WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump pledged Monday to keep the polio vaccine available throughout his presidency, but didn’t extend that protection to other vaccines, saying he expects his administration will look closely at safety — something the U.S. Food and Drug Administration already does before granting approval.
Trump’s comments came during an hour-long press conference where he hinted at trying to privatize the Postal Service and said he planned to file a lawsuit against a presidential preference poll published by The Des Moines Register that found him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris in the last days before the election.
Trump, who will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, also said he would solve the war between Ukraine and Russia and establish the Middle East as a “good place,” though he declined to provide details.
“Starting on day one, we’ll implement a rapid series of bold reforms to restore our nation to full prosperity,” Trump said in his first formal back-and-forth with reporters since the Nov. 5 election. “We’re going to go full prosperity and to build the greatest economy the world has ever seen, just as we had just a short time ago.”
Trump said he expects Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine denier he has said he will nominate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, will be “much less radical” than some people expect.
Trump said Kennedy and others in his administration will file reports sharing what they think about vaccines, but didn’t say what actions might be taken after those reports are released.
Trump said he didn’t like the idea of mandating vaccines, but didn’t go as far as saying he’d change vaccine policy for parts of the federal government, like the Defense Department, which has numerous requirements for troops, including the so-called peanut butter shot.
Kennedy is notorious for spreading misinformation about vaccine safety, one of the many issues that could imperil his attempts to garner U.S. Senate confirmation and actually lead HHS.
Trump said he wanted this administration to look at why autism rates have increased in recent decades. Multiple research studies have debunked any connections between vaccines and autism.
His administration, Trump said, would also look at ways to lower the costs of health care and prescription drugs within the United States, but he didn’t provide details.
Lawsuit threats
Trump doubled down on his grievances with news organizations during the press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, saying he planned to file several lawsuits in the days and weeks ahead against people or organizations he believes have wronged him.
The announcement came just days after Trump’s legal team reached a settlement with ABC News in which the news organization agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library.
The suit centered on anchor George Stephanopoulos saying during an interview that a New York state jury had found Trump liable for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll, when the jury had found him civilly liable for “sexual misconduct.”
Trump said during his press conference that he would likely file lawsuits against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, the news show “60 Minutes” and the Pulitzer Prize organization for awards given to the New York Times and Washington Post.
“In my opinion it was fraud and election interference,” he said of the Iowa Poll published by the Des Moines newspaper. “She’s got me right, always. She’s a very good pollster. She knows what she was doing, and she then quit before and we’ll probably be filing a major lawsuit against them today or tomorrow.”
Selzer, a longtime pollster, said last week on Iowa PBS that she hadn’t yet figured out what went wrong with the poll she released just ahead of Election Day that showed Democratic presidential nominee Harris outperforming Trump in the state by 3 percentage points. Trump won Iowa in the election with 56% of the vote to her 42.7%.
“There wasn’t anything that we saw that needed to be fixed. The reality is that more people supporting Donald Trump turned out,” she said. “I’m eagerly awaiting the secretary of state’s turnout reports that will happen in January to see what we can glean from that.
“But there wasn’t an adjustment to my data when we saw that it was going to be a shocker that I would have said okay, let’s adjust it. It’s not like I know ahead of time what the right numbers are going to be in the future. So, you kind of take the data designed to reveal to me our best shot at what the future is going to look like.”
Selzer said during the PBS interview that she was “mystified” about allegations that she sought to interfere in the election results through the poll. Carol Hunter, executive editor of The Des Moines Register, could not be reached for comment.
Trump said he also planned to sue the CBS News program “60 Minutes” over how it edited an interview with Harris that was released before the election.
He said he wants to sue the Pulitzer Prize organization for awarding staff at The New York Times and The Washington Post the national reporting award in 2018 for their reporting on “Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and its connections to the Trump campaign, the President-elect’s transition team and his eventual administration.”
“I want them to take back the Pulitzer Prizes and pay big damages,” Trump said.
The Pulitzer Prize Board announced in July 2022 that it would not revoke the prizes in response to an inquiry from Trump and two independent reviews of the work.
“Both reviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other,” the board wrote. “The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.”
Israel and Ukraine
Trump said during his press conference that he would address the ongoing Israel-Gaza war as well as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine once he takes office, but didn’t say exactly how he’d encourage those countries to end their conflicts.
Trump said he believed that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing a “fantastic job” and said he thinks his second administration will be able to solve longstanding issues throughout the Middle East.
“I think the Middle East will be in a good place,” Trump said. “I think actually more difficult is going to be the Russia-Ukraine situation. I see that as more difficult.”
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and has refused to leave the country’s borders. In the years since Russia launched a war, numerous organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have all made allegations of war crimes against Russia.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken released a statement in February 2023 that “Russia’s forces and other Russian officials have committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.”
Russia, he wrote, had engaged in torture, rape, execution-style killings and “deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, including children who have been forcibly separated from their families.”
Trump said during his press conference that he didn’t believe the Biden administration should have allowed Ukraine to shoot long-range missiles into Russia’s sovereign territory and said he may reverse the policy once in office.
“I thought it was a very stupid thing to do,” Trump said of the Biden administration’s policy.
On the Israel-Hamas war, Trump declined to clarify exactly what he meant when he said there would be “hell to pay” if Hamas had not released the remaining hostages abducted in October 2023 before Trump took over the Oval Office. He simply added that it “would not be pleasant.”
Postal Service, TikTok, primary challengers
Trump left many questions about his agenda unanswered following the press conference.
He declined to clarify whether he would press to privatize the U.S. Postal Service, saying only that there was “talk” about severing the agency and that his team is “looking at that.”
He didn’t divulge whether his administration would seek to force social media giant TikTok to divest from its Chinese parent company if it wants to remain operational within the United States. TikTok on Monday asked the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay of an appeals court order preserving a bipartisan law forcing ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, to cease operations in the United States.
“We’ll take a look at that,” Trump said.
He left open supporting Republican primary challenges against GOP senators who don’t support his nominees to lead federal departments and agencies.
A senator voting against one of his nominees “for political reasons or stupid reasons” would likely earn them a primary challenger, he said. But Trump added that wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
Trump also declined to say whether he expected Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration after extending an invitation.
“If he’d like to come, I’d love to have him, but there’s been nothing much discussed,” Trump said. “I have had discussions with him, letters, etc, etc, at a very high level. You know, we had a very good relationship until COVID. COVID didn’t end the relationship, but it was a bridge too far for me.”
Trump then added he believes Xi is “an amazing person.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter Robin Opsahl contributed to this report.
