President-elect Donald Trump said in a new interview that he will use the opening hours of his presidency to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, begin deportations of immigrants lacking permanent legal status and increase oil production.
He also said during the interview, which Time magazine published Thursday, that he might support getting rid of some childhood vaccines if data shows links to autism. He declined to answer a question about whether he had talked with President Vladimir Putin of Russia since the November election but said Ukraine should not have been allowed to fire U.S.-made missiles into Russia.
Speaking of pardons in Jan. 6 cases, he said: “We’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.” He said the pardons would go to “nonviolent” people who were at the Capitol, which was overrun by Trump supporters after he lost the 2020 election. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely,” he said.
The president-elect’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview conducted Nov. 25 as part of the magazine’s choice of Trump to be its person of the year. In the interview, which the magazine said lasted more than an hour, the president-elect bragged that he had run a “flawless” campaign and that Democrats were out of touch with Americans.
He also said he planned a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington,” though he did not explain what that meant. And he said that he might reverse President Joe Biden’s expansion of Title IX protections, which includes prohibitions against harassment of transgender students.
Americans “don’t want to see, you know, men playing in women’s sports. They don’t,” Trump said. “They don’t want to see all of this transgender, which is, it’s just taken over.”
On foreign policy, the president-elect lashed out against Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use U.S.-made missiles against some targets in Russia, calling it an escalation of the fighting that began with Moscow’s full-scale invasion in 2022. He hinted that efforts to reach an end to the war might gain momentum once he is back in office.
“But I would imagine people are waiting until I get in before anything happens. I would imagine,” he told Time. “I think that would be very smart to do that.”
Trump declined to say whether he had received assurances from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel that he would end the war in the Gaza Strip. But the president-elect dismissed concerns about a protracted war that could further destabilize the Middle East.
He said “some very productive things” were happening in the Middle East, but refused to say what they were.
“I think that the Middle East is an easier problem to handle than what’s happening with Russia and Ukraine. OK, I just want to say that up front. The Middle East is going to get solved,” he said, adding: “I think it’s more complicated than the Russia-Ukraine, but I think it’s, it’s, it’s easier to solve.”
In the interview, Trump spent a significant amount of time on immigration. He repeatedly said that he would begin a crackdown on people who are in the United States illegally. He said federal law does not prohibit the use of the military in that effort.
“Well, it doesn’t, it doesn’t stop the military if it’s an invasion of our country, and I consider it an invasion of our country,” the president-elect said. “I’ll only do what the law allows, but I will go up to the maximum level of what the law allows.”
On vaccines, Trump said he plans to listen to the arguments made by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic who is Trump’s choice to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Both men have promoted the debunked theory that vaccines cause autism.
“We’re going to have a big discussion. The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible. If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it,” Trump said in the interview.
The president-elect said that the discussion could lead to some childhood vaccinations being banned.
“It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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