Trump’s 15 Minutes of McFame

The former President’s staged fast food photo op drove hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.

This week, Donald Trump played dress up at the fry station and drive-through window at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s. The stunt (which was carefully choreographed by his campaign and took place while the McDonald’s location was closed for normal business) was widely mocked by late-night hosts and liberal pundits on Twitter. But, while some on the left were laughing, the moment spread like wildfire on TikTok, where users were eager to watch, like, comment, and share. 

This post from the @realdonaldtrump account received almost 40 million views and 4.5 million likes, and a few others from @teamtrump earned a combined 100 million views. Other top posts about the visit came from @dailymail. Here’s Trump learning to pack fries with 13.4 million views and 439.8K likes, here he is serving happy customers with 7.3 million views and 388.3K likes, and here’s a bit of viral misinformation questioning whether or not Kamala Harris had ever worked at McDonald's (Fact check: she did.) 

Notably, another big McDonald’s-related post came from @cbsnews, showing someone asking Trump – while in his apron – if he supported raising the minimum wage and Trump refusing to answer. One other interesting note: this story really seemed to resonate with Spanish-speaking TikTok. Several of the top posts (from @joaixy_zu, @tromepe, and @eyrnews) were in Spanish.

While the reception of Trump’s “cosplay-as-a-minimum-wage-working-person” scheme wasn’t all positive, it’s pretty clear this stunt played well on TikTok for the former President. In part because of Trump’s 15 minutes of McFame, the @teamtrump account received more total video views last week (nearly 300 million) than @kamalaharris, @kamalahq, and @realdonaldtrump combined. 

That also had an overall impact on our sentiment analysis tracking: For the first time in months, the majority of top-performing posts mentioning Trump were positive or favorable to his candidacy. 

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Trump dominates the conversation

Each week, we’ve been breaking down how many total videos and posts on TikTok are mentioning either candidate. Week after week, we continue to see there are tens of thousands more posts about Donald Trump than Kamala Harris. That’s not entirely unexpected - as today’s topper clearly demonstrates, his comments and extreme positions – as well as his ability to create viral moments – dominate the mainstream news cycle, and as a result, cause a lot of people to share their thoughts on social media. 

While Trump has far more total mentions, much more of the top-performing content about him on TikTok has been negative or unfavorable to his candidacy. 

We’ve been using social analytics platform Zelf to measure the overall sentiment of thousands of top-performing posts that are favorable or unfavorable to Harris and Trump. The TL;DR is that Zelf uses a mix of AI scraping and sentiment analysis and manual crosschecks to determine which posts are considered positive, negative, or neutral for the two candidates. 

Here’s what that looks like over time:

As we mentioned at the top, this was Trump’s best week on the platform in months. He still trails Harris overall, but just barely. Can he hold this spike in positive content until Election Day? We’ll see. 

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Top posts: Kamala Harris

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 33.1K posts mentioning Harris on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 469.1 million views. 

25% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Harris were negative, 6% were neutral, and 68% were positive. These were some of the most viewed:

This excludes any posts shared directly by the Harris campaign.

The most-viewed video last week mentioning Harris, as we outlined above, was from @realdonaldtrump working at McDonald’s and claiming he’s the only one on the ballot to have done so.

The next biggest was a neutral post from @nbcnews with 14.5 million views and 1.2 million likes about a bakery that puts the candidates’ faces on their cookies and the blowback they’ve been receiving this year for something they’ve been doing since 1996.

Other notable top posts about Harris this week include this powerful post from @msnbc asking a member of the trans community what question they would ask the two candidates, which got 14.2 million views and 1.3 million likes, and this post from @usher with a funny interaction between him and Harris that racked up 11.4 million views and 2 million likes.

@foxnews also posted the full 26-minute interview between VP Harris and Brett Baier, which performed really well, with 12.9 million views and 632K likes, for a video that’s much, much longer than other content on the app.

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Top posts: Donald Trump

According to social analytics platform Zelf, there were 92K posts mentioning Trump on TikTok last week, receiving a collective 925.2 million views.

40% of the top-performing TikTok posts last week mentioning Trump were negative, 1% were neutral and 59% were positive. These were some of the most-viewed:

 This excludes any posts shared directly by the Trump campaign.

This week’s most-viewed post mentioning Trump (excluding his own content) came from @sm.swagger and it showed Trump dancing to a rewrite of the Macarena, declaring that “Kamala’s never gonna beat me in November.” It has received 19 million views and 2.6 million likes.

@maga had a massive clip showing JD Vance declaring that Jesus is King that got 10.2 million views and 1.9 million likes, and @kamalaharris herself made the list with a viral clip of Mark Cuban laughing at Trump’s “economic gibberish” that has 8.2 million views and 1 million likes.

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From the campaign trail…

Here’s how many total views each campaign’s videos have received since the start of the campaign:

You’ll notice that @realdonaldtrump’s account officially hit a billion views this week. And @teamtrump, by far the youngest of the four accounts, is also well on its way to surpassing the billion view marker.

And here’s how many views the campaigns have received on their owned content week over week:

This week, Harris’s combined TikTok accounts gained 123 million new views and posted 61 videos.

Their top post of the week was the one we mentioned above of Mark Cuban mocking Trump’s economic plans. That was followed by them sharing a clip of Trump on The Five saying he’ll defund public schools that don’t obey him.

That was followed by a clip of Tim Walz calling Elon Musk a dipshit and talking about the danger Musk and Trump pose if they win.

Meanwhile, the Trump campaign gained 380 million new views across their accounts and posted 51 new videos. 

Three of their top four posts were about his time at McDonald’s. 

The other post in their top 4 posts this week showed Trump checking in with WWE’s Undertaker, and their 5th biggest post showed him at the Al Smith Dinner. 

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Creator Spotlight: @itsdeaann

We mentioned @itsdeaann above, so we figured we should check in and make sure this young creator is on your radar. Dean Withers has 1.1 million followers and 12.3 million likes.

He does create his own content, but many of his viral moments happen in clips like the @nowthisimpact one shared above. He’s young – just 20 years old – but speaks with the confidence of someone who’s been at this for decades. He really popped up as part of a Jubilee debate roundtable where he went up against 20 Trump supporters and demonstrated an impressive grasp of the facts. You can see examples of that Jubilee debate here, here, and here.

He’s also produced viral content trolling Trump supporters at a rally and asking Trump supporters to debate him. Like a lot of young internet bros, Dean has not been without his controversy, however. It was revealed back in October that he had posted anti-LGBTQ+ and racist slurs online when he was 18. He has since publicly apologized and said that he posted them before he became a progressive.  

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News & platform updates

• There’s some internal sabotage at ByteDance, the company that owns TikTok.

• TikTok is bringing STEM to more users.

• Duolingo might need to add TikTok-speak to its list of languages.

• We hope this goes without saying, but please don’t believe everything you see on TikTok. 

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That’s it for this week. We’ll be back in your inboxes next Thursday with more charts, data, and insights. If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, would you mind forwarding it to a colleague or sharing it on Twitter or Threads? 

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The #FYP newsletter is a product of FWIW and produced by Josh Klemons, Kyle Tharp, and Lucy Ritzmann. Most data included in this newsletter is provided by Zelf, an AI-powered social analytics platform.