President Trump gave the first sit-down interview of his second term to Sean Hannity, the Fox News primetime host, on Wednesday.
Here are a few key moments from the interview.
The president said he had tried to weigh up Joe Biden’s motives for allowing unchecked, illegal immigration at the southern border from a business perspective.
“You always like to understand, like in a business, you want to understand the other side,” he said. “Why do they want something, you know.”
He came up with two possible answers: “You’re either stupid or you hate the country.”
An average of 2.4 million immigrants a year arrived into the US between 2021 and 2024, the largest number in US history. About 60 per cent of those were estimated to have entered illegally, according to an analysis from Goldman Sachs, the investment bank.
• First, an email. Then Trump sends in the troops
“Prisons from all over the world have been emptied out into our country,” Trump said, without giving further evidence.
“Why would somebody say that open borders are good, when jails and mental institutions from other countries and gang members right off the streets of the toughest cities in the world are being brought to the United States of America and emptied out into our country?”
US-Mexico border prepares for Trump’s anti-immigration restrictions
Trump, 78, has promised mass deportations and a zero-tolerance approach to immigration and border security, and labelled the Biden administration’s policies a “gross miscarriage of common sense”.
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“I don’t even know if he knew what the hell was going on,” Trump said of his predecessor.
‘TikTok spying fears are overblown’
It has become conventional wisdom in Washington that TikTok is being used as a Trojan horse by the Chinese communist party to spy on everyday Americans.
Trump challenged that assertion and said he would pursue a deal with ByteDance, the app’s Chinese owners, to find a US investor to allow it to continue to operate.
“Is it that important for China to be spying on young people? On young kids watching crazy videos?” Trump asked.
“Look, we have our telephones made in China for the most part. We have so many things made in China. So why don’t they mention that?”
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Shou Chew, the chief executive of TikTok, attended Trump’s inauguration this week
GETTY IMAGES/MEGA AGENCY
During his first term, Trump led the effort to ban the video-sharing app, which has 170 million users in the US.
Last year, Congress passed a bill to ban TikTok by January 2025. TikTok then worked to curry favour with Trump. Shou Chew, its chief executive, went to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida in December and attended his inauguration this week.
TikTok briefly went dark over the weekend, before Trump signed an executive order to delay the ban to “protect our national security”.
Trump told Sean Hannity that he had won the “youth vote”
In the interview with Hannity, Trump claimed he won the “youth vote” by 36 per cent in last year’s presidential election.
“Maybe that’s because I went on TikTok. I don’t know,” he said.
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Exit poll data showed that Kamala Harris, his Democratic rival, won more votes in the demographic of 18 to 29-year-olds, although the margin had narrowed considerably since 2020.
Fema under threat
Trump suggested that Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, was to blame for the failure to contain the wildfires the state has been battling over the past few weeks.
At least 27 people died in the fires, which burnt entire neighbourhoods to the ground.
Trump threatened to withhold federal disaster funding from California unless Newsom released water from the north of the state.
“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down into their system,” Trump said.
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He said he would travel to North Carolina and California on Friday.
Los Angeles county was battling the Hughes fire in Castaic on Wednesday
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Trump was also critical of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and appeared to suggest he was open to axing the agency.
He said that states may be better off responding to natural disasters on their own, and that the federal government could provide financial aid.
“Fema is getting in the way of everything,” he said. “Unless you have certain types of leadership, it gets in the way.”
Fema was created by Jimmy Carter in 1979 and has an annual budget of $30 billion.
The agency drew the ire of Republicans in November, when a supervisor was fired for telling staff assisting survivors of Hurricane Helene to skip houses displaying Trump signs.
Trump appointed Cameron Hamilton, a former Navy Seal, as acting Fema director on Wednesday.
Trump questioned why Joe Biden didn’t pardon himself
Trump suggested it was a mistake that Biden had granted pardons to several members of his family, but not himself.
“This guy went around giving everybody pardons,” Trump told Hannity. “And you know, the funny thing, maybe the sad thing, is he didn’t give himself a pardon.
“And if you look at it, it all had to do with him. I mean, the money went to him. Should Congress investigate that?”
House Republicans conducted exhaustive investigations into the Biden family’s foreign business dealings in 2023. But their efforts to tie Joe Biden to an alleged bribery and influence-peddling scheme ultimately came to naught.
Biden issued preemptive pardons for several members of his family, including his sister Valerie Owens and his son Hunter
SAUL LOEB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Biden was spared prosecution for mishandling classified documents in February last year after a special prosecutor determined that his memory was too hazy to convince a jury of his guilt.
In a December 2020 interview with CNN, Biden said he would not give preemptive pardons to family members and raised concerns that Trump would do so before he left office.
Minutes before leaving office on Monday, he issued pardons to his brothers James and Frank Biden, and his sister Valerie Owens, as well as to the spouses of James and Valerie.
Biden pardoned his son Hunter, 54, on December 1 while he was awaiting sentencing for gun and tax crimes.
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