I Watched the Trump Admin’s Unfathomably Weird TikTok Videos So You Don’t Have To. But You Might Want To. They’re Insane.

Downtime The Trump Administration Is Finally Allowed to Post on TikTok. I Watched Their Videos So You Don’t Have To. Why are there so many knives slicing things? By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Christina Cauterucci? July 30, 20265:45 AM Photo illustration by Slate. Images via @seckennedy/TikTok and @usedgov/TikTok. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. As of last week, the defining attention-gobbler of our age is also a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. After a multiyear ban on using TikTok on government devices due to security concerns over the platform’s Chinese ownership, the Department of Justice announced that the app, whose U.S. operations are now managed by a joint venture with majority-American stakeholders, is now safe to use. Eager to spew their creative juices, several high-ranking federal officials and departments created their first TikTok accounts or began posting with renewed gusto on old ones. While facility with the platform varies widely across the administration, and while some of the content creators who show up in the videos look conspicuously Gen Z, a thick aura of the thoroughly washed engulfs the accounts. In the interest of managing your own expectations, don’t expect to find the next hottest influencer or viral meme in the annals of the Department of Veterans Affairs TikTok account. The average Trump administration TikTok looks like a video your boomer aunt would post on Facebook with the caption “send this to 10 TRUE Patriots if you suport AMERICA !!!! 🦅🇺🇸” But if you can stomach a stream of sycophantic Trump-worship and a never-ending archive of soaring-eagle video clips, there are worse places to look than TikTok for a glimpse of how administration officials see themselves. Let’s start with the president himself. Trump isn’t new to the platform; he was all over TikTok in the lead-up to the 2024 election, then stopped posting after he won. In fall 2025, he came back to tell young people, “I saved TikTok, so you owe me big.” These days, his account posts a lot of lifeless promo videos, like one for the F1 race he’s hosting on D.C. streets in August, and one simply bragging about how he’s the top account on TikTok. Holding a sheet of paper filled with numbers that someone clearly handed him 10 seconds before pressing record, Trump crows, “I keep hearing about the influence other people have. I don’t know—how come I’m No. 1 if they have so much influence?” (To be clear, the president is the No. 1 world leader on the app, not the No. 1 account. That honor goes to a Senegalese and Italian influencer who has almost 10 times as many followers as Trump.) Trump also relishes the ultimate power A.I. can wield over an enemy’s likeness. In recent weeks, the president has posted a deepfake video of himself throwing Stephen Colbert in a dumpster and a deepfake commercial in which he introduces himself as “Doctor Trump” and diagnoses people with Trump Derangement Syndrome. A.I. video testimonials from purported TDS sufferers follow, including Rosie O’Donnell, John Leguizamo, Whoopi Goldberg, Edward Norton, Robert De Niro, and Julia Roberts. Some of the renderings were so convincing, I came away more worried about the future of cinema—and Cameo, for that matter—than about the president manufacturing disinformation for public consumption. He also posted the same video to X, which tells me his team doesn’t have a separate TikTok strategy. Yikes! The Department of Transportation is also giving TikTok a shot. So far, the account has posted an ambiguous promise of supersonic cross-country flights “coming soon,” an attempt to co-opt Jimothy the foreshortened raccoon into department propaganda, footage of military flyovers (wrong department!), and a video praising young people for going to church. That one is set to a song with the lyric, “baptize me in a bottle of Beam,” which seems inadvisable for people about to head out on the department’s highways. Likewise, in a roid-ragey ad encouraging any military veteran who is “not an illegal alien” to become a trucker, the department says it’s “your road, your rules” out there—not exactly an encouraging stance from an institution tasked with developing safety regulations. Mixed messages are a common theme on Trump administration TikTok. One recent post from Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. claims to show “America after becoming healthy again” through a montage of impressive physical feats, including a puzzling amount of parkour. Many of the depicted activities are certifiably unhealthy pursuits: getting punched in the face, tackling someone to the ground, cracking heads together on the football field. Tired: measles. Wired: CTE! Like his peers in the Cabinet, Kennedy is enamored with A.I. slop. His eeriest video shows the secretary bloodied and bandaged, sulking on a staircase in the snow and surveying a nighttime cityscape, being told by a disembodied voice, “You look hungry! Real food can fix that.” But really, the point of his account is the gym brag. Kennedy’s first TikTok includes clips of him doing pull-ups on three different occasions, and further pull-up shots appear in multiple other videos. One shows him doing 11 quivering reps, allegedly for the first time since a shoulder surgery. Is this the best use of the HHS communications budget? I guess it could be worse. You’d think the Department of the Interior would be killing it on TikTok. So many stunning national parks to show off! Unfortunately, following Trump’s lead, the account is obsessed with the newly painted Reflecting Pool. Multiple videos celebrate the president’s efforts to “beautify” D.C., even after we’ve all seen the photos of the putrid, peeling pool. In another attempt to dream up some clothes for the emperor, one TikTok pairs a video of Trump bemoaning the death of eagles via wind turbines—“they have hundreds of them laying on the ground”—with a cartoon video of Joe Biden throwing birds into the machines, where they explode in a splatter of blood. It’s a searing bit of imagery, so I’m not even going to mention the fact that the Biden administration prosecuted a wind company that didn’t take necessary precautions to save eagles, while Trump stopped prosecuting violators of the treaty that protects them. I’ll just say that someone needs to tell the DOI to stop posting horizontal videos on a vertical-video app. Secretary Doug Collins, head of the Department of Veterans Affairs, could use a TikTok tutorial, too: His very first post kicks off with the millennial pause. Attempts to fit in with the TikTok crowd include a requisite Jimothy clip and a brain-tickling, A.I.-generated ASMR video of knives slicing through various substances labeled with phrases such as “cutting the VA backlog”—so they’re cutting the cutting, I guess? Leading to more backlog? A memo must have gone out about these A.I. slicing videos, because the Department of Education has one, too. That A.I. knife cuts through “BUREAUCRACY,” and sometimes tries and fails to slice it out, befitting the half-assed efforts of an administration that cares more for enforced patriotism (there are videos for that, too) than making strides in education. In fact, another video that grates the eyeballs with ill-formatted text promises the shuttering of the very department running the account, raising the question of why it continues to post things. One answer comes in a lib-baiting cartoon video posted last week. In a kind of before-and-after format, it depicts a heterosexual nuclear family replacing drag queen story hour and an all-girls track meet replacing an adult man racing a young girl—a clear and insulting reference to trans girls in school athletics. As a demonstration of the high standards of creativity and diligence the department expects from U.S. educators, the video is a slapdash A.I. production: Clouds float on the ground in front of a school, and the windows of an animated office building appear to expand and split as the video plays. Luckily, few people are watching it. (The video currently has five comments, one of which asks, “Why are the windows on the DoE building going through mitosis?”) But these TikTok accounts are a telling signal of how the administration sees its relationship to the public. Though they’re official government productions, the TikToks care not for consistency, accuracy, or sense-making. There are barely any mentions of substantive policies that are not spun in a way intended to troll the left. Some of the videos are barely distinguishable from the disinformation-spreading schlock posted by Libs of TikTok and other right-wing outrage farms. In other words, on TikTok as elsewhere in Trumpworld, there is no pretense of governing for the betterment of the entire country or of speaking to Americans across political lines. There is merely a taste for triggering their political enemies, a relationship to the truth that swings between carelessness and contempt, and a desire to use as little brainpower as possible. Human Americans voted for this, but Jimothy deserves better. Get the best of news and politics Sign up for Slate's evening newsletter. Donald Trump Internet Culture Politics Apps Memes TikTok