Photo: Alamy
In lieu of participating in the first GOP debate of the 2024 election cycle, Republican frontrunner President Donald Trump sat down with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson for an exclusive interview from his Bedminster, N.J., property.
Carlson and Trump discussed a number of issues pertaining to Joe Biden’s performance, the weaponization of the Justice Department, and the 2024 election—including Trump’s top priority to tackle if elected to a second term.
“If you’re elected president again, what’s your top—your number one priority?” asked Carlson. “When you ran last time, you said, ‘I will build a wall.’ This time, your bottom-line top promise to the country.”
Trump responded, “You could do numbers things at the same time. But, let’s say number one is the border, and taking hundreds of thousands of criminals that have been allowed into our country and getting them out and bringing them back to their country.”
Trump added that the U.S. was not only facing immigration issues from countries below the southern border but also other nations from “all over the world.”
“Last month we had 149 countries represented—think of it—we had 149 countries represented, Tucker, from places that many people never even heard of coming into our country,” said Trump. “And they’re coming in from mental institutions, and they’re coming in from prisons.
“They’re emptying out their prisons all over South America. They’re emptying out their mental institutions. Terrorists are pouring into our country—we have no idea,” he noted.
Trump then went on to tout the success of his border wall construction he constructed while in office, claiming he built “almost 500 miles of wall” with another 200 miles that was “all set to go” by the end of his term.
“I had the strongest border in the history of our country, and I built almost 500 miles of wall,” said Trump. “You know they like to say, ‘Oh was it less?’ No. I built 500 miles. In fact, if you check with the authorities on the border, we built almost 500 miles of wall, and I had another 200 that I was going to build.
Trump then explained that the Biden administration’s lack of border security and negligence of border wall construction caused him to believe that Democrats “actually want open borders.”
“It was all set to go,” said Trump. “All they had to do was install it. It would’ve taken three weeks. And that’s when I found out, I said, ‘I think these people actually want open borders.'”
“The first thing I would do would be, I would seal up the border good and tight—except for people that wanna come in legally,” Trump concluded.