Donald Trump sat down with TIME magazine for an extensive interview to mark the first 100 days of his second term and delivered a series of White House whoppers.
While the president loves to blast the media, he has a soft spot for the magazine. He has long coveted twice being named TIME’s Person of the Year, and even showcased a fake cover featuring himself at his golf clubs.
In the wide-ranging interview, the president claimed without providing any details that he had locked in “200 deals” as the global economy has been rocked by his widespread tariffs and trade war fears.
When TIME asked him why there haven’t been any trade deals so far, Trump said “no, there’s many deals.”
No trade deals have been announced to date since Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” on April 2, despite the president caving and halting some of the announced tariffs for 90 days amid market turmoil.
“You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals,” Trump said in the interview.
“I’ve made 200 deals,” he claimed.
However, he refused to share who he has made the deals with, declaring “the deal is a deal that I choose” before rambling about setting tariffs.
The first 100 days of President Donald Trump’s second term have been among the most destabilizing in American history.He sat down with TIME at the White House on April 22 for a rare long-form, on-the-record interview about the last three months. Read our story:… pic.twitter.com/FkCTUxCviT
— TIME (@TIME) April 25, 2025
The president suggested that the deals would be announced over the next three to four weeks” and would be finished.
The president also claimed the U.S. is losing $2 trillion on trade a year, but the trade deficit with the rest of the world was $917 billion last year, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.
Throughout the hour-long interview at the White House on April 22, the president also repeated some of his favorite falsities.
When it came to inflation, the president repeated his claim that the price of groceries has gone down. However, the price of groceries was up 2.4 percent in March from a year ago.
The president had a separate eye-popping exchange during the interview when it came to his administration’s mass deportations and the effort to return Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
The 29-year-old dad was wrongfully sent to an Elsavadoran prison due to an “administrative error.”
The president said he believes in the U.S. court system despite his numerous attacks on judges who have ruled against him since he retook office.
However when it came to the return of Garcia, the president insisted he was not defying the 9-0 Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.
“Well, that’s not what my people told me—they didn’t say it was, they said it was—the nine to nothing was something entirely different,” Trump said.
TIME quoted the order to the president and asked directly if Trump was facilitating a release.
“I leave that to my lawyers. I give them no instructions. They feel that the order said something very much different from what you’re saying, but I leave that to my lawyers,’ he responded.
He acknowledged that he had not asked El Salvador President Nayib Bukele to return Garcia.
“But if you haven’t asked him, then how are you facilitating his release?” TIME asked.
“Well, because I haven’t been asked to ask him by my attorneys. Nobody asked me to ask him that question, except you,’ Trump told TIME.
Earlier this month, Trump met with Bukele in the Oval Office where the El Salvador leader said he did not have the power to return Garcia to the U.S.
During the interview, the president continued to blast his predecessor President Biden over the border and illegal immigration.
The president ran on mass deportations in the 2024 election and frequently brought up the border and accused illegal immigrants of being criminals at his rallies. He continued to repeat his claims about immigration to TIME.
“Many criminals, they emptied their prisons, many countries, almost every country, but not a complete emptying, but some countries a complete emptying of their prison system,’ Trump told TIME while discussing illegal immigration.
It was a claim he often made on the campaign trail without evidence, baffling immigration experts.
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