Fact-Checking What Donald Trump Said in His 2024 Person of the Year Interview With TIME

For the 2024 Person of the Year issue, former and future President Donald Trump sat down for a lengthy interview with TIME on Nov. 25 at his Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Fla.

TIME has published the transcript of that conversation. In addition, below is a review for facts and context of several of Trump’s statements from the interview.

What Trump Said: “I was saying it could be 21 million people. They were saying a much lesser number, but it wasn't a much lesser number. But even if it was, it was irrelevant, because it was—they were allowing anybody to come into our country.”

The Facts: Trump was referring to how the undocumented population has grown under President Biden. There are an estimated 11.7 million undocumented immigrants in the United States as of July 2023.

International and domestic laws require the U.S. to offer asylum to those who fear persecution in their country of origin; asylum seekers must prove their life or liberty is at risk, usually through interviews and in immigration court, and receive a background check. The Department of Homeland Security removed and returned more than 700,000 people in fiscal year 2024, the highest number for any fiscal year since 2010. A recent New York Times analysis found that the immigration surge of the past few years—both those entering legally and illegally—has been the largest in U.S. history, and that total net migration during the Biden Administration will likely exceed eight million people. 

What Trump Said: "I won it in 2016 on the border, and I fixed the border, and it was really fixed, and they came in, and they just dislodged everything that I did, and it became far worse than it was in 2016."

 “I had the most secure border we've ever had, and I never had to go to Congress for that.”  

The Facts: Trump has often asserted that he fixed the border during his first term, at times pointing to his expansion of the border wall. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, there were 450 miles of “new primary and secondary border miles” constructed on the Southwest border between January 2017 and January 2021. Much of that construction was built to replace “dilapidated and outdated designs.” About 80 miles of primary and secondary barriers were built where no previous barrier existed. 

Apprehension numbers at the border provide another metric, but there’s disagreement over whether an effective border strategy should translate to a high apprehension rate or a low one. ICE arrests increased during Trump’s previous term, but they did not reach the levels seen under Obama. Southwest border encounters hit a record high last year, but dropped 77% by August 2024. The spike in migrants seen early in Biden’s term began in the spring of 2020, during Trump’s final year, according to Politifact. 

Trump also did appeal to Congress for help with border enforcement. In his first year in office, he addressed the nation about the immigration crisis, calling on Congress to secure the border, and later asked Congress for $4.5 billion in emergency border funding.

What Trump Said: “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."

The Facts: Trump made this comment while discussing vaccines. The false claim that there’s a link between vaccines and autism traces back to a retracted study from the 1990s. Even though that study has been widely debunked and refuted, and modern studies continue to consistently show that shots are safe, the idea that vaccines are linked to autism persists, without evidence, among some vaccine skeptics.

While it’s true that autism is diagnosed much more frequently now than in the past, it is not because vaccines are causing the condition. Researchers have explored possible reasons for that uptick, including rising parental ages and environmental triggers. But much of the increase, research suggests, stems from changes to diagnostic criteria, widespread awareness of the condition, and improvements in screening. Detection jumps have been particularly steep among children of color, girls, and young adults, all of whom have historically been diagnosed less frequently. 

Read more: 'There's Something Causing It.' Trump Draws False Link Between Vaccines and Autism in TIME Interview

What Trump Said: "Look, if you look at the 13,000 plus, 13,099 which was issued by border patrol, they said those people were murderers, and they allowed them into our country." 

The Facts: Trump is likely referring to a Dept. of Homeland Security letter sent to Representative Tony Gonzalez, a Texas Republican, in September. The letter states that there were 13,099 noncitizens convicted of homicide on ICE’s “non-detained” docket as of July 2024. That figure includes people who were incarcerated, but not held at that time by immigration authorities. A DHS spokesperson told CNN that the 13,099 figure “includes many who are under the jurisdiction or currently incarcerated by federal, state or local law enforcement partners.” Additionally, she said, “the data goes back decades; it includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more.” 

What Trump Said: "It wasn't my policy. It was Obama's policy. I didn't build the jail cells for children. He did. If you look at the 2014."

The Facts: Trump was responding to a question about his border policy in 2017 and 2018 of separating children from parents or guardians with whom they arrived. The Obama Administration did hold undocumented migrants in detention facilities, though it did not systematically separate families. From late 2013 to mid-2014, a surge of unaccompanied minors from violence-torn Central America arrived in the U.S. After border detention cells in McAllen, Texas, filled to capacity, border patrol agents placed immigrant families in “sally port” areas outside of the detention centers. Amid an outcry over the dismal conditions, the government converted a nearby empty warehouse into a new holding facility.   

What Trump Said: “By the way, when you talk about separation, we have 325,000 children here during Democrats. And this was done by Democrats who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead, and they were allowed.” 

The Facts: There is no evidence that 325,000 immigrant children are slaves, sex slaves, or dead. These numbers likely refer to an August 2024 report from the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General stating that the government failed to “monitor the location and status of unaccompanied migrant children” after they were released from government custody. That report covered a period from October 2018 to September 2023, which includes more than half of Trump’s first term. According to the report, some 320,000 unaccompanied migrant children did not receive a notice to appear in immigration court, or they received a notice but did not make their court appearance. Experts say this doesn’t necessarily mean the children are “missing” or exploited. Rather, this is likely a bureaucratic failing.  Nevertheless, the report says, children who are unaccounted for are at higher risk for trafficking, exploitation, or forced labor. 

What Trump Said: “Why is it that in Portland and in many other places, Minneapolis—Why is it that nothing happened with them and they actually caused death and destruction at levels not seen before? So you know, if you take a look at what happened in Seattle, you had people die, you had a lot of death, and nothing happened, and these people have been treated really, really badly.”

The Facts: Trump is comparing those jailed for involvement in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to protesters who broke laws following the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in May 2020. 

The Justice Dept. reports that “more than 1,265 defendants have been charged” in the Jan. 6 riot, and "approximately 718 individuals have pleaded guilty to federal charges, many of whom faced or will face incarceration at sentencing.”  

In 2021, the Associated Press reviewed thousands of pages of court documents in hundreds of federal cases connected to the George Floyd protests. The investigation found that  “dozens of people charged have been convicted of serious crimes and sent to prison.” 

The comparison between how law enforcement handled the Capitol riot and the Floyd protests is flawed, Kent Greenfield, a professor at Boston College Law School told the AP in 2021. “The property damage or accusations of arson and looting from [the George Floyd protests], those were serious and they were dealt with seriously, but they weren’t an attack on the very core constitutional processes that we rely on in a democracy, nor were they an attack on the United States Congress.”

What Trump Said: “They don't want to see all of this transgender, which is, it's just taken over. And then you take a look, and not very many years after the person who, you know, went through this process is saying, Who did this to me? As you know, it's a very high percentage.”

The Facts: A 2021 review of 27 studies involving nearly 8,000 transgender teens and adults who underwent any kind of “gender-affirmation surgeries” found that an average of 1% expressed regret. In October, a study published in JAMA Pediatrics found that the majority of transgender youths who received gender-affirming medical care such as puberty blockers or hormones are satisfied with their care. Of the 220 youths surveyed, only 4% expressed regret. 

What Trump Said: “They don't want to see their their food prices go up by 57% in a short period of time. And I think that's why I won.”

The Facts: Polls found that the economy was the top issue for voters in the election, with many feeling the impact of higher prices that economists say were largely due to supply chain disruptions amid the COVID-19 pandemic and global conflicts like the war in Ukraine. Since President Biden took office in January 2021, grocery prices have increased by about 20%, according to the USDA’s Consumer Price Index.

What Trump Said: “I passed the biggest tax cuts ever, bigger than the Reagan tax cuts.”

The Facts: During his first term, Trump passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, sweeping tax cuts that overhauled the federal tax code. That legislation temporarily cut personal income and estate taxes and permanently reduced the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. 

At the time of its passing, and in the years since, Trump has referred to the TCJA as the biggest tax cuts ever. But it was not the largest tax cut in American history. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated that Trump’s tax cut was the eighth largest since 1918, as measured by percent of GDP. However, Trump’s corporate tax cut, which lowered the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, is considered the largest corporate tax cut in U.S. history—larger than Regan’s corporate tax cut, which reduced the rate from 46% to 34%. 

What Trump Said: “We had 107,000 when we had the memorial a few weeks later”

The Facts: Trump has repeatedly claimed that over 100,000 people attended his October rally in Butler. Pa., which was held after an assassination attempt on him during a July rally. 

Newsweek conducted a fact-check of the claim, using photos from the site, crowd-mapping software, and expert analysis. They found that, if every part of the venue was packed in, the site could still only hold 94,000 people. Photos from the event show tents and seats would have further limited the crowd size. Experts told the publication that the number of attendees was likely closer to 30,000, a figure consistent with an estimate reported by CBS. 

What Trump Said: “I thought it was a wrong poll, because we had an Emerson poll that had us up 18, you know.” 

The Facts: Trump was referring to a poll just before Election Day that showed Kamala Harris leading him in Iowa. While Emerson College never had Trump ahead over Harris by 18 points, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll from June found Trump ahead of President Joe Biden by 18 points.

What Trump Said: "When 60 Minutes interviews my opponent—and that's a news program, that's their most important news program—and she gave a really horrible answer, that was a bad answer, and they took that answer and replaced it, and this is her speaking, and they replaced it with another answer from a half an hour later in the interview that had nothing to do, but it was a much better answer, that's really dishonest."

The Facts: In October, 60 Minutes issued a statement debunking Trump’s claim that they had deceitfully edited their interview with Harris. The show says that they gave an excerpt of their interview to another CBS show, Face the Nation, which “used a longer section of her answer than that on 60 Minutes.”

“When we edit any interview, whether a politician, an athlete, or movie star, we strive to be clear, accurate and on point,” the show said in the statement. “The portion of her answer on 60 Minutes was more succinct, which allows time for other subjects in a wide ranging 21-minute-long segment.”

What Trump Said: "And the beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive. Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate." 

The Facts: Trump won both the popular vote and the Electoral College by a clear margin, but it was not the largest margin in 129 years. Trump won 312 of the 538 Electoral College votes, more than the 306 Joe Biden won in 2020 and more than George W. Bush’s electoral wins in 2000 and 2004. However, Barack Obama won 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012, and Reagan won 525 electoral votes in a true landslide in 1984. 

What Trump Said:  "I did interviews with, if I had the time, anybody that would ask, I'd do interviews." 

The Facts: Trump backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes during his campaign, in part over the show’s fact-checking process. He also said he needed an apology from the show following his interview in 2020, saying that, during the interview, correspondent Lesley Stahl said that Hunter Biden's controversial laptop came from Russia. (Stahl did not say that, according to CBS.)

In the final months of his campaign, Trump prioritized interviews with podcasts over mainstream media, appearing on podcasts like Theo Vonn’s, “This Past Weekend” and  “The Joe Rogan Experience.”

—With reporting by Eric Cortellessa and Jamie Ducharme