FactChecking Trump’s ‘Meet the Press’ Interview – FactCheck.org

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In his first post-election, sit-down broadcast interview, President-elect Donald Trump outlined his priorities for a second term. But in the interview, Trump continued to repeat inaccurate information related to immigration, crime, trade, health care and the election.

The interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker aired on Dec. 8.

Unsupported Claim About Jan. 6 Committee Evidence

Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol — which he derisively called the “unselect committee” — had “deleted and destroyed all evidence” obtained in its investigation.

“So the unselect committee went through a year and a half of testimony,” Trump said. “Wait, they deleted and destroyed all evidence of — that they found. You know why? Because [then-House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi was guilty. Nancy Pelosi turned down 10,000 troops. You wouldn’t have had a J6 because other people were guilty. … And all of this stuff came out. People lied so badly. Now, listen, this was a committee, a big deal. They lied. And what did they do? They deleted and destroyed a whole year and a half worth of testimony. Do you know that I can’t get — I think those people committed a major crime. … And [then-Rep. Liz] Cheney was behind it. And so was [Rep.] Bennie Thompson and everybody on that committee. For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail.”

In 2022, the Jan. 6 committee issued a more than 800-page report that detailed how Trump’s false claims undermining the integrity of the 2020 election led to the Capitol riot. The committee also released more than 140 transcripts of the testimony that went into the report and has made public videos, depositions and documents — including memos, emails and voicemails.

When Welker noted that the committee denied it had destroyed any evidence, Trump said, “Bennie Thompson [the Democratic congressman who chaired the committee] wrote a statement that he has destroyed all evidence.”

As we have written, Thompson sent Republican Rep. Barry Loudermilk a letter on July 7, 2023, in which he reported that more than a million records had been prepared for publication and archiving in coordination with several governmental offices, including the National Archives and Records Administration and the Committee on House Administration.

In a footnote to that letter, Thompson explained, “the Select Committee did not archive temporary committee records that were not elevated by the Committee’s actions, such as use in hearings or official publications, or those that did not further its investigative activities.”

After receiving the letter, Loudermilk subsequently told Fox News that the committee hadn’t adequately preserved some documents, data and video depositions. But Loudermilk never claimed the committee’s records were destroyed, as Trump claimed. Rather, Loudermilk raised concerns over what materials needed to be archived. The evidence preserved by the committee is still publicly available on a government website.

As for Trump’s claim that Pelosi turned down his request for 10,000 National Guard troops, the House select committee on the Capitol attack said it found “no evidence” of that.

False Birthright Citizenship Claim

Trump said he was “absolutely” committed to ending birthright citizenship, the granting of citizenship to babies born in the U.S. even if their parent or parents are in the country illegally, according to a longstanding interpretation of the 14th Amendment. Calling the policy “ridiculous,” Trump wrongly claimed “we’re the only country in the world that has it.” While the majority of countries do not have such a policy, more than 30 of them do, including Canada and a number of other countries in Central and South America, according to a 2018 report by the Global Legal Research Directorate, a division of the Law Library of Congress.

Trump was noncommittal about whether he would seek to end birthright citizenship via executive action, as he has proposed in the past. As we wrote in 2023, most legal scholars believe such a change would require a constitutional amendment. Trump acknowledged in his NBC interview that “we’ll maybe have to go back to the people” to end the practice.

No Evidence for Oft-Repeated Migrant Claim

Trump made the oft-repeated and unsupported claim that “migrants are pouring into the country that are from prisons and from mental institutions.” Immigration experts have told us there’s simply no evidence of that. One expert said Trump’s claims appear to be “a total fabrication.”

By way of evidence, Trump said, “Do you know that Venezuela, their prisons are at the lowest point in terms of emptiness that they’ve ever been? They’re taking their people out of those prisons by the thousands and they’re drop[ping]” them in the U.S.

“We have no evidence that the Venezuelan government is emptying the prisons or mental hospitals to send them out of the country, whether to the USA or any other country,” Roberto Briceño-León, founder and director of the independent Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, told us.

According to the Venezuelan Prison Observatory’s 2022 annual report, the country’s prison population in 2022 was 33,558, just 152 fewer than in 2021. During Trump’s presidency, there was a nearly 35% decrease between 2017 and 2020.

Briceño-León told us crime has dropped in Venezuela in part due to worsening economic and living conditions, which have caused nearly 8 million people to leave the country since 2014. The vast majority have settled in nearby South American countries.

Tariff Threats Against Mexico

Trump claimed that “within 10 minutes after [a post-election] phone call” with Mexico’s president — during which he threatened 25% tariffs on imports from Mexico if it didn’t help deter illegal immigration to the U.S. — “we noticed that the people coming across the border, the southern border having to do with Mexico, there were a trickle. Just a trickle.” Trump claimed that in light of his tariff threat, the Mexican government had “largely stopped” caravans of migrants headed to the U.S. border.

Although U.S. Customs and Border Protection has not officially released its border apprehension data for November, the Associated Press reported that about 46,700 people were arrested that month for illegally crossing the border from Mexico, according to a CBP official. That would be the lowest monthly figure of Joe Biden’s presidency, but it’s in line with the figures since June 4, when Biden announced a series of executive actions designed to address “substantial levels of migration” by temporarily restricting asylum eligibility when daily border encounters reach high levels.

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum denied Trump’s claim that his tariff threat had changed Mexico’s migration policy.

“Caravans of migrants no longer reach the border,” Sheinbaum said on Nov. 26.

“In our conversation with President Trump, I explained to him the comprehensive strategy that Mexico has followed to address the migratory phenomenon, respecting human rights,” Sheinbaum wrote on X the following day, Nov. 27, according to a Google translation. “Thanks to this, migrants and caravans are assisted before they arrive at the border. We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.”

Migrant Murderers

While talking about deporting migrants living in the U.S. illegally, Trump again falsely claimed that “13,099 murderers [were] released into our country over the last three years,” adding that they are “walking next to you and your family.”

During the campaign, we wrote that there were 13,099 noncitizens in the U.S. who were convicted of murder, but were not being detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. However, the “vast majority” of them were sentenced prior to the Biden administration, and many were being held in prisons or jails (which explains why they are not in ICE custody), according to the Department of Homeland Security.

No Evidence of 2020 Election Fraud

Trump falsely implied that he only lost the 2020 election because of fraud. Asked if he would concede that he lost the 2020 election, Trump said, “Why would I do that?” He then went on to claim that he won in 2024 because his margin of victory was “too big to rig.”

As we have written, there is no evidence to support Trump’s claim that the Democrats stole the 2020 election. State and federal judges have rejected Trump’s claims, often saying that his legal team provided no evidence of fraud. The Trump administration’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the 2020 election “the most secure in American history,” and his former attorney general at the time, William Barr, repeatedly said he saw no evidence of fraud that could have altered the outcome of the 2020 election.

Why California Vote Count Takes Time

Trump also falsely implied that counting ballots weeks after Election Day is a sign of fraud.

“Do you know they’re still counting votes in San Diego, California? Listen, they’re still counting the votes. This is almost four weeks. They’re still counting the votes,” Trump said. “If we don’t have fair elections and honest voting and machines that work quickly, if you had paper ballots every election would be over by 10:00 in the evening. … And you’d get a much more accurate count.”

As we wrote in late November, several states — including California — were still counting ballots, but it is not a sign of fraud. In California, Secretary of State Shirley Weber said at a Nov. 14 press conference that the state laws and rules result in a lengthy but accurate count of ballots. “This approach involves a series of rigorous checks and safeguards, including signature verification, machine audits and manual counts,” she said.

The following day, Weber said in a post on X that local election officials have 30 days to complete vote counting, auditing and certification. The secretary of state has until Dec. 13 to certify the state’s results.

As for Trump’s call for paper ballots, the Brennan Center for Justice said that an estimated 98% of U.S. voters were expected to use paper ballots to cast their votes in 2024, including in California.

Vaccines

Trump made clear he was open to further investigating the debunked notion that vaccines cause autism. 

Mentioning longtime vaccine opponent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Welker asked Trump if he wanted “to see childhood vaccines eliminated.”

“If they’re dangerous for the children,” he replied, going on to allude to increases in various chronic diseases in children. The conversation quickly pivoted to autism, with Trump emphasizing its increasing prevalence.

“Go back 25 years. Autism was almost nonexistent,” he said. “It was, you know, 1 out of 100,000. And now it’s close to 1 out of 100.”

Trump, who on his own and with Kennedy has previously spread falsehoods about vaccines, did not explicitly say that vaccines cause autism. But he repeatedly suggested it was possible and kept citing prevalence figures when Welker interjected to explain that many studies have already been done on the issue and that much of the increase in autism prevalence is due to better identification of the condition. 

“I think vaccines are — certain vaccines — are incredible. But maybe some aren’t. And if they aren’t, we have to find out,” he said. “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.”

“I think somebody has to find out,” he said at one point.

As we’ve explained repeatedly, the idea that it’s not known whether vaccines cause autism or it hasn’t been tested enough is misleading. While science can rarely prove that something is not causing something, after extensive study under a number of different hypotheses, vaccines have not been shown to be linked to autism in any way. Research also now shows the neurodevelopmental condition begins prior to birth. To continue studying the issue is a waste of research dollars and time — and does a disservice to the families of children with autism, experts say.

One of the prevalence numbers Trump used is also exaggerated. Nearly 25 years ago, in 2000, a CDC study estimated that about 1 in 150 children in the U.S. had autism — not 1 in 100,000 (the latest CDC estimate, for 2020, is 1 in 36 kids). Even in the 1960s and ‘70s, when some of the first prevalence studies were conducted using a very strict definition of the condition, the reported autism rate was higher than Trump said, at about 1 to 5 per 10,000 children. While prevalence figures for autism have greatly increased over time, researchers say this is largely driven by better detection and changes in how autism is defined.

False Claim About U.S.-European Trade

Trump claimed that “European nations” are taking “advantage of us on trade,” falsely adding: “They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our food product, they don’t take anything.”

It is true that the U.S. had a trade deficit of about $125 billion in goods and services with the European Union in 2023, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. However, the EU imported $639.6 billion of U.S. goods or services in 2023, and $487 billion in the first three quarters of 2024, according to BEA data. That doesn’t include the United Kingdom, which imported about $166 billion of U.S. goods or services in 2023.

U.S. goods imported by the EU countries includes crude oil, motor vehicles and agricultural products.

False Claim About Youth Vote

Trump wrongly claimed, “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 were up 35% with youth.”

Trump’s showing among young voters improved dramatically compared to 2020 — and was the best for a Republican since 2008, according to NBC News exit polling — but Democrat Kamala Harris still bested Trump among young voters.

AP Votecast exit polls results showed Harris won 51% to 47% among those aged 18 to 29, and 50% to 47% among those aged 30 to 34. Exit polls conducted by Edison Research on behalf of the National Election Poll, a consortium of media networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC News — had Harris winning among those aged 18 to 24 by 54% to 43%, and by 53% to 45% among those aged 25 to 29.

Crime Not ‘At an All-Time High’

Trump wrongly said that “crime is at an all-time high” or at the “highest” rate. The U.S. violent crime rate peaked in the early 1990s and has dropped considerably since. In recent years, the violent crime rate has been less than half the rates from three decades ago, according to estimates from the FBI.

Trump also cited ABC News’ David Muir commenting during Trump’s September debate with Vice President Kamala Harris that crime was going down overall, according to the FBI. “And then the following day, they released the crime rates and they were way up,” Trump wrongly said. About two weeks after the debate, the FBI released statistics for 2023 and revisions for some recent years. But the revised data still showed a decline in the violent crime rate since 2020, Trump’s last year in office. 

“Violent crime rose in 2020 and has fallen since then though the rise in violent crime has always been more muted than people assume. Murder, by contrast, rose a ton in 2020 and is falling a ton right now,” Jeff Asher, co-founder of the criminal justice data analysis group AH Datalytics, wrote in an Oct. 17 Substack post.

Obamacare

Trump distorted the facts in talking about his actions during his first term regarding the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. “I am the one that saved Obamacare, I will say,” Trump claimed. “And I did the right thing. I could’ve done the more political thing and killed it. And all I had to do is starve it to death.” Trump tried, but failed, to repeal and replace the ACA when he was president, and his administration backed a lawsuit that would have nullified the entire law, as Welker pointed out.

Trump responded that the lawsuit could have killed the ACA “from a legal standpoint. But from a physical standpoint, I made it work.” It’s unclear what Trump means by “made it work,” but if the goal of the law was to get more Americans enrolled in health insurance, Trump’s administration didn’t do that. Under his tenure, the number of people without health insurance went up by 3 million, and the percentage of the uninsured went up by about a half a percentage point.

His administration slashed advertising and outreach aimed at enrolling people in ACA plans, and he pushed the expansion of cheaper short-term health plans that wouldn’t have to abide by the ACA’s prohibitions against denying or pricing coverage based on health status. In the NBC News interview, Trump tried to wrongly take credit for the ACA insuring 20 million people, a figure Welker cited. In this year’s open enrollment period, 21.4 million people signed up for an ACA marketplace plan or were automatically reenrolled. That’s up from the 11.4 million who were enrolled in 2020, Trump’s last year in office.

As he did during his debate with Harris, Trump said he had “concepts of a plan that would be better” than the ACA and “if we find something better, I would love to do it.”

Trump’s Court Cases

Trump spun the facts in claiming that he “won every one” of the court cases against him, “and the rest are in the process of being won.” He said the charges against him were “all being dropped. It’s all been discredited.” He didn’t win any of the cases filed since he left office, and they haven’t been “discredited.” Instead, the criminal cases largely have been upended by Trump being elected.

In the federal case concerning Trump’s attempts to remain in office after losing the 2020 presidential election, special counsel Jack Smith filed a motion on Nov. 25, which was granted, to dismiss the indictment charges, saying the Constitution does not allow for the prosecution of a sitting president. “It has long been the position of the Department of Justice that the United States Constitution forbids the federal indictment and subsequent criminal prosecution of a sitting President,” Smith wrote in the motion. 

But Smith stood behind the investigation and the charges. The prohibition against criminal prosecution of a sitting president “is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the Government’s proof, or the merits of the prosecution, which the Government stands fully behind,” Smith wrote in his motion. The dismissal was “without prejudice,” which means it is at least possible that charges could be refiled after Trump leaves office. 

The same day and for the same reason, Smith filed a motion to dismiss his appeal in the federal case involving Trump’s handling of classified materials. In his motion, Smith noted that the appeal, as it relates to Trump’s co-defendants, Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira, “will continue because, unlike defendant Trump, no principle of temporary immunity applies to them.”

In the New York state criminal case, Trump was convicted in May on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal election law violations regarding hush-money payments over an alleged affair. But Trump wasn’t sentenced in the case. His lawyers argued in a Dec. 2 motion that the indictment should be dismissed and verdicts vacated, citing presidential immunity, the Presidential Transition Act and the Constitution’s supremacy clause. The judge in the case still needs to rule on the motion.

In Georgia, where Trump was indicted for trying to change the outcome of the election in that state, Trump’s lawyers on Dec. 4 filed a motion to have the case dismissed because of Trump’s election.

There are also civil cases against Trump. A federal jury in May 2023 found Trump liable for sexually abusing and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll, and a New York judge ruled in February that Trump fraudulently inflated the value of his assets in financial dealings, ordering him to pay hundreds of millions in penalties. Trump has appealed those rulings.

More on the Criminal Cases

After Welker raised the possibility of Trump receiving a presidential pardon from Biden, Trump again claimed that Biden was responsible for federal and state prosecutions of Trump – a claim that is not supported by evidence.

“[H]e’s the one that started this whole thing,” Trump said of Biden. “He got the Justice Department to go after me. And the state cases are all being run by the Justice Department, which is illegal. They had their people from the Justice Department work for Alvin Bragg in order to get something going.”

First, as we’ve written, Biden had no control over state-level prosecutors who brought cases against Trump in Manhattan and Georgia. 

Also, legal experts told PolitiFact that Matthew Colangelo, a former acting associate attorney general during the first months of the Biden administration, joining Bragg’s Manhattan district attorney’s office in December 2022 does not prove that Biden instigated Trump’s 2024 conviction in that case. The experts said it is not unusual for prosecutors to move from federal to state or local offices, and the investigation into Trump’s activity originally began in 2018, before Biden was president.

In addition, in congressional testimony in June, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, who was appointed by Biden, said that the Department of Justice “had nothing to do with” Colangelo being hired by Bragg.

As for Trump’s federal cases, in November 2022, Garland did authorize special prosecutor Jack Smith to investigate Trump for his post-presidency handling of classified documents as well as any potential unlawful interference with the certification of the 2020 election results. Those investigations led to two federal indictments against Trump. But Biden has long denied being involved in those federal cases.

Not the ‘Greatest Economy’

Trump claimed that prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 “we had the greatest economy in the history of our country.”

As we have written many times before, real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product growth is a widely used measure of economic well-being. By this measure, the U.S. didn’t have the “greatest economy” under Trump, and the U.S. economy started to cool prior to the pandemic.

Real GDP during Trump’s term peaked at 3% in 2018 and declined to 2.6% in 2019 before collapsing in 2020, when the pandemic hit the U.S., according to the BEA. Since 1930, the real GDP grew more than 3% a total of 48 times — including six consecutive years under Ronald Reagan, ranging from 7.2% in 1984 to 3.5% in 1986 and 1987.

Tariffs

When Welker suggested that Trump’s proposal for new tariffs on U.S. imports of goods from Canada, Mexico and China could raise costs for consumers in the U.S., Trump pushed back, falsely claiming that tariffs “cost Americans nothing.”

But as we’ve written, U.S. importers – not foreign countries – pay the tariffs in the form of customs duties, which are collected at ports of entry by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. And economists say that in many cases, those importers pass their increased costs on to consumers through price hikes.

In fact, a June analysis by the pro-business Tax Foundation estimated that tariffs Trump imposed on steel, aluminum, washing machines and other products in 2018 and 2019 amounted to “nearly $80 billion worth of new taxes on Americans.” The analysis also pointed to examples of additional economic studies that found that those “tariffs have raised prices and lowered economic output and employment since the start of the trade war in 2018.”

Inflation

Trump again falsely claimed that “we had no inflation” during the Trump administration, and he also made the false claim that at the beginning of the Biden administration “they didn’t have inflation for a year and a half” because of Trump’s policies.

There were only three months during the Trump administration when the annual rate of inflation was below 1%, as measured by the 12-month change in the Consumer Price Index. Those months were April, May and June of 2020 — all at the very beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, which greatly reduced economic activity globally.

As of February 2020, just before the pandemic was declared in March, the annual rate of inflation was 2.3%, and under Trump it was as high as 2.9% in June and July of 2018. When Biden entered the White House in January 2021, the annual inflation rate was 1.4%. But the rate increased quickly, rising almost monthly until reaching 9.1% in June 2022 – the highest level in about 40 years. The rate of inflation declined from there, but didn’t drop below 3% until July 2024, and it was 2.6% as of the 12 months ending in October.

Experts told us in 2022 that several factors led to high inflation in the U.S. and other countries, including pandemic-related issues with supply and demand, as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year (and retaliatory sanctions the U.S. and other countries placed on Russia). Trump claimed that the Biden administration “created inflation with energy and with spending too much,” but experts said while stimulus spending played a role, the main culprit for inflation was the economic fallout from the pandemic.

Zero-Tolerance Policy

When Welker asked Trump if he planned to revive his first administration’s “zero-tolerance policy” on illegal immigration, which resulted in some family members being separated, Trump repeated the misleading claim that “you also had it with Obama.”

The Obama and Trump administrations did not have the same enforcement policy, as we’ve written.

The Trump administration policy, which lasted for over two months in 2018, required the Department of Homeland Security to refer to the Justice Department all adults who illegally crossed the southern border for criminal prosecution. That resulted in families who migrated illegally being separated, when children were taken from their parents, who entered the federal court system and were placed in detention centers for adults only.

Although there were some cases when such families were separated during the Obama administration, experts told us that, prior to Trump, there was no blanket policy to prosecute parents and separate them from their children. Previous administrations largely used family detention facilities, the experts said.

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