Donald Trump signals an aggressive opening, threatening ‘jail’ for Liz Cheney and others

President-elect Donald Trump on stage at the Fox Nation Patriot Awards in Greenvale, New York on December 5, 2024. Photo / Dave Sanders, The New York Times

US President-elect Donald Trump has outlined an aggressive plan for opening his second term in his first sit-down broadcast network interview since being re-elected, vowing to move immediately to crack down on immigration and pardon his most violent supporters while threatening to lock up political foes such as Liz Cheney.

In an interview on NBC’s Meet the Press that aired on Sunday (Monday NZT), Trump said that on day one of his new administration next month, he would extend clemency to the hundreds of his backers who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and try to bar automatic citizenship for children born in the United States to immigrant parents.

Without indicating a time frame, Trump also indicated that he would fire FBI Director Christopher Wray out of personal pique because “he invaded my home” and was insufficiently certain at first whether Trump’s wound during an assassination attempt this year was caused by a bullet or shrapnel. And he said that members of Congress who investigated his role in the January 6 attack should be thrown behind bars.

“For what they did, honestly, they should go to jail,” Trump said of Cheney, a Republican who represented Wyoming, and the rest of the bipartisan House committee that looked into the attack. He said he would not direct his new attorney general or FBI director to pursue the matter but indicated that he expected them to do it on their own. “I think that they’ll have to look at that,” he said, “but I’m not going to” order them to.

Representative Liz Cheney, centre right, co-chairs a House hearing on the Capitol attack on November 24, 2021. Photo / Doug Mills, The New York Times

At the same time, Trump seemed to signal that he would not appoint a special counsel to investigate President Joe Biden and his family, as he once vowed. And he signalled that he would not take the most assertive position on several other issues, saying that he would not seek to fire the chair of the Federal Reserve or restrict the availability of abortion pills. And although he vowed to end birthright citizenship, Trump said he would try to work with Democrats to spare immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, known as Dreamers, from deportation.

“I’m really looking to make our country successful,” Trump said when asked about investigating Biden and his family. “I’m not looking to go back into the past. I’m looking to make our country successful. Retribution will be through success.”

Trump sought to downplay fears of Kash Patel, a far-right loyalist he plans to nominate to take over the FBI, who has vowed to “come after” the president-elect’s perceived enemies and named about 60 people he considered “members of the executive branch deep state” as the appendix to a 2023 book.

“No, I don’t think so,” Trump said when asked if Patel would pursue investigations against political adversaries. But the incoming president left the door open to it. “If they were crooked, if they did something wrong, if they have broken the law, probably,” he said. “They went after me. You know, they went after me, and I did nothing wrong.”

Trump offered no explanation of what crimes he thought the members of the January 6 committee might have committed. His comments came as Biden’s top aides are debating whether he should issue blanket pardons before leaving office to people such as Cheney who have drawn the president-elect’s ire. Biden and his team have grown increasingly concerned that the selection of Patel indicates that Trump will follow through on his threats of “retribution” against those who have crossed him.

To install Patel, Trump would have to fire Wray, who has a 10-year term under a law meant to avoid politicising the FBI. Wray was originally appointed by Trump in 2017, but the president-elect made clear he was personally aggrieved against him for the FBI search of his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in 2022 for classified documents that he had improperly taken after leaving the White House, even though the search warrant was approved by a judge.

“I can’t say I’m thrilled with him,” Trump said. “He invaded my home. I’m suing the country over it. He invaded Mar-a-Lago. I’m very unhappy with the things he’s done.”

He also cited Wray’s comment after the assassination attempt in July that it was not initially clear whether Trump was hit by a bullet or shrapnel. “When I was shot in the ear, he said, ‘Oh, maybe it was shrapnel,’” Trump said. “Where’s the shrapnel coming from? Is it coming from — is it coming from heaven? I don’t think so.”

Trump did not explicitly say he would fire Wray, but he left little doubt about it. “It would sort of seem pretty obvious that if Kash gets in, he’s going to be taking somebody’s place, right?” he said.

FBI Director Christopher Wray. Photo / AFP

He also said, however, that he does not plan to fire Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve and another Trump appointee with whom he has grown disenchanted. “No, I don’t think so,” Trump said. “I don’t see it.”

The president-elect said that on his first day in office, he would sign a raft of executive actions on the economy, energy and the border. Two specifics that came up during the interview were issuing pardons for January 6 attackers and ending birthright citizenship for children born in the US.

Asked if he would pardon “everyone” who attacked the Capitol, Trump said, “Yeah. But I’m going to be acting very quickly.” Pressed, he added, “First day.”

As for birthright citizenship, Trump said he would try to reverse the constitutional guarantee that anyone born in the United States is a citizen regardless of the status of their parents. Most legal scholars have said the president has no power to overturn the right to citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, which says that “all persons born” in the United States “are citizens of the United States”.

Trump was vague about how he would proceed and whether he would seek to reverse the common interpretation of the amendment through executive action that would surely be challenged in the courts. He left open the idea that he would instead have to amend the Constitution, which would be unlikely to happen since it would require either a constitutional convention or the support of two-thirds of both houses of Congress and the approval of three-quarters of the states.

“We’re going to have to get it changed,” Trump said. “We’ll maybe have to go back to the people. But we have to end it.”

He repeatedly said falsely that “we’re the only country that has it”. In fact, the World Population Review lists 34 other countries and territories that also have unrestricted birthright citizenship, including Canada and Mexico.

But Trump suggested that he would look for a way to keep the so-called Dreamers in the country. “We have to do something about the Dreamers because these are people that have been brought here at a very young age,” he said. “And many of these are middle-aged people now. They don’t even speak the language of their country. And yes, we’re going to do something about the Dreamers.”

He said he would “work with the Democrats on a plan” and blamed them for not protecting Dreamers. But in fact, it was President Barack Obama who first took executive action in 2012 to spare about 700,000 Dreamers from deportation through a policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.

Trump, by contrast, tried to rescind the policy, arguing that it was unconstitutional, only to be blocked by the Supreme Court on procedural grounds.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Peter Baker

Photographs by: Dave Sanders, Doug Mills and AFP

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