In his first sit-down interview since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump told NBC News’ Meet the Press that he remains committed to pardoning individuals convicted for their involvement in the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
In addition, the president-elect also stated that members of the Democrat-dominated House committee that claimed to investigate the incident “should go to jail.”
“Honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker. “So you think Liz Cheney should go to jail?” Welker asked.
“For what they did,” Trump responded.
However, Trump made it clear that he would not direct his FBI director or attorney general to do so, adding, “they’ll have to look at that, but I’m not going to — I’m going to focus on drill, baby, drill. I’m going to look at everything. We’re going to look at individual cases.”
The incoming commander-in-chief also intimated that he may try and take executive action to end so-called “birthright citizenship” — meaning the children of people in the country illegally automatically become American citizens when they’re born in the U.S., though he’ll likely face a legal challenge what will question the constitutionality of such an order.
Welker also questioned Trump about his plans for mass deportation.
“Well, I think you have to do it, and it’s a hard – it’s a very tough thing to do,” Trump said. “But you have to have rules, regulations, laws. They came in illegally. You know the people that have been treated very unfairly are the people that have been on line for ten years to come into the country. And we’re going to make it very easy for people to come in in terms of they have to pass the test.”
Trump stated that he wanted to “work something out” to develop a plan for addressing the situation of “Dreamers,” individuals who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
Welker went on to ask Trump if he planned to go after President Joe Biden, pointing to a Truth Social post from June 12, 2023, a time when he was being inundated with charges from state and federal prosecutors.
Trump responded by saying he was “really looking to make our country successful. I’m not looking to go back into the past. Retribution will be through success.”
But Welker couldn’t let go of the issue, leading Trump to add: “I will say this, no, I’m not doing that unless I find something that I think is reasonable, but that’s not going to be my decision. That’s going to be [attorney general nominee] Pam Bondi’s decision, and, to a different extent, [FBI director nominee] Kash Patel, assuming they’re both there, and I think they’re both going to get approved. … While you ask me that, what they’ve done to me with weaponization is a disgrace.”
Trump then went on to defend his call for mass tariffs, adding that he isn’t confident in economists’ predictions that additional costs will be passed along to consumers, though he didn’t rule that out, either.
“I can’t guarantee anything. I can’t guarantee tomorrow. But I can say that if you looked at my – just pre-Covid, we had the greatest economy in the history of our country. And I had a lot of tariffs on a lot of different countries, but in particular China. We took in hundreds of billions of dollars and we had no inflation,” he said.
Not mentioned was the fact that the U.S. places tariffs on hundreds of items that come into the country and has done so for decades through Republican and Democratic administrations.
Most recently, President Joe Biden approved a wide-ranging increase in tariffs on goods from China earlier this year by 25-50 percent.