PROVO — The request was simple enough: Take the raw video, splice it up, and upload it on TikTok as soon as possible.
Staffers from Donald Trump’s campaign communications team had captured footage of the candidate’s Aug. 26 visit to Arlington National Cemetery and they wanted a video up on Trump’s newly conceived TikTok page. A smattering of raw video was uploaded to a OneDrive folder. Two thousand miles away, Trump’s TikTok gurus went to work.
There was Jack Fuetterer, the unquestioned leader of the group, the one who maintained the formal contract with Trump’s campaign. The curly-haired 22-year-old often traveled with Trump, an iPhone in hand, so much so that Trump came to call him “TikTok Jack.”
That day, though, he was in Salt Lake City, his adopted home base. So was Dillon Renfro, 25, Fuetterer’s right-hand man, a fellow University of Utah graduate who fancied himself the “ideas guy” on the team. His role was endlessly scrolling TikTok, picking up on trends and memes. And then there was Roman George, 19, a former Disney child actor-turned-video editor. He did the dirty work.
The dirty work, in this case, was splicing together a video of Trump’s visit to Arlington National. News of the event was already making its rounds on other social media channels — Trump’s thumbs-up photo above soldiers’ graves, a reported incident involving cemetery officials — but on TikTok, Fuetterer’s team faced fertile ground. In the two-and-a-half months since the @realdonaldtrump account had launched on TikTok, it had tapped into a pre-baked, willful audience — largely young, largely male — awaiting Trump’s arrival.
Between November 2023 and May 2024, twice as much pro-Trump content was created on the app than pro-Biden content, per an internal review reported by Puck. A month later, in June, Trump’s account was formed. It hit 3 million followers within 24 hours.
The first month was Camelot. The debut post showed Trump with Dana White at a UFC fight; it got 10 million likes. The next one showed Trump squaring off against Logan Paul. But none received as much attention as that Arlington National one.
Before it was a viral TikTok, though, it was a stack of raw clips in a OneDrive folder, hastily uploaded by the Trump campaign official earlier that day. Fueterrer and the rest got instructions via Signal to see if anything was worth turning into a social media post. When they started sifting through, they saw a familiar face: Spencer Cox, the affable Utah governor, a newfound MAGA convert making his first public appearance with Trump since endorsing him a month earlier.
Fuetterer worked out of an office space in downtown Salt Lake City he rented from Cox’s campaign manager, Matt Lusty, and he’d met the governor in passing when he interned for the Utah State Legislature. Cox, he determined, would be in the video.
Fuetterer walked Roman through the editing process. They’d open with a video of Cox and Trump side by side, then show an assortment of clips of Trump laying a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and interacting with Gold Star families.
A synthetic guitar track would play in the background. A handful of other Utahns made the cut, albeit coincidentally — Marlon Bateman, a former State Department official who arranged the Arlington visit, and the family of slain Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover.
But when Renfro took a pass at the draft video, he thought it may have been a bit too Utah. “Hey guys, there’s a lot of Gov. Cox in here,” Renfro recalls saying. They cut a second clip of Cox in the outro and replaced it with footage of Trump giving his signature thumbs-up with a Gold Star family member.
The video posted to Trump’s TikTok account Tuesday, a day after the cemetery visit. By then, the entire news cycle had honed into the story. An official at the cemetery had attempted to prevent Trump staffers from filming and photographing, in accordance with federal law, NPR reported. A physical altercation reportedly followed. A Trump spokesperson responded by saying it had permission from Gold Star families to film, and claiming the female cemetery official was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
When the TikTok went live, it only fueled the fire. Trump was now clearly flaunting the cemetery’s rules, critics said, by engaging in campaign or election-related activity on cemetery grounds. The U.S. Army released a statement rebuking the Trump campaign. But for team Trump, the stunt did exactly what it was intended to do. The video racked up nearly 2 million likes on TikTok. Right-wing influencers chattered about it on Parler and Truth Social. A chunk of Trump’s interview with podcaster Lex Fridman that week was spent discussing the incident.
Trump, when asked about the video by an NBC News reporter, feigned innocence. “We have people, you know, TikTok people,” he said. “You know, we’re leading the internet.”
Going viral
The ragtag team behind Trump’s TikTok came about by accident — and before Trump had even launched his campaign.
Fueterrer, then 21, had just finished an internship with the Utah State Legislature, where he developed something of a penchant for ruffling feathers. When his boss, Sen. Dan McCay, sponsored a bill to introduce a new Utah state flag, Fueterrer slapped a giant sticker of the flag on his water bottle; when McCay would testify in legislative hearings, Fueterrer would sit directly behind him, just in line of the cameras, his bottle turned to display the flag.
“I think he did that just to troll people,” Matt Lusty, a Utah political strategist, said.
The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.
