Last night, President Trump offered his first TV interview since assuming office, and things got...interesting.
During the ABC special President Trump: The First Interview, the new POTUS sat down with World News Tonight anchor David Muir at the White House. They discussed everything from how Trump has processed the "magnitude" of his new job to his fixation with the size of the presidential inauguration crowds to his thoughts on issues such as the southern border wall and the unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud during the election.
Ahead, five things we learned from the interview.
He's still repeating false claims about voter fraud and the size of inauguration crowds.
Even though it's been over two months since the election, the president is still fixated on the false claim that there was widespread voter fraud, especially coming from undocumented immigrants. "You have people that are registered who are dead, who are illegals, who are in two states. You have people registered in two states," he said during the interview. "They're registered in a New York and a New Jersey. They vote twice. There are millions of votes, in my opinion." One thing to note is that Trump's advisor, Steve Bannon, as well as his daughter, Tiffany Trump, are indeed registered to vote in two different states. However, the claim that massive voter fraud happens during U.S. elections has been debunked over and over and over again. Trump also argued about the size of his inauguration crowds, in the same way his press secretary Sean Spicer did during an unofficial press briefing last Saturday. "When I looked at the numbers that happened to come in from all of the various sources, we had the biggest audience in the history of inaugural speeches," he said. This statement is, however, unproven — and as Muir said, "I think the American people can look at images side-by-side and decide for themselves."AdvertisementADVERTISEMENT
Here’s a crowd comparison of Trump’s inauguration with Obama’s https://t.co/JVoYWqpwru pic.twitter.com/aSoajVPn1B
— BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) January 20, 2017
He's not over his loss of the popular vote.
After discussing the issue of voting fraud, Trump shifted gears to talk about the election (that he won). "I would've won the popular vote if I was campaigning for the popular vote. I would've gone to California where I didn't go at all. I would've gone to New York where I didn't campaign at all," he said. "I would've gone to a couple of places that I didn't go to. And I would've won that much easier than winning the electoral college." When Muir pointed out that it seemed like Trump was "relitigating" the election, even though he was in fact the winner, the president said that wasn't the case. "We're looking at it for the next time," he said, referring to the 2020 presidential election. "No, no, you have to understand, I had a tremendous victory, one of the great victories ever." That isn't true. Trump's victory margin is actually somewhere between the lowest fourth and lowest fifth in the history of the Electoral College.