TRANSCRIPT: Sharyl Attkisson Interviews President Trump for the Syndicated 'Full Measure', 5.5.26
[Video]
Note: [Sharyl Attkisson conducted a sit-down interview with Donald Trump on May 5, 2026. The interview was broadcast and released in full on May 10, 2026. Video courtesy and copyright Sinclair Broadcast Group.]
Sharyl Attkisson: Thank you for joining us on Full Measure.
President Trump: Thank you.
Attkisson: First of all, we're glad that you are safe and that your family's safe after the latest attempt on your life. How are you and the family doing?
Trump: Very good. Uh, it was an interesting evening, but I felt very secure and I think Secret Service did a very good job.
Attkisson: The judge apologized to the suspect for the treatment that he's gotten in jail.
Trump: Well, I heard that and then after watching that they went back a couple of years and he was very apologetic to another suspect who I didn't even know about. But he was also, the same judge was very apologetic to somebody else having to do with a similar subject and, uh, not even believable actually.
Attkisson: On Iran, would you say the war is over? Is it paused, or is it very much active?
Trump: Well, they're militarily defeated. Uh, in their own minds maybe they don't know that, but I think they do because I deal with them and we cannot ever let Iran have a nuclear weapon, but they are militarily defeated. They have no Navy. They have no Air Force. They have no anti, uh, aircraft weaponry. They have no radar.
They have no leaders. Their leaders are gone. The first set, the A team is gone, the B team is gone, and part of the C team is gone. But I think we're dealing with people that have a certain power. It's very interesting because, you know, they make a deal and then they break it, then they make a deal, they break it. It's a difficult group.
But from a mil- -- military standpoint, I mean, if we left, if we left today, it would take them 20 years to rebuild.
Attkisson: Where are we in the war if we've not yet gotten the nuclear materials, the enriched uranium from them?
Trump: Well, we'll get that at some point with whatever we want. We have it surveilled. You know, I did a thing called Space Force and they are watching that every, if somebody walked in, they can tell you his name, his address, the number of his badge. Uh, no, we have that very well surveilled. If anybody got near the place, we will know about it and we'll blow them up, we'll blow them up.
Attkisson: So is it accurate to say you think the combat operations are over and done, but there may be --
Trump: No, I didn't say that. I said, uh, they are est- -- they are defeated, but that doesn't mean they're done. Uh, we could go in for two more weeks and do every single target. We have certain targets that we wanted. And we've done probably 70% of them, but we have other targets that we could conceivably hit.
But even if we didn't do that, you know, that would just be final touches. But even if we didn't do that, uh, it would take them many years to rebuild.
Attkisson: Few politicians I think would be prepared to take a political hit on something as important to so many Americans as oil and gas prices in the short term.
Trump: Yeah.
Attkisson: Even for something very important in the long term.
Trump: Yeah.
Attkisson: The political and media climate, I don't think they really allow for this sort of thing. They want immediate reactions and responses to things, so --
Trump: Well, I think it's easy when I say it. And somebody like you says, you know, "Answer that question," and gives me a couple of seconds, it's really easy to answer. Uh, we cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon because they're crazy. We cannot let them have access to nuclear. Obama did it. If, if I didn't terminate the Iran nuclear deal, they would have had it and they would have used it on Israel and the Middle East right now and, uh, and maybe beyond.
You know, they have, they actually had rockets that, you saw that the other day, that could reach Europe. They would have used it a hundred per -- And by the way, not 50% or ei- -- 100% they would have used it. They were dying to get it then. So I took Barack Hussein Obama's horrible Iran nuclear deal. I terminated it at my first time.
Uh, knocked out Soleimani, very important. If you didn't knock out Soleimani, I think it would have been a different country. It would have been more competent, but he was an evil genius, but he was an evil guy. The roadside bombs, et cetera, killed many, many people, uh, maimed so many people, the legs, the arms, the face.
So that was a big thing, I took him out. And then, uh, very big, I don't say, I don't know, they're all so important if you think. I'm thinking which is the most, But when those beautiful B-2 bombers attacked eight months ago and attacked their potential nuclear site, they would have had a nuclear weapon within two weeks if we didn't. That's why I had to go in. I knew that they were going to have a nuclear weapon and we obliterated their, uh, I call it the nuclear dust.
There's a lot of nuclear dust, but we obliterated the site at 1:00 in the morning with no moon, you couldn't see a thing. And they went in and stealth, they went in and they did their job. They dropped those bombs and they landed perfectly and it just obliterated. If we didn't do that, they would have already blown up Israel in my opinion.
Israel would have been blown up with a nuclear weapon.
Attkisson: What's next in light of all of this for the US and NATO?
Trump: Well, NATO is proven to be a paper tiger. They weren't there to help. You know, this is, the interesting thing is many of those NATO countries use, we don't use the strait. We don't need it. In fact, boats are coming up to Texas, Louisiana, and Alaska and filling up with oil. Uh, we don't need the strait.
We were doing it to help Israel and Saudi Arabia and Qatar and UAE and others. Uh, we don't need it. It's an amazing, we don't use it. We had 1% and we did that as a favor. And, uh, we have, we're now producing more oil and gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia put together. Think of that, Sharyl. Uh, if you take everything that Russia does, everything that Saudi Arabia puts out, we produce much more oil and gas than Russia and Saudi Arabia put together.
And by the end of this year, that number will probably double.
Attkisson: On some domestic issues, one of them a lot of people are interested in involving the NFL. Your justice department is investigating the NFL for moving a lot of viewers from free broadcast television into more expensive pay programming like Amazon Prime, Netflix, Peacock, and YouTube where the NFL makes more money.
Do you think this is price gouging on America's favorite sport? Should the government do anything about it?
Trump: It's a tough, it's a tough, you got people that love football. They're great people. They don't make enough money to go and pay this. It's, it's tough. And they could be killing the golden goose. I mean, they have that stupid kickoff thing that you can't watch. It's unwatchable. I hate the games where they, you know, they have the new phony kickoff.
I don't think it's any safer. Um, I hope college football doesn't do that. Do you know what I'm talking about, right?
Attkisson: I, I'm not a big --
Trump: You're not a football, you are --
Attkisson: Football viewer. [Laughs]
Trump: -- not a football fan. These people know what I'm talking about. Uh, that, that, you know, they ruined the game. But they have to be careful because, you know, others have tried this and all of a sudden you don't have a sport anymore. Probably will.
Attkisson: Government will step in and do --
Trump: There's something, there's something very sad when they take football away from many, many people. Very sad. I don't like it.
Attkisson: So do you think the government will step in and do something?
Trump: I don't know. But I don't like it. I don't like it. They're making a lot of money. They could make a little bit less. They could, they could let the people, so you have people that live for Sunday. They live, they, they can't think about anything else and then all of a sudden they're gonna have to pay $1,000 a game.
It's crazy so I'm not happy about it.
Attkisson: More with President Trump from the White House after a short break.
Note: [Commercial break]
Attkisson: How do you feel today about the Republicans' chance in the midterms and if the Republicans were not to hold control of Congress, how does that change your strategy as President?
Trump: Well, they'll find a reason to impeach me, even though a lot of people said I had the greatest first term in the history of it. They'll try and impeach me, probably. But, uh, see, we don't play that game. We don't play like them. They play dirty. They have bad policy, you know. If they had normal policy, it would be, it'd be a lot tougher, frankly.
But when they have men in women's sports, transgender mutilization of your children for everyone, open borders so that the world can pour into our country, criminals. We took in 25 million people over the Biden four years and 11,888 were murderers, most of whom more than, substantially more than 50%, committed more than one murder.
Welcome to America. Uh, we took in drug dealers and people from mental institutions that would close up. They would empty entire mental institutions into our country. They would take a mental institution in a South American country, open it up, bring these people into our country, let them go, close the institution in whatever country it may be in, save a fortune.
And Biden allowed this to happen. Now we have the strongest borders we've ever had. We have, as you know, we, for 11 months, they say nobody has come into our country illegally. You know why, nobody tries. Nobody makes the trip up. Uh, the trip is not worthwhile because they know they're not going to get through.
So once they know that, they don't make the trip. But we're running a great country. We're respected by everybody now again. We weren't respected. We were a laughing stock for four years. We were a very, very unsafe place. You know, murders are down now to the lowest in 125 years, the year 1900. But we were a country that was a dead country and now we're the hottest country anywhere in the world.
It's pretty, pretty amazing what we've done in a short time.
Attkisson: As straightforward as securing the border seemed to be once you got into office, it almost implies that another president could reverse it as quickly.
Trump: Yeah.
Attkisson: Is there any way to protect against that in the future?
Trump: Yeah. Vote Republican. It's very simple.
Attkisson: On Venezuela and voter fraud, there are Venezuelan engineer whistleblowers who have provided your administration my understanding is with a lot of information and documentation a- -- alleging vote rigging in the US elections, including in 2020, through an operation engineered in part by our foreign adversaries and centered in Venezuela.
Are you familiar with this information and is anything gonna come of that?
Trump: A little bit. And while I'm familiar with voter fraud, because we have a lot of it, I believe coming up on the 2020 election. The 2020 election was rigged. You know, when I used to say that, they'd say, "Oh, the cameras would turn off. How can you say -- " Now they don't turn. The information, a lot of it's already out there.
The election was rigged. It was rigged. You look at Georgia, you look at Pennsylvania, you look at these states, they were rigged. It was a rigged election and they used COVID to do it and they used crooked, dirty cops to do it. You know, they had dirty cops. Uh, like you read about Comey, Co- -- Comey's a dirty cop, bad guy, bad for the country, bad guy.
But no, the 2020 election was rigged.
Anytime you have mail-in voting, you're gonna have a rigged election. Anytime you're not using voter ID, the Democrats don't want, they're fighting us on the Save America Act. Uh, anytime you don't have, when somebody says, "We don't want voter identification," that means they wanna cheat. Then they say, "We don't want citizenship.
We don't want proof of citizenship." They don't want it to be a part of the voting process. And yet, when it comes to voting, the interesting thing is 97% of the Republicans want voter ID. But if you had the Republicans and the Democrats together, 86% want, jimmy Carter, I mean, I wasn't a big fan of him as a president, but Jimmy Carter had a committee that was set up and along with Scoop Jackson, some very respected people.
And the primary finding of the committee on the election stuff, primary finding of the committee was, can't have mail-in voting, it's crooked.
Attkisson: What's the latest with Cuba and are there talks underway now?
Trump: Well, it's a failed country. It has been for years. And we'll take care of one before we take care of the other. But no, it's a failed country, Cuba. And people are living poorly. It's a, it's a bad experiment.
Attkisson: Are you or is someone from the administration communicating with anybody?
Trump: Well, Marco is. Marco Rubio is doing it. His, his parents came from Cuba. And if we can help out, good. We have a lot of people, 94% of whom voted for me from Cuba. I did great with the Hispanic vote anyway. But Cuba, Venezuela, they all voted for me. You know, Venezuela is a very happy country right now.
They were miserable. Now they're happy, well, it's being well run. The oil that's coming out is enormous, the biggest in many years. And the big oil companies are going in with the biggest, most beautiful rigs you've ever seen, and people are working, and Venezuela's a happy country. People, everyone tells me they're so proud of what happened in Venezuela and they're doing a good job.
So we have a lot of interesting things that we've done and that we're doing.
Attkisson: You'll soon be heading to China.
Trump: Yeah.
Attkisson: How's your relationship with China's leaders and do you have a top goal in mind?
Trump: Uh, my relationship is very good with President Xi. I don't know the other leaders, but President Xi is a, a good man, smart man, loves China. And, uh, I look forward to being there. We did this once before and it was amazing. Uh, it's gonna be an amazing, I think it's gonna be an amazing trip.
Attkisson: There is a woman named Katy Talento, if I'm saying her name correctly, who recently stated that in 2017 she worked for you and her job was to keep Bobby Kennedy as far from the West Wing as possible after you had agreed to a vaccine safety commission. Did you know about that?
Trump: No.
Attkisson: She's published on that last couple of days. She says she's apologizing for that basically. Did you know that at the time that there was somebody supposedly tasked with keeping Bobby Kennedy away?
Trump: No, I didn't. He's doing a good job. I think Bobby, people love him. I didn't know about that.
Attkisson: Do you think there should be a vaccine safety commission?
Trump: A commission on what?
Attkisson: Vaccine safety, something to examine.
Trump: No.
Attkisson: Something like he proposed back then.
Trump: Look, I believe in vaccines, but I don't believe that, you know, you have to have a mandate for all of them. The polio vaccine's amazing. It's, you know, wiped it out and I believe in vaccines, but you know, I think we were up to 88 vaccines. And I really feel that vaccines, if they were given in smaller quantities, uh, they want to cut some out and that's good too.
And I agree with that. 82 is too many. If you look at Denmark and other countries, you have 12, 14, I think 17. Um, and we have, like, 82. But I look at these beautiful little babies and they get a vat, I mean, so like a big glass of, of stuff pumped into their bodies. And I think it's a very negative thing to do and I would like to see it, I'm not doing this in terms of Bobby or not.
I hope they agree with that, but that's just my opinion. Uh, I would love to see much smaller shots like four visits to the doctor and I think you would have a much better result with the autism.
Attkisson: More with President Trump when we continue.
Note: [Commercial break]
Attkisson: On Full Measure, we reported this season on controversy with the Tennessee Valley Authority --
Trump: Yeah.
Attkisson: -- which John Rich got involved in --
Trump: Right.
Attkisson: -- advocating for landowners whose land risks being taken away for a giant power plant.
Trump: I saw it, actually.
Attkisson: Um, are you creating a position for John Rich to advocate more widely on that front?
Trump: Well, I would. I like him. You know, he was on the apprentice and he won. He's a good guy. Um --
Attkisson: Is that a big issue --
Trump: -- and he likes --
Attkisson: -- with government taking land and --
Trump: Well, it's, it's, yeah, a lot of people don't like that, you know? [Laughs] It's not the greatest thing, but Tennessee Valley bothered me for another reason and I have to look, but the person running it always, you know, for years would, got inordinate salaries. Did you know that?
Attkisson: Yeah, I did. We were reported --
Trump: Numbers --
Attkisson: on that too.
Trump: -- numbers that are crazy, like --
Attkisson: I think 26 times the salary of the president of the United States.
Trump: Yeah. Like they get 10 million dollars, 12 million dollars and I said, "Y- -- it's gonna stop."
Attkisson: And you're trying to cap that to $500,000.
Trump: Yeah, I wanna, I wanna have it capped, yeah. So I put John there if he could do that. It's, uh, I look at, I inherited all the stuff. It was so stupid, so crazy. Can you imagine? They take people that are making $200,000 and they give them $10 million a year. Like, he would've taken it for slightly less.
It's crazy. So we, we try and stop things like that.
Attkisson: Couple of, uh, quick hits viewer questions. What happened to the audit of Fort Knox?
Trump: Which one are you talking about?
Attkisson: There was, I think when you first got into office, you and Elon Musk talked about auditing the gold to make sure it's there.
Trump: We want to go knock on the door, Fort Knox, very thick door. And to see whether or not we have any gold in there, you know, because, uh, we take a look at it. It's a very interesting question. Yeah. We played with that. Uh, I wonder if they left the gold in Fort Knox because they steal a lot.
Attkisson: No need to really do that though?
Trump: Well, I, I don't know. I think we, it's, uh, I do wanna go to Fort Knox sometime. I wanna see if the gold is there, which I'm sure it will be.
Attkisson: What would you be doing today, do you think, if you hadn't run for president?
Trump: Well, I was really good at building buildings and I guess I'd be just riding out my life building buildings had I not run. But now that I have become president and for, I guess you could say for nine years, you know, I've been, if you look at it, I had the four years that we had the rigged election. But during that rigged election, we were fighting with these people like more than if I were president.
And then we had a great first year as president. I think we had a great first year. I think it's one of the best. I ended, think of it, I ended eight wars and to a point where the woman, a very good woman too, Maria, uh, she received the Nobel Peace Prize and she said, "I received it. The only one that should get it is Donald Trump." I didn't know her.
And it was very nice, very gracious actually. But I ended, think of it, I ended eight wars and we have the greatest economy we've ever had. Just as I'm walking into the room, I see the S&P hit a brand new high during a so-called war. I call it a military conflict because it was, it was pretty easy. We have the greatest military in the world.
You look at Venezuela, you look at Iran, look at, look at what we, we wiped out their Navy in one week, 159 ships at the bottom of the sea. We wiped out their Air Force. We wiped out their everything. We wiped out their leaders, I guess, maybe most importantly. But, uh, we have the greatest military anywhere in the world and I think you see that.
Attkisson: Do you see your son, Baron, going into politics someday?
Trump: Well, maybe. He's certainly a popular guy. But, uh, I have a lot of members of my family that are very popular, you know? They, I have good kids, they're very good kids.
Attkisson: Back with a final word in a moment.
Note: [Commercial break]
Attkisson: Do you still donate your salary and if so, who's it going to?
Trump: I do. Uh, much of it goes to the White House preservation, you know, I fix things up. You might have seen the path outside. Did you see it?
Attkisson: I, I know about it. I have not personally walked on it.
Trump: If you will, I'll let you take a look at it later. It's beautiful, beautiful black granite. Uh, it was stoned that was all broken in terrible shape. The White House was not properly maintained. You think a guy like Joe Biden would maintain it? He, he didn't know he was alive, but I do. I'm very good. I was a great real estate developer and I can fix things and make them look beautiful, pay for it myself.
But no, I devote 100% of my salary to different things, but I like White House preservation.
Attkisson: Anything else you'd like to add?
Trump: No, but I think your show is excellent. I watch it a lot and it's always an honor to be with you. I think we've done it quite a few times.
Attkisson: This is our 10th interview, sir.
Trump: Wow.
Attkisson: Since 2015.
Trump: It's doing well. It's my honor. Thank you.
Attkisson: Thank you so much. I appreciate it, sir.