"The balloon mania I never really got," Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said last week. "Because we've got like one in every four Americans with TikTok on their phone. We've got Chinese surveillance equipment at almost every U.S. port, where they're able to get signals intelligence on the entire supply chain of the United States. We have rural America being connected by Chinese technology. We have U.S. police stations flying Chinese drones. And we're gonna get worked up over, like, 1950s technology?"

"It was a psyop. I came on the War Room the day after and said it was a total psyop."