When President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. for another 75 days, he explained to reporters in the Oval Office that he wasn’t terribly concerned about Chinese intelligence efforts or influence operations with the app.
“Remember, TikTok is largely about kids — young kids,” Trump said. “If China is gonna get information about young kids, I don’t know. I think, to be honest, I think we have bigger problems than that.”
“TikTok,” Trump concluded, “is not their biggest problem.”
While the president may not be so alarmed, congressional Republicans are.
“I have deep concerns about the Chinese Communist Party’s ties to TikTok, both the information they gather on our children and the information that they push on them with regards to algorithms,” Sen. Katie Britt, who has expressed concerns about children using the app previously, told NOTUS on Wednesday.
Sen. Ted Cruz was similarly worried.
“In no reasonable world should we allow the communist government of China to have a daily platform into the lives of 170 million Americans, including virtually all of our children,” Cruz said on Wednesday.
And Sen. Cynthia Lummis said she still wanted “the Chinese Communist Party out of the business of collecting data and supporting their allies on TikTok.”
“That’s of concern to me,” she told NOTUS.
But Lummis was also quick to jump to Trump’s defense.
“I agree with him,” she said. “He does have bigger fish to fry in the next few days. So I’m OK with him sliding this issue to the back burner, but I don’t want him to push it all the way off the stovetop.”
In these first days of the second administration, no Republican is really looking to disagree with Trump — on TikTok or any other issue — even if, technically speaking, most of them are far apart from Trump on TikTok.
Instead, in conversations with more than two dozen Republicans, GOP lawmakers time and again seemed to return to a charitable interpretation of the president: You have to take him “seriously, not literally.”
“Some people take seriously things that he said in jest,” Sen. James Lankford, who sits on both the Senate Intelligence and the Homeland Security committees, said.
Lankford added that TikTok and Chinese surveillance pose “a very real risk for our national security,” but he didn’t see a problem with Trump seeming to treat the issue more casually than his presidential predecessor or Congress.
“I don’t know what all that conversation was, and I also know his sense of humor at times,” Lankford said, referring to Trump’s comments Monday night.
It was a similar situation among House Republicans. They insisted Trump was actually taking the issue seriously, even if his words and actions indicated the opposite.
“I think he realizes that TikTok is a national security threat,” Rep. Gary Palmer said. But he explained that Trump may not take the issue as seriously as some lawmakers because, “I don’t know if he’s seen the classified information we’ve seen.”
Palmer sits on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which unanimously voted last year — 50-0 — to advance a bill forcing TikTok’s owners to divest from the company. That vote only took place after members of the panel looked at classified information about TikTok, its algorithms and the data it collects.
In March 2024, the House Energy and Commerce Committee also held a five-hour hearing to question TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew about potential national security threats the platform poses. Data privacy came up repeatedly.
Another committee member, Rep. Jay Obernolte, told NOTUS that many “legitimate concerns” were raised about child data privacy during those committee hearings. But he said he thought Trump’s comments about those issues weren’t downplaying them.
“Look, we’re not making a ranking of what problem’s more important,” Obernolte said. “I don’t think anyone would dismiss the legitimate problem of a Chinese entity co-opting the data of millions of Americans. That is a substantial problem, and I think we’re gonna get it solved.”
It was a similar story for another Energy and Commerce member, Rep. Buddy Carter, who said Trump cares about child data privacy.
“We’re all singing from the same song sheet,” Carter said. “Donald Trump does not want the Chinese Communist Party getting information on our children, or anyone else, any more than we do in Congress.”
While the president downplaying TikTok as a concern might normally alarm Republicans, with Trump in the White House, even outspoken China hawks said Trump’s comments on Monday weren’t an issue.
Rep. Chris Smith, co-chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, said TikTok was a part of the Chinese Communist Party’s “ubiquitous, octopus-like reach into everything they can get their hands on.”
“They have access to so many hearts and minds through TikTok,” Smith said.
But he was hesitant to disagree with Trump’s assertions that the U.S. faced “bigger problems.”
“Maybe it was just a glib comment,” Smith said. “I wouldn’t take too much out of it because he does have big issues to deal with, with the border and everything else.”
For years, TikTok’s owners have heavily invested in lobbying Congress, including about child data privacy issues. Last year was ByteDance’s most expensive lobbying year on record. The company spent almost $10.4 million lobbying in 2024, according to its disclosures, and the company’s lobbyists reported advocating to Congress and the White House about “protecting children” and “privacy” every single quarter in 2024.
Still, lawmakers don’t seem to have bought the company’s message that TikTok presents hardly any threat to children or the U.S.
“I am deeply concerned about safeguarding our children’s data and making sure a foreign adversary isn’t profiling all of our kids,” Rep. Nick Langworthy told NOTUS.
And even if Trump has bought TikTok’s message, Langworthy was willing to cut him some slack.
“I do think that the president deserves the time to formulate a plan,” he said.
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Emily Kennard, Samuel Larreal and Nuha Dolby are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.