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Trump Speaks on One-Year Anniversary of His Second Inauguration. Aired 2:30-3p ET

Aired January 20, 2026 - 14:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[14:30:00]

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: ... this country in the world, if it's a country, I don't even think it's a country, there's no organization on it. They don't have police, they don't have military, they don't have anything, they just have people running around killing each other and trying to pirate ships. But she'll come here, comes, and then she wants to tell us how to run our country.

The Constitution says that I am entitled to this. I can't stand her. Terminated all taxpayer-funded benefits for legal aid.

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN HOST: All right, we are going to just come out of this press conference here for a moment. We'll be going back into it as we monitor it and as we wait for the president perhaps to take some questions. I'm joined by Jeff Zeleny.

We have Dana Bash with us. We also have Daniel Dale, Matt Egan, and Elie Honig with us as well here. That, Dana, is, continues to be, it's a pretty winding, even by Trumpian standards, appearance that he's making here as he's trying to have this kind of victory lap on the one-year anniversary.

He's always coming back to immigration. And there are a lot of things to fact-check, which we will, but just your impressions here.

DANA BASH, CNN ANCHOR AND CHIEF POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, he's been speaking for about 45 minutes and hasn't taken questions yet. Hopefully he will. But the way that he started this press conference on his first year in office was very telling about what he knows deep down is a very big problem for him.

And you said it, it's immigration. And he is so confident in his ability to sway public opinion that it's, the fact that he had these photos of people printed out and he just held them up one by one talking about what he said were the crimes, the alleged crimes that people committed who were in the United States illegally. That is his attempt to counter a visual that we are seeing, all seeing on our phones of what's happening on the ground in Minneapolis.

Whether or not he can take this feeling of public opinion and single- handedly shift it with photos and with his words as he has done in some ways, in some instances in the past, that remains to be seen. But you can see where his mind is right now, despite what he's saying, what he actually realizes is the reality. ERICA HILL, CNN HOST: And to that point, I think some of the other things that we could point out, and I want to bring Elie Honig in on this in just a moment, those images, right, they say worst of the worst. We don't have the details on what he claims are these alleged crimes. But he also noted at one point that a number of the ICE agents, in his words, are Hispanics, going on to say, I love Hispanics.

He said that sometimes they'll make mistakes and be too rough sometimes. Said he felt horrible about the death of Renee Good. Called it a tragedy, which we have not heard from him, really.

I mean, he was, of course, gave that interview in the Oval Office of the New York Times, watched the video, claimed that she had rammed the ICE officer, and then realized he was wrong.

JEFF ZELENY, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL AFFAIRS CORRESPONDENT: I mean, to Dana's point, he is trying to reframe this now. What he knows is a problem. The kind words for Renee Good, you know, while not changing his position on the ICE operation, I thought was very telling as he tries to reframe this.

He also left out the part of the fact that U.S. attorneys there have resigned who were overseeing the investigation of fraud, which is the main reason for his obsession with Minneapolis. But I think what we are seeing here now, if you look back to a year ago, and if you look back to the beginning of the second year of his first term, this is a very different Donald Trump. He's low energy, for sure.

He returned to Washington after a night at the National Championship, a football game, of course. He'll be leaving tonight for Davos to give a very big speech tomorrow. This is a Donald Trump who is still standing up there at the moment, who barely resembles the president in his first term.

He is -- just has an entirely different set of energy and capacity to hold that room. That said, one thing I think was notable, he is beginning the second year in a very similar way, blaming Joe Biden for everything from inflation to immigration. So that will remain a soundtrack of this a year.

But he benefits tremendously from Joe Biden in terms of how he looks right now. It does not look like the Donald Trump from 2017, 2018. He is an older person, and I think we should be explicit about that.

KEILAR: Yes. Elie Honig, let's bring you in. Your thoughts as you are watching this.

ELIE HONIG, CNN SENIOR LEGAL ANALYST: Well, Brianna, to Dana's point, one of the primary thrusts of this speech is that they are focusing on the worst of the worst dangerous criminals in Minnesota and Minneapolis. That to be sure is partially true.

[14:35:00]

There have been plenty of people who've been arrested and prosecuted and deported who have committed heinous crimes. The president had some placards there of some people. But let's get some overarching context here. I think it's important.

The healthy majority of people who've been picked up by federal authorities in Minnesota do not have criminal records other than being in the country illegally. And ICE actually released some data on this a few months ago that showed 37 percent, only about 37 percent of the people they've arrested in Minnesota have a prior conviction and only about 19 percent of the people who've been arrested by ICE in Minnesota have a pending case.

So, again, there are some people who absolutely have committed serious crimes beyond being in this country illegally. But the healthy majority of the people who have been swept up in this ICE operation are people who are indeed here illegally, but have not committed any other crime, violent or otherwise, on top of that.

HILL: We also want to bring in, I don't know if we can bring Daniel Dalen yet, but to your point, Brianna, there's actually a fair amount to fact check here. And Daniel, some of these are, I mean, I guess in some ways it's the greatest hits, right, that we are hearing from the president bringing them out again. But just walk us through.

I mean, we're talking about numbers on inflation, on the deficit, on the trade deficit, cuts in drug prices. Just help us fact check what we are hearing from the president in this moment -- Daniel.

DANIEL DALE, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: A lot of inaccurate numbers. So he again claimed that he secured 18 trillion in investment in the U.S. That number is pure fiction. It is nearly double the 9.6 trillion number the White House's own website uses. And my detailed review found that even that number is wildly exaggerated. He spoke of securing deals with drug makers to get 300, 400, 500, 600 percent reductions in prescription drug prices. He has secured some deals, but those numbers are debunked by math itself.

A 100 percent reduction would mean drugs would be free. A reduction of, say, 600 percent would mean Americans were getting paid to acquire their medications, which we know is not happening. And it wasn't just numbers.

He spoke, as he often does, of many countries. He identified Venezuela and the Congo, opening up prisons and mental institutions and dropping people in them in the U.S. He's never presented a shred of proof that that has happened anywhere, let alone in many countries have done it.

He spoke of ending a war between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. That war is ongoing. It never stopped, despite Trump-brokered peace agreements that did not involve the main rebel militia doing the fighting.

And on gas prices, a very important number, as we know, in U.S. politics, he said they're saying the average gas price is now $2.31 per gallon. I don't know who they are, guys, but the actual national average is about $2.82 today. He also said that in some places is $1.99. Well, yes, in some places, but a tiny number of places. The firm GasBuddy told me that as of today, fewer than 100 stations around the country were selling for under $2, aside from special discounts. That's out of 150,000 stations GasBuddy tracks.

And then I'll just add on Minnesota, you did some good fact-checking yourself. He made highly unproven claims, let's say, about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar accusing her of corruption with no specifics at all and saying that protesters there are professionals.

He says he knows this because of the way they talked, the way they shouted. I don't know. There are some protesters involved with, say, activist groups, but we know that many average Americans are also upset about what they're seeing in their communities with regard to immigration.

So certainly no evidence that these are all, you know, paid professionals, as the president continues to allege.

KEILAR: Yes, very important fact check. And let's listen back to the president, who one of the things he is, we've been monitoring this. One of the things he said is he's talking about military going places.

He said that a town looks better with military in it. But let's listen in. He's been talking about Minnesota.

Let's see what he's saying now.

TRUMP: ... Nationwide achieved the largest reduction in violent crime on record. So this just came out nationwide over the last 11 months, achieved the largest reduction in violent crime on record, including the largest one year drop in murders ever recorded. Almost 2,000 lives were saved.

That's despite the fact that we took in criminals under the leadership of the Democrats and Joe Biden. More motor vehicle theft is down by 100,000 vehicles nationwide. That's another nationwide.

The motor vehicle theft is at -- was out of control and now it's very much in control. So it was down by more than 100,000 vehicles to a low -- record low. Began the process of eliminating cashless bail policies across the nation.

You got to get rid of your sanctuary cities. And I hope our people know that we're not going to pay sanctuary cities. We're not going to pay them anymore. There are sanctuary for criminals.

They hold criminals. We're not going to pay. They can sue us and maybe they'll win.

But we're not giving money to sanctuary cities anymore. As of the beginning of the month.

[14:40:00]

We began the process of eliminating the cashless bail. Well, cashless bail is where it all started. It's a disaster. And then other places. I don't know if it started in New York. I

remember it starting in New York. So somebody comes in, murders somebody, and they let him out. No bail, no nothing.

Basically, cashless bail means you just get the hell out. And they go outside. We have one case where a guy murders somebody, gets released and goes out and murders somebody.

Two people in one day. No, we got to get rid of cashless bail. They got to pay.

Got to have bail. There's a reason for bail. Long tested.

Signed an executive order to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums. We're going to have to bring them back. Hate to bill those suckers, but you got to get the people off the streets.

You know, we used to have, when I was growing up, we had in my area in Queens, I grew up in Queens, we had a place called Creedmoor. Creedmoor. Did anybody know that?

Creedmoor. It was big. I said, Mom, why are those bars on the building?

I used to play little league baseball there, a place called Cunningham Park, was quite the baseball player. You wouldn't believe. But I said to my mother, mom, she would be there always there for me.

She said, son, you could be a professional baseball player. I said, thanks, mom. I said, why are those bars on the windows?

Big building, big, powerful building. It loomed over the park, actually. She said, well, people that are very sick are in that building.

I said, boy, I used to always look at that building and I'd see big building, big, tall building. It loomed over the park. It was sort of now that I think it was pretty unfriendly site.

But I'll never forget. I don't know if it's still there because they got rid of most of them. You know, they -- the Democrats in New York, they took them down and the people live on the streets.

You know, that's why you have a lot of the people in California and other places. They live in the streets. They took the mental institutions down, they're expensive.

But I'd say, why is it building up those bars? Boy, it didn't. It wasn't normal.

You know, you're used to looking at like a window. But this when you look at it, all the steel, vicious steel, tiny windows, bars all over the place. Nobody was getting out.

It's called a mental institution. That was an insane asylum. Designated Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization and many

others. It is. America is respected again on the world stage. It's another topic.

Obliterated Iran's nuclear enrichment capability and Operation Midnight Hammer was one of the most successful anyone's ever seen. CNN, fake news. I don't know where they are.

CNN. Anybody from CNN? Fake news.

Nobody wants to raise their hand anymore. They used to argue. Now, if you're with CNN, you don't raise your hand.

They said, well, maybe it wasn't that successful, which I really went and was angry because these pilots took their life in their hands. Two o'clock in the morning with no moon, dead, dark gun shooting at them. They went in with those beautiful B2s, and every single bomb went down an air shaft and obliterated it.

And CNN came out and said, well, maybe it wasn't -- by the same -- by a scam writer, a scam writer who wrote, you know, fake stories, a lot of fake stories on other topics. That's when we did it. And we said, that's a terrible thing.

You know, the pilots came back and they said we hit everything. They did a great job. Then on top of that, we launched from a submarine about 30 Tomahawks on top of everything else.

The place was obliterated. CNN said, well, maybe it wasn't that bad. It was turned out it was worse than it was.

You know who could tell you that? The Iranians would tell you that. Because if they do anything, they're going to have to start a brand new place.

But they did an amazing job. That was a -- it was like what we did with Venezuela. I mean, nobody's ever seen a military operation like that.

Ended eight unendable wars in 10 months. These were unendable wars, Cambodia and Thailand fighting for years, Kosovo and Serbia. The Congo and Rwanda, Pakistan and India, they were really going at it.

Eight planes shot down. They were going to go nuclear, in my opinion. The prime minister of Pakistan was here, and he said President Trump saved 10 million people and maybe much more than that. They're both nuclear countries.

Israel and Iran. Egypt and Ethiopia were going to fight over a dam. And I got them to stop.

[14:45:00]

I still got to work it out because they put a dam up in Ethiopia that stops the flow from a little river called the Nile. I always think of the Nile being in Egypt, you know, beautiful Nile with the pyramids. But they put a dam up.

You know who paid for the dam? The United States, the biggest dam, I think, in the world. They put a dam up. I said, how did you let that happen?

Why would we have done that? We financed it. This country would.

I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it was a Republican president, but I don't think it was.

I think it was a Democrat. But what a terrible thing. So Egypt basically is -- they don't have enough water in the Nile.

And they use that for a lot of things, including entertainment and travel and tourism and everything. I mean, I don't know. They got a big dam. I got to work that one out now, too.

Armenia and Azerbaijan. President Putin told me, I cannot believe you settled that war. I've been trying to settle that war for 10 years. Armenia and Azerbaijan. They were fighting it for many, many years.

And I ended up getting the heads of the both countries in my office. Beautiful Oval Office. Much more beautiful now than it ever was.

And one sat on one side, one side on the other, said, you know, I've been the head of Azerbaijan for 22 years and for 22 years I've been killing his people. And the other gentleman, and both very good guys, said, I've been here for seven years and for seven years I've been killing his people. And they started over there.

And within an hour they were next to each other. And by the time we ended, they were hugging each other. And it's been a great peace, you know, should have gotten the Nobel Prize for each war.

But I don't say that. I saved millions and millions of people. And don't let anyone tell you that Norway doesn't control the shots, OK?

It's in Norway. Norway controls the shots. They'll say we have nothing to do with it.

It's a joke. They've lost such prestige. Got all.

That's why I have such respect for Maria doing what she did. She said, I don't deserve the Nobel Prize. He does.

When she got it, they named -- they said, wow, that's amazing. I thought President Trump would get it. President Trump deserves it.

He ended up eight wars. How nice. Right.

It's a good woman. Got all 20 living hostages returned to their families and the remains. They all came out.

We got the 20 living hostages. We got the 28 hostages. They have one left that we think we know where it is.

Amazing. Looked like we weren't going to get anywhere near that. Now they've gotten almost.

And more importantly, we got many more hundreds, we got them all. If we didn't -- if we didn't do it, you wouldn't have had most of those people would have been dead. I don't know if that's covered properly, but, you know, the 20 is great.

They were the last ones. I always said the last 20 are going to be hard, but we got them. We got the last 20 and we got close to 28 of the of the bodies of the dead.

And to those parents, that was just as important as getting their son back alive. They were almost even more intent on getting -- they knew their son was dead. They wanted to get the body. I got him back.

We just created the Board of Peace, which I think is going to be amazing. I wish the United Nations could do more. I wish we didn't need a Board of Peace, but the United Nations -- you know, with all the wars I settled, the United Nations never helped me on one war. I mean, I guess I'm not blaming them.

I didn't call them to help. But I got, you know, the presidents and prime ministers together. We knocked heads.

We got along. And they like me. I like them.

Every single one of them nominated me for a Nobel Prize. Every one of the wars, among many other people, nominated me for a Nobel Prize. But Putin told me, I cannot believe you got this war settled. I've worked on it for 10 years because it's his territory.

Rescued 83 American hostages and citizens detained from abroad without paying a lot of money. Paid no money.

Apprehended terrorists responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing that claimed the lives of 13 U.S. servicemembers in Afghanistan, the lowest point in the history of our country. That was a Biden disaster. I was getting out, but I was getting out with dignity and strength.

We were the boss. Oh, we were the boss. They wouldn't do a thing against us.

And this very stupid person got in, and what a shame. He should have left from Bagram, which is the big military base, which has hundreds of acres around it. Should have left from Bagram.

Terminated visas of Hamas sympathizers and deported pro-jihad foreign nationals.

[14:50:00]

Got NATO members to agree to raise defense spending to 5 percent of GDP from 2 percent. And they pay the 5 percent, and they didn't pay the 2 percent. And by the way, I did more for NATO than any other person alive or dead.

Nobody's done for NATO. And I think for the most part, they'll tell you that. I think you could ask the secretary general about that.

But he said it. I've done more for NATO than anybody ...

HILL: President Trump continuing to speak here. We are now at an hour that the president has been at the podium there in the White House briefing room, going through a rambling, I think it's clear, a rambling list of what he sees as some achievements. And going back to things multiple times.

Dana, as we're watching this, there are so many different themes that he has tried to hit. But we were just talking briefly. One of the things coming out of the gate that he had to say was he was throwing part of his team under the bus in the way that what he sees as his accomplishments he feels have not been properly projected, if you will, or communicated.

BASH: And that specifically was about the economic situation that this country is in. And he said, I don't know, maybe it's just I don't have a good public relations team. I mean, I can't imagine this president having a better spokesperson for him that is more aligned with him than the one that he has, who I think is sitting there.

This is not a comms issue on the economy. This is a word that he doesn't like to use. This is an affordability issue.

And it is the same -- I mean, you can cut and paste, you know, the kind of thing that President Biden and his advisers said about the economy with what this president and with people around him are saying about the economy, that what you see, that the numbers are getting better, that the data are getting better. And in most ways, that is true.

They're not wrong about that. But as good as the president is at the power of persuasion, he is not going to be able to persuade people who go to the grocery store or take out their electricity bill and have trouble paying it, that that is not happening to them. And that is the problem.

It is not a comms issue. It is a -- an economic and I don't know if it's policy. It's just a reality issue.

ZELENY: And for all the hour here, how much time did he spend talking about the biggest legislative achievement? The one Big, Beautiful Bill? Barely a mention.

A quick mention of it. But that is also one of the issues here. I mean, that was designed to help people economically, but that really has not come to pass.

KEILAR: That's a really good point. And let's bring in Matt Egan to this conversation about economics. He's touting the stock market performance during his presidency, which, you know, it has increased, Matt.

But today, it's certainly not cooperating with the narrative. It is, I think, demonstrating the narrative of his presidency, which is the volatility, right?

We see it even hopping around as we're speaking here. Part of that because of these tariff threats against allies over Greenland today. I wonder what you're seeing in his comments.

MATT EGAN, CNN SENIOR REPORTER: Yes, well, Brianna, his comments do set up this sort of surreal split screen moment where he is taking a victory lap for the stock market performance during his presidency at a time when U.S. stocks are tumbling, right? The Dow is down almost 2 percent, nearly 900 points. The Nasdaq today is down by more than 2 percent.

And this selloff is not happening randomly. This is happening because investors are rattled. They're rattled by the president's quest to use tariffs to take over Greenland, right?

I mean, the president has announced this plan to put 10 percent tariffs on eight of the U.S.'s European allies, including Germany and France and the U.K., planning to double that tariff by June 1 if there's no deal on Greenland. And look, it's true that the market is up since the president took office.

But I don't think, to Dana's point, I don't think that's what people are focusing on right now, right? They're focusing on the real economy, on the pocketbook issues.

And on that front, one of the big negatives of the president's first year in office has been the job market, right? The unemployment rate has gone up under Trump.

Job growth has slowed significantly. The U.S. economy has added, last year, it added less than 600,000 jobs. That might sound like a lot, but that's the worst job growth for the U.S. economy outside of a recession since 2003 under George W. Bush.

And the president talked about inflation. He claimed a couple of times that there was no inflation or very little inflation. And the inflation rate has come down a bit, but that, of course, doesn't mean that prices are down. It means they're just going up at a slower pace.

[14:55:00]

And, in fact, some things that are exposed to the president's tariffs have gotten more expensive over the last year. Bananas are 6 percent more expensive, audio equipment, double-digit price increases, coffee 20 percent more expensive. All of those things are exposed to the tariffs that the president says are helping the economy, but they're not creating the manufacturing jobs that the president has promised, at least not yet.

HILL: In terms of jobs, too, I think it's important to note he talked about the large number that we know of federal jobs that were cut. CNN has done such extensive and important reporting about the impact on those federal workers, how they felt about it.

The president's saying here -- and I'm quoting him -- "We're proud of the fact that we cut so many because I didn't want to cut," he said. "I don't want to cut people when you cut them, but then they can go out and get a better job."

And he's, I mean, the fact that he is saying this is that I don't like doing that, but I don't feel bad. He then went on to claim that they were getting private sector jobs, making better money.

And while they didn't like him initially, now they do. That's not the case for all of these federal workers. In some cases, people have gotten other jobs.

But there are still people who are still -- there are people who are still out of work. And it's an interesting note. You talk about a comms issue.

That's when you may want to correct it as a communications issue.

BASH: Yes. And it's not just, you know, sort of run of the mill federal worker at an agency that's alphabet soup that nobody's ever heard of. We're talking about entire agencies and entire programs that have been part of the American sort of fabric for decades that are now just gone.

USAID is gone. It's just -- and what it does internationally, it's going to be very hard to bring that back in the future. So it's not just about federal workers who are, you know, important and they obviously are a big part of the story of the first year of this second term, but it's about what they actually did.

HILL: Yes.

ZELENY: And it matters because of things like Iran. I mean, Iran is still very much on the radar of a potential of doing something there. So USAID would have been very significant.

I was in Atlanta last week talking to a fired CDC worker. One third of the CDC is no longer there. So these are things that, you know, have been eliminated over the last year.

And it will be -- take a lot to rebuild.

KEILAR: Yes. And I'm not sure what data he's pointing to. He sort of painting this narrative of people being fired from public service, but they're being plugged into the private sector where they're actually doing real work and actually providing a public service.

And I do think that from the reporting that a lot of us have done talking to federal workers, you know, and certainly in some of the cases of people I've spoken with, it's actually the opposite. You know, I've spoken with workers who were helping mom and pop farmers and now are arguably doing work that they're not as proud of, feeling that they are doing things that actually work against mom and pop farmers.

So that is certainly something -- he's painting a narrative. And I'm not sure exactly what facts back up that narrative at this point in time.

Let's bring in Daniel Dale to kind of take us through another bit of a fact check of what you've been hearing here -- Daniel.

DALE: So the president repeated his claim that he achieved no tax on Social Security in a so-called Big, Beautiful Bill. He did not do that. What that bill did is create an additional temporary tax deduction for people age 65 plus.

But many of those people, millions, will still be paying tax on their Social Security benefits, not to mention the millions of Social Security recipients below age 65.

Now, he based his his complaint about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize on his claim that he ended eight unendable wars. He has not ended eight unendable wars, in fact, not ended eight wars at all.

His list includes a diplomatic dispute between Egypt and Ethiopia that was not a war at all under President Trump. It includes that Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo war that again has not ended. It's ongoing.

It includes something else that was not a war under President Trump, some sort of mystery dispute between Serbia and Kosovo. It also includes the Thailand-Cambodia border dispute that flared back up again in December. It does not seem to be a durable, long-term peace.

So yes, he has played a role in resolving some conflicts this year, that's to his credit, but that eight number is clearly exaggerated.

KEILAR: All right, Daniel, thank you so much. Let's listen back in to President Trump.

TRUMP: ... We made a deal with South Korea and with Japan that gives us money, the likes of which nobody's ever seen before. Signed executive orders to end Biden's war on coal and put, I say, clean, beautiful coal. I never say the word coal. This has to be preceded by the words clean, beautiful coal.

And put miners back to work. The miners love Trump. I think I got 100 percent of their vote.

We banned transgenders from the military. We don't want transgender in the military. Ordered reinstatement of patriots expelled from our military with full back pay. We had some people that were terminated and they're coming back into our military.

Fired the woke boards of visitors at our military service academies, the boards of visitors were run by radical left, maybe communist ...

END