83 MINUTE READ
BY TIME STAFF
UPDATED: APRIL 30, 2024 6:27 PM EDT | ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: APRIL 30, 2024 7:00 AM EDT
Read our full cover story on Donald Trump here. You can also read the transcript of the interviews here and a full fact check here.
Over the course of the interviews, Trump discussed his agenda for a second term, which includes deporting millions of people, cutting the U.S. civil service, and intervening more directly in Justice Department prosecutions than his predecessors. He also discussed his thinking on other issues, including abortion, crime, trade, Ukraine, Israel, and the prospects for political violence in this election cycle.
Below is a transcript, lightly edited for clarity, of the interviews between Trump and TIME National Politics Reporter Eric Cortellessa. Click here to read our fact-check.
Let’s start with Day One: January 20, 2025. You have said that you will take a suite of aggressive actions on the border and on immigration—
Donald Trump: Yes.
You have vowed to—
Trump: And on energy.
Yes, yes. And we’ll come to that, certainly. You have vowed to launch the largest deportation operation in American history. Your advisors say that includes—
Trump: Because we have no choice. I don’t believe this is sustainable for a country, what’s happening to us, with probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out. Twenty million people, many of them from jails, many of them from prisons, many of them from mental institutions. I mean, you see what’s going on in Venezuela and other countries. They’re becoming a lot safer.
Well, let’s just talk—so you have said you’re gonna do this massive deportation operation. I want to know specifically how you plan to do that.
Trump: So if you look back into the 1950s, Dwight Eisenhower, he’s not known for that, you know, you don’t think of him that way. Because you see, Ike, but Dwight Eisenhower was very big on illegal immigration not coming into our country. And he did a massive deportation of people. He was doing it for a long time. He got very proficient at it. He was bringing them just to the other side of the border. And they would be back in the country within a matter of days. And then he started bringing them 3,000 miles away—