Donald Trump's Time 'Person of the Year' Interview Fact Checked

[Thiệu Ngô]

Donald Trump's interview with Time, accompanying the magazine naming him its 2024 Person of the Year, was replete with a wide selection of falsehoods and misleading claims from the president-elect.
By Tom Norton



The interview included significant admissions, including toning down claims that he could make groceries cheaper, playing down rhetoric against the transgender community, and hailing parts of the Project 2025 policy agenda as "very conservative and very good."

The incoming president also used the interview to double down on mistruths about immigration, his record, and his mandate from the 2024 election. Newsweek has assessed some of the key claims and reached out to his media representatives via email for comment.

"The country was angry because of immigration, because of the people, you know, millions and millions of people. 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."

Trump told Time that the Democrats had not effectively understood public feeling about immigration, claiming that 21 million undocumented migrants had entered the country.

This has been repeatedly debunked by Newsweek.

The president-elect said this recently during his Fox Nation "Patriot of the Year" speech. As of September 2024, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded 8.2 million encounters on the Southwest border since January 2021. Including national border encounters and "gotaways," referring to estimates of undocumented migrants that evaded authorities, does not bring that figure close to 21 million people.

These "encounters" included people who crossed the border more than once and those who were detained or turned away by border enforcement. The highest estimates of the number of people living in the United States with undocumented status, which would include people who entered the country during Trump's last administration, are around 16 million.

"...I fixed the border, and it was really fixed."

This is subjective, but if Trump is judging it by the number of monthly border patrol encounters it was not "fixed" by the end of his presidency.

According to official figures, in January 2021, Trump's final month of his first presidential term, there were around 75,000 encounters on the Southwest border, a 77 percent increase from the 42,463 encounters the month he entered office.

While encounters fell during that first year in office, it moved significantly during his presidency, hitting a peak of 132,856 in May 2019, a more than 700 percent increase from its lowest point in April 2017.

"[Trump] was the one that ended the Russian pipeline, Nord Stream 2."

As reported by FactCheck.org, Trump did not end the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project.

He did approve sanctions against companies building the pipeline, leading to the suspension of its construction. However, the pipeline was reportedly 90 percent completed by this point. It resumed construction while Trump was in office.

"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. "

Here, Trump cites false claims that 13,099 "murderers" had been allowed into the U.S. The context of the conversation made it sound as if that had happened during the Biden administration.

Although 13,099 noncitizens on the ICE docket have been convicted of homicide, the data spans 40 years and does not cover only the Biden administration. The figures include individuals who are in jails and prisons serving a criminal sentence.

"[Separating families] wasn't my policy. It was Obama's policy."

This came up as Trump answered questions about his mass deportation plans.

As Newsweek has previously reported, while under Obama, large numbers of children were indeed housed without their parents, it was in large part driven by an influx of children arriving unaccompanied to the U.S. The Obama administration tried to keep families who entered the country together in special family centers.

Under the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy, officials referred everyone illegally crossing the border—adult or child—for criminal prosecution. Because children cannot be housed in jail with their parents, they were moved to separate shelters and placed with legal guardians where possible.

"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."

Trump has repeatedly made this false claim that misuses audit figures combining the number of unaccompanied migrant children who had not appeared for court proceedings after issuing orders with those who had not been issued orders at all between 2019-2023.

The audit did not state that the 291,000 without court orders were missing, nor did it say that all 32,000 children who didn't appear in court could not be located. The audit included data from the Trump and Biden administrations.

His claims that these children are "slaves, sex slaves, or dead" is unsubstantiated.

"And I say, why is it that in Portland and in many other places, Minneapolis, why is it that nothing happened with them?"

Trump rebuffed questions about pardoning January 6 rioters by bringing up a misleading claim regarding the arrest and charges of those who took part in nationwide riots in 2020.

As assessed by Newsweek's Fact Check team in 2023, while many charges against protesters arrested at demonstrations following George Floyd's death were dropped, this was often due to prosecutors deciding there was a lack of evidence or that the offenses, such as curfew-breaking, were too minor to pursue; some arrests were made primarily to disperse crowds; and a low likelihood of some charges succeeding in court.

Investigations into the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, were aided by far more documentary evidence. The January 6 riot took place in one central location during the day, and its events were closely recorded by legacy media, social media, police, security and other footage.

"We had 107,000 when we had the memorial a few weeks later."

One of Trump's frequent false crowd size claims is about his second rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, after he was targeted in an assassination attempt at the first event.

The 107,000 figure appears to be a mix-up with another false figure he used describing the numbers who attended a rally in Wildwood, New Jersey, in May 2024.

As Newsweek found, the unobstructed capacity at the rally site in Butler, with a crowd size of 2.5 people per square meter, was 57,000. Photos from the event show the whole site was not packed out throughout, with much of the site occupied by infrastructure, seating, facilities, and other necessary obstructions.