President Trump Joins White House Press Secretary for Press Briefing
Donald Trump defends his administration’s policies, claiming tariffs cut the U.S. trade deficit by 77%, boosted exports by $150B, and slashed violent crime by nearly 2,000 lives while reducing illegal border crossings to 100% for eight months. He touts economic wins like gasoline dropping from $4.50–$7 to $1.99/gallon and Venezuela’s 50M barrels seized, dismissing inflation critiques as "fake news." On foreign policy, he insists NATO spending rose to 5% GDP, avoids direct engagement with Maduro, and hints at military leverage over Iran’s mass executions. Skeptical of Macron’s leadership and the UN, Trump asserts his policies prevent civil wars and prioritize American sovereignty, framing his legacy as divinely approved. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
Main
donald j trump
admin01:12:00
Appearances
Clips
a
aishah hasnie
fox00:06
c
cara castronuova
lindelltv00:26
m
mary miller
rep/r00:16
p
philip wegmann
00:27
?
Voice
Speaker
Time
Text
Drug Prices Plummet00:04:41
unidentified
Bills under suspension of the rules, including legislation requiring the Small Business Administration to help business owners use AI in their operations.
Also, a bill to establish a veteran scam and fraud evasion officer at the VA.
Later this week, members are expected to work on the four remaining spending bills funding parts of the federal government through September 30th, the end of the fiscal year, in order to avert a shutdown on January 30th.
It includes funding for the Departments of Defense, Education, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, and housing, as well as labor and transportation.
The House is also expected to vote on legislation to block further U.S. military action in Venezuela.
Senators failed to advance a similar measure last week.
Watch live coverage of the U.S. House when lawmakers return here on C-SPAN.
Live now to the White House, where President Trump is taking questions from reporters.
That's going to be done very easily without hurting a lot of people.
But we're waiting for that case anxiously.
And we have tremendous national security because of tariffs and tremendous income.
You know, we have, and by the way, no inflation.
So everyone said, oh, tariffs will cause inflation.
We have no inflation.
We have very little inflation.
Biden had inflation and he didn't do tariffs.
We had a huge problem.
We have a 62% reduction in our trade deficit.
So if you had a 1% reduction, a normal president would have a 1%, 2% reduction.
Everybody would be high-fiving.
At a 62% reduction, next year we won't have a trade deficit.
We secured most favored nations agreements to slash drug prices by as much.
To me, I think this might be the biggest thing of all.
We get zero talk about it.
The New York Times had a story way in the back of the paper, a little story about it.
I think it's the biggest thing there is when you talk about health care.
Drug prices will go down more than ever before for any country because we were priced at such a level that we were subsidizing the entire world, big place the world.
We were paying 10, 12, 13 times more than other countries.
13 times more, not 13%, 13 times more.
A pill that was selling in London for $10 would sell in New York for $130.
That's 13 times.
More than that, even.
But we secured most favored nations agreements to slash drug prices by as much as 300, 400, 500, and even 600%, including with Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, Nova, Nordesk, Gilead Sciences, EMD, Serenio, and many others.
If you look at some of the prices that are coming down, where a price would come down $1,300, coming down to $87.
Think of it.
So something that was costing $1,300 is now costing $87.
And the fake news doesn't want to write about it.
That's why I do this.
I don't like to do this, to be honest with you.
But I do it because I've got to get the word out.
We signed one big, beautiful bill.
I call it the Great Big Beautiful Bill, delivering the largest tax cuts in history.
No tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime.
We made interest on car loans tax deductible for U.S.-built automobiles only.
So if you buy an automobile built in the United States, we're not doing it for Germany and Canada and different places.
We're doing all of it's built here.
We want them to be built here.
A lot of the Canadian auto plants are closing and they're moving into the United States.
Same thing with Mexico.
Same thing with Germany and same thing with Japan and other countries.
They're moving into the United States because of tariffs.
Because they don't want to pay the tariffs.
It's too much.
They can't pay the tariffs.
So they're coming here.
Nothing different than what other smart countries did.
But it works better for us.
Under my leadership, it's not done properly, but it's done properly.
Last, my first four years I did, when we put on a new regulation, you had to cut eight.
This year I said you have to cut 10.
Instead, we cut 129.
So every time, so far, can't remain like that, I don't imagine.
I hope I can, because we have so much wasted regulation, stupid regulations, regulations where they go by California, which is a disaster state, with a governor that truly is doing a bad job.
He's killing that state.
If he ever ran the country, this country would be Venezuela very quickly.
Using tariffs slash the U.S. trade deficit by an incredible 77%.
The trade deficit is down.
And that doesn't include the last month where we had our best month.
We slashed the trade deficit by an incredible 77% in one year with no inflation, something that everyone said could not be done.
So we had essentially no inflation.
In fact, the last month we had almost no inflation.
But we slashed the trade deficit by 77%.
If you slash it by 1%, that was good.
Again, we did that with tariffs and intelligence.
We did that with November 5th.
Great election.
We secured historic trade deals to reduce barriers on U.S. exports with countries covering 40% of all U.S. trade.
Think of that.
American exports are up by more than $150 billion this year.
People said, oh, we're not an exporting.
All we do is buy.
If you keep buying, you're not going to have a country for very long.
So we increased exports by more than $150 billion.
Investment in American factories is up 41%.
That's a record.
Nobody goes 41% up.
You go 2% up, 1% up.
You go down by 3%.
If Kamala got elected, the 41% up would be 41% down.
We removed over 270,000 bureaucrats from the federal payroll.
That's another thing.
So we have, you know, we announce our unemployment numbers, call it unemployment or employment.
And they were very good, but we could make them great.
But we've slashed tremendous numbers of people off the federal payroll.
Because ultimately, if you're on the federal payroll, I mean, we have jobs where they had 10 people for every job.
So we cut.
Now, if you want to see some good numbers, I'll hire a million people.
We cut millions of people off the federal payroll.
I don't like doing that, but the good news, I don't feel badly because they're getting private sector jobs and they're getting sometimes twice as much money, three times as much money.
They're getting factory jobs.
They're getting much better jobs and much higher pay.
But all I have to do is say like what the Democrats do all the time.
They hire a million people and then they hire another million, another million.
They load it up and it says, oh, they only have a 3% unemployment rate.
It's a fake rate.
So with us, we're proud of the fact that we cut so many because, again, I don't want to cut people.
But when you cut them and they go out and get a better job, I like to cut them.
And sometimes they have to be forced to do that because, you know, it's like they want to stay where they are.
They don't know.
And then all of a sudden they end up, we have many cases, Caroline, where people were devastated.
They hated Trump.
I got caught from my very boring federal job where they had, again, sometimes 10 people to do one job.
And they were very upset.
And now they ended up with a job where they get paid three times more money.
They're ending up buying houses.
It's like crazy.
So they went from not liking me to liking me a lot.
Because it's hard to get, we need people.
We need people.
It's one of the reasons, I mean, I want to, when you have good people on the farm or good people in hotels and everything else, we want to work with them as much as we can.
Under Biden, one out of four jobs added was a government job.
Think of that.
So 25% of the jobs added.
When you know that, that's 25% of jobs aren't real jobs.
But again, I could do that.
I could add two million jobs right now, would have an unemployment, I could say just hire some more people.
I do the opposite.
I say get rid of everybody that's unnecessary because that's the way you make America great again.
When you have, you know, all these jobs where people are sitting around doing nothing and they get a lot of money by the government, it's no good.
But that's what the Democrats do.
They show, oh, we were at 4% unemployment.
That's a good number.
But they just add jobs or they wouldn't cut.
They would never cut jobs.
Under Trump, 100% of all new jobs created have been in the private sector.
Think of that.
Not 1% has gone to federal.
So under Biden, 1 out of 4 was a government job.
Under Trump, 100% of the new jobs created, 100% came from the private sector.
That's how you make your country wealthy and strong and good.
We inherited the worst border in history and turned it into the strongest border in history.
Illegal crossings have plummeted to the lowest level ever recorded, down 99.999%.
That means down 100%.
99.999.
I want to find out who that one person is.
For eight months in a row, zero, and these are government numbers, these are not my numbers.
For eight months in a row, zero illegal aliens were admitted to our country.
Zero.
Nobody came in unless they came in illegally.
We have a big process for having people come in legally, by the way.
A lot of people are coming in legally.
They have to prove they love our country.
They have to prove that they're not going to need welfare.
A lot of things they have to prove.
For the first time in 50 years, we are now seeing reverse migration.
Where we're getting, because we're getting all of these illegal people out.
People that came in illegally, many cases they're criminals in many, many cases.
You remember when they used to say that the people that come into our country as immigrants are very nice people.
They're wonderful people.
They don't commit crime.
No, they make our criminals look like babies.
They make our Hell's Angels look like the sweetest people on earth.
The Hell's Angels are now considered a nice, high-quality person.
I like the Hell's Angels.
They voted for me.
They protected me, actually, believe it or not.
But they make our criminals look like babies.
These are some of the most vicious people anywhere in the world.
They came from the Congo.
The prisons, I know the Congo because I ended the war with the Congo and Rwanda.
Tough group, very tough group.
They came from prisons in the Congo.
Some of the toughest, meanest people you'll ever meet.
Thank you very much.
They allowed them to come into America.
These are tough people.
Before my election, 100% of net job creation was going to foreign migrants.
Since my inauguration, 100% of the net jobs created have gone to American-born citizens.
That's a big thing.
In other words, we're now taking care of our people.
100% of net jobs created have gone to the American-born people.
Before that, we didn't care.
Designated Trende Aragua, MS-13, and the Mexican drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and we've hit them hard.
You've seen what we've done on the water.
We're starting to do that on land.
The land is much easier, actually.
Water is incredible.
We did that on the water so that when you do it on the land, they don't go to the water.
Nobody's going into the boat business right now, I can tell you.
97% down drugs coming in by water.
Think of it.
97%.
Nobody ever heard of that before.
They heard 2%, 1%.
It went up 2%.
97%, and we're looking for the 3%.
Who the hell are the 3%?
They're crazy.
But we've taken out almost 100% of the drugs coming in by water.
Now we're going to be very shortly starting drugs coming in by land.
We know exactly where they're coming from.
Remove tens of thousands of illegal alien gang members, drug dealers, murderers, child predators, human traffickers, fraudsters, savage criminals and others.
We removed them from our country.
They're out.
They're gone.
In some cases, they're so dangerous that we put them in jail because we don't want to give them to their country.
Their country doesn't do anything and they end up coming back.
We have some that we're just, they're so bad that we don't want to really release them.
We want to put them in a jail where we know they're properly ensconced.
Think of that.
Remove tens of thousands of illegal alien gang members, drug dealers, murderers, child predators, human traffickers, fraudsters, and savage criminals.
Why wouldn't you want them removed?
The reason is because these are insurrectionists that are doing this work.
And you know, they're going to make mistakes sometimes.
ICE is going to be too rough with somebody.
You know, they're dealing with rough people.
They're going to make a mistake sometimes.
It can happen.
We feel terribly.
I felt horribly when I was told that the young woman who was had the tragedy, it's a tragedy.
It's a horrible thing.
Everybody would say, ICE would say the same thing.
But when I learned her parents, and her father in particular is like, I hope he still is, but I don't know, was a tremendous Trump fan.
He was all for Trump.
He loved Trump.
And, you know, it's terrible.
I was told that by a lot of people.
They said, oh, he loves you.
I hope he still feels that way.
I don't know.
It's a hard situation.
But her father was a tremendous, and parents were tremendous Trump fans.
It's so sad.
It just happens.
It's terrible.
Halted all refugee admissions to the United States, including from Somalia, which is a terrible, terrible place and other dangerous places.
And we also stopped the pirates because they get the same treatment as the drug boats.
So in Somalia, the Somalians, you know what they're good at?
That's about the only thing they're good at is they're good at pirating ships at sea, big ships.
So you have a huge oil tanker with millions of gallons, millions of barrels of oil.
And if it gets hit by a big weapon, the whole thing blows up.
And they don't want to fight because if they do, they're told by their insurance companies, do not hand over the ship.
And they're not allowed to have any guns on the ship.
They're literally, you have these massive ships being taken over by a Somalian small boat with a big weapon.
Because if they hit the side of the ship, the ship can blow up.
I mean, you talk about a blow-up.
We've seen some bad things happen.
And the insurance companies, some of these ships cost more than a billion dollars to build.
And the insurance companies say, look, we'd rather give them money than take a chance on a billion-dollar insurance policy.
But they don't have to worry about it because we hit them the same way we hit the people with the drugs in their boat.
They don't know what the hell happened.
But all of a sudden, there are no pirates at sea.
Do you notice?
We haven't had a boat taken in a little while.
Came out of Somalia, really corrupt place.
It's not a country.
They don't have government.
They don't have anything.
I always hate to see this.
Ilan Omar, she comes from Somalia, a backward country, probably the worst country.
They say it's the worst country in the world, if it's a country.
I don't even think it's a country.
There's no organization or anything.
They don't have police.
They don't have military.
They don't have anything.
They just have people running around killing each other and trying to pirate ships.
But she'll come here.
And then she wants to tell us how to run our country.
The Constitution says that I have a title to this.
I can't stand her.
Terminated all taxpayer-funded benefits for illegal aliens and kicked 275,000 illegals off of Social Security.
They were illegally getting Social Security.
275,000 people.
I'm telling you, it's not that this is pleasurable, but if I weren't elected president, this country was going to be destroyed quickly, very quickly.
I think within a year, if you had Kamala or a Joe type, I mean, Joe was a disaster.
But if you had Kamala, he was the replacement.
I was up by like 25 points on Joe, and they said, hey, let's get somebody else.
This never happened.
I had so many firsts.
You're leading somebody by a lot.
And they say, oh, let's take them out.
Let's put somebody.
That's like I said to Dana White the other night.
I said, you know, Dana, it's like you have a fighter, two fighters, one guy is winning by a lot.
And they say, oh, let's take this guy out.
Let's put a new fighter in the ring with him.
That's what happened to me.
I was doing great with Biden.
The whole campaign was against Biden.
All the money was spent against Biden.
And all of a sudden, I got Kamala.
Everyone said, who the hell is she?
But that didn't work out too well for them.
But never happened before.
We are about lots of firsts.
Designated English as the official language of the United States of America.
We did that very powerfully.
And while we're at it, we also took the Gulf of Mexico, and now it's the Gulf of America.
Because we have 92% of the shoreline.
It always bothered me, I'd say, you know, we have most of the shoreline.
Mexico has a small percentage, talks about 8%.
We have 92%.
And I said, why is it the Gulf of Mexico?
It should be the Gulf of America.
I was going to call it the Gulf of Trump, but I thought that I would be killed if I did that.
I wanted to do it.
I wanted to.
My people worked so hard.
Sir, I don't think it'll look too good.
I'm telling you, it's a good thing.
And it'll be hotter than ever.
No, but I decided not to do that.
I'm joking, you know, when I say that.
I was not going to call it the Gulf of Trump because tomorrow will be Trump wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump, but he was rebuffed by his people.
Our country is proud for the attack on Venezuela, the attack on the Iran nuclear capability, wiped it out.
I mean, first administration, Salome, the father of the roadside bomb, Al-Baghdadi, the father of ISIS, who was rebuilding ISIS.
We wiped them out.
Done a great job.
Signed an order that will end birthright citizenship for children of illegal migrants.
You know, that case is in court right now.
That case was meant for the children of slaves.
All you have to do is look at the years.
Look at the years where the cases were filed and where the decisions were made.
They were right at the end of the Civil War.
They're trying to say that, you know, China is making a big business out of that.
They come to the country, they have a child, they're an American citizen, they get all the benefits.
They have nothing to do with that.
That was for the children of slaves.
And I hope the Supreme Court so rules.
Designated fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.
It is.
We lost, I believe, 300,000 people last year, this year.
300,000 people.
That's like filling up one of those big football stadiums five times.
It's not even believable.
I mean, you could be in a war and you wouldn't lose that many people.
So we designated fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.
Conducted numerous successful military strikes against narco-terrorists operating in our hemisphere, including the water strikes.
Drugs brought in by ocean.
So I told you that we're down by, I mean, close to 100%.
It's hard to get somebody to pilot those boats very hard.
They have to be people that don't watch television, don't read the news.
And we just blew up their facility.
They had a docking facility where the drugs were stored.
And now we have a great relationship with Venezuela.
We're getting along fantastically with the leadership in Venezuela, so we wouldn't have to do that.
This was done before the attack.
But we captured and brought to justice the outlaw dictator of Venezuela, Nicholas Maduro, who, through drugs, killed millions of people in our country.
Tremendous drug dealer.
Also sent millions of people into our country, including Trende Aragua, the worst gang.
They say it's the worst gang in the world.
They took over parts of Colorado.
They just take the apartment building.
They just took it away.
Just took it away, like we're here.
They cut the hand off one man because he called the police.
Who called the police?
I did.
You took my apartment from me.
Boom.
No hand.
This is what they sent us.
Restoring law and order, new category.
D.C. in Memphis, federal task forces deployed massive numbers of federal law enforcement officers and National Guard to restore safety.
Crime down in D.C. is almost down to nothing.
D.C. was a very, very dangerous place.
And I think you probably know better than I do.
I have a lot of people in the media thanked me for that, but some of them found it hard to thank me.
But, you know, D.C. is now, look how beautiful.
D.C. is now.
You can walk right from here to a restaurant, right through the center of town.
unidentified
You can be with your child, with your loved one, with your lover.
To me, a town, it looks better when you have military people.
These are big, strong guys, the bad guys look at them and they say, we're not going to mess around.
But what they don't know is that we took over 2,000 people out permanently out of D.C.
These were career criminals.
But I feel much better seeing those people there.
I went in a couple of times and had dinner in D.C.
I walked right down the middle of the street.
I felt very safe.
A year ago, I couldn't have done that.
I would have been crazy to have done that.
Secret Surface wouldn't let me do it.
They weren't thrilled anyway, I will tell you.
It wasn't like they were thrilled.
But we did it, and it was great.
But D.C. is a great thing.
We have virtually no crime in D.C. anymore.
And before we did this move, we could do the same thing with Chicago.
You know, we brought Chicago down 25%, even though we just had a minimal crew there.
We brought Wisconsin down.
We brought Minnesota down, way down, even though everything's a fight, you know?
Because they want to keep those people that are lying on the floor.
They want to keep those people in Minnesota, but they really don't.
I don't think the real people of Minnesota, very corrupt place, and the elections are totally corrupt.
I feel I won it all three times.
Nobody's won that state since Richard Nixon.
It's a rigged state.
And the Somalians vote as one group, even if they're not citizens, and they vote as one group, and you know, you get 600,000 votes against you.
They all ought to get the hell out of here.
They're bad for our country.
Nationwide achieved the largest reduction in violent crime on record.
So this just came out nationwide over the last 11 months, achieved the largest reduction in violent crime on record, including the largest one-year drop in murders ever recorded.
Almost 2,000 lives were saved.
That's despite the fact that we took in criminals under the leadership of the Democrats and Joe Biden.
More motor vehicle theft is down by 100,000 vehicles nationwide.
That's another nationwide.
The motor vehicle theft was out of control, and now it's very much in control.
It was down by more than 100,000 vehicles to a low, a record low.
Began the process of eliminating cashless bail policies across the nation.
You got to get rid of your sanctuary cities, and I hope our people know that we're not going to pay sanctuary cities.
We're not going to pay them anymore.
They are sanctuary for criminals.
They hold criminals.
We're not going to pay.
They can sue us, and maybe they'll win.
But we're not giving money to sanctuary cities anymore.
As of the beginning of the month, we began the process of eliminating the cashless bail.
Well, cashless bail is where it all started.
It's a disaster.
And then other places, I don't know if it started in New York.
I remember it starting in New York.
So somebody comes in, murders somebody, and they let them out.
No bail, no nothing.
Basically, cashless bail means you just get the hell out.
And they go outside.
We have one case where a guy murders somebody, gets released, and goes out and murders somebody, two people in one day.
No, we've got to get rid of cashless bail.
You got to pay, got to have bail.
There's a reason for bail.
Long tested.
Signed an executive order to bring back mental institutions and insane asylums.
We're going to have to bring them back.
Hate to build those suckers, but you've got to get the people off the streets.
You know, we used to have, when I was growing up, we had in my area in Queens, I grew up in Queens, we had a place called Creedmoor.
Creedmoor.
Did anybody know that?
Creedmoor.
It was a big, I said, Mom, why are those bars on the building?
unidentified
I used to play Little League Baseball there, a place called Cunningham Park, who's quite the baseball player, you wouldn't believe.
I mean, nobody's ever seen a military operation like that.
Ended eight unendable wars in 10 months.
These were unendable wars.
Cambodia and Thailand fighting for years.
Kosovo and Serbia.
The Congo and Rwanda.
Pakistan and India.
They were really going at it.
Eight planes shot down.
They were going to go nuclear, in my opinion.
The prime minister of Pakistan was here.
And he said, President Trump saved 10 million people and maybe much more than that.
They're both nuclear countries.
Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethiopia were going to fight over a dam, and I got them to stop.
I still got to work it out because they put a dam up in Ethiopia that stops the flow from a little river called the Nile.
I always think of the Nile being in Egypt, you know, beautiful Nile with the pyramids, but they put a dam up.
You know who paid for the dam?
The United States of America.
It's the biggest dam, I think, in the world.
They put a dam up.
I said, how did you let that happen?
Why would we have done that?
We financed it.
This country would, I don't know, I don't know.
Maybe it was a Republican president, but I don't think it was.
I think it was a Democrat.
But what a terrible thing.
So Egypt basically is, you know, they don't have enough water in the Nile.
And they use that for a lot of things, including entertainment and travel and tourism and everything.
I mean, I don't know.
They got a big dam.
I got to work that one out now, too.
Armenia and Azerbaijan, President Putin told me, I cannot believe you settled that war.
I've been trying to settle that war for 10 years.
Armenia and Azerbaijan, they were fighting it for many, many years.
And I ended up getting the heads of both countries in my office.
Beautiful Oval Office, much more beautiful now than it ever was.
And one sat on one side, one sat on the other.
He said, you know, I've been the head of Azerbaijan for 22 years, and for 22 years I've been killing his people.
And the other gentleman, both very good guys, said, I've been here for seven years, and for seven years I've been killing his people.
And they started over there, and within an hour they were next to each other.
And by the time we ended, they were hugging each other.
And it's been a great peace, you know?
Should have gotten the Nobel Prize for each war, but I don't say that.
I saved millions and millions of people.
And don't let anyone tell you that Norway doesn't control the shots, okay?
It's in Norway.
Norway controls the shots.
They'll say, we have nothing to do with it.
It's a joke.
They've lost such prestige.
Got all, that's why I have such respect for Maria doing what she did.
She said, I don't deserve the Nobel Prize.
He does.
When she got it, they named, they said, wow, that's amazing.
I thought President Trump would get it.
President Trump deserves it.
He ended up eight wars.
How nice, right?
Good woman.
Got all 20 living hostages returned to their families and the remains.
They all came out.
We got the 20 living hostages.
We got the 28 hostages.
They have one left.
We think we know where it is.
Amazing.
Looked like we weren't going to get anywhere near that.
Now they've gotten almost.
And more importantly, we got many more.
Hundreds.
We got them all.
If we didn't do it, you wouldn't have had, most of those people would have been dead.
I don't know if that's covered properly, but the 20 is great.
They were the last ones.
I always said the last 20 are going to be hard, but we got them.
We got the last 20, and we got close to 28 of the bodies of the dead.
And to those parents, that was just as important as getting their son back alive.
They were almost even more intent on getting, they knew their son was dead.
They wanted to get the body.
I got him back.
We just created the Board of Peace, which I think is going to be amazing.
I wish the United Nations could do more.
I wish we didn't need a Board of Peace, but the United Nations...
And you know, with all the wars I settled, the United Nations never helped me on one war.
I mean, I guess I'm not blaming them.
I didn't call them to help.
But I got, you know, the presidents and prime ministers together.
We knocked heads.
We got along.
They liked me.
I liked them.
Every single one of them nominated me for a Nobel Prize.
Every one of the wars, among many other people, nominated me for a Nobel Prize.
But Putin told me, I cannot believe you got this war settled.
I've worked on it for 10 years because it's his territory.
Rescued 83 American hostages and citizens detained from abroad without paying a lot of money.
Paid no money.
Apprehended terrorists responsible for the Abbey Gate bombing that claimed the lives of 13 U.S. service members in Afghanistan, the lowest point in the history of our country.
That was a Biden disaster.
I was getting out, but I was getting out with dignity and strength.
We were the boss.
Oh, we were the boss.
They wouldn't do a thing against us.
And this very stupid person got in, and what a shame.
They should have left from Bagram, which is the big military base which has hundreds of acres around it.
Should have left from Bagram.
Terminated visas of Hamas sympathizers and deported pro-Jihad foreign nationals.
Got NATO members to agree to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP from 2%.
And by the way, I did more for NATO than any other person alive or dead.
Nobody's done for NATO.
And I think for the most part, they'll tell you that.
I think you could ask the Secretary General about that, but he said it a lot.
I've done more for NATO than anybody, and I see all this stuff, but NATO has to treat us fairly, too.
The big fear I have with NATO is we spend tremendous amounts of money with NATO.
And I know we'll come to their rescue, but I just really do question whether or not they'll come to ours.
You know, I'm just asking.
Just saying, right?
You remember during the debate?
Just saying.
Signed $1 trillion investment in U.S. military.
And next year, we hopefully will go to $1.5 trillion.
We're building battleships that are 100 times more powerful than the battleships of World War II, which are the big, beautiful, those big, beautiful things with the guns.
I said, what about bringing them out of dry dark?
They said, sir, what we're building will blow them away.
Think of it.
These ships are 100 times more powerful than the battleships that you see on Victory at Sea.
Do you ever see Victory at Sea?
What a great thing that is to watch.
Renamed the Department of Defense into the Department of War, which everyone loves, by the way.
Signed landmark critical minerals deals with Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, Ukraine, Japan, and many others.
We're going to have so much rare earth.
It's actually not that rare.
Getting it processed is rare, but there's a lot of rare earth.
There's a lot of earth around, I can tell you.
Withdrew from the corrupt World Health Organization, where we were paying hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
So we were paying $500 million a year, and China was paying $37 million a year.
I said, why aren't we paying the same as China?
They said, well, nobody asked.
I said, China's got 1.4 billion people.
We have 350 million, probably with all the illegals.
China probably knows more accurately.
But we have much smaller in terms of the number of people.
We have a much more powerful military.
But we have much smaller.
I rebuilt the military during my first term, by the way.
And while they gave away a lot to Afghanistan, the Taliban, which was just horrible seeing them every year, seeing them do that military down some dirty street is a disgrace.
But while they gave, well, Biden gave a lot of it away.
It's a tiny fraction compared to what we did.
I rebuilt the military, and now we're continuing to build it.
And bigger and better.
We need it.
Peace through strength.
But we withdrew from the corrupt world health organization.
So I remember we were paying $500 million.
They were paying $37 or $39 million.
And I said, how come?
So I withdrew and they called, we'll give you the same deal that they had.
I said, well, it should be less than that.
Because if they're at 37, and you have three times, four times the number of people, even maybe five times, I don't know.
So it should be less.
But I didn't want to chisel around.
And I thought about it.
So I could have taken $500 million to $37, and everybody knew it.
I chose not to do it because it was actually very popular when I got out because they were terrible.
And so I chose not to take that deal.
First thing Biden did is go back into it.
You know what he paid?
More than $500 million.
So I actually called them.
I said, you know, you can buy it for less.
You can make a deal at 37.
There's no reason to pay $500.
They didn't care.
They paid more than $500.
Did you know that?
They paid more than $500 million.
I made a deal at $37.
I could have had $37.
They were public about it.
We'll give you the same deal that China has for $37.
And they paid $500 million.
That's the way you ruin a country.
And it's the same attitude that you have on everything else with these people.
They were terrible.
The anti-American UN Human Rights Council we ended.
The UN Relief and Works Agency we ended.
And the fake Paris Climate Accord, which was a rip-off of America, where we had to pay a trillion dollars and they were paying nothing.
China didn't kick in until 2035.
We kicked in immediately.
We were supposed to pay a trillion dollars.
Russia went to a standard of 1991, which was a dirtier standard.
We ended the woke lunacy and restored common sense, abolished all discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion DEI policies throughout the federal government and the private sector.
They're gone.
Everybody, they're gone.
Terrible.
Terminated the Green News scam and ended the insane electric vehicle mandate.
I love electric vehicles.
That caused me a little problem with a man named Elon.
But he understands and he's a good guy.
We get along.
But I said, Elon, we can't have all electric cars.
But we can't do that because some people don't want an electric car by 2030.
And to build the power stations all over the country would have cost $4 trillion.
$4 trillion.
That's more than any country has.
If you've got China, the United States, and everyone, you couldn't do it.
And it would have taken years.
And yet they were supposed to be switching over electric vehicle mandates.
Some people don't like electric cars.
Some people want hybrids.
Some people want regular gasoline-powered cars.
We have more gasoline than anybody.
And now with Venezuela, we have, you know, we have 62% of the market when you include Venezuela.
So I ended the Green New scam, and I ended the insane electric vehicle mandate.
Now you can buy a gasoline-powered car, a hybrid, and you can buy an electric vehicle.
I mean, if you think, if you want electric, you can buy it.
Make a good deal on them right now, because they made a lot of them.
Permanently stopped, Joe Biden's ridiculous, cafe standards, that's having to do with the environment, so ridiculous.
Cancel the EPA's absurd, totally absurd tailpipe emission standard, which made you spend hundreds of thousands for hundreds of thousands of cars.
The numbers, the cost numbers were incredible that the consumer has to pay.
Imposed 25% tariff on all foreign automobiles and 100% tariff on Chinese cars, which don't come into the country because of tariffs.
Only because of tariffs.
We didn't have tariffs.
You wouldn't have any car deal.
We have now more car factories being built in the United States than ever before because of tariffs.
If they take those tariffs away, China will eat our lunch.
They'll take all of our car business.
Now, there's another way of doing it, but it's more cumbersome, et cetera, et cetera.
I don't want to scare you, but it's more, much more cumbersome, not as good, not as good for national security as this.
We have a perfect system right now.
We're making a fortune.
We've never been stronger, and I hope the Supreme Court does the right thing for our country, because if they don't, it's such a problem.
It's just so, it would be so sad.
We're doing so well because of tariffs.
And the people that are heading up the lawsuit, like there's a guy named Leonard Leos, bad guy, and people that are very China-oriented and foreign car-oriented and foreign business-oriented, but in particular China.
They're suing to get rid of tariffs because they don't want tariffs, like Coke.
Coke has businesses outside of the United States.
If you have them outside, you don't want tariffs.
But because of tariffs, they treat us well.
Without tariffs, they would treat us very badly, as you saw for many years.
They respect us more now than they ever have respected us by a lot.
And revoked the California Missions waiver to stop San Francisco communists from regulating the automobile industry and destroying automobiles and the industry in the nation.
I was with Bill Ford of Ford Motors.
I was with all the people at General Motors the other day, and they are making more money and building more cars than they've ever, they are doing so good, all because of tariffs and what I've done.
And they're building their plants all in the United States.
We opened NWAR for drilling.
That's a big deal.
Launched a massive Alaskan pipeline project to export natural gas to Asia.
We made a deal with South Korea and with Japan that gives us money, the likes of which nobody's ever seen before.
Signed executive orders to end Biden's war on coal and put, I say clean, beautiful coal.
I never say the word coal.
This has to be preceded by the words clean, beautiful coal.
Ordered reinstatement of patriots expelled from our military with full back pay.
We had some people that were terminated and they're coming back into our military.
Fired the woke boards of visitors at our military service academies.
The boards of visitors were run by radical left, maybe communists, maybe not, but they were still heavily radical left and they were bad for us.
Signed an executive order to remove anti-American propaganda from federal museums and national parks.
Required the federal employees to return to work in person or be fired.
We don't want them sitting in their home on their bed working.
We want them in an office that we're paying for in Washington, D.C., or wherever it may be.
And we've largely taken care of that mess.
That was crazy.
I guarantee you they're out on the ball fields.
I guarantee you they're out playing golf.
And you can't run a country or a company that way.
I think it's happening even so with countries and companies.
But we had so many of our federal workers, they wouldn't come into work.
Signed an order banning all government censorship and restoring free speech.
Made it the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders.
This was not a tough one.
Two genders.
Can anybody guess what they are?
Male and female.
I think the Democrats know that too, but they refuse to admit it.
Banned the use of puberty blockers, hormone injections, and other chemical and surgical mutilation of children.
Can you imagine saying this 15 years ago?
That we banned the use of puberty blockers, hormone injections, and other chemical and surgical mutilation of our children.
You know, when I say it, I say, do I have to say that?
I actually asked my people today, yes, sir, because people, it's where the country went.
Banned men from playing in women's sports.
Big Supreme Court case.
I mean, I can't believe it.
Some of the justices were fighting hard for men to be able to play in women's sports, a couple of them.
I can't imagine it, but I think anybody that rules that way should lose a lot of credibility.
But we banned men from playing in women's sports.
All you have to do is look at the records, look at weightlifting records, look at swimming records, look at track and field.
It's not fair.
It's very demeaning to women.
Banned transgender ideology and critical race theory from our schools.
Secured unprecedented settlements with Brown University, Columbia University, and many other colleges, including the University of Pennsylvania, where I went, the great old Wharton School of Finance.
To restore fairness and merit, we're working with Harvard right now.
They've been very anti-Semitic.
Terrible what they've done.
And we'll see what happens.
I hear we have a deal, but who the hell knows with them?
They have a lawyer that wants to show how hot he is.
Ended taxpayer-funded student loan forgiveness for radical left and anti-American activists.
Began the process of abolishing the federal department of education and returning education back to the states.
And Linda McMahon is doing a fantastic job.
Ended Joe Biden's weaponization of our government and removed his hand-picked radical left Marxist prosecutors from the Department of Justice, like deranged Jack Sick Smith.
He's a sick son of a bitch.
They gave me the worst of the worst.
And here I am.
How did that happen?
How did that happen?
He's a sick guy.
And Letitia James is sick.
And Alvin Bragg is sick.
They're sick people.
And others.
Fanny.
Fonnie.
You can't call her Fanny.
She doesn't like it.
She wants to be called Foni.
Fonnie Willis.
I wanted, can you imagine? Putting somebody through that.
And then if I suggest that somebody may be guilty of a terrible crime, oh, he's weaponizing government.
Trump is weaponizing government.
It's terrible.
Can you imagine?
They say to me about weaponizing, I don't weaponize anything.
But what they did to me, nobody ever went through what I went through.
And here I am in a place called the White House.
It's a beautiful place.
Who would have thought, right?
Signed legislation to cut all taxpayer funding to woke and biased NPR and PBS.
And they're sort of gone now, I guess.
I heard they're closed up.
They were terrible.
They were so unfair.
They were so terrible.
Officially reinstated, Columbus Day.
I like the name Columbus Day.
The Italian people are very happy about it.
Remember when you go to the voting booths, I reinstated Columbus Day.
That was an easy one.
Christopher Columbus.
Cut Social Security wait times by 50%, serve 65% more Social Security recipients by phone and are on track to doubling the service and performance compared to the Biden administration.
We're two and a half to three times better and faster.
Slash VA claims backlog to the lowest number ever recorded.
Created Trump accounts starting with $1,000 for every newborn baby.
This is something that's become so popular.
And I give Mr. and Mrs. Michael Dell, Dell Computer, who put in $6 billion, $250 million, started with nothing.
And he actually invested all that money to give to kids so that when they grow up, they have an account that might be worth a lot of money.
It'll be riding with the markets.
And, you know, they can, at 20 years old, 21 years old, they could have $100,000.
They could have a lot of money.
That's going to be amazing.
But I give a lot of credit to Mr. and Mrs. Michael Dell, signed an AI executive order to ensure the United States dominates the future of artificial intelligence.
So we're leading China.
We're leading the whole world.
We're producing more electricity than we ever have because I'm allowing every one of those plants to build their own electric facility.
We're giving them very, very fast approvals, unlike Los Angeles with the fire.
So the federal government, I want to give a lot of credit to Lee Zeldon.
The hardest approval for the 20,000 houses or more that burned down in Los Angeles because they didn't have the water.
They didn't allow the water to come down from the Pacific Northwest.
They routed the water into the Pacific Ocean.
So we had no water there.
No, he had.
I would say, open up the water.
Open it up to the governor, to the mayor.
They didn't want to do it.
They want to protect a tiny little fish that's, you know, I said, how can you have a fish when you don't have any water?
It was just an excuse, I guess.
But it's amazing.
We took 20,000 houses, and Lee Zeldon, the toughest permit, is from the federal government.
Within two weeks, every single permit was given to the people to build their houses.
Then you have the incompetent mayor of Los Angeles, he's neutral, who decided to go to Africa during the fire.
So you have this incompetent mayor, and I had it out with her the night when I got right after the fire went there.
She said, we're working on it so that we can have everybody starting to build within two or three years.
Remember that?
I said, you mean two or three days?
No, I mean two or three years.
And the place went crazy.
Well, they still haven't gotten their permits.
But every federal permit, every single one, has been given a year ago.
And Lee Zeldon has done a great job.
But he's done a great job in the approval of all these big plants and factories and all of the electricity that they're creating for themselves.
I said to Zuckerberg, I said to all of them, I said to Jeff Bezos, I said to everybody, Mark Zuckerberg couldn't believe it.
He said, you know, where are we going to get all the electricity?
Because you need double the electricity that the country currently makes just to fire up those big plants.
I said, well.
Nobody can do that.
So what we're going to do is let you make your own electricity.
Nobody believed it.
And I said, we're going to get you fast permits.
So we get them within two weeks.
And they're coming up with some of the most incredible electric plants you've ever seen.
So each one of those massive buildings, AI or otherwise, is building their own electricity.
They're building their own plant.
And it's incredible.
Many of them are under construction already.
We're leading AI and we're leading China by a lot.
Established a Maha Presidential Commission, banned many artificial food dyes, as you know, issued new vaccine recommendations and created new real food pyramid.
I don't think we would have to go the Congress out, but we'll find out.
The reason that we're even talking about it is that we have so much money coming in from tariffs that we'll be able to issue at least a $2,000 dividend and also pay down debt for the country.
But we'd do a $2,000 dividend to the people of our country.
It would probably set a limit of income limit where it made sense.
But we will be able to make a very substantial dividend to the people of our country.
I believe we can do that without Congress.
unidentified
Last night on True Social, you said that the British plan to hand the base of Diego Garcia over to Mauritius and then rent it back was an act of great stupidity.
Previously you backed that bill.
Is it now your position that the deal should not go ahead?
I think that they, you know, when they originally were going to do it, they were talking about doing some concept of ownership.
But now they're looking to essentially just do a lease and sell it.
And I'm against that.
You know, it's reasonably nothing like Greenland, but it's a reasonably important area of the globe.
Not anywhere near Greenland, but I think they should keep it.
I don't know why they're doing it.
Do they need money?
unidentified
Mr. President, with your support to the Syrian government, most probably you avoided another civil war and a bloodshed in Syria, especially after the fall of the regime.
The Syrian government the last two weeks had to use some force to implement its force on specific areas to keep the prisoners, the terrorist prisoners, which are some of the worst in the world, at bay.
Now that Maduro is in U.S. custody and he was criminally charged, has any more information emerged that you could share with us regarding Venezuelan election software and Venezuelan ties to tampering with the 2020 election?
And would you consider speaking to Maduro personally in prison in New York to get some answers on Venezuela's involvement with the 2020 election?
You know, take a look at the word license, take a look at other things.
I mean, we have other alternatives.
But what we're doing now is the best, the strongest, the fastest, the easiest, the least complicated.
unidentified
Sir, if you move ahead with the Greenland-related tariffs on Europe, you secured almost a trillion dollars of commitments from them to invest in the United States.
The Kurds as the most loyal U.S. partners facing attacks by some Syrian elements within the Syrian government.
What will you do to ensure the Kurdish rights protected on their effective forces against terrorism in Rojava, Syria, continued as the Kurdish see you as a president does not abandon this alliance?
Well, I like the Kurds, but just so you understand, the Kurds were paid tremendous amounts of money, were given oil and other things, so they were doing it for themselves more so than they were doing for us.
But we got along with the Kurds, and we are trying to protect the Kurds.
That's correct.
unidentified
And of your speech in Davos, can you give us a preview of what we can expect as far as laying out the plans for Americans to be able to buy homes?
Look, I inherited a terrible, I mean, it's a great question because we inherited a terrible, terrible mess between the border, between all the problems.
The whole country was falling apart.
And in 12 months, less than 12 months, I mean, in 12 months, we have the strongest border we've ever had.
We have prices that are much, much lower than they were for the last.
We inherited very high prices.
We inherited, remember this, inflation was at a historic high.
We had never had inflation like that.
They say 48 years, but whether it's 48 years or ever, we had the highest inflation, in my opinion, that we've ever had.
Prices, because of that, were very high.
I inherited, we brought down eggs immediately.
Remember the first news conference, they were screaming at me about eggs.
I was in the position for two days, and we brought eggs down to lower than what they were before.
And by the way, they continue that way.
We brought the prices down from when I came into office and from what Biden had, way down.
We're going to bring them down further.
But the job we did is a miracle.
One of the reasons I'm doing this today is to explain.
We inherited a mess and we've made it a beautiful, beautiful picture.
Think of gasoline at $1.99 in many states.
$1.99 a gallon.
It was $4.50, $5, in some cases, $6 or $7.
We're at $1.99.
And energy is so big that with energy, everything else comes down.
But the prices are coming way down.
And we're going to bring them down further.
But we started up here with these guys.
We inherited a country that was broken.
We inherited a country, and I have a very warm spot.
We've done very well with Venezuela.
And by the way, that even in itself is going to help us bring down the oil prices.
I mean, the Venezuelan oil, we've taken 50 million gallons of oil.
We've taken 50 million barrels of oil out of Venezuela in the first four days.
You suggested a moment ago that perhaps the reason why a positive story about the economy isn't getting through is because of bad communications people.
But are average Americans wrong to still feel high prices?
And how much longer does the White House hope that they have?
If a consequence of your determination to take control of Greenland is the ultimate breakup of the NATO alliance, is that a price you're willing to pay?
I think that we will work something out where NATO is going to be very happy and where we're going to be very happy.
But we need it for security purposes.
We need it for national security and even world security.
It's very important.
How about it?
unidentified
Thank you very much.
First of all, last year you told me that you believe that the reason you won election is because God put you in this place so that you could save the world.
Looking back one year, do you feel like God is proud of the effort that you've put in?