Trump lambasts Biden, myriad policies during first interview since he re-assumed office

WASHINGTON

US President Donald Trump launched broadsides Wednesday against his predecessor, Joe Biden, and policies spanning state disaster responses, migration and the national ban on TikTok in his first media interview since he returned to the White House this week.

Trump accused Biden of "allowing" foreign nations to send criminals to the US, including Venezuela, whom he said is "a big abuser," and Congo.

"This was a gross miscarriage of common sense to allow people to come in. And I believe the number is 21 million people, and a large percentage of them are criminals all over the world," Trump said in an interview with Fox News.

"We're thinking about South America. It's much more than South America, but prisons from all over the world have been emptied out into our country by Biden allowing it to happen. I don't even know if he knew what the hell was going on, but who would want this?" he added.

The comments come after Trump signed a raft of executive orders that are part of his ongoing crackdown on migration to the US. The directives have so far closed the southern US border, halted refugee resettlement and sent some 1,500 troops to the Mexican-American border.

Trump downplayed the prospects of the Chinese government exploiting Americans' personal data from TikTok, asking rhetorically "is it that important for China to be spying on young people, on young kids, watching crazy videos?"

"They make your telephones and they make your computers and they make a lot of other things. Isn't that a bigger threat?" he said.

TikTok was reinstated, perhaps temporarily, across the nation Sunday after the app shut itself down ahead of a deadline imposed under US law for the short-form video service to be sold from its China-based parent company or be banned in the US.

Its ultimate fate remains unclear. The law was passed with broad bipartisan support amid ongoing concerns over the popular platform.

Trump floated several controversial proposals, including the dismantling of FEMA, the federal government's disaster response agency, saying he would prefer to provide its funding to states directly. The president said FEMA "is a whole other discussion, because all it does is complicate everything. FEMA has not done their job for the last four years."

Trump further said he "might have to" cut federal funding for jurisdictions, including states and cities that refuse to cooperate with federal immigration officers as he seeks to crack down on undocumented migration. He pointed, in particular, to California, the nation's most populous and wealthy state, as a top target for any such effort.

The president also reiterated his pledge to release FBI records related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, saying he is "going to release them immediately" after he stopped short of doing so during his first term due to opposition from senior officials, including his former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo.