Wordpress not saving <p> tags for custom taxonomy term description

I'm using wordpress API to display content. I'm using the classic editor since guttenberg is bugging out elsewhere.

I noticed that if a paragraph does not have inline styles, wordpress does not save the p tags in the database. So when I call the api, the response is something like this:

first paragraph.

second paragraph.

There isn't even a br tag in between, just a newline I believe.

I just need to style paragraphs to be spaced apart, so I would prefer to have the paragraph tags.

Looked into wpautop function, but i just does not seem to save paragraph tags unless I tweak inline styles.

Any suggestions or alternatives?