Donald Trump has been on quite a press tour around his first 100 days in office, the latest stop of which was a sit-down interview with ABC News that aired Tuesday night. It wasn’t always cordial between the president and correspondent Terry Moran — particularly as Moran tried to tell Trump that an obviously edited image of “MS-13” appearing across the knuckles of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was not, in fact, real.
“On his knuckles he had MS-13,” Trump said of Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that the Trump administration must facilitate his return. Trump and his allies have baselessly tried to cast Abrego Garcia as a terrorist gang member they were justified in expelling from the country without due process (even though the administration itself has admitted in court his deportation was due to an “administrative error”).
“He had some tattoos that were interpreted that way,” Moran replied.
Abrego Garcia has four symbols tattooed across his knuckles, and the White House has been circulating an image onto which someone Photoshopped — or just superimposed with a basic paint app, really — “MS13,” purporting that it’s what Abrego Garcia’s actual tattoos represent. Trump even posed with a printout of the photo in the Oval Office.
Trump kept insisting the text overlaid across Abrego Garcia’s knuckles were the actual tattoos. “Wait a minute. Terry, Terry, Terry. Don’t do that. It says ‘MS13.’”
“That was Photoshopped,” Moran said.
Trump then started mocking Moran. “That was Photoshopped? Terry, they’re giving you the big break of a lifetime. You’re doing the interview. I picked you because, frankly, I’d never heard of you, but that’s OK,” Trump said. “You’re not being very nice.”
Moran again tried to move to another question, but Trump wasn’t having it.
“Terry, do you want me to show you the picture?”
“I saw the picture.”
Moran kept trying to move on — even saying “agree to disagree” — but Trump kept insisting: “No, no: He had ‘MS’ as clear as you can be, not ‘interpreted.’ This is why people no longer believe the news, because it’s fake news.”
The exchange was emblematic of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional deportation agenda, which seems to be predicated on doing anything possible to label immigrants gang members and then banishing them to a Salvadoran prison without due process. When Moran pressed Trump about the apparent illegality of the deportations and the court orders blocking them, the president passed the buck to the Justice Department. “I’ll have to ask the lawyers about that,” was a typical response.
Of course, the interview touched on several other lowlights from Trump’s second first 100 days. Moran asked the president what he said to people who felt that the president was acting recklessly in his tariff and economic policy, and that they “didn’t sign up for this.”
Trump replied that the people who voted for him “did sign up for it, actually.”
“This is what I campaigned on,” Trump added. “I said that we have been abused by other countries at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We were losing $3-5 billion a day on trade.”
When asked if he had a message for “small businesses who are saying we can’t live two months with these tariffs,” or was willing to offer them a break like his administration did for Apple and other major companies, the president deflected: “Not only Apple. We have $7 to $8 trillion being invested in our country in two months. Biden didn’t have that for over a year. I mean, if you look at Biden, nobody was really investing in this country. Everybody was ripping off our country.”
Trump said that “everything’s going to be just fine. It wouldn’t have been if I didn’t do this. I had a choice, I could leave it to have a nice, easy time, but I think ultimately you would have had an implosion.”
There was tension between Trump and Moran for most of the interview.
When Moran asked Trump whether he had “100-percent confidence” in Pete Hegseth, his scandal-plagued defense secretary, the president replied “I don’t have 100-percent confidence in anything,” adding that it was a “stupid question” and that he doesn’t even have “100-percent confidence that we’re going to finish this interview.”
