Trump Wrongly Claims He's No. 1 Person On 'Tic Tac'

US-POLITICS-TRUMP — Source: MANDEL NGAN / Getty

Watching President Donald Trump mentally deteriorate right before our eyes is depressing because it’s a constant reminder of how far we’ve fallen as a nation. It’s scary because this guy is at the helm of the world’s largest military force. It’s maddening, especially for Black people, because he’s a constant reminder of how seamlessly white mediocrity succeeds while we’re still “working twice as hard to get half as far.”

Then, of course, there are times when watching Dementia Don be Dementia Don is just plain hilarious.

So, if you love a good laugh, I present to you, good people, the No. 1 president of “Tic Tac.”

Now, to be fair, the full video of the White House briefing does show the president got the pronunciation of TikTok right the first time; otherwise, we’d have to assume he was trying to say he’s been rated No. 1 by the authority on fresh breath, and, well — sorry, but that just couldn’t possibly be the case. There’s just no way Trump’s breath doesn’t smell exactly like what one would expect to come out of a mouth that is shaped like a butthole. But I digress…

“Now, there is a thing called TikTok. Have you heard of it?” Trump asked, probably rhetorically (although he apparently just discovered the word “groceries” like a year ago, so who knows). “I was watching a show this morning, Maria Bartiromo. She is fantastic. On her show, they were talking about the dangers of TikTok, and it’s Chinese, a whole thing, spying, and what they are doing. Well, except it was announced about two days ago, the new numbers just came out, you know who the number one person in Tic Tac is by far? Trump, me. I’m number one.”

“Taylor Swift was number eleven,” he continued. “I’m number one on TikTok by far. The numbers just came out, and I said, ‘Well, I’m hearing about how they influence. They are talking about [how] they’re a tremendous danger because of the influence. If they influence so badly, I’m saying all things like I love our country, we have to stop Communism. We’re doing a lot of things.'”

You know how, whenever there’s a clip of Trump saying something stupid making the rounds on social media, Trump supporters hop in the comments, saying, “You’re taking him out of context” or “Where’s the rest of the video?” Well, you can always expect that when a longer clip surfaces, it will only make this rambling sack of orange crayon shavings sound even more stupid. Trump is somehow simultaneously boasting about having the most followers on TikTok while also drifting in and out of a rant about how he heard the platform was run by Chinese communists, who must be stopped.

Anyway, surprising to absolutely no one, Trump didn’t know what he was talking about.

From Billboard:

It’s unclear which “numbers” Trump was referencing, but a cursory search on the app shows that he has 16.7 million followers, while Swift has more than double that amount with 33.5 million. Even their follower counts pale in comparison to the actual most followed creators on the site, which is led by Khaby Lame (162.3 million followers), Charli D’Amelio (159.1 million) and MrBeast (129.1 million).

Trump doesn’t even scrape the top 10 most-followed on TikTok. Neither does Swift, which makes his claim that she stands at No. 11 all the more unintentionally comical. All I’m going to say is the president is lucky the bane of his existence, Barack Obama, doesn’t have an official TikTok account. You just know those numbers would send the president into a not-so-early grave.

I can only assume Trump was still reeling from the fact that his Freedom 250 celebration turned out to be a big shitshow of no-shows. The man who is obsessed with crowd sizes bragged so much about how big his big MAGA bash would be, only for it to get the squeaky-tank-wheel treatment all over again. So, maybe in an effort to appease him, a staff member mocked up some fake TikTok numbers to make him think he’s loved on literally any social media platform besides the one he owns.

Or, hell, maybe he really was actually talking about Tic Tacs.