Time Undercuts Trump Interview With 2,300-Word Fact Check
Time magazine contested Donald Trump’s claims about undocumented immigrants, a link between vaccines and autism, and gender-transition regret in a sprawling fact-check published alongside its Person of the Year interview.
The president-elect was awarded the magazine’s Person of the Year title—which has gone to influential figures as disparate as Taylor Swift and Joseph Stalin—for the second time, having also won it in 2016. Trump proudly attended the award ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.
In an interview with Time for the award, Trump made a number of bold statements, saying, for one, that his election campaign was “72 days of fury” after his July assassination attempt and that he won because “the country was angry.”
When it came to some of Trump’s most dubious statements, though, the magazine apparently felt a need to intervene.
More than any other topic, the 2,300-word fact-check combats Trump’s remarks on the border and immigration.
In addition to undercutting Trump’s claim about the number of undocumented immigrants currently in the United States, Time questioned his assertion that he “fixed” the border crisis after he was elected in 2016.
“Apprehension numbers at the border provide another metric [to assess the claim], but there’s disagreement over whether an effective border strategy should translate to a high apprehension rate or a low one,” the report reads, adding: “The spike in migrants seen early in Biden’s term began in the spring of 2020, during Trump’s final year, according to Politifact.”
Another eyebrow-raising remark Trump made came during a discussion of vaccines.
“The autism rate is at a level that nobody ever believed possible,” Trump said. “If you look at things that are happening, there’s something causing it.”
“The false claim that there’s a link between vaccines and autism traces back to a retracted study from the 1990s,” the fact-check states. “Even though that study has been widely debunked and refuted, and modern studies continue to consistently show that shots are safe, the idea that vaccines are linked to autism persists, without evidence, among some vaccine skeptics.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s embattled pick for secretary of health and human services, has often peddled conspiracy theories about the link between vaccines and autism, among other dubious health claims.
Time’s report also addressed Trump’s remark that “a very high percentage” of transgender people who transition later express regret and ask, in the president-elect’s words, “Who did this to me?”
In response, Time cited a review of studies showing that less than 1 percent of people who transition later express regret about the decision, as well as a single study that found that only 4 percent of transgender youth who receive gender-affirming care say they feel regret.
Representatives for Trump did not immediately respond to a Daily Beast request for comment on Time’s fact-check.
