Fact-Checking What Donald Trump Said in His ‘100 Days’ Interview With TIME

On April 22, just ahead of the 100th day of his second term, President Donald Trump sat down for an interview with TIME in the White House.

TIME has published the transcript of that conversation. Below is a review of some of Trump’s statements from the interview.

What Trump Said: “We were losing $2 trillion a year on trade.”

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The Facts: The US had a trade deficit with the rest of the world of $917.8 billion in 2024, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. But this isn’t money “lost ”; it’s an indication that the U.S. is importing more goods and services from other countries than it is exporting to the rest of the world. The U.S. trade deficit on just goods was actually higher at $1.2 trillion. That figure is offset by America’s $295 billion trade surplus on services.

What Trump Said: “Many criminals—they emptied their prisons, many countries, almost every country, but not a complete emptying, but some countries a complete emptying of their prison system.”

The Facts: While Trump has frequently made this claim, there is no evidence that it is true. The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, is among the groups that have researched such assertions. 

“While it’s not possible to know what has animated this repeated allegation, the only prior instance we can think of is the Mariel boatlift in 1980,” says Michelle Mittelstadt, MPI’s director of communications, in an email to TIME. “Castro allowed about 125,000 Cubans to leave amid deep economic problems and political unrest. A small minority of these were released from prison (where Cuba detained many political dissidents) or mental health institutions. This is the only instance we are aware of.”

What Trump Said: “I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then he didn’t want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. An extension. And he didn’t want to do that.”

The Facts: Trump did build hundreds of miles of wall in his first term, most of which replaced or supported existing fencing. The barrier cost U.S. taxpayers some $11 billion and was breached by smugglers more than 3,200 times over three years, according to a 2022 Washington Post report. Biden tried to redirect funds Trump had allocated to build the wall, but a 2019 law stipulated that funds allocated to the wall could not be used for other purposes.

What Trump Said: “The prices of groceries have gone down.”

The Facts: Total food prices increased 3% in March, year over year, according to the federal Consumer Price Index. Grocery prices, specifically, rose 2.4% during that period and rose 0.5% since February. Eggs, meat, fish, and poultry saw the sharpest price increases over the last year, jumping 7.9%. In 2025, food prices are expected to increase 3.2%, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Grocery prices, specifically, are expected to increase 2.7%.

What Trump Said: “We’re taking in billions of dollars of tariffs, by the way.”

The Facts: U.S. Customs and Border Protection said the U.S. was taking in about $500 million per day in tariff revenue, CNBC reported on April 16. Since his April 2 tariff announcement, Trump has repeatedly claimed the U.S. was taking in $2 billion per day from tariffs. Tariffs are a tax paid by the companies importing goods from other countries. Economists say the increased costs are usually passed on to consumers.

What Trump Said: “We had no inflation.” 

“We had the highest inflation we’ve ever had as a country, or very close to it. And I believe it was the highest ever. Somebody said it’s the highest in only 48 years.”

The Facts: The Federal Reserve has long viewed 2% as its target inflation rate for the US economy. In January 2020, at the end of Trump’s first term, the inflation rate was 2.5%. Under Joe Biden, it rose to 8% in 2022, the highest inflation the country had seen since 1980, when it hit 13.5%. By the end of Biden’s term, inflation dropped to 2.9%.

What Trump Said: “Look, that’s what China did to us. They charge us 100%. If you look at India—India charges 100-150%. If you look at Brazil, if you look at many, many countries, they charge—that’s how they survive.”

The Facts: In 2024, India’s average tariff on U.S. goods was 17%; Its tariffs on U.S. agricultural products were 39%. In January 2025, Chinese tariffs on U.S. exports were 21%. Trump and others in the Administration have suggested that some countries engage in “non-tariff cheating” such as currency manipulation, intellectual property theft, and dumping cheaper products into U.S. markets that amount to a higher tariff rate.

What Trump Said: “In Mexico, many car plants that were under construction have stopped. They’re all coming into this country.”

The Facts: The response from automakers to Trump’s second term has been mixed.  In March, Hyundai announced a $21 billion U.S. investment, including $9 billion to expand current U.S. production. On April 3, General Motors said it would increase its light truck production in Indiana. Honda Motors, which divides production of its Civic Hatchback Hybrid between Japan and Indiana, plans to move all production of that model to Indiana later this year. 

Conversely, Stellantis announced the day after Trump’s April 2 tariff announcement that it was pausing production in assembly plants in Canada and Mexico, as well as temporarily laying off 900 workers at five U.S. facilities that supplied those facilities.

What Trump Said: ”He wasn’t a saint. He was MS-13. He was a wife beater and he had a lot of things that were very bad, you know, very, very bad. When I first heard of the situation, I was not happy, and then I found out that he was a person who was an MS-13 member. And in fact, he had a tattooed right on his—I’m sure you saw that—he had it tattooed right on his knuckles: MS-13”

The Facts: Whether Kilmar Abrego Garcia is a member of any gang remains a point of contention. Courts have not ruled that he is a gang member; in a 2019 bond hearing case connected to Abrego Garcia’s request for asylum, immigration courts said a Department of Homeland Security report claiming Abrego Garcia was a gang member “appears to be trustworthy” enough to deny bond. Agrego Garcia’s family has denied he is part of a gang. 

On April 19, Trump posted a photo on social media showing Abrego Garcia’s hand with MS-13 tattooed on his knuckles. Some believe the photo was altered. Regardless, experts say tattoos may indicate gang membership, but are not sufficient on their own as evidence.

Abrego Garcia’s wife has acknowledged she filed a civil protective order against him four years ago. CNN reported on a petition for a protective order that described “a disagreement and physical altercation that included hitting and ‘scratching’ between Abrego Garcia” and his wife.

What Trump Said: ”We have crime rates under Biden that went through the roof, and we have to bring those rates down. And unfortunately, those rates have been added to by the illegal immigrants that he allowed into the country.”

The Facts: In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic and Trump’s last year in office, violent crime rose sharply. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the homicide rate rose 30% between 2019 and 2020— the highest in modern history, while assault rates increased by more than 10%. 

Violent crime and homicide rates fell from 2020 to 2023, according to FBI statistics. In 2023, the FBI reported an 11.6% drop in the number of murders reported, its steepest decline on record. 

Multiple studies have found no proof that a rise in immigration—legal or undocumented—leads to more crime. A 2024 study by the American Immigration Council compared crime data to demographic data and found that as the immigrant share of a population grew, the crime rate declined.

What Trump Said: “Because I’ve watched in Portland and I watched in Seattle, and I’ve watched in Minneapolis, Minnesota and other places. People do heinous acts, far more serious than what took place on Jan. 6. And nothing happened to these people. Nothing.”

The Facts: Trump is comparing the prosecutions of those involved 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.

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:  “DOGE has been a very big success. We found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. We found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The Facts: The Department of Government Efficiency’s website claims that its work has saved the U.S. government an estimated $160 billion dollars as of April 20. However, multiple analyses of DOGE’s efforts have found that much of its claims have been overstated. A Wall Street Journal analysis from February compared more than 1,100 cancelled contracts listed by DOGE to their actual costs during the 2024 fiscal year. They found that, though the organization claimed to save around $7 billion from those contracts, the actual savings could look closer to $2.6 billion. An NPR review also concluded that DOGE was likely overstating savings by billions of dollars.

What Trump Said: “European Union sounds nice, but they’ve been very tough. $300 billion loss. China—hundreds of billions of dollars in losses.” 

The Facts: Though President Trump did not specify what the billions in losses was referring to, he was likely alluding to the U.S. trade deficit with China and the E.U. Those deficits reflect how much more the U.S. imports from those parts of the world than it exports; they do not represent any “loss” of money by any countries.  

In 2024, the U.S. trade deficit with the E.U. was not $300 billion, but $161.1 billion—up from $125.1 billion in 2023, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Commerce. 

The trade deficit with China in 2024 was $263.3 billion—up from $252.1 billion in 2023.

What Trump Said: “A lot of the money like Stacey Abrams got $2 billion on the environment. They had $100 in the account and she got $2 billion just before these people left—and had to do with something that she knows nothing about.”

The Facts: In August 2024, Power Forward Communities, a consortium of groups aimed at lowering housing costs and utility bills, received a $2 billion grant from the EPA. Members of the consortium included Habitat for Humanity and United Way Worldwide. The funds were allocated through the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which was established in 2022 as part of the Inflation Reduction Act. 

In a form filed with the IRS in 2023—before the grants were awarded—Power Forward Communities reported a revenue of $100—though in their application, the group asserted that it had “collectively deployed or invested over $100 billion in community-based housing, health, environmental, and economic development initiatives and created or preserved over 1.4 million affordable housing units.”

In March 2023, Abrams was hired as senior counsel for Rewiring America, which is a member of the consortium. Both Rewiring America and an Abrams spokesperson told Politico that Abrams’ contract ended at the end of 2024, and she received no money from the EPA grant.

What Trump Said: “It was certainly a big win, and that’s despite cheating that took place, by the way, because it was plenty of cheating that took place…’20, of course. But ‘24 also, they tried. They tried that. They did their best.”

The Facts: There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud or “cheating” in either the 2020 or 2024 election. The Trump Administration brought more than 60 lawsuits contesting the results of the 2020 election, most of which failed in court or were withdrawn by Trump’s legal team. Only one case saw a favorable ruling. 

Federal and state election officials have also refuted claims of voter fraud, or attempts of significant voter fraud, in the 2024 election—some of which came from those convinced that Vice President Kamala Harris’ poor showing was an indication of fraud. On Nov. 6, the day after the 2024 elections, Jen Easterly, the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, issued a statement on election security. “As we have said repeatedly, our election infrastructure has never been more secure and the election community never better prepared to deliver safe, secure, free, and fair elections for the American people,” Easterly said. “This is what we saw yesterday in the peaceful and secure exercise of democracy. Importantly, we have no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

What Trump Said: “And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren’t asking him questions like you’re asking me.”

The Facts: Trump is referring to a 35-minute interview TIME conducted with Biden in June 2024 for a cover story. The interview delved into a number of foreign policy issues—including the war in Gaza and U.S.-China relations.

What Trump Said: “We lose $200 to $250 billion a year supporting Canada.”

The Facts: Trump has often made the claim that the U.S. is “subsidizing” Canada—it’s a key reason behind his desire to annex the country. In his interview with TIME, he mentioned Canadian cars, lumber, and energy, so it’s possible was referring to the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, which in 2024, amounted to $63 billion for goods. 

But that number still is far short of $200 billion. In the interview, Trump also mentioned “taking care of their military.” Trump officials have often highlighted military spending as part of the $200 billion. The Department of Defense requested a budget of $849 billion for the 2025 fiscal year—though the request does not break down spending by region. In March, a White House official pointed The Washington Post towards North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a shared air defense program between the two countries. The U.S. is responsible for 60% of the cost of the radar system—though the system costs just $20 billion, an expert told the Post.

What Trump Said: “We owe $36 trillion, right?”

The Facts: Trump is referring to the national debt, which is indeed $36 trillion dollars. The national debt refers to the amount of money the federal government has borrowed to cover the outstanding balance of expenses it has incurred over time.