TikTok’s future in the U.S. seemed to be the last thing most attendees were worried about at the “Power 30” awards on Sunday night in Washington., D.C, as partygoers danced, donned Make America Great Again hats, munched on McDonald’s fries, and wore white earmuffs emblazoned with TikTok’s logo hours ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration.
“I am ecstatic President Trump is saving TikTok,” Abigail Clark, a 21-year-old University of Alabama student who attended the party, told TheWrap.
The vast majority of attendees shared that feeling — even those who held concerns the app, owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, is a stealth spyware app for China’s communist government.
“I think it’s absolutely a Chinese spyware app. I don’t agree with the equivalency [argument] that every app is taking our data,” Kendall Pennington, a 27-year-old marketing director, told TheWrap. “With that said — I’m still at the party.”
Just hours earlier, TikTok had resumed working for American users — 14 hours after it had shut down in the U.S. on Saturday night. TikTok’s brief dark period coincided with a law signed by President Joe Biden last year banning new downloads of the app and prohibiting it from Apple and Google’s app stores unless it found a buyer for its American business. No deal was made.
Still, TikTok returned following a Sunday morning Truth Social post from Donald Trump saying “Save TikTok!” He then said he would issue an executive order on Monday, granting TikTok more time to make a deal — ideally one in which the U.S. has “a 50% ownership position in a joint venture” with ByteDance or a new owner.
That was enough for TikTok to flip the switch back on, and the app thanked Trump personally in a message that greeted users when they came back online.
The Trump-TikTok alliance was met with cheers from most of those who attended the “Power 30” party, which was sponsored by TikTok, as well as the American Conservation Coalition and Kalshi.
The black-tie-optional event was co-hosted by Raquel Debono, who organizes “Make America Hot Again” dating events for conservative singles, and CJ Pearson, the co-chair of the Republican National Committee Youth Advisory Council, and held at Sax Restaurant & Lounge. On the way in, attendees snapped pictures with cardboard cutouts of Trump, JD Vance, and Elon Musk, who were all dressed as Old West gunslingers, and posed in front of a #SaveTikTok banner.
Young conservatives packed the venue’s downstairs dance floor, and an upstairs bar area doubled as a DJ booth; at midnight, Atlanta rapper Waka Flocka Flame performed a medley of hits, before telling the crowd that Trump was going to “go hard in da paint on the Deep State.”
Beyond the aforementioned earmuffs, TikTok-branded drinking glasses, TikTok-branded beanies, and beer koozies — complete with a silhouette of Trump doing his trademark fist-pump dance — were offered as free swag to attendees. The crowd was populated by a mix of creators, including Bryce Hall, a TikTok star with 23.7 million followers, as well as social media influencers and young MAGA-leaning politicos and media figures.
Ami Kozak, a comedian and impressionist with 285,000 TikTok followers, said Trump’s desire to save TikTok was a shrewd move that would win him brownie points with the app’s 170 million U.S. users — despite the fact that Trump originally backed the TikTok ban.
“Not only has he found a way to turn the tide from an electoral perspective — making a total 180-degree political comeback — but also an incredible cultural comeback,” Kozak said.
At the same time, Kozak said he understands “both sides of the argument” when it comes to TikTok, including those who want to see it banned because it answers to a foreign adversary. TikTok, according to Chinese law, is required to hand over user data, if the CCP compels it to. This was a chief concern among lawmakers who passed the ban, as well as the U.S. Supreme Court, which voted 9-0 last week to uphold the law requiring ByteDance to divest if TikTok were to continue in the U.S.
Some at the party agreed.
“I’m not happy about [Trump’s plan for an] executive order,” said Mark Moran, a creator who dubs himself the “cavalier philosopher” on X and Instagram, where he has a combined 60,000 followers. “I wish that TikTok would stay banned. I think that it is purposefully ruining our younger generation.”
In particular, Moran said China’s version of TikTok, Douyin, offers kids math and science problems, while in the U.S. users are hit with more mindless content. “I worry that as attention spans shorten and shorten, this is something that will have such a big impact that we can’t measure on future societies.”
The other side of that, Kozak said, is that banning TikTok would hurt users who are simply using the app for entertainment purposes — or to advance their careers.
“There’s a lot of people who are building real communities on TikTok; I’m biased, because I built a whole community on the platform,” Kozak said.
O’Rian Hairston, while donning a green “Make America Beautiful Again” hat, told TheWrap something similar. “It’s very good” Trump is going to extend TikTok a lifeline, he said, “because I’ve seen it be a great avenue for people to connect — or start businesses.”
Tara Suess, who handles media for the New York Young Republican Club, said she is thrilled Trump will likely issue an executive order to overturn the TikTok ban. (A move one legal expert told TheWrap would, at a minimum, grant TikTok “more leeway” to find a buyer.) She said TikTok’s existence is “ultimately a free speech issue” — which is what TikTok argued before the Supreme Court. The court disagreed. But most of the Trump-loving crowd at “Power 30” embraced Trump’s plan to “save” TikTok, for one reason or another.
And for the record, the DJ did play “YMCA” — the “Power 30” crowd just had to wait until 12:48 a.m. on Monday to hear it.
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