Fact-checking Trump's interview
with 'Meet the Press'
The president-elect discussed the
major policy priorities for his second term and made several false, misleading
or exaggerated claims along the way.
Dec. 8, 2024, 11:00 AM CST
By Jane C. Timm
President-elect Donald Trump’s wide-ranging interview with “Meet the
Press” moderator Kristen Welker that aired Sunday touched on
just about every major policy he has proposed for his second term, including
imposing new tariffs, tackling inflation and mass deportations.
This was Trump’s first network
interview since defeating Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election,
giving people the clearest idea yet of how he plans to govern once he takes
office.
But as he did during his first term
and on the campaign trail, Trump sometimes ran afoul of the facts, making
false, misleading or exaggerated claims. Here are some of the more significant
instances.
Crime, border security and family separation
Trump said that crime is rising
sharply in the United States and blamed it on migrants.
“Look, our country is a mess,” he
said. “We have the highest crime rate.” He later said “a lot of that is migrant
crime.”
There is no evidence of a
migrant-driven crime wave in the U.S., and crime broadly is down,
according to the most recently available data.
Violent crime was down about 3% from
2022 to 2023, and property crime took a similar drop of 2.4%, the FBI reported in September. The
most serious crimes, murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, dropped an estimated
11.6% — marking the largest single-year decline in two decades.
Speaking about immigrants coming into
the country, Trump also claimed there were “13,099 murderers released into our
country over the last three years.”
Trump is misstating the data, as
Welker noted during the interview. While there are more than 13,000 noncitizens
convicted of homicide in the U.S. or abroad who aren’t in immigration detention
centers, they came into the U.S. over the last four decades or more, according to the Department of
Homeland Security.
The individuals are included in
Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s “non-detained” docket, meaning the agency
is aware of the immigrants and there are pending immigration cases about them.
But they are not in detention centers because they are not prioritized for
detention, they are serving time behind bars for their crimes, or because ICE
can’t find them.
Trump also repeated his false claim that
gangs have taken over an apartment building in Aurora, Colorado.
“We’re getting the worst gang probably
with MS-13, and the Venezuelan gangs are the worst in the world. They’re
vicious, violent people,” Trump said. “And you’ve seen what they’ve done in
Colorado and other places. They’re taking over, they’re literally taking over
apartment complexes and doing it with impunity. They don’t care.”
Welker pointed out during the
interview that local police officials have refuted
that claim.
Asked about his controversial policy
of separating families who crossed the border illegally, Trump suggested
President Barack Obama’s administration had done the same.
“You also had it with Obama,” Trump
said. “You also know he built the jails for the children.”
Obama didn’t have a policy of family
separation, as Welker pointed out during the interview and as NBC News fact-checked back in 2018.
The detention centers the U.S. built during his administration — which were
later used by Trump during his “zero tolerance” family separation policy — were
due to a massive surge of unaccompanied minors who crossed the border without
their parents during his administration.
Trump also asserted that migrant
crossings at the southern border had all but ceased after he threatened the
presidents of Canada and Mexico with new tariffs in a
post-election call.
“Within 10 minutes after that phone
call, we noticed that the people coming across the border, the southern border
having to do with Mexico, there was at a trickle. Just a trickle,” Trump said.
“In fact, I called the border. See, unlike my opponent, I do call the border a
lot. And I said, ‘How’s the border looking today?’ They said, ‘There’s nobody
here.’ They couldn’t believe it. The military stopped these vast groups of
people. You know, we call them caravans. But they had caravans of people, and
they largely stopped them.”
Trump is exaggerating here. Southern
border crossings have been low since the summer, when President Joe Biden
limited asylum for people who crossed the border without authorization. There
isn’t any evidence that border conditions have changed dramatically in the last
two weeks, as no new data has been made available since Trump made his tariff
threat.
More than 46,000 people crossed in November, The
Associated Press reported, citing a U.S. Customs and Border Protection
official. That figure is a new low for Biden’s administration, and reflects a
monthslong trend of low crossings in the south.
Mexican authorities also routinely
break up caravans — large groups of migrants walking north — and very few ever
make it to the U.S. border.
Trump also vowed to end the 14th
Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship to American-born children.
“We’re going to end that, because it’s
ridiculous,” Trump said. “We’re the only country that has it, you know.”
That is false: More than 30 other countries recognize
birthright citizenship.
The Jan. 6 riot
Trump repeated false and misleading
claims about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
“I saw people that didn’t even go into
the building, and they were convicted. And you had the police saying, ‘Come on
in. Come on in.’ I mean, you know, the police are saying, ‘Come on in,
everybody, come on in.’ They had people, you know — you know, you have a lot of
cameras. They don’t want to release the tapes. They don’t want to release the
tape,” Trump said.
There’s no evidence that any police
officers encouraged protesters to enter the Capitol. And last year, House
Speaker Mike Johnson vowed to make more
than 40,000 hours of security footage available to the public.
It’s true that some Jan. 6 protesters
who did not enter the Capitol were convicted. That was for serious crimes
including assault of a police officer.
Trump also claimed that the House
select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack “deleted and destroyed a
whole year and a half of testimony.”
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Donald Trump
Read the full transcript:
President-elect Donald Trump interviewed by "Meet the Press"
moderator Kristen Welker
“So the unselect committee went
through a year and a half of testimony,” Trump said. “They deleted and
destroyed all evidence of — that they found.”
In the interview, Welker pointed out
that Democrats deny this.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, who
chaired the committee, said in a 2023 letter to Rep.
Barry Loudermilk, R-Ga., who first made this claim, that private and sensitive
information was sent to the White House and the Department of Homeland Security
for review to ensure that certain information wasn’t released improperly.
According to Thompson, those agencies,
and another House committee, continue to have access to the files and
information the Republicans have argued was deleted, since the House committee
didn’t archive them pending White House and DHS review.
“You know why?” Trump continued.
“Because Nancy Pelosi was guilty. Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 troops. You
wouldn’t have had a J6 because other people were guilty.
The Jan. 6 committee found no evidence to
support the claim that he had offered Pelosi, who was speaker of the House at
the time, troops. The committee did find that Trump had discussed using 10,000
National Guard members to protect his supporters.
And Pelosi did not have the authority
to direct their movements. After rioting began, Pelosi and then-Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell requested military assistance.
Tariffs, jobs and inflation
Trump misconstrued the potential
economic realities of tariffs, the taxes charged to importers on goods coming
into the U.S. from abroad. They are a central part of his economic policy.
According to most economists, corporations typically
pass these import taxes on to consumers, leaving Americans to pick up the tab
if they want to buy foreign goods. Trump enacted nearly $80 billion in new tariffs during his
first term.
“I don’t believe” that tariffs are
paid for by consumers, he told Welker when pressed on that fact. He also argued
“they cost Americans nothing.”
But American consumers paid hundreds
of dollars each year in higher costs as a result of the tariffs Trump enacted
in his first administration, according to one analysis from the
Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
He went on to claim that his tariff on washing machines coming
in from China and South Korea, which started at 20% and rose to 50%, helped
companies that made them, including Whirlpool, which has a major plant in Ohio.
“We saved thousands of jobs, tens of
thousands of jobs. They were all going out of business because they were
dumping washing machines,” Trump said of the imports of washing machines from
Asia. “When I put the tariffs on, they became successful businesses.”
It’s true that Trump’s tariffs on
washing machines provided a jobs boost in the U.S., but not to the degree he
claimed. And he left out some context about the costs associated with the
tariffs.
The International Trade Commission, a
federal government agency, said in a 2020 report that Trump’s tariffs had
contributed to 1,800 new jobs in the washing machine industry, including 200 at
Whirlpool. The rest of the jobs came from foreign producers opening plants in
the U.S.
Each new job, however, cost
consumers $815,000, according to the
ITC, because washers started costing more as American manufacturers hiked their
prices to match their foreign competitors’. (Whirlpool disputed
the figure, which was calculated by economists at the Federal Reserve and the
University of Chicago, arguing it was less than $22,000 per job.)
Trump also said that when Biden took
office, “they didn’t have inflation for a year and a half.” He added,
“Then they created inflation with energy and with spending too much.”
Inflation — measured by the cost of
services and goods — started going up in the summer of 2020, when Trump was in
office, before sharply rising after he left office, according to the Consumer Price Index. It
peaked 18 months later, in June of 2022.
Covid relief spending — which began
under Trump but accelerated under Biden — played a role in fueling inflation,
but economists believe supply chain issues during the pandemic, production
costs and changing demand are also to blame.
Vaccines
Trump has picked Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a
prominent anti-vaccine activist, to be his secretary of the Department of
Health and Human Services. In the interview, Trump said he’d be open to
eliminating childhood vaccines “if they’re dangerous for the children.”
“When you look at what’s going on with
disease and sickness in our country, something’s wrong,” Trump said. “If you
take a look at autism, go back 25 years, autism was almost nonexistent. It was,
you know, 1 out of 100,000 and now it’s close to 1 out of 100.”
In 2000, 1 in 150 children had been
diagnosed with autism by age 8, compared to 1 in 36 today.
But as Welker noted in the interview, researchers say that
is in large part due to increased screening and a greater awareness of the
complex disorder. Scientists have also linked genetic factors to autism.
Trump said he wasn’t sure vaccines
were leading to higher rates of autism, but was open to more investigation.
“Hey, look, I’m not against vaccines.
The polio vaccine is the greatest thing. … But when you talk about autism,
because it was brought up, and you look at the amount we have today versus 20
or 25 years ago, it’s pretty scary,” Trump said.
There is no evidence of a link
between vaccines and autism, as hundreds of studies have found childhood
vaccines to be safe.
The 2024 election
As for his victory last month over
Harris, Trump made exaggerated claims about his success with young voters in
response to a question about TikTok.
“I won youth by 30%. All Republicans
lose youth. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s changing. And last time, we were down
30% with youth. This time, we’re up 35% with youth,” Trump said during the
interview.
Trump picked up a larger proportion of
voters under 30 than any Republican presidential candidate since 2008, according to NBC News exit polling,
but he didn’t win them. Among voters ages 18-29, Harris won 54% to Trump’s 43%,
the exit poll shows.
Jane C. Timm is a senior reporter for
NBC News.
