Hurricane Victims should "Never Vote for a Democrat because they Held Back Aid," Trump Said

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax's Chris Salcedo, president Trump said, addressing illegal immigration, our country has never been "abused like it is being abused now."

The 2024 Republican presidential nominee told Salcedo, host of Newsmax's "The Chris Salcedo Show,"that the border during his time as president was "peanuts" compared to the its current state.

"There's never been a border so bad as this, and this is all self-inflicted. What they've done to our country is not even believable.

"Allowing murderers and drug dealers and everybody just — they don't even know who they are. All they know is they're murderers, drug dealers. They don't even know," he said.

"They don't know where they are, who they are. They're all over the place. They came into our country totally unvetted, totally unchecked.

"And it turned out we had 13,099 murderers. We had many drug dealers, many terrorists. We had a year," Trump said. "There's never been a time like this."

Trump said the solution is quite simple: Close the border.

"We cannot do this to our country. We've gone through four years of this with people that are incompetent, and we can't do this," he said.

Trump then pivoted to the issue of transgender women competing in women's sports.

"Who would do this?" he questioned of the biologically male volleyball player who transitioned and subsequently is playing on a women's volleyball team.

"Did you see this shot? That was not a woman hitting that. The woman, the girl that got hit on the head said, 'I've never seen any... I've been playing for my whole life,'" he said.

Trump said this policy is very bad for women and "demeans women really terribly."

Trump said President Joe Biden is a "grossly incompetent person," specifically referring to his response efforts following Hurricanes Helene and Milton.

"They got hit with a very bad hurricane, especially North Carolina, and spent parts of Georgia. But North Carolina really got hit.

"I'll tell you what, those people should never vote for a Democrat because they held back aid," he said, before outlining the coordinated effort he undertook with Elon Musk to provide Starlink to the storm-ravaged Carolina towns.

"They said, 'Well, we need Starlink.' I said, 'What's Starlink?' And basically, it's a communication system, a great one.

"So, I called Elon, I got the system done. And when they were bringing it, they were stopped. Did you hear that? They were stopped. They couldn't bring it," he said.

"They desperately needed because all there was, they had no communication to anyplace. You know, they were actually cut off by water.

"It's like they were cut off and they desperately and, you know, they stopped them from — it took them two days to get it in. He was going to have it there immediately. So something is strange going on," he said.

Trump said anyone from North Carolina should not vote for a Democrat after this "because what they did is disgusting."

"I think now Biden thinks they're doing wonderful, but he doesn't know what wonderful is. You know, he's run a terrible country and he thinks everything's wonderful. He just wants to, you know, go to sleep at 4 p.m.," Trump quipped.

As for his canceled interview with "60 Minutes," Trump said the network owes him an apology and that CBS committed "election interference."

More broadly, he said the mainstream media "played it down," referring to the assassination attempt on his life during a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, earlier this year. He further questioned why the FBI has not been able to access three potentially foreign-based apps of gunman Thomas Matthew Crooks