Both campaigns are flooding the social network, in a project that’s both goofy and high-stakes: turning their candidates into influencers.
Earlier this month, Kamala Harris appeared on “60 Minutes.” Bill Whitaker asked her what kind of gun she owns. “I have a Glock,” she replied. When he asked if she had fired it, she laughed and said, “Of course I have.”
The next day, Harris reposted a clip of the exchange to her personal TikTok account, @kamalaharris. Then the Harris campaign posted a remix of the moment to its own TikTok account, @KamalaHQ. That version recast the clip in the style of a fan edit: Harris’s answers were spliced with flickering images of her appearing cool and unbothered throughout her career, sound tracked to the rapper Key Glock’s “Ambition for Cash.”
Harris’s campaign releases content on TikTok from these two accounts: @kamalaharris, the buttoned-up personal account, and @KamalaHQ, the looser campaign operation. While the personal account churns out safe, presidential images of Harris — clips from her rallies and mainstream media interviews, footage from her meetings with firefighters and friendly Republicans — the campaign account filters her raw materials through the eye of a zealous online supporter.
The Trump camp, too, manages dual TikTok accounts: the personal account, @realdonaldtrump, and the campaign account, @teamtrump. The @teamtrump TikTok operation can be aesthetically indistinguishable from that of @KamalaHQ; it posts new Trump campaign ads with emergency-light emojis and promotes clips of Harris interviews shaved down to contextless, humiliating micro-moments. Trump’s personal account, however, takes a different approach from Harris’s.
While the Harris account presents her largely as a media figure filmed from afar, with occasional behind-the-scenes glimpses shot in a vérité style, Trump assumes the posture of an online influencer, walking right up to the camera and addressing his audience directly. Even as Trump’s approach fits more snugly into the TikTok aesthetic, his rambling one-man show also feels forced into compliance here, producing uncannily boring offerings that nevertheless can rack up tens of millions of views.
@realdonaldtrump BACK THE BLUE!
