In his first interview since the election, Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker about his priorities for day one, and beyond, of his next administration.Peter Kramer/NBC/Getty
President-elect Donald Trump appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday to deliver his first televised interview after winning the 2024 election. In a wide-ranging conversation with moderator Kristen Welker, filmed at Trump Tower on Friday, he outlined some of his priorities for social policy, immigration, his plans to use the presidential pardon, the economy, foreign policy, and reproductive rights for his next term. Much of it was as dystopian as his proposed administration appointees. Naturally, he also again refused to acknowledge having lost the 2020 election.
Here are some of the highlights from the approximately 40 minute-long interview.
A very busy Day One
On his first day in office, Trump told Welker he plans to issue a flurry of executive orders, focused on the economy and the border. He noted that he was not planning to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
He also said he’ll issue pardons to imprisoned January 6 insurrectionists on his first day. “They’ve been in [jail] for years, and they’re in a filthy, disgusting place that shouldn’t even be allowed to be open,” he said. He declined to mention that the insurrection led to assaults of about 140 law enforcement officials and that more than 900 participants have been sentenced for criminal activity.
And he “absolutely” will end birthright citizenship on day one—even though the 14th Amendment would pose a barrier. This could potentially affect millions of people who were born in the US, have worked, paid taxes, and started families. Trump appeared to suggest he would circumvent legal challenges by a constitutional amendment or executive action.
Mass deportations
When Welker asked how he would address his campaign promise of dealing with “everyone who is here illegally,” Trump reiterated his plans for mass deportation. This could affect, according to the Department of Homeland Security, about 11 million people.
“You have no choice,” Trump told Welker. He proceeded to falsely allege that there were more than 13,000 murderers released into the country during President Biden’s term. Welker pointed out that this number refers to the period encompassing at least the last 40 years. (Trump, predictably, dismissed that fact: “That was a fiction, that they put that out.”)
“We’re starting with the criminals, and we gotta do it, and then we’re starting with others, and we’ll see how it goes.”
“We’re starting with the criminals, and we gotta do it,” Trump said, “and then we’re starting with others, and we’ll see how it goes.” As my colleague Isabela Dias has chronicled, the enactment of Trump’s mass deportation plan would lead to a dire shortage of low-wage workers, rising inflation, and higher costs for services, not to mention a human tragedy on a massive scale, among other outcomes.
He noted that concerns about family separation could easily be dismissed, referring to previous comments made by his proposed “border czar” Tom Homan—the father of Trump’s first-term family separation policy. In a 60 Minutes interview, Homan said that entire families would be deported together to avoid separating parents from children.
“I don’t want to be breaking up families,” Trump told Welker, “so the only way you don’t break up the family is you keep them together and you have to send them all back, even kids who are here legally.”
Notably, Trump said he wants to work with Democrats to “work something out” to allow the approximately 3 million Dreamers—undocumented adults who arrived in the US as children—to be able to remain in the country of their birth.
Medication abortion
Trump said he does not intend to restrict access to medication abortion—which last year accounted for more than 60 percent of abortions nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute—but he did not entirely rule it out. Project 2025, the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, led by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, says the FDA should revoke approval of the drugs and that Trump’s Department of Justice should prosecute distributors of the pills under the 19th-century Comstock Act. More than 100 scientific studies have shown medication abortion is safe and effective—including when it’s prescribed virtually and mailed to patients.
“I’ll probably stay with exactly what I’ve been saying for the last two years. And the answer is, no,” Trump said.
“You commit to that?” Welker pressed.
He did not. “Things do change,” he allowed, “but I don’t think it’s going to change at all.”
Retribution
Trump told Welker that all the elected representatives who served on the House Select January 6 committee should go to jail. But, he assured her that he would not direct his FBI Director or Attorney General to carry out that order. He also defended his controversial choice for FBI Director, Kash Patel, who has called Democrats like Biden and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton members of the “Deep State.” (He has also pledged to go after prominent Republicans, including Trump’s former attorneys general Bill Barr and Jeff Sessions, among several others, as my colleague David Corn recently wrote.)
“If they think that somebody was dishonest, crooked or corrupt politician, I think he probably has an obligation to” investigate them, Trump told Welker.
Implausibly, he then proceeded to claim he never called for Biden to be prosecuted. He did. And that he’s “not looking to go back into the past.”
“I’m looking to make our country successful,” he said. “Retribution will be through success.”
A couple of minutes later, however, Trump seemed to walk back his promise that he wouldn’t prosecute Biden. “I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable. But that’s not going to be my decision,” he said, adding it would be up to Patel and Pam Bondi, his pick for attorney general, if they are confirmed. Trump also said he would not instruct Bondi to prosecute Special Counsel Jack Smith, who led the investigation into Trump’s role in inciting the January 6 insurrection before dropping it after the presidential election.
Shortly after Trump’s interview, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who served on the January 6 committee, appeared on CNN’s Inside Politics and said he had “absolutely no worries about” being prosecuted and jailed.
The 2020 Election
When Welker asked, Trump said he has no plans to concede the 2020 election.
“No. No,” he said. “Why would I do that?” (Maybe because—as more than 60 lawsuits have found—he lost.)
“Why didn’t [Democrats] steal this election, since they have more power now?” Welker pressed.
“Because,” Trump replied, “I think it was too big to rig.”
On Sunday, after the interview aired, just in time for the holidays, Trump released his newest offering on Truth Social: a new line of perfumes and colognes he calls “Fight, Fight, Fight.”