TRANSCRIPT: President Trump is interviewed by Will Cain on Fox News’ “Will Cain Show”, 1.27.26
[Video]
Will Cain: We're here with President Donald J. Trump. Mr. President, great to see you.
President Trump: Thank you very much.
Cain: Thank you for doing this.
Trump: Well, you know, you do have great ratings.
Cain: [Laughs] Well, thank you.
Trump: We check the ratings, but I -- even if you had lousy ratings, I would do your show. You are terrific.
Cain: Thank you.
Trump: You've been a terrific guy.
Cain: I anticipate they should do very well today --
Trump: Good.
Cain: -- with this type of guest today here on The Will Cain Show. Welcome back to the campaign trail.
Trump: Thank you.
Cain: Welcome back to Iowa. How does it feel?
Trump: Well, I love Iowa. We've won it three times conclusively. There wasn't like any late-night voting or anything. We just won it right at the -- right at the beginning. The doors closed, and they said Trump won. And I love the people. You know, I just get along with the people.
Cain: I was watching the other room. You look back in your element. You're back with the people. What do you like better? Do you like this? Standing on the stage at a rally, or do you like making a deal, maybe for Greenland?
Trump: Nah, I think I like maybe the rallies better. Deals are fun, but we're making a lot of good deals. We've made record-setting deals. We have $18 trillion coming into the country. That's why they're building auto plants, AI. They're building everything, thousands of businesses are being built all over the country. And you're going to have a beautiful, very positive explosion sometime during the year when these things start opening up. But there's never been any country that has -- no country has done what we've done. [Inaudible]
Cain: That explosion --
Trump: Yeah.
Cain: -- that anticipated economic explosion, that's going to be important because you also need to do something that someone has done very rarely. You acknowledged this a couple of days ago with Maria Bartiromo --
Trump: Yeah.
Cain: -- and that is for the president in power to win the midterms. I think it's been only twice since 1938 --
Trump: That's right.
Cain: -- that the sitting president, the president in power, has won the midterms. Are you concerned?
Trump: Well, nobody can explain why, you know, even when we've had an amazing year, this has been a record setting year in every way, and nobody can explain. Even presidents, whether it's Republican or Democrat, when they win, it doesn't make any difference; they seem to lose the midterms. So, that's the only thing I worry about. I said why -- there's some psychological factor out there.
Cain: What do you think that is?
Trump: But I think it's like two in more than 50 years. Well, I don't know, maybe they want to put up a guard fence, maybe -- you just don't know. It doesn't make sense. Even if a president did well, they seem to lose the midterms. But hopefully we're going to change that around. We're doing great. We have the best polling numbers we've ever had. We have the best numbers in the country, lowest crime numbers in the history of our country. You know, Minnesota's in the news a lot, but they don't -- what they don't say is that Minnesota has low numbers because of the fact that we took thousands of hardened criminals out of Minnesota. So, they had good crime numbers, believe it or not.
And that's all working out. You know, we have Tom Homan there now. We put him in there, he's great. And they met with the governor, the mayor, everybody else, and we're going to deescalate a little bit. But I will tell you, you look at the numbers, they're doing better than they've done in many years because we took thousands of criminals out of Minnesota.
You look at Washington DC; it was a very dangerous place a year and a half ago, now it's as safe as you can get. You can walk your family down the middle of the street. Nothing's going to happen. You know, we got rid of over 2,000 hardened criminals, many of them let in through the open border policy of Sleepy Joe Biden. It was not a good -- that was not a good policy, Will.
Cain: I want to come back to Minnesota in just one moment, but let's go to those guardrails. I'd imagine you do not feel like you need guardrails in this moment. You talk about the investment in this country.
Trump: No, I don't need guardrails, I don't want guardrails. Guardrails would hurt us because, you know, we're a free enterprise people. The people in this room, the people of Iowa are free enterprise. That's why we won it so big three times in a row.
Cain: I would have to imagine that guardrails would be an understatement of what would happen should you lose the House or the Senate. There has been talk of impeachment. You've been through this before. You've been through it multiple times.
Trump: Yeah, I'm a professional.
Cain: What will happen -- what will happen if Democrats take the House and the Senate?
Trump: Well, they'll probably try and impeach me. They'll say he went to Iowa and he spoke unfairly to people and he's not supposed to do that, let's impeach him, OK. And the people in Iowa would say how did he get impeached, he just did an interview with Will who has very good ratings, OK. But they just did an interview with Will.
No, they'll find something. They'll be something -- I made the wrong turn at an exit and let's impeach him. They did that before, they impeached me on a perfect phone call, turned out -- they impeached me twice. And by the way, I won the impeachments very easily and quickly. But they impeach -- they're very nasty people.
You know, they have bad policy, really bad, but they do two things. They stick together -- not stupid. Some are because, you know, that's true with everything, right? But they stick together, but they have really bad policy: men in women's sports, transgender for everybody. So many things are so bad, they're horrible to the farmers.
And by the way, I just gave the farmers $12 billion because they were treated unfairly. We're taking in a fortune with tariffs, and I wrote him a little check about two weeks ago for $12 billion. Anybody in this room get any of it yet? Yes, yeah. A lot of people, it's a lot of money. And you know what? You deserved it. But we're taking in so much money from the tariffs that we can do that.
Cain: I want to talk about the point of view from some of these farmers, some of these people in this room a little bit later. But now I want to take you up on your invitation to talk about Minnesota. Listen, the entire country is talking about what happened this past weekend in Minnesota. You've already spoken about it. Everyone watching has seen the video. Everyone has an opinion. I'm curious what you thought when you first saw that video.
Trump: Well, I think the whole thing is terrible. I don't like the fact that he was carrying a gun that was fully loaded and he had two magazines with him and it's pretty unusual. But nobody knows when they saw the gun, how they saw the gun and everything else. Bottom line, it was terrible. Both of them were terrible. The other was terrible too. And I'm not sure about his parents, but I know her parents were big Trump fans. Makes me feel bad anyway. But I mean I guess you could say even worse, they were tremendous Trump people, Trump fans. And you know, the daughter was -- she was -- I don't know if you could say radicalized, maybe radicalized, maybe not, I don't know. But I hate to see it, I hate to see that.
Cain: You bring up the term radicalized. What do you think is happening? You see these people in these videos, they feel very emboldened to step in and interfere with law enforcement. I'm not talking about protests, holding signs. I'm talking about people physically interfering with immigration enforcement. Why? Why do they feel so emboldened?
Trump: You have to go throughout the whole country. You know, we have done so much work throughout the whole country. We don't have any problem. The only one we have is Minnesota. We're in a lot of different places, New Orleans -- the governor of Louisiana called; they have a big problem in New Orleans. And we went there; we've cut the crime by 67 percent in four weeks. It'll be down to practically nothing soon. Washington DC, we don't have problems like, you know, we've cut it down from a lot. It was very bad. It was terrible. People go to Washington to look at the Lincoln Monument, and they end up getting whacked or whatever, killed in some cases, numerous killings. That's a safe -- that's a beautiful safe place now. Memphis, Tennessee, one of the worst in the whole country and now it's got very little crime.
Cain: But it's gone very differently in Minneapolis.
Trump: Well, it has -- it's the only place.
Cain: And now the message is out that Tom Homan is in, Commander Bovino is supposedly leaving Minneapolis along with some CBP agents. Is this a pullback?
Trump: I don't think it's a pullback, it's a little bit of a change. Everybody in this room that has a business, you make little changes -- you know, Bovino is very good, but he's a pretty out there kind of a guy. And in some cases, that's good. Maybe it wasn't good here. But you have to understand, when I watch some of the people that I've been watching over the last few weeks, these are paid insurrectionists.
These are paid agitators. These people aren't normal like, oh gee, that they're incensed about anything. How do you get incensed when you go into a state and you're taking criminals out, you're taking monsters out, murderers? You know, we had 11,888 murderers let into our country by other countries, by Biden with his open borders stupid policy.
It's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. You talk about bad policy, open borders where people were coming. So, the whole world, the Congo, Venezuela -- all over the world they're letting people in from their prisons and they're feeding them into the United States. And they're murderers and they're drug dealers and everything else you can think of, every bad name you can think of, and they let them in by the millions. We closed the border. You know, we have nobody coming into our country anymore, literally --
Cain: It just shows how hard it is to clean up even after you close it. It shows the price that we paid under Joe Biden.
Trump: It's the hardest thing when you think of it. You know, inflation we've solved -- it's done. We have it good where prices are coming way down. They were just saying in Iowa the fuel is $1.95. Did you hear that? Somebody said $1.85, but it was $3.50, $4.50 just a year ago, a year and a half ago. You look at eggs, you look at groceries, it's all down, everything's come down.
Do you notice they don't mention affordability anymore? That's like an old-fashioned word. They brought up affordability, but they were the ones that caused it. I didn't cause it. I came in, prices were way too high. We had the highest inflation in the history of our country, 48 years they say, I say the history.
But we had the highest, let's say, in 48 years, the highest inflation, prices were way high. Now I've got the prices down and they're going down still further. But think of it, we brought fuel from $4, $3.50, $3.75 down to $1.99, $1.85 -- I was just told in Iowa $1.85 a gallon.
Cain: No doubt, no doubt. But that leaves that problem, like you said, the hardest one to solve. People say they want our immigration laws enforced.
Trump: The hardest one to solve is that.
Cain: You know, I remember a conversation that you and I had a year and a half ago with your secretary of war, our friend, Rachel Campos-Duffy. And you said to me, you looked at me and said it's going to be difficult when The New York Times runs a picture of a little kid being taken away from their mother, it's going to be difficult. And by the way, that basically happened to you a week ago, it was propaganda and it was false about a five-year-old.
Trump: By the way, it was a totally false story about the five-year-old.
Cain: But you're now dealing with the difficulty of the propaganda in the face of enforcing illegal immigration. You said no.
Trump: And I knew that. I mean, I said no, it's always tough.
Cain: Are you still --
Trump: We take out 25 murderers, we take out drug dealers, we take out a whole group of people by the thousands. And if we get one person a little bit wrong, headlines, but they don't talk about all the tremendous -- you know, the reason that we have Minnesota crime down, I talk about that, because it's only down for one reason, we took out so many criminals.
But other states are way down. So, the report came out -- now think of it -- in the history of this country we have the lowest number of murders, we have the lowest crime, the best crime numbers. That's despite the fact that millions -- I say 25 million people, millions of people were let in through the border by Biden and many of those people were not people you want to have in the country.
Cain: So, what's going to change? You put in Tom Homan. Have you spoken today to Tom Homan?
Trump: Well, yeah, I have. Tom is fantastic. Tom is a tough guy, but I've watched over the years, and he's gotten along with governors, and he gets along with mayors. Some people don't. Some people just want to do their job and leave me alone. And that's sort of OK, too, that's generally been OK, most of them are happy.
Memphis, Tennessee, very tough, very straightforward. We're taking the criminal out. We're getting them out, either putting them in jail, because some are so bad that you don't want to send them to another -- to where they came from because you're afraid they're going to come back. They're murderers. So, some are very down and straight. And others -- Tom, I've noticed, as tough as he is, he gets along very good with governors and mayors. Now I spoke to the mayor and to the governor yesterday and they want to see it cleared up. I believe them.
Cain: I'm so fascinated by your conversation with Governor Tim Walz. This man has suggested that this is a modern-day Gettysburg. He has likened his situation to Anne Frank in the Holocaust. He has said that ICE is your Gestapo army. And then you guys speak on the phone. I'm fascinated by that conversation.
Trump: It couldn't have been a nicer conversation. And in fact, I said to my people, I said it's hard to believe that's the same guy I watch on television, or I watch in the debate not doing so well. Because we had a very reasonable conversation, a very good conversation. If you believe the conversation, he'd like to get this thing over with.
But think of it, in the whole country, we've done this so much. We have the crime down to a level that nobody ever -- you know, I campaigned a little bit on crime, a lot on the border. The problem is I gave you the best border in the history of our country. Nobody wants to talk about it anymore. You know, I did it a long time ago.
I was able to do it -- within three months of taking office, I had that border locked and closed, and you know, nobody even tries to come up anymore. It's easy now; nobody even tries to come up. Before they were coming up by the millions. But nobody wants to talk about that; they only want to talk about whatever the last thing is. But we're taking out thousands and thousands of criminals.
And the worst thing that Biden did to this country -- because again, inflation I can solve, all this stuff. The hardest thing to solve is when you have people brought into the country and you have to take those people -- we have a very unfriendly court system, frankly, especially at the lower levels -- take those people and you have to say, I'm sorry, but you're going out.
And in many cases, they're murderers and, you know, they shoot you, they kill you, you've seen that where they kill you. You're after a murderer; sir, you're going to have to come with me, and they end up shooting you. It's a very tough job that they have.
Cain: I know you addressed this this morning, you talked about the incredible success, and it is an incredible success at the southern border. But you were asked with the shift in Minneapolis and Tom Homan going to Minnesota, do you still have confidence in DHS Secretary Kristi Noem? You brought up the success at the border4.
Trump: I do.
Cain: You do.
Trump: She was there with the border. Who closed up the border? She did with Tom Homan, with the whole group. I mean, they closed up the border. The border is a tremendous success, one of the most secure borders in the entire world. We were a laughingstock one and a half years ago for the whole world. The whole world laughed at us. I had friends that said is that real.
You know, they'd look at a picture -- you've been down to the border. They'd look at a picture of the border with hundreds of thousands of people pouring in like it was water. And they said, is that really taken? They can't believe it; they think it's one of these crazy movies that they make. The border was horrible, it was horrible.
You know, I did the border twice. The first time I won, 2016 I won on the border, but that border was nothing and I fixed it immediately. It was great. We had great years and we had a great economy. We had the best economy in history in 2016, my first term, and we rebuilt the military and we get the largest regulation cuts. We had the best job numbers. We had a great first term. This term seems to be blowing it away. I mean, the only thing we have is a Minnesota situation and that is, I believe, easily resolved.
Cain: OK. You're about to take the stage here in Iowa. I imagine you're going to talk about the economy. I'm curious what your plan is if the Supreme Court rules negatively on your tariffs. You talk about the tariffs a lot?
Trump: We'll have to find another way.
Cain: Is there a plan B?
Trump: Yeah, the tariffs have been indispensable towards success. We've taken in $600 billion in tariffs. I gave the farmers $12 billion last week. I took them out of tariff money. It's kept the unfair competition out of our country. Now, they can build their auto plant here, but they can't build a plant someplace with labor costs for a penny and then sell it into this country and then charge people a lot of money for a car.
So, the only way they can do that, they have to build the plants here. So, the big auto companies from Germany, from Mexico, from Canada -- Mexico and Canada are literally, their plants are closing down, they're moving into this country. So, we have more activity than we've ever had. We have thousands of businesses all over the country being built. We have hundreds of big, major factories between AI, autos and many other things being built. We've never had a thing like this.
Cain: And you used them as a tool for world peace.
Trump: For world peace, yeah, we have to use it for world peace.
Cain: But what happens if the Supreme Court strikes down the tariffs?
Trump: We will find something -- some other way of doing a similar thing, but it'll be more inconvenient, it won't be as easy.
Cain: I was just speaking to some of the diners here today, David Uhlmann, he's lived in Iowa for a long time. He's in agriculture. He does express concern about the tariffs and the effect it's had on farmers in Iowa.
Trump: Well, it's going to be very -- just -- don't forget, they just kicked in and it's going to -- and we've taken in hundreds of billions of dollars. And we've kept a lot of people out that want to come in and rip off our -- for years it was the reverse. China would charge us tariffs; other countries would charge us tariffs.
I've totally reversed it. Japan gave us $550 billion. South Korea is supposed to give us $350 billion, but what happens is they're coming in, they're building plants, they don't have to pay tariffs. If they don't do that -- so, what's happening is we're getting a tremendous amount of business coming to this country and they're coming in fast and sharp.
I think the farmers are going to be the biggest beneficiary because, when you used to have people coming in and dumping their crops into the United States and you guys were hurt, they're not allowed to do that because we're tariffing those crops.
Cain: Just a couple more questions.
Trump: I think the farmers in a way -- it's going to take a little while to kick in, and the farmers stuck with me the first time and I was right with China when China did a little bit of a number. We gave you $28 billion then because -- it was help because they were taken advantage of for years, we gave them $28 billion.
Now we gave them $12 billion, sort of a minimal payment, $12 billion for the farmers. Nobody else would be able to do that. Nobody else would even think of doing that. But the tariffs are going to be phenomenal for the farmers, but they just kicked in.
Cain: I can see some nods here as you're talking.
Trump: A lot of nodding. Thank you -- well, they all work for me. Thank you.
Cain: A couple of quick more questions. Mr. President, one serious one. This whole Minnesota thing -- it started because of a focus on fraud. It started because of illegal immigration and welfare fraud. The question is, will there be accountability in Minnesota and beyond?
Trump: There's got to be.
Cain: Other states, California --
Trump: Minnesota is one state. If you look at California -- so, in Minnesota, they think it's $19 billion. If they think it's $19 billion, triple it or quadruple it. And if we catch a lot of this fraud, and I felt it for a long time, but now we know what's happening and the answer is yes, there will be accountability.
It's one of the little problems. You know, I happen to think, and I've said it from the beginning, that a lot of what's going on with respect to Minneapolis, you know, with what's happening with all the hoopla is so people don't talk about the fraud.
Cain: You think it's a distraction.
Trump: I've said it from day one, it's a distraction, because what you don't see is that we have hundreds of accountants from Todd and -- from all of the different people. We have hundreds of accountants going over everything that's happening. And we're finding fraud on top of fraud on top of fraud. And I think that they don't want that to happen.
You're talking about $19 billion, probably that's a minimal number. Now, you take that and you go to California, you think California is better? I would say California is worse, it's totally out of control. They don't know what they're doing out there. The governor is -- I actually thought he was a pretty nice guy, but he has no clue what he's doing. Look at a railroad. He builds a railroad. It's like 20 times more expensive than it was supposed to be. And what they did to get down the cost, they made it shorter, so it doesn't go to San Francisco, it doesn't go --
Cain: You saw what he said, right? He's claiming victory in Minnesota, by the way. He has posted that you have retreated in Minnesota, Governor Gavin Newsom, and he is encouraging people to keep the pressure up.
Trump: See, I haven't heard that at all because it's just the opposite. I was called by the governor yesterday. I was called by the mayor yesterday. How do we do something, please? How do we do something? I think it's bad for them. I don't think it's bad for us. I think it's bad for them.
Cain: Yeah, you'll have to see what Governor Newsom posted.
Trump: But it's not a question of retreat. We want safe cities, whether it's -- if we -- you know, we took a lot of the bad the crime out of there. We want safe cities and states; we want a safe country. And again, we just got a report, done by Democrats, that the country is the safest ever recorded right now.
Cain: Right, along with a secure border. I'm just looking around, you know, who's here today. There's a lot of people, but one guy who is not here is your secretary of state and I'm afraid he made a very big mistake. He gave an interview where he said that one of his tricks with you is on Air Force One, Marco Rubio goes into a room and covers himself up with blankets so that you won't see him sleeping, that you'll think it's a staffer. And so, I think there's only one of two ways you go with this. You give him yet another job or you pull the blankets back.
Trump: That's what he wants. Let me tell you, he's doing a fantastic job. He is. He's a tough cookie. I can tell you that, he's a tough cookie. He's doing -- he's going to go down as the best secretary of state we've ever had. You see what we're doing. Just today, we solved a tremendous problem in conjunction with Syria, saved many lives.
I mean we're saving a lot of lives all over the world, ended eight wars. I'm very proud of that because it's not tough -- and we're trying to end one more, by the way, Russia-Ukraine, and I think we're going to get that done too. But we ended eight wars and saved tens of millions of lives and I'm happy about that.
Cain: Should be proud.
Trump: Thank you.
Cain: I know you're a big sports fan, so we'll end here. We now have the Super Bowl set, New England Patriots, Seattle Seahawks. Now usually when someone asks you these questions you answer with which of these two teams have a greater affiliation and fandom of President Donald Trump.
Trump: That's true, in those cases --
Cain: So, I'm curious, have you already done the analysis? And who's going to win the Super Bowl?
Trump: I'll tell you what -- no, but I -- yeah, Bob Kraft is a friend of mine and I've watched that team, you know, you've got to hand it to him. He had the great team and now he's got the great team again. They made a fantastic draft pick, the quarterback is great. But it's going to be a very -- I think it's going to be a tremendous game. I hope it's going to be a tremendous game.
Cain: Yeah. Mr. President, I know you've got to take the stage. I really appreciate all the time you've given us and joining us live. We called a lot of audibles right here at the last moment. We really appreciate you joining.
Trump: Well, you've done a tremendous job and you've really been very fair to me. I don't even say nice, I just want to be fair. And you've been fair and you've also been nice. And so, it was an honor to do it. When I heard it was you I said let's do it.
Cain: My goal is to tell the truth, Mr. President.
Trump: Thank you very much.
Cain: Thank you so much.
Trump: Thank you, Will, very much. Thank you.
Cain: Thank you to the president of the United States.
Trump: Thank you.