Republican presidential candidates participate in a presidential primary debate hosted by NBC News in Miami.
He blamed former President Donald Trump — the frontrunner for the Republican nomination who is boycotting the debates — for failing to act when he could. The debate over TikTok soon became part of a larger argument about growing Chinese influence in US society. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said TikTok showed that the US rivalry with China was not just military and economic but also cultural.
“We have to ban any US company actually transferring US data to the Chinese,” he said. “So this is the problem when you have Republicans that temporarily go the way the winds blow and now it’s popular to talk tough on China.”