President-elect Donald J. Trump said in a new interview that he will use the opening hours of his presidency to pardon people convicted of participating in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault, begin deportations of undocumented immigrants and increase oil production.
He also said during the interview, which Time magazine published on Thursday, that he might support getting rid of some childhood vaccines if data shows links to autism. He declined to answer a question about whether he had talked with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia since the November election but said Ukraine should not have been allowed to fire U.S.-made missiles into Russia.
Speaking of pardons in Jan. 6 cases, he said: “We’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office.” He said the pardons would go to “nonviolent” people who were at the Capitol, which was overrun by Trump supporters after he lost the 2020 election. “A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely,” he said.
The president-elect’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview conducted on Nov. 25 as part of the magazine’s choice of Mr. Trump to be its person of the year. In the interview, which the magazine said lasted more than an hour, the president-elect bragged that he had run a “flawless” campaign and that Democrats were out of touch with Americans.
He also said he planned a “virtual closure of Department of Education in Washington,” though he did not explain what that meant. And he said that he might reverse President Biden’s expansion of Title IX protections, which includes prohibitions against harassment of transgender students.
Americans “don’t want to see, you know, men playing in women’s sports. They don’t,” Mr. Trump said. “They don’t want to see all of this transgender, which is, it’s just taken over.”
