In the final segment Tuesday evening of Jesse Watters’s Primetime interview with former Donald President Trump and his running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, some pointed questions were asked and answered. Watters’s sit down with Trump and Vance was the two Republican nominees’ first broadcast interview since their party’s convention that nominated them last week, and Trump’s first TV interview since he survived the assassination attempt on July 13. The duo’s Q&A with Watters was recorded in Grand Rapids, Michigan last Saturday afternoon, prior to Trump and Vance’s first joint rally. Trump was clear and direct in his answers that were broadcast in the final segment on Tuesday.
FOX News Media provided the video links and the transcript, from which I selected excerpts below.
The video links can be found here and here.
Watters’s first question was especially relevant, if not prescient, in light of President Biden’s surprise ending of his reelection campaign one day later and the Democrats’ subsequent circling of the wagons around Vice President Kamala Harris as the substitute candidate for the Democrat presidential nomination.
JESSE WATTERS, FOX NEWS HOST: Who’s more incompetent, Biden or Harris?
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Well, I would say that he is currently more incompetent. I think at a certain point he was probably slightly better than her, but not much. Like he was never known as a rocket scientist. You do know that, right? And I’m talking about 35, 40 years ago. This was not a rocket scientist. This is a guy that got elected because of COVID. They kept him in a basement. They wouldn’t let him talk. They wouldn’t let him -- I used to say, where is this guy? When’s he coming out? They ran a brilliant campaign, but is it a legal campaign? Everybody lied about him. He was grossly incompetent then, just as he is now. Now, he’s a little bit worse. Maybe a lot worse.
Former President Donald Trump responds to a question from FOX News’s host Jesse Watters, Grand Rapids, Michigan July 20, 2024 broadcast July 23, 2024 on FOX News’s Jesse Watters Primetime, screenshot of FOX News video used by permission
That brief segment was a tease, and more from the interview with Trump and Vance followed a commercial break. After some small talk about Trump and Vance playing golf together, Watters raised the issues of the importation of Fentanyl and the massive illegal immigration under Biden.
WATTERS: Mexico, are strikes against the cartel still on the table?
TRUMP: Absolutely.
WATTERS: Even against our biggest trading partner?
TRUMP: Absolutely. Mexico’s gonna have to straighten it out really fast, or the answer is absolutely. They’re killing 300,000 people a year with Fentanyl coming in. And China, by the way, will do what they have to do. They’re gonna do it just like I had to deal with President Xi. But then Biden never took it over. They were gonna give the death penalty to anybody sending Fentanyl our way. And that was part of my negotiation. They never did it because nobody forced it on our side.
You know, China has the death penalty for drug dealers, et cetera. And I said, they’re drug dealers. They -- they agreed with me. He agreed with me, death penalty for drug dealers, death penalty for people that send Fentanyl into our country. And that would have made a big -- that would have made a big difference.
But you know what happened? Nothing. Because, when Biden came in, nothing happened. And I don’t know why he’s so soft on China, but, boy, is he soft on China. But China’s sending -- almost 100 percent of it is from China, to the Mexican border. And then it’s coming in.
Mexico is gonna be given a very short period of time to police their border. I’m sure they’re gonna do not well. And then you’re gonna see the action start. And you know what’s gonna happen?
We’re gonna have -- we’re gonna have a lot of people living -- they’re killing 300,000, 350,000 -- not 100,000 or 90,000 -- I’d like to say 100,000. That’s a lot of people. That’s two Yankee stadiums, OK?
They’re killing 300,000 people, maybe more than that, and destroying families. Even if there’s no death, they’re destroying families. The families are decimated, and they’re destroyed.
WATTERS: And, Senator, your mother, victim of addiction.
VANCE: Yeah.
WATTERS: How’d she kick it?
VANCE: You know, just, she kept on getting back on the horse [author’s note: it’s unclear if Vance, in using the word “horse,” was referring to a slang term for heroin]. I know a lot of families struggle with addiction. I think my message is there is hope on the other side of addiction. You just have to keep on at it. And she’s getting -- getting close to 10 years clean and sober.
But the president’s point about this, if the poison that is coming across the border now had been coming across 20 years ago, I don’t think that my mom would be here. And she’s a great grandma to her three grandkids. And it’s -- it’s so, just, good to see her happy and healthy. A lot of families.
TRUMP: She was great the other night.
VANCE: Thank you, sir. I appreciate that.
TRUMP: She was great.
VANCE: She was so excited to be sitting next to you, and you were very kind to her, and I appreciate that. But a lot of families don’t get that chance at a second chance because of that poison that Biden’s letting into the country right now.
It -- it’s funny that people accuse us of being bombastic for saying the cartels, we need to go after ’em. What about American citizens who are losing their lives by the tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, because we won’t do something serious about the cartels?
That’s what’s reckless. It’s not actually doing something to stop ’em. I actually believe, Jesse, that the Mexican government, even though they couldn’t say that, they -- they want President Trump to be serious about the cartels because that poison is destabilizing their country, too, $14 billion coming into the cartels. And that was a couple of years ago. It’s probably more today. They’re not gonna be a real country anymore. They’re gonna become a narco-state unless we get some control over this.
WATTERS: Yeah, we could be a narco-state, too.
VANCE: We’re getting close to it.
WATTERS: Are you prepared for the hysteria from the left, legally --
TRUMP: Yes.
Watters turned the conversation to Trump’s pledge to conduct “mass deportations“ of illegal immigrants who have invaded the country.
WATTERS: -- bureaucratically, when you do mass deportations?
TRUMP: So, Dwight Eisenhower, who people consider a moderate, he probably wasn’t as moderate as people think, but Dwight Eisenhower did the largest deportation ever in this country. He was very big on not -- people not coming into our countries. People breaking our sealed borders, right?
And the hardest thing, in a certain way, is exactly what you said. We have to get some very bad people out of this country. And as soon as we grab, perhaps we take a woman with two children, three children, she shouldn’t be here, but she’s a nice woman. The children are beautiful. And all of a sudden, it ends up being a front-page story in the liberal newspapers.
And you’re right. It’s a hard thing to do. Harder than a long time ago with Dwight Eisenhower, right? A lot harder. Nobody complained. In those days, it was -- you know, we had a country that was much different. But we have no choice. We have to get the criminals out. These are murderers. These are drug dealers. These are people that will take women and put them in the trunk of a car and sell them to the highest bidder. They’ll come across the border, human traffickers, which is, you think of that as an ancient thing.
VANCE: Yes.
TRUMP: Actually, it’s almost as big as the drug trade now. You wouldn’t even believe this. And the reason is because of the internet. The internet has made that into a massive business. Human trafficking, it’s mostly in women. And all of these things, we have no choice, we have to do it.
VANCE: You’re right. The media will attack us for doing what we actually promise to do, which is get a lot of the violent criminals and the people who shouldn’t be here out of here. But one, that’s why leadership actually matters. I think President Trump showed during his first four years, he wasn’t willing to take on the lying media when he had to, and the country was better off for it. But you just start with the worst people, right?
But before you get into what you can’t do, I don’t understand why our entire governing class doesn’t ask, well, what’s the part you actually have to do? Why don’t we start there and then figure it out from there, right? Take it -- walk before you can run. Pretty common sense. It’s how it works in business. Certainly, I think how it should work in government.
TRUMP: Look, the problem is Mexico is petrified of the cartels, because they’ll take out...
VANCE: Exactly right.
TRUMP: ... a president in two minutes. And they’re petrified of the cartels. The cartels are running Mexico.
And I had a great relationship, as you know, with the president of Mexico. But I had Remain in Mexico. I had catch-and-release in Mexico. We released them in Mexico, not here. I did things that nobody believed I did -- that could be done.
Remember when I had Remain in Mexico? In other words, nobody could come into our country. They had to remain in Mexico. You think that was easy to get? And I got it. I got it because of tariffs.
I said, “If you don’t agree to it, I’m gonna put tariffs on your cars and everything you sell us at a level of 50 percent to 100 percent. And all of a sudden they said, “We would love to keep them in Mexico.”
(LAUGHTER)
“It would be a great honor to keep everybody in Mexico.”
VANCE: The art of the deal, right?
TRUMP: But we had...
(LAUGHTER)
No, we have great powers, if we -- if we had people that knew how to…
VANCE: That’s right.
TRUMP: ... use them. They don’t…
Next up was a discussion of the hoaxes that characterize the Biden Administration’s and its surrogates’ description of Donald Trump as an existential threat to democracy.
WATTERS: That’s how the bloodbath hoax started. You were talking about tariffs on cars from China through Mexico.
TRUMP: That’s right. That’s right.
Joe Biden calls for unity, lowering the temperature, and then goes out the other day and says you’re a dictator, a threat to democracy...
TRUMP: Yeah.
WATTERS: ... “fine people” hoax.
Does that language put you in danger?
TRUMP: You know, it’s interesting. I never took it seriously until now. Because people believe things when they hear it over and over. Biden gets up, he can’t read two sentences. He can’t put two sentences together. “Trump is a threat to democracy. He’s a threat.” He doesn’t even know what the hell he’s saying. He couldn’t even define the word democracy. And he says he’s [that is I, Trump’s] a threat.
Then I started realizing a couple of weeks ago, you know, every single time he gets up he calls me a threat to democracy. And he’s actually a threat to democracy because he’s grossly incompetent. I mean, that’s a big threat to democracy.
After another commercial break, the final segment featured a discussion of a plethora of important issues including the war in Ukraine, the Israeli war against Hamas, the American hostages held in Gaza since last October 7, how to prevent wars, the wokeness of the U.S. military, A.I., the Climate Change hoax, and the mandates for E.V. automobiles.
WATTERS: In terms of Ukraine, you get in there. Do you pull funding right away in the middle of a war?
TRUMP: So I spoke yesterday, as you know, President Zelenskyy called me and we had a good talk. And I said, we got to get this war over. This is a war machine. You’re facing a war machine. That’s what they do is they fight wars. They beat Hitler. They beat Napoleon. They’re fighting a war.
And the spring offensive never happened. And I hear they had millions of mines put down and they had thousands of army tanks, meaning the Russians.
And I said, “We’ve got to get this war over with.” A lot of Russians are being killed, but a lot of Ukrainians being killed. It’s a whole mess, should have never happened. Biden should have never allowed this to happen. This was an easy stop. This was zero chance of happening. And it didn’t happen for my four years. You know, “It would have happened.” It didn’t happen.
And President Putin would have never done it -- never, ever. Two reasons, number one, the oil prices were low. I kept them low. I kept gasoline low. I kept oil low. And he wouldn’t have had the money to prosecute it. As soon as these guys came in, the oil went to almost $100 a barrel, which is double what it should be. And all of a sudden he’s got tremendous amounts of money that he didn’t have -- Russia had.
So they did the war. And in my opinion, every single thing that Biden said was the opposite of what he should have said. I watched this happening. I said, “He’s -- he’s saying the wrong things. He’s saying absolutely the opposite of what he should be saying.”
I think one of the reasons Putin went in is because, when he saw Afghanistan, the way we got out -- not that we got out; I was gonna get out. I would have been out sooner, but we would have been out with dignity and strength.
When people saw that, like Putin, like President Xi of China, strong guy, strong man. When they saw that, Jesse, they said, “This is our time.” And that’s why he went in, in my opinion. That’s why he went into Ukraine.
I mean, he went to Ukraine when he saw how bad we were with Afghanistan. He said, “These people are incompetent. They don’t” -- and we do -- we have incompetent leaders, but we have great -- because I defeated ISIS in a very short number of weeks. And they were fighting ’em for years.
I -- we have a great military. And they’re not woke, at the -- they’re not woke.
WATTERS: No.
TRUMP: Because I have generals in there that are great, not the ones on television that you see, that you hear, the Milleys and the Mattises. We have great generals. These are not woke people. And we have a great military, too. And they’re not gonna be woke.
WATTERS: No.
TRUMP: Even -- look, we’re gonna win. We gotta win.
WATTERS: Are we gonna be able to end the Ukraine war in three weeks?
VANCE: Well, like the president said, Jesse, the best way to stop a war is to prevent a war. And one of the real interesting things is, you know, I always talk about how the world actually respected President Trump. And all these crazies and the media say, “No, no, that’s not -- that’s not true.”
I sit in classified briefings in the United States Senate. Without revealing state secrets, people were terrified that, if they got too out of line, that President Trump would actually hit back and hit back hard. That’s the way you establish deterrence.
OK, now we’ve already got a war, you’ve got to be willing to engage in diplomacy and do the things that need to be done. And I think President Trump did that better than anybody.
So it really just requires leadership, and people -- I think a lot of Americans who aren’t, maybe, decided are saying, “Well, how do we get from four years of President Trump, where we had a relative calm and stability all over the world, and now it’s like, every continent now has a new conflict?”
And the answer is, you went from a guy who knew what he was doing to Joe Biden. And whether it’s Joe Biden or somebody else, it’s gonna be the same policies, the same staff, the same diplomats. We need to completely change course and change direction. That requires us to elect President Trump.
WATTERS: American hostages, still in…
VANCE: Still in there.
WATTERS: ... Gaza.
VANCE: It should be a scandal. It should be the biggest scandal in the country. We have Americans -- not, not Israelis, of course we wouldn’t get the Israelis -- American citizens being held by terrorists. The president seems not to care about it.
WATTERS: Hostages in Russia, Evan.
TRUMP: We’re gonna get ’em all back.
WATTERS: How?
TRUMP: Well, I’m gonna make a phone call. We’re gonna get ’em back.
We’re gonna have ’em back fast.
WATTERS: What’s your plan for A.I.?
TRUMP: Well, we’re going to be big for A.I. But you know, A.I. requires unbelievable amounts of electricity.
VANCE: Absolutely.
TRUMP: You know this. Do you know we need twice as much electricity as we currently have in our country for A.I.? But the environmentalists won’t let you produce it. They want wind. The wind, is it blowing today? The whole thing is the most expensive hoax in the world. The wind. It kills our birds. If you want to see a bird cemetery, go under a windmill sometime, you’ll see a bird there.
You know? If you shoot a bald eagle, or an eagle of any kind, they put you in jail for two years. Go under a windmill, see how many eagles are under there, nobody goes to jail. It’s -- they say the environmentalists like them, I don’t know what’s to like, it ruins everything. And it’s the single most expensive form of energy. And then, by the way, every nine years you have to replace them.
WATTERS: They’re falling apart off the coast of Nantucket. They’ve shut down all the beaches right now.
VANCE: Yes.
TRUMP: Well, these are mechanical machines. You know, people think, oh, we built them. But you’re going to have to replace them, and especially the ones in the ocean.
VANCE: Yes.
TRUMP: The salt water just absolutely eats through the steel like it’s nothing. Anyway, we have a lot of things to do, and we can do it, we’ll do it fast, and we do it with common sense. I call it the party of common sense because 90 percent of the things we’ve talked about over the years, common sense, like, we don’t want all electric cars. You want an electric car, it’s great, but not everybody wants an electric car. They want to go far. They don’t want to pay China or they don’t want to pay too much because an electric car is more expensive.
WATTERS: Does Elon Musk hate it when you bash electric cars?
TRUMP: Well, I love Elon. And I have to tell you this about this, he endorsed me. He announced he’s giving me $45 million a month. And yet, I’m against certain electrics. I love electric cars for people that want them. People that don’t want to drive across the country. People that don’t want to go long distances. You’d have to stop too much. But if you go back and forth or whatever, I think they have a great place.
And here’s the thing with Elon that’s amazing and I -- I keep waiting -- he has never once, as you know, he endorsed me just recently and I’ve been making this whole thing about electric cars and the mandate for electric cars, another mandate for the electric cars. And I’ll tell you, he’s never called me and said, could you lay off the electric car?
I think -- because I think electric cars are fantastic for certain people. So right now, you’re selling 6 percent, 7 percent. They want you to go to 100 percent all electric.
And the other day I saw they built chargers like the gas pump.
WATTERS: Right.
TRUMP: Someplace in the Midwest, they built eight chargers. They cost $9 billion and two of ’em don’t work, okay? $9 billion.
WATTERS: Right.
TRUMP: This country doesn’t have enough -- the whole world doesn’t have enough money to -- we don’t have enough money to even think about. It would cost $5 trillion to build chargers so that we could charge electric cars. And yet under our feet, we have more liquid gold than any country in the world, including Saudi Arabia and including Russia.
And we’re going to start using it and we’re going to start paying down debt and lowering taxes.
VANCE: Yeah. And the president talks about jobs all the time, the effect of jobs. If you go to 100 percent electric cars, everybody that’s making carburetors, transmissions --
TRUMP: Yeah.
VANCE: -- traditional gas-powered cars are going to be out of the job.
If you go to 100 percent electric, Pennsylvania, Michigan become economic wastelands, especially Michigan. Again, another reason it’s important to elect President Trump. Drill, baby drill, right? Drill, baby, drill. Right? That -- that -- it’s such a simple line, but it’s true.
Like I said, we have basically unlimited energy resources. We just have to allow our own people to get it out of the ground.
WATTERS: Before we let you guys go. There was a few questions from fans, real quick.
Have you heard DJ Donald Trump with his iPad?
(LAUGHTER)
WATTERS: Not yet?
VANCE: I -- I will say that my all time favorite music video is “November Rain“ by Guns N’ Roses. The first time I ever play -- I ever sat on his airplane. He played “November Rain“ by Guns N’ Roses. So it was meant to be at least a little bit.
Okay. J.D. Vance, what does the J.D. stand for?
VANCE: James David.
WATTERS: Did you know that?
TRUMP: Yes.
(LAUGHTER)