s casual treatment of the law surrounding TikTok is part of a bigger story of the onetime tough-on-China president going soft on Beijing. And while he is hardly the first president to circumvent or even straight-up ignore the laws of the land, Trump has demonstrated in both his first term and now his second that the powers of the chief executive ought to serve his needs, regardless of what the law might say.
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