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Sep 17, 2023 · In this full, unedited interview with Meet the Press, former President Trump discusses his views on the 2020 election, abortion rights, foreign policy and more.
- 78 min
Sep 18, 2023 · President Putin said, “We surely hear that Mr. Trump says he will resolve all burning issues within several days, including the Ukrainian crisis. We cannot help but feel happy about it.” What do you make of that?
- 8 min
- Allan Smith,Jonathan Allen
- Trump tells his party to drop pushing abortion bans with no exceptions. Trump said members of his own party “speak very inarticulately” about abortion, and he criticized those who push for abortion bans without exceptions in cases of rape and incest, and to protect the health of the mother.
- Trump says he is not afraid of going to prison. Despite facing four trials, Trump told Welker that he's not consumed with visions of prison. “I don’t even think about it,” Trump said.
- Trump says he likes democracy, just not how the U.S. system currently works. One of Welker's final questions centered on whether Trump — who has spent three years trying to overturn or delegitimize the 2020 election he lost — still believes democracy "is the most effective form of government."
- Trump doesn't rule out pardoning himself if elected but says it's 'very unlikely' Trump chose not to pre-emptively pardon himself before exiting office in January 2021.
Sep 23, 2023 · The stunning first 9 minutes and 44 seconds of Kristen Welker's interview with Trump were largely edited out of Meet the Press — but they're illustrative.
- Overview
- Are immigrants 'flooding' the U.S.?
- Are a record number of terrorists crossing the border?
- Did the U.S. give $85 billion worth of equipment to the Taliban?
- Did people who never entered the Capitol on Jan. 6 get long sentences?
- Was the 2020 election 'rigged,' 'so rigged' and 'crooked'?
- Is bacon five times more expensive than it used to be?
- Did Trump's tax cuts bring in more revenue?
- Did Covid, not Trump, drive up the deficit?
- Trump claimed Democrats want to murder babies. What's he talking about?
Former President Donald Trump made a spate of false and misleading comments about immigration, foreign policy, abortion and more in a wide-ranging interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" moderator Kristen Welker that aired Sunday morning.
“I have all the facts,” he said at one point, falsely claiming that the 2020 election was rigged and that there was broad evidence of it.
Watch the full interview and read the transcript here.
NBC News has also extended an invitation to President Joe Biden to sit down with Welker for an interview.
Trump’s presidency was marked by repeated false, exaggerated and misleading claims. Some of those claims drove policy, while another triggered an impeachment. Trump's false view that the election was stolen helped land him and dozen people of others in legal trouble in Georgia. One senior aide — during a "Meet the Press" interview — even coined the phrase "alternative facts" in his defense.
Let’s review what Trump said on "Meet the Press."
Trump claimed there were “millions of illegal immigrants coming into our country, flooding our cities, flooding the countryside. I think the number is going to be 15 million people by the time you end this, by the end of this year. I think the real number is going to be 15 million people.”
Border crossings are up significantly in the last two years. In fiscal year 2023 so far, U.S. Border Patrol has apprehended or turned away more than 2.5 million people. In fiscal year 2022, border crossings topped 2.7 million, breaking the previous record by more than a million. Because some migrants make multiple border crossings, the numbers are slightly higher than the true total of immigrants at the southern border.
Speaking about immigration, Trump also said there was a surge in terrorists crossing the border — seeming to refer to the southern border.
“I saw some statistics, and it said in 2019, there were no terrorists. They caught no terrorists,” he said. “And now this year, it’s a record number like they’ve never seen before.”
Trump is right that Border Patrol is having more encounters with people on the terrorist watchlist at the southern border, but there were more such encounters in 2019, when he was president.
The number of all people, including U.S. citizens, on the terrorist watchlist who were stopped at the southern border as of July of this fiscal year was 216, compared with 165 in all of fiscal year 2022.
“We gave $85 billion worth of equipment to the Taliban,” Trump said, speaking about the Afghanistan withdrawal.
That is false. The Defense Department estimated last year that the Afghan government had more than $7.1 billion of U.S.-funded military equipment in its possession when it fell to the Taliban in August 2021 amid the withdrawal.
“These people on Jan. 6,” Trump said, “some of them never even went into the building, and they're being given sentences of many years.”
That misses critical context. Some of the defendants who got some of the longest sentences of any participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol — including Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes — did not enter the Capitol themselves but got lengthy sentences after they were convicted of seditious conspiracy.
There is extensive proof that the 2020 election was not marred by fraud, but Trump nonetheless said more than a dozen times that it was "rigged."
“If this were ever before a court, we would win so easy. There is so much evidence that the election was rigged,” he said at one point.
Trump and his supporters brought more than 50 lawsuits to overturn the results of the election; none succeeded.
Trump said there was proof of fraud in “2000 Mules” and tapes of “ballot stuffing,” referring by name to the widely debunked film by conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, which showed people depositing multiple ballots into drop boxes in Atlanta’s suburbs. According to The Associated Press, a Georgia State Election Board investigation determined that they were following the law and submitting ballots for themselves and family members who lived with them.
“Things are not going right now very well for the consumer. Bacon is up five times. Food is up horribly — worse than energy,” Trump said.
Inflation has absolutely raised the cost of many consumer goods, including food.
But Trump is exaggerating the price of salt-cured pork: In U.S. cities on average, the cost of sliced bacon is up by about 12% from the end of his term in office, though at one point in 2022, it was 30% more expensive than it was at the end of 2020.
Trump is correct, however, to note that food inflation is far outpacing energy costs, which fell from August 2022 to August 2023, while food prices rose 4.3%.
Trump said he would like to further lower corporate tax rates but said he wanted more income first.
“You have to get some income coming in. You know, when I lowered taxes, we took in more revenue,” Trump said. “When I lowered taxes, I cut taxes tremendously, created tremendous jobs, but more importantly, we had more revenue with lower taxes than we did with higher taxes.”
“We had the greatest economy in history, and then we got hit with Covid. And we had to keep this, this beautiful thing going,” Trump said. “We had to do things that were very severe. We had to let some money come out.”
Trump went on to claim that deficit-reduction efforts — linked to American energy — were underway but blocked by Covid.
His argument that the national debt rose only because of Covid-19 pressures is false. The national debt rose every year during the Trump presidency — in 2017, 2018 and 2019 — before the pandemic hit in 2020 and Congress poured trillions of dollars into relief measures. Even before Covid-19 hit, the U.S. was nowhere close to paying down its debt.
The increase in debt was due to a mix of existing obligations, and it was further fueled by Trump’s deficit-raising policies, including his tax law, which Republicans passed along party lines in late 2017.
Asked about abortion, Trump claimed that Democrats support infanticide.
“The radical people on this are really the Democrats that say after five months, six months, seven months, eight months, nine months, and even after birth, you are allowed to terminate the baby,” he said. “You have a Virginia governor, previous governor, who said after the baby is born, you will make a determination, and if you want, you will kill that baby.”
While some Democrats support broad access to abortion regardless of gestation age, infanticide is illegal, and no Democrats advocate for it. Just 1% of abortions are performed after 21 weeks of gestation, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Trump first made the claim in 2019, after Virginia’s governor at the time, Ralph Northam, made controversial remarks in discussing an abortion bill. NBC News debunked the claim then, reporting that Northam’s remarks were about resuscitating infants with severe deformities or nonviable pregnancies.
- 78 min
- Jane C. Timm
Jan 17, 2021 · The trove of more than 500 videos recovered from a largely pro-Trump social platform provides a uniquely immersive account of the violence and confusion as seen from inside the insurrection.
Apr 30, 2024 · Former U.S. President Donald Trump sat down with TIME for two conversations and made inaccurate statements. Here’s what they are.
