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One way Trump’s TikTok deal could benefit his nearest and dearest

President Donald Trump’s son is being tipped for an appointment to the board of a majority U.S.-owned TikTok.

President Donald Trump’s son is being tipped for an appointment to the board of a majority U.S.-owned TikTok.
Dado Ruvic
Update:

Donald Trump’s youngest son is being tipped for a leadership position in a majority American-owned TikTok, after the president issued an executive order that sets the stage for a U.S.-led consortium to take control of the social-media app’s operations in the country.

“Hopeful President Trump will consider appointing son”

Speaking to the Daily Mail, Trump’s former TikTok producer, Jack Advent, said it would be beneficial to include 19-year-old Barron Trump among the platform’s decision-makers.

“Young people are overwhelmingly the user base of TikTok,” Advent said. “I’m hopeful President Trump will consider appointing his son Barron and maybe other young Americans to TikTok’s board to help ensure it remains an app young people want to keep using.”

Barron “brought in so many young people”

Barron, a New York University student who is the president’s only child with current wife Melania, has been credited with helping his father to attract young voters in the 79-year-old’s 2024 presidential election win over Kamala Harris.

“[Barron] brought in so many young people,” Melania told an interview with Fox News in December 2024. “He knows his generation, because nowadays the young generation, they don’t sit in front of TV anymore. They’re all on the tablets, they’re on the phones, and all of these podcasts and streamers.

“He was very vocal, and he gave an advice to his father, and was incredible how he brought in a success because he knew exactly who his father needs to contact and to talk to.”

According to statistics compiled by Pew Research Center, Trump accrued 39% of the vote among Americans in the 18-29 age category in 2024, four percentage points up from his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden.

Chinese TikTok owner forced to drop stake

Late last month, President Trump signed an executive order stipulating that TikTok can only continue to operate in the U.S. if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, reduces its ownership stake in the app’s American iteration to “less than 20 percent”.

In the U.S., the platform “will be majority-owned and controlled by United States persons”, the executive order said.

Speaking as he signed the executive order, President Trump said: “Especially the young people, they really wanted this to happen. They did not want to have TikTok closed. I used it myself during the [election] campaign, and it was very successful - because you know how I did with the young voters.”

Trump’s executive order follows last year’s bipartisan action against TikTok by Congress, which passed the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act. Signed into law by then-President Biden in April 2024, the national-security legislation required ByteDance to divest its U.S. TikTok holdings.

During his first term in the White House, it was Trump who had initiated the U.S.’s standoff with TikTok, warning in an August 2020 executive order that the platform threatened to “allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans’ personal and proprietary information”.

Talking to reporters during last month’s signing ceremony in the Oval Office, Vice-President J.D. Vance said: “The fundamental thing that we wanted to accomplish was that we wanted to keep TikTok operating, but we also wanted to make sure that we protected Americans’ data privacy [...].

“Both because it’s the right thing to do, but also because it’s a legal requirement of the law that was passed last year by Congress.”

Vance added: “This deal really does mean that Americans can use TikTok, but actually use it with more confidence than they had in the past, because their data’s going to be secure and it’s not going to be used as a propaganda weapon against our fellow citizens.”

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