Interview: Aishah Hasnie Interviews Donald Trump for Fox News in Illinois - September 27, 2026

Um, you're heading back to D.C. in a little bit.

I am.

Um, and you might have dinner with Dario, I hear --

That's true.

-- of, of Anthropic. Uh, you know that he's called on slowing down AI.

He has.

What are you gonna tell him tonight?

Well, we're gonna talk about it. Uh, I'm for, uh, let's go and let's win. You know, we're about a year, maybe a year and a half up on China. There is nobody in third place. I mean, it's just us and China. Uh, we're leading by quite a bit. Uh, I spoke a little bit about it with President Xi, not too much.

It wasn't a topic of conversation. Because I think if you, as they say, open it up to China, you give up the lead. You know, once you do that, you sort of give up the lead. But I'll be speaking to Dario and to others. We have, as you know, a very big meeting on Tuesday.

Yes.

Where everybody's coming in.

Yeah.

And that'll be very important.

There's a new report out that shows that Anthropic and OpenAI have had tens of thousands of problematic incidents. Is there any part of you that worries at all about AI going rogue?

Well, I don't worry about it. I just, you know, it's a huge industry. It's really the Industrial Revolution, maybe bigger.

Yeah.

You know, they actually say it could be bigger than the Industrial Revolution. Who would think that? Uh, and it is, in fact, bigger than the internet. And we're leading, and we're building tremendous, you know, trillions of dollars worth of places. And why should we give that up? Uh, if something is bad, they have to fix it. And if they don't fix it, that's why you have the Department of Justice.

And we've used the Department of Justice on two occasions to straighten out a company that we thought there was a problem with, and they immediately straightened it out. But you don't give up a, a trillion-dollar or more, two or three or $4 trillion industry because you think something like that. We will straighten it out if and when a problem occurs.

You know, there's, um, some shortages of diesel in the South right now.

Yeah.

Uh, the governor of Louisiana just issued a state of emergency, um, and some talk in Washington.

And he's actually -- the governor of Louisiana is building some very big refineries.

Yeah.

You know, I have refineries being built all over the country.

Absolutely.

Which for 50 years, we haven't built a refinery. Now I'm building them all over the country because the environmental nonsense kept them from building, but now we're building refineries. But that'll take about a year.

So what about an export ban on diesel?

Well, we're thinking about it very seriously. That can oftentimes lead to a little bit of an increase on gasoline for cars. So we're looking at it very seriously. We may do it. Uh, the big problem is the refineries in Russia are being blown up. This isn't really a Middle Eastern problem. This is more of a Russia problem, that Ukraine and Russia are going at it, and Ukraine is blowing up diesel refineries in Russia because they do a lot of the refining.

So this one's an interesting one indeed. And, uh, I spoke to President Zelenskyy. I said, "You gotta take it easy on the refineries [Laughs] as much --"

What did he say?

He said, "Well, we'll probably do that."

Okay. Um --

No, because we're causing a world problem. There are other things you can do. But a very big problem is the refineries in Russia are unable to do what they were doing. But we'll take care of that situation. I think what's gonna happen is we're gonna win this war very soon. And as soon as we win it, it's gonna go -- the, the oil will go down, way down to what it was before the war.

Do you think --

And the key is, uh, Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. That's the key to the whole thing.

Yeah. Do you think we're gonna win this war through this economic warfare that the Treasury Department is waging?

I think both.

Or strikes?

I think both. I think we'll win it both ways. We've already won it really through, from a military standpoint. But that doesn't mean we've, uh, stopped that, but we're certainly winning it very big. I -- if you look at their economy, it's gone. They have no economy. The value of their money is, as they say, valueless.

Uh, we have, uh, inflation. They have inflation now of, uh, close to 300%. I heard 318% as of this morning, 300, meaning their money's shot, their economy's shot, their military is shot. They're in trouble.

Yeah. Are strikes before midterms still on the table for you?

Uh, I don't wanna say that.

Okay.

I don't wanna say that. I mean, it's possible, but I, I just don't wanna say that.