Fact-checking Trump's interview with 'Meet the Press'
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/NBC News
President-elect Donald Trump’s wide-ranging interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, which 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 U.S. 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.”
“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.”
’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.
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/NBC News
President-elect Donald Trump’s wide-ranging interview with “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker, which 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 U.S. 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.”
“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.”
’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.
