President-elect Trump, in a lengthy, wide-ranging interview with Time Magazine for a somewhat fawning “person of the year” profile, says pardons for January 6 defendants and convicts may come within “the first nine minutes” of his return to the White House. 

He declined to say if violent rioters would be excluded from the pardon list. 

When Trump was asked what kind of relief the January 6 defendants and convicts can expect, Trump said he had already made a decision and told Time that their pardons or commutations will likely come quickly. 

“I’ll be looking at J6 early on, maybe the first nine minutes,” Trump said, before immediately pivoting to bringing down the price of energy and closing the border.

The president-elect made clear that January 6 participants would assuredly get pardons “if they were non-violent,” but left the door open for the violent rioters as well. 

“I’m going to do [them] case-by-case, and if they were non-violent, I think they’ve been greatly punished. And the answer is I will be doing that, yeah, I’m going to look if there’s some that really were out of control,” Trump said. When pressed if that meant the violent ones would remain in prison or under indictment, Trump told Time only that, “we’re going to look at each individual case.”

“We’re going to do it very quickly, and it’s going to start in the first hour that I get into office. And a vast majority of them should not be in jail. A vast majority should not be in jail, and they’ve suffered gravely,” Trump said. 

The president-elect said that the January 6 defendants deserve relief because of the conditions of incarcertation they have endured, and due to the fact that riots at Portland, Seattle, and Minneapolis consumed the two cities for weeks at a time during the summer of 2020. 

“I say, why is it that in Portland and in many other places, Minneapolis, why is it that nothing happened with them and they actually caused death and destruction at levels not seen before? So you know, if you take a look at what happened in Seattle, you had people die, you had a lot of death, and nothing happened,” Trump claimed. Of the January 6 defendants, he reiterated: “These people have been treated really, really badly.”

Beyond the pardons for January 6 defendants, Trump discussed a number of other issues in his interview with Time. 

He listed the economy and the border as the reasons he bested Vice President Harris in November and he blasted her campaign.

Trump was asked, “What do you think were her worst mistakes in the campaign?” 

“Taking the assignment,” he responded. “Number one, because you have to know what you’re good at.”

During his interview, he hedged on some of his important promises. 

In the final weeks of the campaign, Trump promised repeatedly that prices would begin coming down immediately once he returned to the White House because of his energy policies, though in his Time interview, he conceded that it would be very difficult to deliver on that promise. 

“I’d like to bring them down. It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up. You know, it’s very hard. But I think that they will. I think that energy is going to bring them down. I think a better supply chain is going to bring them down,” Trump said. 

Where he was unequivocal, however, was his promise to institute his mass deportations plans, including the potential for separating families and using detention camps to gather illegal immigrants for deportation. 

When asked about the possibility of detention camps, Trump said, “Well, there might be. Whatever it takes to get them out. I don’t care. Honestly, whatever it takes to get them out.”