Fact-Check: Trump’s Fox News Radio Interview with Brian Kilmeade (March 13, 2026)

Bottom Line Up Front: This interview contains accurate descriptions of two recent terror-related incidents alongside at least five demonstrably false or significantly misleading claims on immigration figures, border crossing statistics, mail-in voting, and Trump’s personal history. The most serious concern is Trump’s invocation of “genetics” to explain the violent behavior of Muslim immigrants — language scientists and ethicists associate with debunked racial pseudoscience. Assistance from Claude AI.

Source Material

Interview: Brian Kilmeade of Fox News Radio interviews President Donald Trump
Date aired/published: March 13, 2026
Transcript source: Factbase / CQ and Roll Call
Fact-check prepared: March 15, 2026

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Claims Examined

Claim 1: Old Dominion University Attacker

What was said: Kilmeade described the attacker as “a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone, convicted in 2017 of providing support for ISIS.” Trump affirmed the description.

Verdict: Substantially Accurate (minor date nuance)

The core description is confirmed by federal law enforcement. The shooter was identified as 36-year-old Mohamed Bailor Jalloh, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Sierra Leone who served six years in the Virginia National Guard and was convicted in 2017 for involvement in supporting the Islamic State.¹ His arrest and guilty plea occurred in 2016; the formal conviction extended into 2017.

Jalloh was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison and was released from federal custody in December 2024.² He had been taking online classes at the university after his release when he carried out the attack, killing ROTC instructor Lt. Col. Brandon Shah before being subdued and killed by ROTC students in his classroom.³

A notable context point: a 2025 law made inmates with terrorism-related convictions ineligible for early release — a provision that, had it been in effect earlier, might have kept Jalloh incarcerated.⁴

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Claim 2: Michigan Synagogue Attack

What was said: Trump said the attacker “plowed into a building of a preschool entrance where 140 kids are inside,” that “he’s from Dearborn, Michigan,” and that “his car’s registered to someone in Lebanon.”

Verdict: Mostly Accurate with Key Errors

The attacker was identified as 41-year-old Ayman Mohamad Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon who died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after exchanging fire with security guards at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township, Michigan.⁵ He lived in Dearborn Heights — not Dearborn proper, which are adjacent but distinct municipalities.⁶

The vehicle was registered in Dearborn Heights, Michigan, to the attacker himself — not “to someone in Lebanon,” as Trump implied.⁷ The more than 100 children inside the preschool (all aged 5 and younger) were uninjured; Trump’s figure of “140 kids” is unconfirmed by official sources, which reported “more than 100.”⁵

Critically, the FBI noted that the motive remained under investigation and that there was no confirmed connection between the Michigan attack and the ISIS-linked Old Dominion shooting.⁸ Trump’s framing implied a common ideological thread that investigators had not established.

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Claim 3: “25 Million People” Under Biden

What was said: “We took in 25 million people and many of those people came from bad places.”

Verdict: FALSE

This claim is not supported by any government data. According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection, 7.4 million undocumented immigrants crossed the border outside of legal checkpoints during the Biden administration. Including people who crossed at legal points of entry without documentation, the figure rises to approximately 10.2 million.⁹ The Center for Migration Studies of New York found the total undocumented population in the country did not increase by anything approaching 25 million during the Biden years.¹⁰

Trump repeats this specific figure twice in the interview. It has been rated false by NBC News, Newsweek, and the Cato Institute, among others.¹¹

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Claim 4: “11,888 Murderers”

What was said: “11,888 murderers came into our country illegally. They came into our country and they let him in. They didn’t even check.”

Verdict: FALSE — Serious Misrepresentation of Government Data

This figure appears to be a downward variant of the “13,099” number Trump and his allies have repeatedly cited since September 2024 — itself a misrepresentation of an ICE letter to Congress. That letter reported the number of noncitizens convicted of homicide who were not in ICE detention — a figure that covers people who entered the country over the past four decades under multiple administrations, many of whom are currently serving sentences in state or federal prisons, not “on the loose.”¹²

The Department of Homeland Security itself stated at the time that “the data in this letter is being misinterpreted” and that it “includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more.”¹³ FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and the Associated Press have all rated this characterization as false or misleading.¹⁴

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Claim 5: “Zero” Border Crossings

What was said: “For eight months now, we have had zero people come through the border” / “Nine months, nobody coming in. We have a border that’s 100%.”

Verdict: MISLEADING — Conflates “Zero Parole Releases” with “Zero Crossings”

Border crossings under Trump’s second term have fallen to historic lows — that part is well-documented and real. According to CBP data, there were 237,538 total crossings in 2025, and in January 2026, CBP recorded approximately 10,000 encounters — a fraction of Biden-era highs but not zero.¹⁵

The DHS “zero” figure refers specifically to a narrow category: Border Patrol parole releases into the interior. For nine consecutive months, CBP released zero undocumented immigrants on parole — a genuine milestone.¹⁶ But Trump presents this as meaning nobody crossed the border at all, which Snopes, ABC7, NPR, and PBS NewsHour have all described as false or misleading.¹⁷

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Claim 6: Attributing Violence to “Genetics”

What was said: “They’re sick people… Others, they’re just bad, they go bad. Something wrong, there’s something wrong there. The genetics are not exactly — they’re not exactly your genetics.”

Verdict: Scientifically Unsupported; Contains Additional Factual Error

Trump’s “genetics” comment drew immediate widespread condemnation. Experts note the language is consistent with eugenics — a theory of racially determined hereditary traits that mainstream science has thoroughly debunked and that was historically used to justify forced sterilization and racial discrimination.¹⁸

There is also an embedded factual error: Trump’s framing implies these attackers “snuck in” through Biden’s border policies. In fact, both Mohamed Bailor Jalloh and Ayman Mohamad Ghazali were U.S.-naturalized citizens who entered the country years before Biden’s presidency.¹⁹ Neither man “came in through Biden.” The Cato Institute’s director of immigration studies noted: “Trump is an old-school eugenicist nativist.”²⁰

Research consistently shows that immigrants — documented and undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than native-born U.S. citizens.²¹

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Claim 7: Gavin Newsom’s Dyslexia

What was said: “He has learning disabilities… He admitted he had learning disabilities. Somebody said, ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ I said, ‘That’s okay, but not for the president.’” Kilmeade added: “He did say he couldn’t read, which I found astounding.” Trump: “He said much beyond that… He committed political suicide.”

Verdict: Factual Basis Real; Characterization Deeply Misleading

Newsom did, at a book tour event in Atlanta in February 2026, openly discuss living with dyslexia. His actual words were: “You’ve never seen me read a speech, because I cannot read a speech… I haven’t overcome dyslexia. I’m living with it.”²² This was a candid, voluntary disclosure about a neurodevelopmental condition — not evidence of incompetence.

Dyslexia is not a “mental disorder” or “cognitive deficiency,” contrary to how both Trump and Kilmeade characterized it. The International Dyslexia Association categorizes it as “a language-based learning disability” affecting reading and language processing. The Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity estimates it affects up to 20% of Americans.²³ Numerous high-achieving public figures — including entrepreneurs, scientists, and politicians — have dyslexia.

Trump’s assertion that “the president can’t have a learning disability” conflates dyslexia with general cognitive impairment, a characterization that disability advocates and medical professionals rejected immediately.

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Claim 8: U.S. as the “Only Country” with Mail-In Ballots

What was said: “We’re the only country in the world that does mail-in ballots like this… We’re the only country, there’s no other country in the world because it means you cheat.”

Verdict: FALSE — Repeatedly Debunked

This is one of the most thoroughly and repeatedly disproven claims Trump makes. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), 34 countries or territories allow mail-in voting. Of these, 12 — including Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Australia — allow all voters to vote by mail.²⁴ An additional 21 countries, including France, Ireland, Japan, and Spain, allow it for some voters.²⁵

Trump himself has occasionally cast mail ballots and encouraged Republicans to use mail voting in 2024.²⁶ Elections experts note that fraud rates in mail voting, while marginally higher than in-person rates, remain extremely low. Courts have repeatedly rejected fraud claims tied to mail ballots.

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Claim 9: Trump’s Book and Osama bin Laden

What was said: “One year before it happened, almost exactly, is Osama bin Laden. I said, ‘You have to go out and kill Osama bin Laden. He’s big trouble. Kill him.’ Nobody did anything… A year later, he knocked down the World Trade Center… It was in a book. Did you know that I wrote it in a book? One of my many bestsellers.”

Verdict: FALSE — Debunked Continuously Since 2015

Trump’s 2000 book, The America We Deserve, contains exactly one reference to bin Laden — a passing mention in a passage criticizing the Clinton administration’s handling of multiple foreign threats. The book contains no prediction, no warning, and no recommendation to “kill” or “take out” bin Laden.²⁷ As FactCheck.org put it in 2015 and again in 2019: “Trump’s 2000 book contained no warning at all about bin Laden.”²⁸

CNN, PolitiFact, the Associated Press, and the Washington Post Fact Checker have all rated this claim false on multiple occasions going back to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.²⁹ That bin Laden was already widely known as a top-tier threat by 2000 — with the CIA maintaining a dedicated unit against him since the mid-1990s — also undercuts any claim of unique foresight.³⁰

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Claim 10: Iran Military Claims

What was said: “We’ve knocked out close to 90% of their missiles.” / “Their Navy has been totally gone.” / “We’re hitting them harder than anybody’s been hit since World War II.”

Verdict: Unverifiable — Treat as Unconfirmed Presidential Assertions

These claims cannot be independently verified from open-source information at the time of this report. The United States has conducted significant strikes on Iranian military infrastructure, including with B-2 bombers in an operation Trump refers to as “Midnight Hammer.” The specific percentages and the sweeping characterizations of Iranian military destruction should be treated as unverified presidential assertions, not established facts, until confirmed by independent military analysis or official assessments.

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Logical Fallacies

Causal Oversimplification: Trump attributes the violent acts of two naturalized U.S. citizens who entered the country legally years before Biden’s presidency to Biden’s border policies. The causal chain he implies does not exist.

Overgeneralization: From two individual acts of violence, Trump extrapolates sweeping claims about 25 million dangerous immigrants, people from “mental institutions,” and those with defective “genetics” — a pattern contradicted by research showing immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born citizens.

False Precision: The figure “11,888 murderers” creates a misleading air of exactitude for a number that is, at best, a distorted version of a decades-long ICE docket entry that does not mean what Trump implies.

Appeal to Emotion: Describing terrorists as coming from “mental institutions” and “bad places” with defective “genetics” is designed to provoke fear, not inform policy.

Straw Man: Characterizing all Democratic opposition to the Save America Act as motivated by a desire to “cheat” attributes bad faith without evidence and avoids engaging with the substantive policy objections critics have raised.

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Racism and Pseudoscientific Language

Trump’s invocation of “genetics” to explain the violent behavior of two Muslim immigrants — one of African descent, one of Arab descent — and his framing of this directly to a white interviewer (“they’re not exactly your genetics”) is consistent with what NBC News described as language that “experts have long associated with racial pseudoscience, or eugenics, a theory regarding superior hereditary traits of racial groups that modern scientists have debunked and found to be unethical.”¹⁸

The Hastings Center, a nonpartisan bioethics research institution, has documented that this kind of genetic determinism has historically been used to justify immigration restrictions, forced sterilization, and racial segregation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations logged 8,683 anti-Muslim and anti-Arab complaints in 2025 — the highest number since it began tracking data in 1996 — and attributed part of the increase to language and policies emanating from the Trump administration.²⁰

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Lack of Self-Awareness

Trump is the grandson of German immigrants (Friedrich Trump) and the son of a Scottish immigrant (Mary Anne MacLeod Trump). His attacks on immigrant “genetics” while celebrating his own family’s immigrant origins represent a significant lack of self-awareness that multiple commentators noted immediately after the interview.

Additionally, Trump mocks Gavin Newsom for having dyslexia while himself demonstrating in the same interview an inability to recall the title of his own book (“whatever the hell the title”), and repeating a long-debunked fabrication about that book’s contents. Attacking another public figure’s learning challenges while confabulating memories of a passage that does not exist as described is, at minimum, ironic.

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Hubris

Trump’s claim to have “predicted Osama bin Laden” one year before September 11, 2001 is a self-aggrandizing claim that has been continuously debunked since 2015. In this interview, he presents it as settled, obvious fact: “A year later, he knocked down the World Trade Center. Do you know that? It was in a book.” The book does not contain the prediction he describes.

Similarly, Trump takes unqualified personal credit for “the greatest economy ever,” “the strongest military in the world by far,” and predicts that the Iran campaign will resolve quickly and the economy will “bounce right back so fast” — predictions for which no analytical basis is offered. When asked when the Iran conflict will end, Trump responds: “When I feel it. When I feel it in my bones.”

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Conspiratorial Thinking

Trump asserts, without evidence, that the 2020 election involved cheating “at levels never seen before” and that “all of that’s come out.” This claim is directly contradicted by more than 60 court rulings, findings from Trump’s own appointed Attorney General William Barr, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s assessment, and multiple nonpartisan reviews. No court has confirmed evidence of widespread fraud affecting the 2020 outcome.³¹

Trump also characterizes all Democratic opposition to the Save America Act as rooted not in policy disagreement but in a desire to cheat — a conspiratorial framing that forecloses democratic deliberation by attributing criminal intent to political opponents as a class.

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End Notes

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This fact-check was produced using journalist-grade standards, APA-style citations, and primary sourcing from government data, established news organizations, and recognized fact-checking outlets including FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, Snopes, NPR, PBS NewsHour, NBC News, CNN, ABC News, and the Associated Press. No advertising revenue or partisan funding influences this analysis.