Read here the full transcript of former President Donald Trump’s conversation with Sharyl Attkisson.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
SHARYL ATTKISSON: President Trump, thank you for agreeing to an interview less than seven weeks before the election.
DONALD TRUMP: Thank you.
Rhetoric and Threats
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Harris and her campaign have called you an existential threat, a danger, and said that you will be a dictator. And after the second attempt on your life in a row, afterwards, Hillary Clinton said, you’re a danger to the country and the world. Do you blame that kind of rhetoric in any way for inspiring assassination attempts, or do you think it’s completely unrelated?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I do, and a lot of people say that. But more importantly, it’s really just the opposite. They are a danger. They’re destroying our country. They’re allowing millions and millions of people to come into our country that shouldn’t be here, people from jails and people from gangs that are all over there, like Caracas in Venezuela.
Their crime is down 72 percent. You look at what’s happening all over the world. And I’m not just talking about South America. I’m talking about prisons are being emptied all over the world. They’re dumping them into the United States. Criminals are being taken off the street in cities and places all over the world. They’re being dumped into the United States. Mental institutions are being emptied out into the United States.
They are a threat to democracy. What they’re doing to our country, they’re poisoning our country. They’re poisoning it. And you can take a look in Ohio what’s happening. You can take a look at Aurora in Colorado and see what’s happening. But those are two that have been in the news. You have hundreds of little towns and cities that are being taken over by migrants or at least being horribly affected by migrants.
We have 21 million, at least 21 million. They have a lower number. They say 16 million, whether it’s 16 or 21, but I think it’s much more than 21. And they’ve come into our country, and they’re tough, and they’re nasty, and we’re going to have to do something about it and fast, or we’re not going to have a country left. And they’re the ones that are the threat to democracy.
Security Concerns
SHARYL ATTKISSON: If elected, you will arguably be the most targeted president in American history, whether we’re talking about foreign threats or domestic threats. Does it change how you can govern? If the Secret Service or some people say they can’t guard you effectively at a static golf course, how can they guard you on an overseas trip?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think we just have to do what you have to do. You know, the only ones that really are trouble are consequential presidents. So in that way, it’s a very nice honor. That’s true. I mean, I was a very consequential president and would certainly be, and maybe even more so this time, because I understand the system.
I understand countries. I understand who rips us and who doesn’t. And a lot of people don’t. A lot of people don’t have a clue. They don’t even know what’s happening. And I think that I will feel safe. I think I’m going to feel safe.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Are you ever scared?
DONALD TRUMP: I can’t be scared, because if you’re scared, you can’t do your job. So I just can’t be. I have thus far had somebody protecting me, because you almost think it couldn’t have just been two times. I mean, two times.
If I go another 300 or 400 yards walking, which I would have been there in a few minutes, right? Probably 15 minutes. Nasty things could have happened, would have happened. But we had a very good Secret Service agent that spotted a rifle coming out of a very, very dense group of trees and foliage and plants. Saw the rifle, and he started shooting. He didn’t talk. He shot. And then they caught him with the help of a woman, by the way, that got the license plate, and they were able to get him in a high-speed chase down a highway.
That was one. And then, of course, Butler. Everyone knows about Butler. That was a quick turn of the head to show a chart. That was a good immigration chart, showed what a good job I did. But that will go down as my all-time favorite chart.
Potential Cabinet Members
SHARYL ATTKISSON: In looking at a possible second term, I think people are curious what specific positions you’ve discussed giving to Bobby Kennedy, Elon Musk, and Tulsi Gabbard, three people, by the way, who were Democrats or, in the case of Musk, I don’t know, at least supported Democrats. What specific positions do you see them holding?
DONALD TRUMP: And we have a lot of other Democrats that have come aboard and will come aboard. Bobby will do great on health and on the environment.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: But does that mean like health and human services?
DONALD TRUMP: No, no. It doesn’t mean anything. It means it could be, but I didn’t make deals with anybody because it’s not appropriate to do it at this. It’s too early, but it’s getting to be that time, isn’t it, when you think we have just a short while to go? It’s amazing. It’s amazing. But a short while in my life is an eternity. So we’ll see what happens.
But Bobby’s a really—what he’s done on health care over the years, I mean, I’ve known him for a long time. And with him, it’s eating what you eat, what chemicals you put in your body. I mean, he’s been fighting for this for years. He looks at other countries where they don’t use chemicals or they use much less than we use.
And the people are healthier than they are in the United States, which is not that healthy a country.
Also, environmentally, and I understand the environment, I think, as well as anybody, but I also want to have the greatest economy. We had the greatest economy ever, and we’re going to have the greatest economy again, even better. We’re going to bring back the auto business. We’re going to bring back a lot of businesses into our country that nobody thought would have been possible.
Now they think it would have been. So what I did during my term, I had the greatest economy in the history of our country. I think in the history of the world, there’s never been such production that we had. And I’ll be able to do it again, and I think very quickly.
One of the assets we have is we have more liquid gold, meaning oil, etc., under our feet than anybody else, than any other country, including Saudi Arabia and Russia. And we were energy independent just a short while ago. We’ll be energy independent, but we’ll actually be energy dominant again. And we’re going to make a lot of money. We’re going to pay off debt. We’re going to pay down debt, and we’re going to do things that nobody would have thought possible.
But Bobby’s great. Tulsi has always been good from the standpoint of common sense. She’s like a common sense person. I’ve watched her for a long time on shows. I’ve known her a little bit, and it was a great honor when we got her. You’re right. She was a Democrat and popular, too, in Hawaii. And she will be terrific.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: And Elon Musk?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, Elon is Elon. I mean, Elon, he’s endorsed me very powerfully. He feels this is the most important election we’ve ever had. And as you know, he probably has a couple of other things to do. He’s indicated he might be willing to help with, like, government waste type issues.
What he will do is, and the thing that we talk about more than anything else, is exactly that. It’s costs. He’s a big cost cutter. He’s always been very good at it. And I’m good at it. But, Elon, I’ll tell you what. He will go in and he’ll say, this is what you have to do. You have to do this. He is so into that. He feels there’s so much waste and fat in this country. And he’s right. He’s 100% right.
And he’s been just great. He’s given me ringing endorsements. Even though I disagree with him a little bit on the electric car. But he agrees with me from the standpoint that not every car should be electric.
Electric Cars and Energy Policy
DONALD TRUMP: They have an electric mandate that will put Detroit and every other automaker out of business entirely within two years. And I’m going to terminate that immediately. That’ll be in the first day. I’ll terminate it. And we want electric cars. But we want, really, to have all cars. You have hybrids. You have everything. You have gas-powered cars. We have gasoline, more gasoline than anybody else. We want to use it.
Right now, they’re mandating electric cars. They don’t go far. They’re very expensive. And they’re going to be built in China. They’re all going to be built in China. And what the autoworkers, the union, has done is just a disgrace. We’ve lost 50% of our business over the period of 25 years. A lot of it went to Mexico. A lot of it went to China. It went all over the world. Japan. It went all over the world. And we’re going to get it back.
We will be at a level that nobody would have thought possible with automaking. And I’m going to cut fuel prices in half within 12 months, because the energy costs are so high. The biggest problem, and you can see this even in polling, that people have is everything’s too expensive. Because under Harris or Biden or both, you can call it any way you want, under them, under this administration, the costs have gone out of control.
People cannot afford it. If I cut energy, and I’ll be able to cut it in half within 12 months, if I do that, oh, the world will be, this world, the world that we live in will be a different place.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: We continue our conversation with former President Trump after a break.
Immigration Policy
SHARYL ATTKISSON: On immigration, which you’ve mentioned, most people seem to think that you can tighten up the border. And for the untold millions who are here illegally that you referred to, you’ve talked about a mass deportation program. How is that practically possible? Because a lot of the millions of people have had children here who are American citizens. And don’t you think the first time there is an image on television of a family tearfully being told to board a bus that that whole program would end?
DONALD TRUMP: That’s right. You take a young woman with two beautiful children, and you put her on a bus, and it ends up on the front page of every newspaper. It makes it a lot harder.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: So yes to mass deportation, even of women and children.
DONALD TRUMP: So we’re going to look at it very closely. The way you phrase it is exactly right. You put one wrong person onto a bus or onto an airplane, and your radical left lunatics will try and make it sound like the worst thing that’s ever happened. But we’re getting the criminals out, and we’re going to do that fast.
And we know who they are. The local police know their names, and they know their serial numbers. They know everything about them. We work with the local police, the local law enforcement, which is great all throughout the country.
But we have to get… Look, we have people. We have murderers that have been let into our country. They’re not going to get better. We have people that are insane. Their mental institutions are… The mental institutions all over the world have a much lower population, and in many cases, they’ve been emptied out. The jails are down to much lower numbers, and soon they’ll be emptied out. They’re emptying out into the United States of America.
We’re not a dumping ground. We’re going to get all of those people out, and we’re going to get them out fast. And we have no choice because that’s not sustainable by any country.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: On the economy, which you’ve mentioned, for our viewers, a dozen eggs under Trump cost no more than $2.08 and as low as $1.46. Under Biden-Harris last month, $3.20. A gallon of unleaded regular gas under Trump is low as $1.88, never hitting $3. Biden-Harris is high as $5.06, and last month still $3.52.
Kamala Harris has been very short on specifics when it comes to economy other than saying she wants an opportunity economy. What are the specific mechanics of how prices come down, the steps that would be taken in a second term for you?
DONALD TRUMP: First of all, she can’t do an interview. She could never do this interview because you ask questions, like give me a specific answer. She talks about her lawn when she was growing up. This woman is not equipped to be president. She’s not equipped to deal with President Xi, who I took in hundreds of billions of dollars with him, and Putin. We had no war with Putin.
Remember, and I’m just going to go off just for this, with Bush, they took a lot, Russia. With Biden, they’re trying to take everything. With Obama, they took a lot. With Trump, Russia took nothing. Just remember that. It’s a little chart.
But what happened, and when you look at what took place, was so sad. When they took over, they cut the oil way down, and oil started going through the roof. It was going to go to $10 a gallon. It was going to go to numbers that nobody’s ever seen. And so they went back to the Trump drilling. They said, let it go back.
That was the only good thing, but they stopped because I would be there, but four years later, I would be triple what the number was. Right now, they’re just about even where I was, but they only did that because of the fact that they eventually have an election coming up, and you remember at the beginning what happened. That’s one of the reasons that Putin went in because it went to $100 a barrel instead of $40 a barrel, and he could fight all the wars he wants with those kind of numbers because he’s a big seller of oil and gas.
So what happens is they went back to what I was doing, just said, reopen, just reopen. It wasn’t hard. It’s so crazy what they want to do. They’re going to destroy lives. They’re going to destroy what they have done to this country, and especially in the sense of allowing millions and millions of people come in because that’s something.
Lowering Prices and Energy Costs
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Do prices come down magically because it’s not them?
DONALD TRUMP: They come down with energy, and they come down with interest rates. We’re going to get, as I told you, we’re going to get energy down by 50% in 12 months. We’re going to have it. It’s going to be a major smash on energy. If you look at the energy, and I’m not just talking about cars. I’m talking about air conditioning, heating.
Your basic energy, operating a bakery, operating any kind of a business, it’s all having to do with energy. That was where they started wrong. When they cut way back on what I did, and again, just so you understand, they then let it go back to where it was, which was a very smart thing. Otherwise, you would have had, I think you would have had a depression, if you want to know the truth, but energy was rising at a level that nobody had ever seen, and then they said, go back, go back.
They were telling people, go back to your wells. Go back to drilling. Go back to fracking. Do whatever you have to do, but if they win, the day after, they’re going all the way. They were only doing that because of an election coming up. They’re going all the way. It’s madness, and what they’ve done to our country is mad.
Reflecting on Time Away from Office
SHARYL ATTKISSON: I’m wondering, looking back at you sitting out for four years, basically, at least, is there a benefit to that in terms of you being able to see, maybe to regather, regroup, see who you could trust and who you can’t trust?
DONALD TRUMP: That’s a good point, but I’ll tell you the maybe bigger point. It would have been easier if I did it, you know, contiguous, to be honest. You have to go a long way back in history to see the one person that was able to do it non-consecutively, but the benefit is, more than anything else, it shows how bad they were. It shows how bad this radical left liberal crazy philosophy is with defund the police.
You know, they wanted to defund the police. She still wants to defund the police. Anybody that wanted to defund, she was a leader of the defund the police, Kamala. I’d call her Harris, but nobody knows who I’m talking about when I say Harris. They only know, it’s just sort of interesting, it’s her last name, but nobody knows who I’m talking about.
Defund the police, all of these different things. It shows how bad they were. It shows how much they don’t work, and I think it makes it much easier for me to do my job. People want us to do the job. They’ve got to stop crime. They’ve got to stop crime. You go out for a loaf of bread today, and you end up getting mugged, killed, shot.
If you look at Chicago, just a short while ago on Labor Day weekend, they had over 100 people shot. 17 people died. You don’t have numbers like that in Afghanistan and all these other countries we talk about as being unsafe countries. There are no numbers like that.
You take a look at Chicago, you take a look at the crime all over the United States. That’s why the FBI has to give the real numbers, but the DOJ gave the real numbers, and crime is absolutely out of control. We’re going to make sure… You know, we have a little expression. It’s called MAGA. It’s called Make America Great Again. That’s what we’re going to do, because America is not great now.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: By the way, we asked Kamala Harris for an interview, but so far, she hasn’t agreed. Back after a short break.
COVID-19 Response and Vaccines
SHARYL ATTKISSON: On COVID, you frequently say at your rallies and so on that you don’t feel like you get enough credit on COVID, but by nearly every assessment, the CDC failed miserably at job one, and yes, the COVID vaccines were developed in record time, but as we now know, they don’t prevent infection, illness, or transmission, and they have very potentially serious side effects. Do you think that’s true? Do you think that maybe they were approved too fast, and in hindsight, based on what we know now, what would you have done differently?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I think they’re doing studies on the vaccines, and we’re going to find out, and it’ll come out one way or the other, but I really had a mandate to get vaccines done, and I got them done very quickly in record time. The Democrats love it. You know, the Democrats love it, and the Republicans don’t. It’s very interesting.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: The vaccines don’t. Love what?
DONALD TRUMP: The vaccines. They love it.
I have a friend of mine who said to me, why don’t you talk about the vaccine, what you did with the vaccine? He’s a Democrat, but I’m sure he voted for me. He said, what you did was the most incredible thing that any president has ever done. You’ve saved hundreds of millions of lives all over the world, and this was just recently.
Very smart guy. He said, I don’t understand why you don’t talk about it, and I don’t talk about it, but if you go to Pfizer, if you go to some of these companies, they have charts, and they have all sorts of statistics, and I say, why don’t you release those statistics, let people know, but I don’t talk about it. I can say this. The Democrats would love to claim it. The Republicans don’t want to claim it, but it’ll be determined, I’d say, over the next 12 months.
I say this in terms of overall. I think I did an amazing job with COVID. I never got the credit for it. Remember that more people died under Biden-Harris than died under Trump, and they had a much easier time because when it came in here, nobody knew what it was.
It came from the Wuhan labs, which I always said, but nobody really knew what it was, where it came from, nothing. They knew nothing, and we got hit, and I got great credit on military. We knocked out ISIS. We rebuilt the military. Great credit on military. Great credit on the economy. I never got great credit on the fighting of the China virus, which is COVID, but we call it the China virus because we like to be accurate, but if you think of what I’ve done, I took a disaster that came into our shores, that dust flew in from China, and we started making things like the ventilators.
We were supplying the whole world with ventilators within a period of seven months. We took auto factories and started making ventilators in auto factories. We did the gowns, the costume, all of the different things, all of the rubberized products, the masks, everything, and we also had to go because when I took over, the cupboards were bare. We had nothing.
We were supposed to have, but we had nothing, and in all fairness to previous presidents, the reason is that nobody really thought a pandemic in this world, in this age, was possible. You know, you remember 1917. We had the great pandemic that people talk about. A hundred million people, they say, died, and basically, this would have happened here, too, and it didn’t happen here.
I think I did a great job. I think I will not be given credit for it, but there are a lot of people that think I did a really fantastic job on that. Nobody knew what it was. Nobody knew where it came from, and remember, we had far fewer deaths than Biden, and Biden just got the tail end, so we did a good job.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: More with Donald Trump after a break.
Personal Health and Future Plans
SHARYL ATTKISSON: I have two quick questions that are just sort of one sentence, maybe. What are two things you do to stay healthy?
DONALD TRUMP: Well, I used to play golf a little bit. That gave me a show. I don’t know, but it seems to be quite a dangerous sport, in retrospect. I try and eat properly. I try. I do the best.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: How do you eat hamburgers?
DONALD TRUMP: I do, but proper hamburgers, but I like perhaps all of the wrong food, but then I say, does anybody know what the right food is? I have people lecturing me for years. Oh, don’t eat this. Don’t eat that. They’re gone. They have passed away long ago, and here I am, so I’m not sure I want to make too many changes.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: And then, if you’re not successful this time, do you see yourself running again in four years?
DONALD TRUMP: No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I think that that will be it. I don’t see that at all. I think that hopefully we’re going to be successful.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Mr. President, thank you for the interview. I appreciate it.
DONALD TRUMP: Thank you very much. Thank you, Sharyl.
SHARYL ATTKISSON: Thanks for joining us. From Mar-a-Lago, I’m Sharyl Attkisson.
