President-elect Donald Trump said on Sunday (Dec. 22) that he favors allowing TikTok to continue operating in the United States for at least a period of time, saying he had been viewed billions of times on TikTok during his presidential campaign.

Trump’s remarks to a crowd of conservative supporters in Phoenix, Arizona, were one of his strongest signals yet against TikTok’s potential exit from the U.S. market.

The U.S. Senate passed a law in April requiring TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to divest the app over national security concerns.

TikTok’s owners have been seeking to overturn the law, and the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case. But if the court rules against ByteDance and it doesn’t divest, TikTok could be banned in the United States the day before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 19.

It’s unclear how Trump would get around the TikTok divestiture order that the Senate passed overwhelmingly.

“I think we have to start thinking about it because, you know, we did go on TikTok and got billions and billions of responses,” Trump told the crowd at AmericaFest, an annual gathering organized by the conservative group Turning Point.

“They brought me a chart, it’s a record, it looks beautiful, and I looked at it and said, ‘Maybe we’ll keep this guy for a while,'” he said.

Trump met with TikTok’s CEO on Monday. Trump said at a press conference that day that he had a “good impression” of TikTok because of his successful campaign on TikTok.

The Justice Department believes that China’s control of TikTok poses an ongoing threat to national security, a position supported by most U.S. lawmakers.

TikTok said the Justice Department misrepresented TikTok’s relationship with China, saying its content recommendation engine and user data are stored on cloud servers operated by Oracle Corporation in the United States, and that content review decisions affecting U.S. users are made in the United States.