President-elect Trump doubled down on his support for TikTok on Friday, as the popular social media app prepares to argue against an impending ban before the Supreme Court next week.
“Why would I want to get rid of TikTok?” Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, accompanied by an image touting his accounts’ statistics on TikTok.
Trump’s personal account has received 1.4 billion total views on the video-sharing app and sees 24 million views per post on average, according to the statistics shared by the president-elect.
His campaign account has received 2.4 billion total views and sees 6 million average views per post. The @teamtrump account has received eight times more total views on TikTok than on Instagram.
Trump, who vowed to “save TikTok” during his campaign, asked the Supreme Court last week to delay a law that requires the app’s China-based parent company ByteDance to divest or face a ban on U.S. networks and app stores starting Jan. 19.
The court is set to hear oral arguments in TikTok’s case against the divest-or-ban law on Jan. 10, after taking up the case last month on an expedited schedule.
The president-elect argued that the Supreme Court should delay the law until after he takes office, suggesting he could negotiate a new deal that would obviate the need for the justices to weigh in.
“President Trump alone possesses the consummate dealmaking expertise, the electoral mandate, and the political will to negotiate a resolution to save the platform while addressing the national security concerns,” wrote D. John Sauer, one of Trump’s personal appellate attorneys, who the president-elect has tapped to serve as U.S. solicitor general.
The Supreme Court agreed to take up the case in late December after a federal appeals court rejected TikTok’s argument that the divest-or-ban law violated the First Amendment.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit found that the law, which passed Congress with wide bipartisan majorities and was signed by President Biden in April, was justified by the government’s national security concerns about the app’s ties to China.
After losing a bid to put the law on hold in the D.C. Circuit, TikTok turned to the Supreme Court, asking it to delay the law while it appealed. Instead, the high court opted to move the case to its normal docket and hear it on an expedited schedule, one that could allow the justices to rule before the Jan. 19 deadline.
