WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump pledged Monday to keep the polio vaccine available throughout his presidency, but did not extend that protection to other vaccines and said he expected his administration to closely examine its safety — which the U.S -American Food and Drug Administration already does before approval is granted.
Trump made the comments during an hour-long news conference in which he suggested he wanted to privatize the Postal Service and said he planned to file a lawsuit challenging a presidential preference poll published by the Des Moines Register that found him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris in recent days before the election.
Trump, who will take the oath of office on Jan. 20, also said he would resolve the war between Ukraine and Russia and establish the Middle East as a “good place,” but declined to provide details.
“From day one, we will implement a series of bold reforms to return our country to full prosperity,” Trump said in his first official call with reporters since the Nov. 5 election. “We will achieve full prosperity and build the greatest economy the world has ever seen, just as we did just a short time ago.”
Trump said he was expecting Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the vaccine denier he named he will nominate The leadership of the Department of Health and Human Services will be “much less radical” than some people expect.
Trump said Kennedy and others in his administration would file reports outlining their views on vaccines, but did not say what action might be taken after those reports are released.
Trump said he didn’t like the idea of mandating vaccinations, but didn’t go so far as to say he would change vaccination policy for parts of the federal government, such as 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 jeopardize his attempts to win U.S. Senate confirmation and actually lead HHS.
Trump said he wants this administration to investigate why autism rates have risen in recent decades. Several research studies have refuted this any connections between vaccinations and autism.
Trump said his administration would also look for ways to reduce health care and prescription drug costs in the United States, but he did not provide details.
Threats of lawsuit
During the news conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump doubled down on his grievances to news organizations and said he plans to file multiple lawsuits in the coming days and weeks against people or organizations he believes have wronged him have.
The announcement came just days after Trump’s legal team has reached an agreement with ABC News In it, the news organization agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library.
At the center of the lawsuit was anchor George Stephanopoulos, who said in an interview that a New York state jury found Trump responsible for the rape of writer E. Jean Carroll, while the jury found him civilly liable for “sexual misconduct.”
Trump said during his news conference that he would likely file lawsuits against Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer, the news show “60 Minutes” and the Pulitzer Prize Organization over awards given to the New York Times and the Washington Post.
“In my opinion it was fraud and election interference,” he said of the Iowa poll published by the Des Moines newspaper. “She always really understood me. She is a very good pollster. She knows what she did and then she resigned beforehand and we will probably be filing a big lawsuit against her today or tomorrow.”
Selzer, a longtime pollster, said on Iowa PBS last week that she had not yet figured out what went wrong with the poll she released just before Election Day that showed Democratic presidential candidate Harris outperforming Trump by three percentage points in the state . Trump won Iowa in the election with 56% of the vote compared to 42.7%.
“We didn’t see anything that needed to be repaired. The reality is that more people have come forward to support Donald Trump,” she said. “I eagerly await the Secretary of State’s turnout reports, which will be released in January, to see what we can learn from them.
“But there was no adjustment to my data when we saw that it was going to be a shock that I would have said, okay, let’s adjust it.” It’s not like I know in advance what the right numbers are will be in the future. So, in a sense, you take the data to show me what the future will look like best.”
Selzer said during the PBS interview that she was “mystified” by the allegations that she tried 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 plans to sue the CBS news program “60 Minutes” for editing an interview with Harris that was published before the election.
He said he wanted to sue the Pulitzer Prize organization for the award Staffers at The New York Times and The Washington Post received the 2018 National Reporting Award for their reporting on “Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election and its ties to the Trump campaign, the president-elect’s transition team and his subsequent administration.”
“I want them to take back the Pulitzer Prizes and pay big damages,” Trump said.
The Pulitzer Prize Panel announced in July 2022 that it would not retract the awards in response to a request from Trump and two independent reviews of the work.
“Both reviews were conducted by individuals who had no connection to or any connection with the institutions whose work was examined,” the committee wrote. “The individual reviews agreed in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, claims or assertions in the winning entries were discredited by facts that came to lithe after the awards ceremony.
“The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes are in national news.”
Israel and Ukraine
Trump said during his news conference that after taking office he would address the ongoing Israel-Gaza war as well as the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but did not say exactly how he would encourage those countries to end their conflicts.
Trump said he believes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing a “fantastic job” and said he believes his second administration will be able to resolve long-standing problems across the Middle East.
“I think the Middle East will be fine,” Trump said. “I think actually the situation between Russia and Ukraine will be more difficult. I see that as more difficult.”
Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and refuses to leave the country’s borders. In the years since Russia started a war, numerous organizations, including the United Nations, Amnesty International And Human Rights Watch have all made allegations of war crimes against Russia.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken published a opinion in February 2023 that “Russia’s armed forces and other Russian officials have committed crimes against humanity in Ukraine.”
Russia, he wrote, has engaged in torture, rape and execution-style killings and “deported hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian civilians to Russia, including children who were forcibly separated from their families.”
Trump said during his press conference that he did not believe the Biden administration should have allowed Ukraine To fire long-range missiles into the territory of Russia and said he could reverse the policy once he was in office.
“I thought it was a very stupid thing to do,” Trump said of the Biden administration’s policies.
As for the war between Israel and Hamas, Trump did not want to clarify exactly what he meant when he said that there would be “hell to pay” if Hamas had not released the remaining hostages kidnapped in October 2023 before Trump took over the Oval Office. He simply added that it “wouldn’t be pleasant.”
Postal Service, TikTok, primary challengers
Trump left many questions about his agenda unanswered after the press conference.
He declined to clarify whether he would push for privatization of the U.S. Postal Service, saying only that there are “discussions” about spinning off the agency and that his team is “looking into it.”
He did not announce whether his administration would try to force social media giant TikTok to separate from its Chinese parent company if it wants to remain operational in the United States. TikTok asked the US Supreme Court for a stay on Monday a decision of the appeal court Preserving bipartisan legislation forcing ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, to cease operations in the United States.
“We’ll look at it,” Trump said.
He left open the fact that he is supporting the Republican primaries against Republican senators who do not support his candidates for the leadership of federal departments and agencies.
If a senator voted against one of his nominees “for political or stupid reasons,” it would likely give him a primary opponent, he said. But Trump added that it had nothing to do with him.
Trump also declined to say whether he expected Chinese leader Xi Jinping to attend his inauguration after being invited.
“If he wants to come, I would love to have him, but there hasn’t been much talk about it,” Trump said. “I had conversations, letters, etc. with him 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 that he thought Xi was “a great person.”
Iowa Capital Dispatch reporter Robin Opsahl contributed to this report.
Last updated on December 16, 2024 at 5:31 p.m
