And Ms. Artson, before we let both of you go, what to you are the most important things to watch out for, specifically in the weeks ahead?
unidentified
What I think is the most important to watch out for is what happens on the ground.
Dulcy Rodriguez is now the president designated and whether there will be any real pressure for movement in a democratic direction from the U.S. government.
And if that does not take place, I couldn't agree more with Admiral Montgomery that this will be seen in hindsight as a failure of Trump policy.
And the Venezuelan government will probably bend over backwards to save their own skins and allow U.S. companies back into the country to allow the oil sector to slowly begin to get back on track, if not at some point to flourish.
But if that is really the end result and the principal product of the U.S. intervention, coupled with what I think all of us expect to be a conviction of Nicolas Maduro on the charges for which he will stand trial, that will be a very Pyrrhic victory and not one that will be looked on with kindness by a lot of policymakers in the U.S.,
but also the Venezuelan people and populations throughout Latin America.
For the next two to three months, you're going to see us maintain a quarantine that keeps the pressure on the government to bend to bend the need of Donald Trump.
So you'll continue to see that.
We're probably running down one of the tankers right now, somewhere in the Atlantic, to pull it back.
The other thing, a good tipper about whether we're going to do anything about democracy will be the status of the political prisoners.
There's thousands of political prisoners in Venezuela.
The president hasn't called for their release.
Even Rubio, who knows better, hasn't called for their release.
So if you see us, the United States not care about the political prisoners, I think that's going to be indicative that we're not going to care about democracy long term.
If you see us get involved in that and the release of political prisoners, there's some hope that we'll eventually get involved in ensuring free and fair elections.
And I agree, you know, they'll eventually, this is going to take more than, it'll take eight to 12 months, I think, to convict Maduro.
It'll take seven or eight months before they even start the real trial and then a trial for one to two months.
And you'll see, I think you'll see his conviction because, first of all, he's guilty.
And second of all, he doesn't have the protection of being the actual leader of a foreign country.
Admiral Montgomery serves with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies as a senior fellow, FDD.org, and Cynthia Arnson, electorate at Johns Hopkins University, jhu.edu.
To both of you, thanks for the conversation.
unidentified
Thank you.
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Up next, President Trump, addressing House Republicans, gathered together at the newly renamed Trump Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
He spoke on the GOP's legislative priorities going into the second session of the 119th Congress, the deposed Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro, while also criticizing the Democrats' political agenda.
And you've done an amazing, you've done an amazing job.
You love the country.
You're doing what's right for the country.
And I want to wish everybody a Happy New Year, the most successful House Republican majority in decades.
And we did it with not a big majority.
This was not a, that was not a big majority, but it's a unified majority and it's people that know what it takes to make America great again.
So together we had 12 months of unprecedented success in 2025 and now we're going to make history and break records with the epic midterm victory that we're going to pull off.
It just doesn't seem to happen for people that win the presidency.
It's an amazing phenomenon.
You know, you win the presidency and we sure as hell are having a successful presidency.
I will say that.
But even if it's a successful presidency, there's been nothing like what we're doing.
We had a very good day two days ago, too.
But even if it's successful, they don't win.
I don't know what it is.
Just something psychological, like you vote against.
You can win by a lot.
We won every swing state.
We won the popular vote by millions.
We won everything.
But they say that when you win the presidency, you lose the midterm.
So you're all brilliant people.
Most of you are in this business longer than me.
That makes me smarter than you.
Because look where I am, right?
No, it doesn't.
But I wish you could explain to me what the hell's going on with the mind of the public because we have the right policy.
They don't.
They have a horrible policy.
They do stick together.
They're violent.
They're vicious.
You know, they're vicious people.
And they stick together like Lou.
They don't have a couple of the people that we have.
A couple of people, not too many, really very few.
And that's why I want to just say that before we go any further, I want to express our tremendous sorrow at the loss of a great member, a great, great, great member, Congressman Doug Lamalfa, who passed away yesterday, as you probably have heard.
And he was the leader of the Western caucus, a fierce champion on California water issues.
He was great on water.
He wanted, release the water, he'd scream out.
And a true defender of American children, he was a defender of everybody.
And our hearts go out to his wife, Jill, and his entire family.
You know, he voted with me 100% of the time.
And by the way, he wasn't a three o'clock in the morning person.
Do you know what I mean by that?
Where the speaker goes, sir, could you call up?
Could you call?
I said, what time is it, Speaker?
Sir, it's three in the morning.
Could you make a couple of calls?
How many?
Nine.
So I'd start calling.
I'd start calling.
Three in the morning, I said, like, I shouldn't use any names.
I'm just going to create problems.
But hi, Jim, and I'm not talking about Jim Jordan there.
I never had a call three in the morning for him.
But I say, hi, Jim, how you doing?
They just called to say hello, you know, three in the morning.
Okay, sir.
Sir, you haven't spoken to me in three years, and it's now three in the morning, so I know what you want.
You want my vote?
And usually almost always they'd give it, but they wanted to be called.
And with Doug, I never had a call.
He was with us right from the beginning.
I love those guys.
I must say I probably love them the best, you know, the guys that I don't have to call.
They know we're doing the right thing.
I have a couple that are going to be with us all the way, but they just want the call.
They want love.
They need love.
They're more insecure than most of you.
It's true.
No, most of you are secure people.
Don't you're all laughing.
No, most of you are secure people.
I had a couple say, look, I could have Trump call me all the time.
I just have to break his ass a little bit.
And he'll be calling, calling, calling.
But I appreciate those.
We actually had a little party.
We opened up a beautiful section of the White House in the Rose Garden and we had a party for all of those people that I never speak to and vote for me.
And you know, I spoke to Doug, but I didn't speak to him about, I mean, never had a problem.
And I was really, I was really saddened by his passing and was thinking about not even doing the speech in his honor.
But then I decided that I have to do it in his honor.
I'll do it in his honor because he would have wanted it that way.
He would have wanted it that way.
He would have said, do that speech.
Are you kidding me?
Do the speech, big guy.
But he was a fantastic person.
Man, that was a quick one.
I don't know.
I don't know quite yet what happened, but boy, it's a tough one.
He was just with us.
He was our friend, all of us, every one of us.
And I also want to send our best wishes to Congress and Jim Baird and his wife, who are recovering from a car accident.
They're going to be okay, but they had a pretty bad accident.
And we're praying that they get out of that hospital very quickly.
He's going to be fine.
She's going to be fine, but it was a bad accident.
And I want to thank the man who has been central to so many of our triumphs.
He really has been.
He's the guy that would call me to make those calls all the time.
He's always working.
And he's a nice person.
You know, he's a very nice, he's a high-quality person.
But I want to tell you, he's a very tough cookie.
I've seen both sides.
Not often do I have to see the other side because he's just, by nature, he's a very fine, religious person.
So basically, they didn't ask him to, but if he did, it wouldn't be good.
But it's good with me because, you know, we have so much ammunition.
We have ammunition.
The problem is the fake news.
That's why I like being on it.
I'd much rather do live television than do non-live because, like, when they say, as an example, in my speech, peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol, peacefully and patriotically.
Do you know that the unselect committee didn't report it that I said those words?
Do you know that the news never reported the words walk or march peacefully and patriotically to the Capitol?
Do you know they never reported it?
It's a scandal.
The unselect committee never reported that.
They never reported that Nancy Pelosi was offered 10,000 soldiers, National Guard soldiers, whatever you want.
No, I don't want them.
And the mayor.
The mayors were in writing.
She was more honorable about it.
But Nancy got caught when her daughter did a documentary.
She's a documentary.
And she has her mother saying, it's my fault.
I should have taken the soldiers or something.
I saw that in the documentary.
I said, whoa, this was a major story.
Has she spoken to her daughter since that?
But they just, you know, they are vicious people, even on the attack.
And it was an amazing military feat that took place yesterday.
Think of it.
An amazing military.
The people are saying, well, thank you.
You know, people are saying it goes down with one of the most incredible.
It was so complex.
152 airplanes, many, many.
Talk about boots on the ground.
We had a lot of boots on the ground.
But it was amazing.
And think of it, nobody was killed, and on the other side, a lot of people were killed.
We're getting rich because of tariffs, by the way.
I hope everyone understands that.
They hate to report.
We have over $650 billion poured into our country.
We're coming in shortly because of tariffs.
You know, they're finding all of these pockets of money a couple of weeks ago.
Sir, we're off by $39 billion.
Oh, is that good or bad?
Meaning, do we have it or are we short of it?
Sir, it's 39 billion that we can't account for.
That means we have an extra 39.
Yes, sir.
I said, well, what are you saying?
We just don't know where it came from.
I said, check the tariff shelf.
Sir, that tariff doesn't start until September.
He said, no, no.
It started about a month and a half ago.
Check it.
Comes back 25 minutes later.
Sir, you were right.
It came from tariffs.
This never happened to us before.
Where we find plus 39 billion, not million, plus 39 billion.
They were missing.
We've taken in $650 billion or shortcoming.
And that's because I'm being nice.
If I want to be, and we have national security because of tariffs.
And frankly, we have a big Supreme Court case.
I hope they do what's good for our country.
I hope they do the right thing.
The president has to be able to wheel and deal with tariffs.
And now, if you have the right president, it's good.
You have the wrong person.
You know, if you have the wrong president, nothing's good.
Tariffs are the least of your problems.
We found that out for four years.
We had the worst president, did the worst job.
They had the worst policy.
Yeah, we have to even run against these people.
Now, I won't say cancel the election.
They should cancel the election because the fake news will say, he wants the elections canceled.
He's a dictator.
They always call me a dictator.
Nobody's worse than Obama and the people that surrounded Biden.
Not Biden.
I don't think it was Biden.
He didn't know what the hell was going on, okay?
The election was rigged.
He had no idea what happened.
He still doesn't.
The Autopen.
And by the way, you ought to make a big deal out of the AutoPen.
The Autopen was your president because most of the things were signed by Autopen.
And you're not allowed to do that.
I signed very little.
Now I just sign everything because it's just so crazy.
But you know, like I had the other day, we elevated a general to four stars.
I think you should sign that.
You know, that's a big deal.
A general did a great job, was elevated to four stars.
And I had the gentleman, and I signed it in front of him, held it up.
You know, you gotta send it.
You can't give it to an Autopen.
And you can always tell an AutoPen.
One thing that has two little tiny dots, you know that?
Two little dots.
You know what that's from?
Two pins.
They go bing, bing, p.
They're wonderful things.
But you got to sign it.
And the law is you have to sign it.
If somebody's, you know, telling the AutoPen person, he has to be authorized by the President of the United States.
Well, he wasn't.
The guy barely knew the president.
How many times did you just speak to the president, right?
He said two.
And they just spoke about the weather.
It was like this.
But he was never authorized to sign.
And I think it's, what is it, 95% of the things were signed by Autopen.
You can tell because the AutoPen is a nice plain signature and his signature is a mess.
The only thing he signed was, which is nice, was Hunter's pardon.
No, that's the only thing that we could find that he signed.
Most of it he didn't sign.
So somebody's sending papers to sign.
And he wasn't the president.
First of all, the election was rigged.
You ought to have voter ID.
You ought to insist on it.
You ought to insist on it.
Can you imagine?
In California, they not only don't have voter ID, but if an official at the voting booths, which they don't have, by the way, because it's all mail, if an official, a voting official, even asks somebody for voter ID, sir, we'd like to see your identification.
Do you come from our country?
They put him in jail for tampering with the election.
Okay?
We've got to straighten this out before it gets too crazy.
I'll tell you what, I did great there three times.
I was surprised three times.
Those elections are corrupt.
They got you one time, too.
But I heard. a long time ago, but they got you.
But they got to straighten those out.
But we have to have voter ID.
And you know, when you confront a Democrat about voter ID, like in a debate or something, I said it a couple of times with Biden.
They're very embarrassed when they say, we want voter ID, voter identification.
The only reason somebody doesn't want that is because they want to cheat.
Our elections are crooked as hell.
And you can not only win elections over that and not only win future elections, but you'll win every debate because the public is really angry about it.
And you ought to pass the SAFE Act or whatever you're going to call it.
Are we going to SAVE Act or the Save America Act?
I think we're going to change the name a little bit.
You're going to put that up for a vote?
I think everybody in this room certainly should do it.
And it's a bad vote for them because they're voting against things like voter ID and other things that are almost equal to voter ID.
But when somebody says, no, we don't want voter ID, that means they're crooked.
And the public understands it.
You win elections with that.
But I think it would be really important, Save America Act, if you would put that up for a vote.
It's got my total endorsement.
And all it is is common sense things about the election.
And they'll fight it like crazy because they cheat.
That's the only way they can win.
When you have policy so bad, when you have policy with men in women's sports, men in women's sports, and they fight like hell for it.
They still are.
I saw the other day a person that you know very well, a congressman, was fighting like hell.
And, you know, I was out the other day with somebody, and I was with an ex-football player.
The guy was massive.
His leg was like this.
And a young woman who plays flag football.
And she's very good, supposedly, as an athlete.
She's smaller than this guy's leg.
Okay?
And if they were playing football together, he wouldn't even have to run.
They got hats that are all frayed and all, they look like they're all paid.
They don't even know what they're talking about.
When the reporters don't interview them because they know that it's, you know, the reporters, the press is so anti-it's hard to believe the press could be so anti because it's all common sense.
I got 97% bad stories on one network, 93% on the other, and I won in a landslide.
You know what that means?
The press has no credibility.
That's all it means.
And we got to keep it that way.
So I don't talk too much about the swimming, the weightlifting, the boxing.
I don't talk about it.
You know why?
I want to start bringing it up about a week before the election because I don't want them to correct themselves.
I don't want them to say, you know, we've decided that we don't want to have men playing in women's sports.
That'd be a devastating blow for us.
Because that's, you know, they say it's an 80-20.
No, no, it's about a 98-2 issue.
We've decided that we will not have open borders where the entire world from the Congo, prisons from the Congo, these are extraordinarily tough people.
These are people that make our motorcycle gangs look like fine young men.
Our motorcycle gangs are wonderful people by comparison.
No, they come in from prisons in the Congo.
They come in from prisons from all over the world, but in particular, Venezuela, Trende Aragua.
Trende Aragua comes in and Trende Aragua.
They say it's the worst gang in the world.
It makes our gangs look like little sweethearts.
It makes our gangs, you want to take them out to dinner.
So Trende Araga, they don't want to do anything about it.
So ICE has to go in and take them out because the governor doesn't want to do anything.
But they make a phone call.
They've taken over my building.
The landlord's calling.
They took over his building.
So the governor doesn't want to do anything.
But he calls the police, the guy.
They come in.
Did you call the police?
This is Trende Rugg.
We're talking to the man that owns the building.
Did you call the police here?
Boom, they cut off his fingers.
If you call him again, the next time your hand comes off, do you believe?
Because walking around, his fingers were cut off.
And these are the animals that we're throwing the hell out of here.
Washington, D.C. is now the safest city in the country.
And you people know that better than anybody because you, you were, I mean, think of it.
You're in Congress.
You're respected people.
You're afraid to walk outside.
Washington, D.C.
Now, we had a terror attack four weeks ago.
And one person's looking down from heaven and the other one is actually recuperating and going to make it, I think.
But really badly hurt.
Really badly hurt.
Most positive mother I've ever.
No, my son's going to be fine, sir.
The mother was telling me that the night of the attack, I went just like I went to you.
I just, I spoke to this incredible woman.
Sir, everyone's praying for my son.
He's going to be fine.
The doctors thought she was, you know, just hoping against hope.
There was no chance.
And two weeks ago, he got up and started walking around.
It's amazing, actually.
So maybe some really pet.
It looks like he could be, okay, he's going to have pretty bad after effects.
But that was a different, that was a terrorist attack on people that are doing a great job.
And it could have been anywhere.
But we haven't had a murder.
You know, we would have, on average, two murders a week in Washington.
I don't even like talking about it.
Two murders a week in Washington.
You see, we haven't had one in seven months.
People can walk out now.
You can walk down with your wife down to the restaurants, which are booming, by the way.
I mean, if you go back to before I got in, and we did the pretty good job four years ago, but it was never this, you know, in my first term.
So when we were during the first term, we were pretty good, but, you know, it wasn't like that big of an issue.
It became a big issue because people were being mugged all over the place.
We had a couple of people working in the White House that were killed.
We had one guy waiting for his wife in a car.
They said, get out of your car.
He said, well, I'm waiting for my wife.
They blew his head off.
The wife is walking up to the car.
Animals.
And then they get angry when I say, they're animals.
Nancy broke.
They're not animals.
They're human beings.
No, they're not.
This is another thing.
That's a 98-2 issue also.
No, they're animals.
And we've taken them out.
We've took out over 2,000 people, brought them back to their countries from where they came, or they're in prison now in Washington.
Because it's not just like, you have to take the bad ones out.
2%, 3% of the population causes 90% of the crime.
Think of it.
2% of the population in Washington, D.C. causes 90% of the crime.
So when you get rid of the 2%, we took out over 2,000 people, got them out of the country or in prison.
Some were so bad that we didn't want to send them back to their countries because they'll come back in, even though it's hard now, but you know, they're pretty smart.
They're sick, but they're smart.
But you're now living in one of the safest cities in the country.
It's a great thing.
You can walk to the restaurants.
Restaurants are booming.
New restaurants are open.
They were all closing.
You wouldn't have had a restaurant.
And I don't know about you, but to me, those soldiers standing there look so good.
I'm not going to feel safe walking down the street without them.
I don't think you would either.
Even though, you know, we took out so many criminals.
I just feel better.
To me, they're beautiful.
I look at these soldiers and you feel safe.
You feel safe.
I don't think if we took them out, even if the crime wasn't much, it would definitely be more.
We did a great job in Chicago.
They don't want to talk about it.
You know, against all this, this slob of a governor, this stupid slob, the family threw him out of the business.
He was a dope.
And the Pritzker family.
But they threw him out of the business.
And the mayor, he's a low IQ person, extremely low IQ.
We should give everybody, like, these competency tests, right?
The cognitive, they call it cognitive.
You know, I'm the only president that went for cognitives.
I think every president and vice president should be forced to take cognitive exams, mental tests.
If on Monday you haven't agreed to every single thing that we want, I'm putting a 25% tariff on everything coming out of France, including your wines, your champagnes, and everything else.
We have just a piece of the last month left for the first year.
47 days out of 11 months, we hit a new record.
Well, we hit one last night.
We hit another one today, I understand.
But we hit one last night.
A new record, brand new record.
All exchanges, not just, you know, Dow, Dow was up, but all of them.
We have another record 40, that's the 47th time in 11 months that we've had an all-time high.
And the future, because we have more money coming into our country than any country has ever had by far.
The record was about $3 trillion many years ago by China.
We've got $18 trillion pouring into our country.
You know why?
Because of tariffs.
Because if they build a factory, they don't have to pay any tariff.
But if they make it in another country and they send it in, they have a very big tariff to pay.
So they can't pay that tariff.
So what they do is they come in and they're building.
By the way, this is what China did to us for many years.
It's just reversing it.
than we have we have a great product we have a great we were losing our product Tell you what, if I had lost this election, if you had Kamala, it's the same thing, Joe and Kamala, I call them equals.
If you had Kamala come in, I believe that our country would have been Venezuela on steroids.
I used to say that during the campaign.
If I don't win, we're going to have Venezuela.
So we have 18 trillion coming in.
I think we could hit 20 trillion by the time the year is up, right?
Less than one year, 18 trillion.
The record is $3 trillion.
$3 trillion is a lot of money.
$18 trillion is not even thinkable.
That's all investment.
That's building factories, that's building plants.
You know how many car factories we have?
Half of you guys are having car factories.
Where you are, Louisiana is doing great.
Georgia right next to you is doing great.
Hello.
Nice guy.
All nice people.
Actually, in this room, I can't see you.
Is there anybody I'm supposed to dislike in this room?
I think the couple of people maybe didn't show up.
There's only one that I really dislike.
I mean, I really, the same person that Mike gave up on, because there's something wrong with him.
He's a sick person.
But there's only one, really.
The others, you just have to understand them.
You know, they have some problems too.
But you just have to sort of go with them and understand them, feel sorry for them, advise their family.
But when I travel, I make a lot of money for the country.
Not for me.
For me, I don't make, I don't care.
I have a much higher purpose.
I have plenty of money.
I don't need money.
I don't want money.
I want to make money for the country.
And like I did with Intel, Intel came in.
They had a problem.
I said, I can solve the problem, but I think you should give the United States 10% of your company.
He goes, whoa.
I said, yeah, I think I can help you with the problem, but you've got to give the United States, not me.
Sometimes I'll say, give me, but when I say me, I'm talking about, I'd love to accept it, but I don't think that law enforcement would like that, right?
unidentified
I'm very cognizant of law enforcement, perhaps more than anybody in history.
Actually, a friend of mine who's really smart said, you know, you've got to be the most honest guy in history.
Because you have been examined, your books, your records.
I have a big business.
Every record.
I had these Democrats hired the biggest accounting firms, the biggest law firms, the biggest.
I went through years of abuse.
And here I am.
They didn't find anything wrong.
Remember?
We want his tax returns for years.
We want his, finally, the Supreme Court, shockingly, I'm the only one.
This couldn't happen to anybody else.
You have to give your tax returns, right?
I gave my tax returns there from here to here.
It's a big business.
It's a great business.
And I built a great business, like much bigger and better than anyone even understands.
But I gave my tax returns.
They go from here to the ceiling, practically.
They got them.
Headline, Trump to give tax returns.
Supreme Court ruled that.
They give my tax returns.
Can you believe it?
Everyone said, you're not supposed to, it's not supposed to do that.
And by fighting, they think you're trying to hide something.
You know, naturally.
I gave my tax returns.
That's the last we ever heard.
They hired the biggest accounting firm in the world, most powerful lawyers in the world.
They spent millions and millions of dollars going over those returns.
There hasn't been one story that I did anything wrong.
So this friend of mine is highly sophisticated, rich guy, smart guy, said, there's nobody that I know that could have gone through an examination like that and not ended up in prison.
Nobody ever had to suffer like I did.
Nobody ever did that to anybody else.
You know, there was an expression, Andrew Jackson was the most abused president in the history of the United States.
You know who second was?
This before me.
You know who second was?
Abraham Lincoln.
But he had a Civil War.
So we have to give him a pass.
But Andrew Jackson was treated horribly.
He was a great general and a good president.
So bad that his wife died.
I mean, his wife died.
They were horrible.
But I just saw a report came out the other day.
I blow them away.
I blow.
He never got impeached twice.
I got impeached twice on nothing.
On a perfect phone call, remember?
Perfect phone call.
Tim Scott, who's a great guy, great, wonderful guy, South Carolina, straight guy, right?
He is a good guy, good person.
He's an honest person.
He read a transcript.
Thank goodness I had a transcript.
Essentially, the call was taped because they taped calls.
I didn't even know.
So was that call taped?
Yes, sir.
I said, oh, well, bring it down.
I don't even know.
And we read the transcript.
It was perfect.
It was so good.
I told Ukraine not to cheat.
And if you see any cheating, report it to the Attorney General of the United States.
And we have a signed agreement that Ukraine can't cheat.
You know that.
It's the only country we have actually assigned.
They violated the agreement many times, I will tell you.
You'll find out.
I was right about that too.
But nobody's gotten treated.
But this guy said to me, for you to have escaped, but the one thing, and I'll just end it, because Jim Jordan back there, world champion wrestler, 128 and 1.
Whatever happened to the one guy?
The Russian.
How dare you lose to a Russian?
Do you know the more impressive record for Jim?
Because I'm a big sports person.
I love sports.
Jim went to high school.
In high school, he was considered like the top wrestler.
But he was undefeated in high school.
Now, what that means is that as a freshman, he was beating seniors.
Is that true?
Were you actually undefeated?
Seriously, were you undefeated in high school?
That means as a freshman, he had to beat senior Steve.
Nobody could, because there's such a difference between a freshman and a senior.
To me, that's more impressive than anything.
But I'm also impressed with his fight.
Now we have to close the deal, Jim.
We've got to close the deal.
close that deal, but I, but the right, so I, you know, I respect.
I saw Jim, and the first time I met Jim, I looked at him and I said, tough looking guy.
But I noticed the ears, they were a little rough.
They were a little bit of a rough.
Some people would say a little cauliflower on that ear.
They said, Jim, have you wrestled before?
Yes, I did.
Where?
Was it Ohio State?
Something?
Like, he was an all-American at Ohio State.
I said, yeah, I could sort of tell.
I look at the ears and I can sort of tell.
But have you had plastic surgery on your ears, Jim?
No?
Because they look better now than they did the first time.
He's actually sitting in this room right now, that son of a gun.
He knows who I'm talking about.
He was giving me a hard time, but he's turned out to be a decent person.
Not the best in the room, but the decent person.
He's not my favorite in the room, but he's decent.
But we have one thing that's really strong.
Uh-oh, it's a fake news.
Pullet surprise, right?
Pullet surprise.
He got one for the bullet.
He had the bullet, but he got how many bullet surprises?
Three bullet surprises and all talented guys.
These are great guys.
I don't like the people back there.
These are the ones that take the pictures.
Make me look thin for a change, Douglas.
You're making me look a little bit heavy.
I'm not happy about it.
But one thing I did see and find out in the last two months: when you tell the people that we want the money to be paid to the people so the people can buy their own health insurance and health care, it is like, and I just said it, and I said it because I read a story on the front page of a certain paper that I don't even mention because it's so stupid, paper is so bad.
It's gotten so far off the Wall Street Journal.
I don't mention it.
I refuse to tell you which.
I refuse to tell you that it's the Wall Street Journal.
They've lost their way.
This is not the Wall Street Journal of old.
But I read a story on the Wall Street Journal and it said that the insurance companies are making so much money.
They weren't demeaning them or anything.
And I guess as an investor, you're happy.
When I read that, I said, wait a minute, they're making that kind of money.
And they're making it because of stupid politicians, I hate to say, that we allow them to make it.
If you guys can get in a room, because you know, we don't have that as one of our issues.
It's the only thing they have.
They're lousy at it.
They came up with Obamacare.
We tried to fight it.
We almost had it won, but we didn't get three votes.
We should have gotten them.
But here's, you want to turn this thing?
You work on favorite nations, you work on borders, you work on all of the things that we talked about.
But now you take the health care issue away from them, and they want to fight it.
You know why?
They're all owned by the insurance companies.
And they cannot fight it successfully.
There's nothing they can do.
That's like almost the voter ID thing.
When they try and fight, I watched the guy trying to explain why we shouldn't have voter ID the other day, and the guy was a fool.
He looked like an idiot.
This is the same kind of an issue.
Let the money go in the healthcare account or however you do it.
Let the money go directly to the people.
Now, you have to be a little flexible on Hyde.
You know that.
You got to be a little flexible.
You got to work something.
You got to use ingenuity.
You got to work.
We're all big fans of everything, but you got to be flexible.
You have to have flexibility.
I came out with a statement: let the money go not to the big fat cats and the insurance companies that made 1,700% over the last short period of time.
Let the money go directly to the people where they can buy their own health care.
And I don't think, I'm not sure that I've ever said anything that was more impactful.
You know, I say a lot of things and have a lot of good ideas.
And this was an idea that, I mean, the whole world went crazy.
The whole country went crazy.
The world went crazy with envy.
If you can somehow do that, Mr. Speaker, Tom, all of you, Steve, if you can do that, you're going to have, this is going to be your issue.
And the other thing is fertilization.
They're trying to hit us on fertilization.
They were dead on fertilization when I got a call from a very wonderful young senator from Alabama saying they had just lost a case and the case I've never been met with such scorn.
Friends of hers were just going crazy.
And I said, explain the issue to me.
And it was on IVF, the fertilization.
A judge ruled against and said all fertilization places have to be closed down like immediately.
It would have been a disaster.
And fortunately, I picked it up and we became, we owned the issue.
But now I understand they're trying to make a case on fertilization.
You can't let them do that.
Very important issue.
All of these issues are very important issues.
But you can own healthcare.
Figure it out.
Let the money go directly to the people.
It goes in a healthcare account.
It does, there are numerous things you can do, but you have to let no money for the insurance companies.
You know, I'm going to meet with the insurance companies.
I said, I'm going to meet with them.
Because I met with the prescription drug companies.
And that's when I found out what was going on with the fact that we were paying 10 and 13 and 14 times more money than Europe and other places.
I learned that at the meeting.
Now I'm going to meet with them in a few days.
I'm meeting with them all, 14 companies.
I'm meeting with them all.
I'm also meeting with oil companies.
Let's go.
You know what that's about.
We've got a lot of oil to drill, which is going to bring down oil prices even further.
But if you can come up with healthcare, remember this, where the money goes to the people, you have just owned, they can't fight it.
They're owned by the insurance companies.
You guys don't get money from the insurance companies.
They do.
They get a massive amount of money.
It's their biggest donor.
They're going to try and fight you, but they can't win the fight.
If you explain it, the money goes directly to the people.
That's going to be your issue.
The other thing is energy.
Your energy prices have come so far down since that president.
And nobody wants to, I saw on television, energy prices are down 3%.
No, they're not down 3%.
They were $3.50 and $4.
It's now $1.99 a gallon in many stations, many stations.
And it's going down further.
And that's like a massive tax cut.
And that's the other thing, tax cuts.
No tax on tips.
No tax on Social Security.
No tax on overtime.
Now think of this.
No tax on tips.
No tax for seniors on Social Security.
No tax on overtime.
You're allowed to deduct if you buy a car and you take out a loan on the car.
For the first time ever, middle-income people, all people could deduct, but they never got a deduction before like this.
It's only for rich people.
They got them.
They have so many deductions.
You're allowed to deduct the interest against your taxes.
Nobody thought it was possible.
It's going to be phenomenal for the car companies, but it's even more phenomenal for the people.
It's like getting a, you know, it's like paying half for the car.
All of these things, you have so much ammunition.
All you have to do is sell it.
Taxes.
But the one thing they know about the taxes, the great, big, I call it the Great Big Beautiful Bill.
I think it's even better.
But the Great Big Beautiful Bill is just that.
There are so many goodies in the bill.
You have to get the word out.
Because the people in the back of the room won't do it.
That's why I love live television.
Because they can't, well, sometimes they'll turn the camera off, but they're embarrassed when they do that.
You know, if we're going too strong and doing too well, if the lights go off, you know you're doing well.
If the lights are on, you got yourself a problem, okay?
I see that little red light.
That light goes on.
If that light, that's bad, isn't it?
If that light goes off, you know that you're doing a good job because you're fighting the Democrats and you're fighting the fake news.
And it's amazing that they can be so stupid.
And they don't have credibility anymore, and you can beat them.
I mean, it's the old thing that, you know, never fight the news, but you have no choice because it's almost like they become radicalized.
Congressman Doug LaMalfa has died at the age of 65.
The Republican lawmaker was in the middle of his seventh term representing California's first congressional district.
Mr. LaMalfa was a fourth-generation rice farmer and prior to being elected to Congress, was a former state legislator as well.
Governor's Paid Leave Announcement00:02:06
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In addition to serving on the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committees, LaMalfa was well known for his ability to connect with presidents at the annual State of the Union address to lobby directly for his district.
His office released a statement that reads in part: Congressman LaMalfa cared deeply for the people he served and worked tirelessly to hold the government to its word to fix our failing forests, build water storage, and leave people to be free to choose what is best for themselves.
His tragic and unexpected passing leaves a deep impact on many.
C-SPAN, Democracy Unfiltered, were funded by these television companies and more, including Comcast.
The flag replacement program got started by a good friend of mine, a Navy vet, who saw the flag at the office that needed to be replaced.
Said, wouldn't this be great if this can be something that we did for anyone?
Comcast has always been a community-driven company.
This is one of those great examples of the way we're getting out there.
Comcast supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy.
And up next, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz answering reporters' questions on alleged welfare fraud within the state, as well as his decision to not seek re-election later this year.
The governor's remarks came during a news conference on paid family medical leave.