The Utahns that helped Trump go viral
The request was simple enough: Take the raw video, splice it up, and upload 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.” Today, though, he was in Salt Lake City, his adopted homebase. 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 2½ months since the @realdonaldtrump account had launched on TikTok, it had tapped into a pre-baked, wilful 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 2024, 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 Trump campaign official earlier that day. 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 used to work out of an office space in downtown Salt Lake City, 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 ground. 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 two 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. Fuetterer, 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, Fuetterer slapped a giant sticker of the flag on his water bottle; when McCay would testify in legislative hearings, Fuetterer 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.
By day, Fuetterer was a student at the University of Utah, studying business and serving as the David Eccles School’s representative in the student assembly. By night, he was cutting videos for influencers and celebrities, funneling payments through his own single-member LLC. Logan Paul, the influencer-turned-wrestler, was a top client. (Fuetterer did not respond to multiple interview requests for this story, and a Trump transition spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.)
Then Vivek Ramaswamy emerged. The presidential candidate was campaigning in a way only a millennial tech bro could: leaning heavily on social media, hobnobbing with influencers, exuding youthful arrogance. On the stump, he rapped Eminem; on his Instagram page, he posted videos of himself playing tennis shirtless. But he drew a line at TikTok. The Chinese app, he declared, was “digital fentanyl.”
Quietly, though, Ramaswamy began to soften his position. His consultants told him to avoid the app like the plague, but his newfound influencer friends prodded him to reconsider. Jake Paul made a hard push, urging him to consider all the young people on the app he was failing to reach. “We were fighting with one hand behind our back,” Tricia McLaughlin, the communications director on Ramaswamy’s campaign, recalled. “TikTok is where young people were getting their news.”
In September 2023, Ramaswamy launched his TikTok account, and he brought on Fuetterer, the social media whiz kid, to lead the charge. By mid-October, Ramaswamy published five TikToks per week.
Back in Utah, Fuetterer continued his double life. He rented office space from Lusty, the political consultant, in the Election Hive offices in downtown Salt Lake City. On weekends, he hung out with his Sigma Chi fraternity brothers. That’s where he met Renfro, then a 24-year-old economics major, a fellow Sig and a former intern for Sen. Mike Lee. They were more friends-of-friends than anything, until one night in the fall of 2023, when they went out for dinner. Over Chinese food, Fuetterer explained his work for Ramaswamy. Renfro spent the rest of the night mulling. The next day, he called Fuetterer and asked if he could work for him. Five days later, Renfro quit his part-time finance job and devoted himself to TikTok.
Ben Yoho, the CEO on Ramaswamy’s campaign, was Fuetterer’s biggest supporter. But the Ramaswamy campaign flamed out by mid-January. Fuetterer continued work for his other clients. In February, President Joe Biden joined TikTok. No other major presidential candidates budged until summer, when Trump jumped in the mix. Fuetterer, again, got the call. In turn, he roped Renfro and George into joining.
At first, it was a slow burn — the Trump account posted only four videos in its first 50 days. Then Biden dropped out of the race, Kamala Harris entered, and the entire election moved online. “That was a turning point for all of this,” Renfro said. The Trump campaign made a hard pivot into TikTok content, banking on its ability to access an online community of Trump supporters that were being fed pro-Harris content. A separate TikTok account, @teamtrump, was formed by the campaign, and the Fuetterer-led team dedicated itself to Trump’s personal account.
Before long, Fuetterer became a fixture on the Trump campaign. “He was with Trump for every day for the last 50 days or so,” Lusty said. He traveled with the candidate on Trump Force One, an iPhone in hand, making videos on the go. Trump, who’s flip-flopped on his support for the Chinese-owned app, was unequivocally supportive of his own popularity there; when Trump donned an apron and served fries in a McDonald’s drive-through, he boasted to reporters about how many TikTok“hits” he’d accumulated. “10 billion views,” he crowed. He pointed to Fuetterer, who was filming. “That’s TikTok Jack,” Trump said. “Actually, he’s become very famous.”
The goal, Renfro noted, was to help young people see a different side of Trump. The @teamtrump account, led by the campaign, took jabs at Harris and focused on Trump’s politics; the @realdonaldtrump page, led by Fuetterer’s team, was more “lighthearted,” Renfro said. The team would scour TikTok for trends and songs they could work into their videos. “We didn’t want them to feel overly polished or professionally done,” Renfro said. “We wanted to get rid of the third wall. We wanted it to be authentic, not a production.”
Lusty would call Fuetterer on occasion, and they’d talk about the things they were seeing. Fuetterer would often talk about how Trump had become a personal mentor, Lusty recalled, signaling him out on the plane and dishing advice on business.
”You realize you’re talking about Donald Trump, right?” Lusty would say.
Correction: This article was edited for clarity and to correct the last name of Jack Fuetterer.