5,000 young soldiers are being killed every single week on average.
Can you believe it?
5,000.
And it's actually a number probably worse than that.
In addition to other people that are being killed in towns, and we're trying to stop it.
It's a bloodbath.
It's an absolute bloodbath.
I've seen satellite pictures that are so bad, so horrible, and it's just to think that in this day and age, we're living with this horrible thing that's going on, and we're doing the best we can.
This was not our war.
This was not me.
We're doing something from the last administration, how they allowed that to happen.
It wouldn't have happened, it would have never happened.
And, you know, the Ukraine-Russia would have happened, but I'll tell you what else wouldn't have happened.
October 7th would not have happened.
This was a terrible thing also.
A lot of bad things happened in the last four years.
But good things are happening now.
We had a tremendous visit in the Middle East.
We went to Qatar.
We saw the Saudi Arabia, all the top people in UAE.
And we brought back about $5.1 trillion.
That's not bad.
And it's being credited as one of the maybe the most successful visit that anybody's ever made to any place.
There's never been anything like this.
Hundreds of planes, big white-body planes ordered.
Boeing, getting them from Boeing, but I think an order of, I think, 148 planes.
It's a lot of 777s, those are the big ones, or the 787 Dreamliners, and orders of everything.
The AI is going wild.
I hope it's as good as people say, because otherwise some people are going to be pretty disappointed.
But it seems like it is.
A lot of smart people are doing it.
But massive orders into our country.
We did $1.4 trillion in one case.
We did $2 trillion in another case, numbers that nobody's ever really heard of before.
And our relationship is fantastic with those three beautiful places.
I mean, they're incredible.
Money is like no place else probably anywhere.
Well, we have more money, but we didn't use it right, but that's how right now we're starting to.
We were losing in trade $5 billion a day.
And now, because of tariffs and other things, we're making $1 billion a day.
And the tariffs haven't even really kicked in.
It's a big difference.
The last four years have been a disaster for us with trade and, frankly, with everything else.
So we're here for a different reason tonight.
We're going to have to fix this one, too.
We're fixing everything.
We're going around Mr. Fix It, Mrs. Fix-It.
Anybody want to join me?
But the Kennedy Center, when I said I'll do this, I hadn't been there.
That's the last time I'll take a job without looking at it.
But it's got a tremendous amount.
Lindsey Graham and some people put in the budget, either $200 or $250 million.
Money was spent there, tremendous amounts of money were spent there over the last 10 years.
I don't know where they spent it.
They certainly didn't spend it on wallpaper, carpet, or painting.
And they had over $200 million was spent.
So I don't know what's going on.
Pam, are you here?
When I hear that, I say, what?
Pam, where did all this money go?
It's crazy.
It's crazy what's happened with our country in that regard.
You know, build things.
We go back to the Woman Rink.
They went for years, 12 years without getting in a rink, and I got it built in three months for a fraction, like a tiny fraction.
They had spent over $20 million.
They never got it opened.
I said, I want my kids to go ice skating before they're too old.
They don't want to go ice skating anymore.
I used to watch it from my window.
I used to watch people, nobody working and spending money like crazy.
And as you know, I got it built very quickly.
This is a, well, maybe a more difficult.
That was pretty easy, actually.
That was pretty.
We had cement mixers from the rink all the way back into Harlem.
We poured one contiguous pour over a period of a day and a half.
They would pour a little section, then another little section.
And when they put water, it all leaked, surprisingly, you know.
So it was fun, but I love construction.
That's, I guess, why I like this a little bit, because we're going to have to redo it.
So I'm honored to welcome an exceptionally talented and committed group of patriots.
You're amazing people.
This is an amazing board, I'll tell you.
And I got so many calls from people.
Could I get on the board?
You have a lot of people that are not so much in love with me right now because I couldn't get them on the board.
But because the board is taken, but we're going to turn it around, and the Kennedy Center Board of Trustees, you're here, and in many cases, you have your spouses.
You see him, he's in one country, another country.
I think he loves it.
But he's so respected everywhere he goes.
And I know how tough he is, because I used to have to be up there with him.
He was not nice.
He was a tough one.
He was as good as you get.
I didn't know that we would end up being this close.
Actually, we like each other.
I think I can speak for him.
I can speak for myself, but I like him, and he's done a fantastic job, and he's really, really working.
And we're getting relationships that we lost that were very important for us in many ways.
And so I want to thank Marco, and Marco's on the board.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who I've known so long.
And she's married to the best-looking guy in the room, I must admit.
But she is the man.
She has been amazing.
She's so respected, and she's really delving into some tough territory.
She sees what's happened and what's going to happen, and she knows before anybody else.
She's just a fantastic person.
She's got a great staff that's surrounding her, and I think she's just a star.
But I've known that for a long time.
I'm not surprised at all.
So thank you very much, Pam, for the job you do.
And by the way, she was the Attorney General of Florida, so she had plenty for a long time and never had a problem.
I can't remember a problem.
And she kept everybody safe, and they felt very secure.
Now she's doing it on an even bigger level.
Who would have thought it would have been a much bigger level, right?
But she gets it.
Secretary Howard Luttnick is here with his wife, Allison, and he's went with us to that incredible four-day little journey that we had.
And we saw some things that were incredible, but everybody respects him.
Did a great job in business.
He built this firm twice.
His firm was at the top of the World Trade Center when the planes hit.
And he was an amazing story.
He was always, Allison, good job.
You got him to take your boy, right?
Years ago on that horrible date when you think of it.
So Howard would always be, he was a built canter Fitzgerald, and he built it and very top firm.
They had the top three floors of the World Trade Center, the building, the first building that was hit.
And he was always there at 6 in the morning, 5.30 in the morning.
You know, a lot of the stock guys have to do that.
Someday you'll explain to me why.
Probably insider trading, Pam.
I don't know.
It's probably.
But whatever the hell reason, he was there always at 5.30 or 6 o'clock.
And the first time ever, like almost ever, his wife was after him for years to take their son to school.
He was a young boy, very young, like early grades.
And he would say, no, I can't.
This was years after like two or three years of being harassed by Alice, and who's very tough.
Great wife, beautiful wife, but she's very, very tough.
And finally, he did it.
He took his boy, and it was on that day.
And he dropped the boy off at 8.30 and started driving down the West Side Highway.
And he would have been in that building.
And every single person died in your firm.
Every single, he had lost everybody.
And with the exception of a few people in Europe and maybe a couple of other places, small, because they were all very New York-centric.
And every single one of them died, including your brother.
And what he did was incredible, actually.
He rebuilt the firm.
And he gave a percentage of it for years to the people, the families of the people that died.
And the new firm became more successful than the old firm, using the same name, Cantor Fitzgerald.
And he rebuilt it step by step by step.
And I mean, that's to me, that's why I said, I have to get this guy if I have a chance, if I ever do.
And he was very happy.
They were doing great.
They were doing record business.
But when I said, how about coming over to commerce, a little thing called commerce, and now I don't think you could ever go back into that world because it's so big.
He and Scott are in charge of, along with others that are great, but they're in charge of the biggest deal ever made in history.
That's the whole tariffs.
We're taking in trillions of dollars, trillions.
And we've been hurt very badly by other countries that did this to us for 20, 25 years.
They were taking advantage of us.
We never did anything.
But now we're doing it to them in fairly, very, I'll tell you what, modestly.
But we'll be taking, and we are taking in right now, 25% on cars, 25% on steel and aluminum, 25% on other things, and that'll be going up to 50%, 75%, maybe 100 in some cases.
We have to get our pharmaceutical industry back.
And once we establish that in another couple of weeks, it'll start roaring back.
It's already roaring back because they know we're doing it.
Chief of Staff, Susie Wells, she's considered the most powerful woman anywhere in the world.
She is.
She's the most powerful woman in the world.
A lot of people are saying that, but she had a couple of articles, and I said, you know, it's actually true.
She can wipe out a country with just a mere phone call.
That's the end of the country.
But she's great.
She's been, I mean, I knew because we won Florida three times and won it convinced.
You know, Florida didn't used to be a red state.
It was a blue state.
When I first ran, that was a blue state.
And now it's a seriously red state.
And it got more and more.
And we're going to keep it that way.
But Susie ran it.
And we won by a landslide.
And a Republican hadn't won.
You know, you had a Democrat senator.
You had two Democrat senators.
But you had a Democrat governor.
You had a lot of Democrats.
And so we won in a landslide.
I said, good.
Then the next time I won again in a much bigger landslide.
And anybody I endorsed also won.
And I said, that's good.
And then when it came time to do this, after the election was rigged, the second one was rigged, whether you like it or not, it was rigged like nobody's ever seen.
And now people are seeing it.
Now people don't even fight me.
You know, they used to say, sir, it's not really nice to see it.
I'm an honest.
It was rigged.
And unfortunately, that's what happened.
You look at some of the things that happened.
All of these things would have never happened.
But when it came time to thinking about doing it again, I didn't think I'd have to do that.
I said, you know, I think I can take that woman, my friend now, but at the time I didn't know.
Her father was Pat Sommerall, who's a great football player, was probably a greater announcer for 28 years for the NFL.
But that tells me, you know, because I'm a big believer in the genes, person's genes.
And Susie was, I said, you know, let's use Susie.
She did a great job in Florida for me twice.
We beat every Democrat by numbers that they never saw before.
I said, let's use, and she took over and she did great.
Chris was fantastic, but she had a group of people that she brought with her.
And there was no looking back.
We started off leading by a lot, and it only got bigger and bigger and bigger.
We had a couple of challenges that didn't work out too well.
Worked out well for us.
But Susie was fantastic.
And now she's the chief of staff of the president, and she really makes it work.
And she's the first woman.
This is shocking to me because, you know, I thought we were beyond that.
First woman chief of staff in the history of the country, right?
And she's doing a great job.
And, you know, those men are scared.
She sits in the back of the room.
She watches them like this.
She doesn't want publicity.
She doesn't want to be on camera.
She doesn't want stories.
But they're up there yapping, yapping, yapping.
And if they start yapping the wrong way, it's not pleasant for them.
She's great.
And we have a friend of mine, a man that I endorsed, and he proudly went through the roof, Jeff Landry, governor of Louisiana.
Did my endorsement mean much?
When I endorsed you, he became a rocket chip.
Right?
We avoided.
Do I say it?
We won in the first round.
Yeah, it was good.
We didn't want to go a second round.
He just went up and won everything, and he's the great, great governor, great attorney general, great governor.
So it's great to have you.
And we have so many people here that we're not going to do that, but we may play around in a little while because we're going to have some fun tonight.
But it's been neglected very badly, and it needs an infusion of different things, including probably funds.
But I think we're going to do very well when we get some money from Congress to fix it because it's so important.
The previous leadership wasted millions and millions of dollars and handed us a budget deficit of $26 million.
Can you believe that?
In addition, the programming was out of control with rampant political propaganda, DEI, and inappropriate shows.
We had some very inappropriate shows, to put it, I think to put it very nicely.
They had dance parties for, quote, queer and trans youth.
And I guess that's all right for certain people.
Quote, and I'm just quoting, I'm not saying it, queer and trans youth.
That wasn't working out too well.
They had a Marxist anti-police performance.
And they had lesbian-only Shakespeare, which is different.
Who thinks of these ideas, really?
It's different.
Oh, we're bringing our country back so fast.
The military is so much better.
Everything is just gone.
They had people who are paying them $400,000, $500,000 a year to teach DEI.
Just 12 weeks, our new board has balanced the budget.
Think of that in the 2026 budget.
That's a pretty good job you've done.
That's amazing.
So the 2026, I told you it was $25 million under balance now for the fiscal year.
Eliminated DEI initiatives in all cases, brought back family-friendly programming that will attract large audiences once again and launched a plan to renovate the building and reclaim the grandeur as a landmark, a really Washington landmark, which it always was.
So instead of putting forward programming that tears our country down and tears our country apart, the Kennedy Center should be the nation's premier venue for lifting up the best of our country and lifting up the American arts, theater, music, and culture.
And together, it's really an honor to be with you.
I mean, I have so many friends on the board.
This is a hot board, just like we have a hot country.
You know, we have a hot country.
Our country was stone cold eight months ago.
It all began on November 5th.
Does anybody know that that was Election Day?
And from that moment on, and then January 20th came, and what we've done, you know, we have almost no inflation.
Our energy prices are way down.
Our gasoline costs are way down.
Groceries are way down.
Eggs.
Remember, they hit me with eggs my first week, sir.
The fake news, those people right there, they were saying, sir, eggs have gone through the roof.
They were doubling and tripling eggs.
I said, I don't know.
I've just got here.
Excuse me.
And through our great, she's done a great job, Brooke Rollins, Secretary of Agriculture.
Anyway, the prices came down.
They didn't want us to, we had the egg roll here a couple of weeks ago for Easter.
They didn't want us to order eggs.
They wanted the eggs to be made out of plastic.
They wanted plastic.
I said, I'm not going to do that.
But by the time it came around, the egg prices are way down.
The groceries are way down.
Everything's way down.
We are just doing great.
Think of it, no inflation.
And we're taking in billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, which we never did before.
We got a hot country right now.
We have a country that people are proud to be a part of.
So we're going to honor the legacy of President Kennedy.
It's a great legacy.
And we'll create the best and most beautiful home for the performing arts anywhere in the country.
And many other things also.
I want to thank you.
Again, we're going to have some fun working together.
It's going to make this a fun project.
That's what I thought until I walked into the building.
I said, this won't be the fun that I thought, but it is fun.
I like to create, you like to create.
Most of the people in the room like to create, just like Bob Kraft created the New England Patriots.
He happens to be here.
And he tells me he's a great new quarterback, so we're going to see.
You know, a lot of people make that statement.
We're going to find out, but I have a feeling you're going to be right.
You've been right about a lot of things.
But he was right about Tom Brady, right?
He got him almost the last draft choice in the last round, sixth round, whatever it was.
You know, it's not often you wake up in the morning and your first meeting is with the Pope and your last meeting is a dinner with the President of the United States.
That's a heck of a day.
And but it actually is an honor to be a part of this administration, Mr. President.
It's actually a very unique situation.
I don't know how many of you got to see the President's speech in Saudi Arabia.
I think it will go down as one of the most profound foreign policy speeches in American history.
And where it outlined a vision for the future and a vision of prosperity.
And I tell people we have a president of peace.
In fact, I'll tell you, kind of an aside, one of the cardinals I was meeting with, Mr. President, the day before the papal mass said to me, you know, it's very unusual for us.
It's, you know, we have an American president that wants peace, and it's some of the Europeans that are constantly talking about doing war stuff.
So it's kind of the world's upside down in their mind right now.
It's usually the other way around.
And it's a great honor to work for a president who literally spends half his day, maybe more, trying to stop wars, end wars, prevent wars.
And it's an extraordinary thing to be a part of, and thank you for your leadership on that front.
He's a key part of the speech he gave, and I just summarize it this way: our president is a builder, not a bomber.
He wants to make things, he wants to build things, he wants people to have prosperity and to be happy.
And frankly, he knows we have to have national defense because, of course, that's the world we live in.
But I think one of the things that troubles him deeply is how much money has to be spent on some of his military and war because it's just the way the nature of the world is.
He'd much rather be spending growing the economy and doing the deals that we've seen.
And he's trying to convince other countries of that as well.
It's an honor to be a part of this tonight for a few moments because you have an opportunity here.
You know, the Kennedy Center is a showcase of American excellence in arts and culture, and that's what it needs to be again.
And the work that Rick and his team are doing, both to bring the building and the actual function of the organization to reflect that.
But the programming is the other thing we're really excited to see: the programming, the shows that are coming, that will be a highlight of American excellence and of American culture and American entertainment.
And just so you know, the influence that American culture has around the world in a positive way, a few months ago, the president hosted the Prime Minister of Italy down in Florida, and her English is excellent, very good English.
And I asked her, why is your English so good?
It was really good.
You know what she said?
You know she learned English?
Michael Jackson.
Not from him, not like personally.
He wasn't doing the lessons, from his music.
But what it tells you is the impact that American culture has on the world in such a positive way, and it can have such an influence.
And the Kennedy Center is a showcase for it.
So we're excited to see what you're leading here and all of you contributing towards that.
And we're excited to see also the restoration of that building.
That really should be a showcase and something that we're proud of.
That when people come to Washington, when people come to America, they want to see the shows that reflect the greatness of our culture and society and in a building run by an organization that is reflective of excellence as well.
So it's an honor to be here tonight.
I want to thank all of you for contributing to this because it's important that this board and everyone that's involved in it and Rick and his team are doing a great job of making sure that your dollars and everything you've made possible will be well spent so we'll have a treasure in our hands for future generations.
I think, Sergio, you want to come up here now and tell us about Sergio Gore personnel?
First of all, how great is it to have a president who actually cares about the Art Center?
That's what I love best, is that he actually cares.
He came, he saw the problem, and he immediately said, I'm going to call Congress and we're going to try to fix it.
This is traditionally a Democrat territory, except President Trump says, I want to do this.
I have to tell you, President Trump is actually saving the Kennedy Center because there is discussion right now of whether or not to take it down.
The deferred maintenance of the Kennedy Center is criminal.
It has been terrible.
Mr. President, we said today in our board meeting, our great new CFO went through the 24 and 25 budgets of the Kennedy Center and found $26 million in phantom revenue, fake revenue.
It's criminal.
We're going to refer this to the U.S. Attorney's Office here.
We're lucky enough to have the Attorney General on the board of the Kennedy Center who heard all the details today.
She heard the details.
And this is unacceptable in America to have a fake revenue of $26 million fraud on previous donors.
It's unacceptable.
But I'm here to tell you that what we have is total transparency now.
We announced our program today, which is literally shocking the media because they're saying, okay, this is pretty good.
We're not getting criticized for the programming because guess what, Mr. President?
When you pick programs that are popular with the public, they respond.
People buy tickets.
It is popular when you do programming for the masses.
As I said today, I am somebody who loves niche programming in the arts.
I am somebody who embraces it.
It's not for everybody, but I like to be challenged by the arts.
I like it when somebody can teach me and make me a little bit uncomfortable in a show.
But one thing that we're not going to do at the Kennedy Center is inappropriate content for children.
We're going to protect children and we're going to make sure that we are absolutely not losing money on our program.
We can't do arts education if we don't have enough money and we have fake revenue coming in.
So I promise you, and this board today responded incredibly well.
I can't thank you all enough.
Jennifer, thank you for being the chair.
Thank you for every single board member.
Your commitment is amazing.
And as President Trump said, we're going to do great things.
Everyone needs to go out and buy tickets to Les Miz and Porgy and Best, which are currently being right now about to launch.
We're building the stages and we're getting ready to have premier entertainment at America's premier arts institution.
Thank you very much.
unidentified
C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum involving you to discuss the latest issues in government, politics, and public policy from Washington, D.C. and across the country.