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Jan. 21, 2026 09:38-10:01 - CSPAN
22:56
Washington Journal 01/21/2026
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United States Keeping the World Afloat 00:04:29
And I realized in that conversation that the United States is keeping the whole world afloat.
Many places, I could give you six, seven places, just in the people in this little area.
I know every one of them.
They're sort of, they're looking down.
They don't want to see me.
They don't want to stare me in the eyes.
But they're taking advantage of, everybody took advantage of the United States.
But I've been very fair, and I gave them a tariff, and it was fine.
But I realized that without us, it's not Switzerland anymore.
Without us, it's not any of the countries that are represented here.
And we want to work with the countries.
We want to work with them.
We're not looking to destroy them.
I could have said 39, 40%.
I could have said I want a 70% tariff.
Then we make money with Switzerland.
But Switzerland would have been probably destroyed, financially destroyed.
I don't want to do that.
But we should be paying the lowest interest rate of everybody.
I hope Scott's listening to this because we should be paying the lowest interest rate of everybody.
Without us, without us, most of the countries don't even work.
And then you have the protection factor.
Without our military, which is the greatest in the world by far, without our military, you have threats that you would never, you wouldn't believe.
You wouldn't believe.
You don't have threats because of us, and that's because of NATO.
One other thing, and I have to say it so importantly, in the old days, and I used to say I'm the youngest in the room.
Now I'm among the older.
I hate to say it.
I don't feel old, but I'm among the older.
But I remember not long ago, 20, 25 years ago, when good news came out about, let's say, the United States.
The United States had a great quarter.
The United States had a great month.
All the stocks went up.
And that's the way it's supposed to be.
Now when they say the United States had a record quarter, it's unbelievable how well it's doing.
All the stocks crash because they say, oh no, inflation, inflation, they're going to raise interest rates.
And they do.
Some of these stupid people like Powell, they raise interest rates.
And what they do is they stop you from being successful.
It used to be when we had a great quarter, a great month, great earnings, great anything, any good news, the stock market went up.
That's the way it's going to be.
We got to do that again.
Because that's the way it should be.
Now when we have a great month, they want to kill it.
Like we did over 5%.
People were surprised.
We should do 20%.
We could do 25%.
Well, we announced good numbers.
And the reason is they're so petrified of inflation.
And growth doesn't mean inflation.
We've had tremendous growth with very low inflation.
In fact, growth can fight inflation, proper growth.
So we want to get back to the days when we announced great numbers because we're going to be announcing phenomenal, you know, all these factories that are being built at record, thousands of businesses are being built right now.
Remember, $18 trillion is invested.
I think the second number is three.
And that was China many years ago.
Investments in the country from outside.
18 trillion, nobody's ever seen it.
And that's money coming in and building things, factories.
Thousands of businesses are being built.
Thousands.
Hundreds of big factories, car plants are moving back to the United States.
They're coming in from Canada.
They're coming in from Mexico, from Japan.
Japan's coming in and building plants here in order to avoid tariffs.
They're coming in from China.
They're coming in from all over the world.
We have more plants being built now, car plants than we've ever had built, even in the heyday from the 1940s and 50s.
And they're bigger.
They don't use renovations anymore where they take an old plant, they rip it down, they build a brand new plant, super modern plant.
But it's happening at levels that nobody's ever seen.
In 2024, the U.S. built less than 2 million new homes, but Biden admitted more than 8 million new migrants.
Hit By Unexpected Challenges 00:15:29
And those days are over.
In 2025, for the first time in 50 years, the United States had reverse migration.
Boy, that was nice.
And these were criminals that were being taken out of our country because they allowed people to come into our country from jails, from gangs, drug dealers, murderers.
11,888 murderers.
We've gotten most of them out.
And then ICE gets beat up by stupid people from leadership in Minnesota.
We actually are helping Minnesota so much, but they don't appreciate it.
Most places do.
You know, Washington, D.C. is the safest place now in the United States.
It was a very dangerous place to walk.
And now you can walk with your wife, your kids right through the middle of the city right now.
Washington, D.C. is as safe as it gets.
It was one of the most unsafe.
I had to admit, we sent in the military, the National Guard.
Within two months, it was great.
Within three months, it's like it's like a really great place and a safe place and a beautiful place.
It's even been cleaned up.
The graffiti's gone.
The fences are gone.
We don't have to worry about fences anymore.
All of the places, the grasses are cut and replaced with new grass in many cases.
It's all going to happen in the spring.
But Washington and D.C. is beautiful again, and it's safe.
New restaurants are opening up.
They're all closing.
Now you can't get into a restaurant.
Restaurants in Washington, D.C. are all opening.
Memphis also, Memphis, Tennessee, New Orleans, Louisiana.
We're there for three weeks.
We've cut the crime down by 64% within another month.
We'll have virtually no crime there.
We can do that all over.
We're going to help the people in California.
We want to have no crime.
I know Gavin was here.
I used to get along so great with Gavin when I was president.
Gavin's a good guy.
And we're going to, if he needed it, I would do it in a heartbeat.
I'd love to see.
We did help them a lot in Los Angeles, a lot with the early, early in my term when they had some problems.
But we would love to do it.
I will say this, if I were a Democrat governor or whatever, I would call up Trump.
I'd say, come on in, make us look good.
Because we're cutting crime down to nothing.
And we're taking people out, career criminals who are only going to do bad things, and we're bringing them back to their countries.
But where we've done it, it's been amazing.
And we have a capacity to do it at much greater levels.
We're cutting illegal aliens off welfare and other government benefits.
And I have directed that starting immediately, there will be no more payments to sanctuary cities because they are really just sanctuaries for criminals.
They're really protecting criminals.
And those are the ones we have to get out of the country.
Murderers, drug dealers, the mentally insane.
They emptied their mental institutions into the United States.
And despite that, we have the lowest crime numbers that we've ever had in the history of the country.
Just came out.
But equally importantly, we're cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits.
Can you believe that Somalia, they turned out to be higher IQ than we thought?
I always say these are low IQ people.
How did they go into Minnesota and steal all that money?
And we have, you know, they're pirates.
They're good pirates, right?
But we shoot them out of the water just like we shoot the drug boats out.
They're not pirating too many boats lately, do you notice?
When they go out into those boats, they want to take over a billion and a half dollar tanker loaded up with oil.
And they say, we're going to blow up your boat.
They have powerful weapons.
You hit the side of the boat, you blow the whole thing up.
The insurance companies are petrified.
So they say, just give them the boat.
We'll give them money instead.
And I don't do that.
We blow them right the hell out of the water.
We see them going out.
We blow them out of the water.
We don't have any pirates so much anymore.
We do.
They won't be there long.
We've cut down with the hitting of the boats that are loaded up with drugs, including submarines.
Can you believe it?
They actually buy what they call mini-subs, very fast.
They're meant for drugs.
We've knocked out two of them.
The Democrats say they were fishing.
You have ruined somebody's fishing weekend.
I would say.
A submarine is not a fishing boat.
You don't fish.
But we've knocked down drugs by water, the oceans, the sea, by 97.2%.
Think of that.
And I actually say, who the hell are the 3%?
Because I would not want to be piloting one of those boats.
We knocked them down, and now we're going to start on land.
We're going to knock it all out.
The land is the easy part.
What we did on sea is incredible.
And that's our great military.
The situation in Minnesota reminds us that the West cannot mass import foreign cultures, which have failed to ever build a successful society of their own.
I mean, we're taking people from Somalia, and Somalia is a failed, it's not a nation, got no government, got no police, got no million, got no nothing.
And then we have this fake congressperson who they just reported is worth $30 million.
You believe this?
Elon Omar talking about the Constitution provides me.
She comes from a country that's not a country, and she's telling us how to run America.
Not going to get away with it much longer, let me tell you.
The explosion of prosperity and conclusion and progress that built the West did not come from our tax codes.
It ultimately came from our very special culture.
This is the precious inheritance that America and Europe have in common.
We share it.
We share it, but we have to keep it strong.
We have to become stronger, more successful, and more prosperous than ever.
We have to defend that culture and rediscover the spirit that lifted the West from the depths of the Dark Ages to the pinnacle of human achievement.
We live in an incredible, changing period.
It's an unbelievable time, but we have to take advantage of the time that we're in.
In our hands are technologies that our ancestors could scarcely have.
I mean, they couldn't have even dreamt some of the things that we see today.
And so rapidly they're produced.
I mean, AI, two years ago, nobody ever heard of the term, and now everybody's talking about it.
And it can have some very good purpose.
It could also have some dangerous purpose.
And for that, we have to watch out.
But some tremendous things are happening because of it.
And we're leading by so much.
We're doing so well.
But opportunities that are bigger and grander than ever before in human history are right before us.
It is the pioneers in this room.
Many of you in this room are true pioneers.
You're two truly brilliant, brilliant people.
Just your ability to get a ticket is brilliant because you have about 50 people for every seat.
I don't know what, that's Larry.
Everything Larry touches turns to gold.
He made this very successful.
But you're in this room, and some of you are the greatest leaders anywhere in the world.
You're the greatest brains anywhere in the world.
And the future is unlimited, and to a large part because of you.
And we have to protect you and we have to cherish you.
I always say we have to cherish our brilliant people because there aren't many of them.
So, together with confidence, boldness, and persistence, let us lift up our people, grow our economies, defend our shared destiny, and build a future for our citizens that is more ambitious, more exciting, more inspiring, and greater than the world has ever seen.
We're in a position to do things that nobody else has ever even thought of before.
And many of the people in this room are the ones that are doing it.
And I want to congratulate you, and I'm with you all the way.
You can do things that nobody else can even think about.
So I congratulate you on your tremendous success.
And the United States is back, bigger, stronger, better than ever before.
And I'll see you around.
Thank you all very much.
Thank you very much. Thank you.
I didn't know about this.
This was supposed to be a nice fire chat, Mr. President.
Yes, good.
I got set up.
I did know.
You made a job for the moderator really easy.
Thank you, Mr. President, for your speech.
I do have a few follow-up questions, if it's okay.
I don't think I should start with Greenland, maybe.
I'll start with the economy.
The U.S. economy is doing really, really well.
But how to sustain this growth moving forward?
Because there's always a recession looming around the corner.
Well, you know, the one thing about economies and recessions is sometimes you get hit unexpectedly and there's nothing you can do about it.
All brilliant people, but there's nothing.
One example was COVID.
We had an economy going at levels like nobody had ever seen my first two and a half, three years.
And then I heard the word pandemic, not COVID.
They came up with that name over a period of time.
We won't get into that.
But I heard the word pandemic.
And I had a poll come out that was so strong just prior to that.
And I was with the two best pulsers, McLaughlin and Fabrizio.
And they said, sir, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, if they came back and ran as president and vice president, they couldn't beat you.
And then what happened is the following day, I was told to stay tuned because there's something really bad happening in China.
There are bodies laying all over Wuhan, right around that certain building that we talk about.
I would have said it came from Wuhan.
It did come from Wuhan.
And they were body bags.
We saw it by satellite.
And they said there are strange things happening in China.
And so it began.
And we ended up with the COVID, and the whole world suffered.
We did a phenomenal job.
I don't think we got the credit we deserve.
We did something that Operation Warp Speed, which some people say was one of the greatest military feats ever.
We did a great job, used our military, used a lot of people.
But sometimes you get hit with things, nothing you can do.
You get hit with things like that unexpectedly.
And we got through it.
And when I left, the stock market was higher than it was previous to the COVID coming up.
And I called it a great achievement.
But things happen.
Bad things happen.
The things that we can stop are wars if we're smart.
That we can stop.
Those are a matter of being intelligent and having intelligent people on the other side, because wars are the worst of all.
Wars are worse than anything.
But we can stop wars because that's sort of up to us.
But things like dust flying in the air, wherever COVID comes from, or whatever comes, sometimes you have to be a little bit lucky.
But we are poised to have an economy like no other, not only in this country, but anywhere.
And when you hear the kind of numbers that I can tell you that Scott Besant was with me the other day, and he's looking at numbers, he said, I can't, and that's all he's done his whole life, pretty much your whole life, Scott.
You weren't going to be a football player, I don't think.
Scott was not that great at football, but he was always good at numbers, right?
And he was looking at the numbers.
He said, I've never seen anything like this.
We're poised to do things that no other country has ever done.
And, you know, luck, I hate to say it, but we need a little luck.
We don't want to get hit by something that nobody could have thought.
Whoever thought we were going to hit by a pandemic.
You know, when I heard the word pandemic, I said, oh, that's an ancient problem.
World War I, they lost 100 million people.
It actually ended World War I.
A lot of people don't know.
The Spanish flu in World War I ended the war because all the soldiers were sick.
The soldiers were so sick on both sides.
And that war was raging and they were all dying from the Spanish flu.
They were sick as dogs.
They couldn't fight.
So, you know, you don't know how that would have turned out.
But so we do, I mean, subject to that, and I always have to put a caveat in for it, but we're poised to have the greatest growth of any large country.
I think any country that there's been, when you look at what's happening in the United States, it's really amazing.
Thank you.
One thing that maybe keeps you up at night, I know you don't sleep that much anyway, Mr. President, is the debt.
The U.S. debt is high, is now the biggest expenditure on your budget.
How to get out of that impulse?
Well, the big thing is growth.
I mean, growth is the way.
If we grow like this, we go from having a $37, $36, $37 trillion.
We go from having high debt to low debt.
But we also are cutting expenses, you know, the old-fashioned way.
We have extraordinary growth.
I think we're going to be growing our way out.
I think we're going to be paying off debt.
We're taking in tremendous money from tariffs fairly.
And again, I'm using them judiciously.
You know, Switzerland's a case study.
I could have gotten much more.
I could have asked for much more.
But we're using them judiciously.
But I think growth, most importantly, and then cutting costs.
Now, if you take a look at Minnesota, $19 billion in fraud and other things.
People going to airports, they came into the country, they don't have 10 cents, and they're leaving with hundreds of thousands of cash in their bags.
When we get to that, and our DOJ, Pam, and Todd, and all the people that work over there, and all of the people that work here, I can tell you, Scott Besant is working on that.
It's a priority, right?
You have your whole team.
We're in there looking for where this money is coming from, how much it is.
It could be more than $19 billion.
Can you believe that?
That's just one state.
If we were able to cut out 50% of the fraud, 50%, and we should be able to do better than that, we would have a balanced budget without having to talk about even growth.
50 Billion on AI? 00:03:02
So we have a lot of options, but we're working very hard on that.
That's a big deal.
It's not just the protests, the fake protests done by agitators and professional insurrectionists.
That's what they are.
They're professional troublemakers.
But we are looking very strong at the money, too, in Minnesota and other places.
I think, Mr. President, also the 500 billion U.S. dollars invested in artificial intelligence and the frontier technologies last year also were driving growth exponentially in the U.S. AI has been a big factor.
AI is massive.
I mean, Mark Zuckerberg showed me a plant where he put it over a map of Manhattan, and it was basically the size of Manhattan.
This is not, I said, you got to be kidding.
It's a plant that was miles long, miles wide, very high.
I don't think it was high like the Empire State Building, but it was high.
And it literally covered most of the island of Manhattan.
That's called a big plant.
And, you know, when I heard they're going to spend 50 billion building it, I said, what, you know, if you spend 50 million, you can build a nice little shopping center.
If you spend 500 million, you can build a good shopping center.
But how do you spend 50 billion?
When I looked at this thing, I said, you think you'll be able to do it for that?
It's amazing.
When, you know, some of the plants that I see, and I see them all, and again, so big is we're letting them build their own electric generation.
This way we have no problem.
And otherwise, they'd be complaining.
There'd be nobody able to, but, you know, we have an old grid system.
And not only that, they're going to sell at a very cheap price the excess electricity that they create back into our grid.
So that'll solve some problems for certain states that don't have enough electricity.
We also know that on the AI there is fierce competition between the U.S. as the largest economy in the world, 27% of the global GDP and 5% of the global population not doing that badly, and China.
And we know that that competition is very tough on AI.
I know you're heading to a state visit to China in April.
How do you see the U.S.-China relationship moving forward?
Are you able to combine this tough competition with also collaboration?
So I've always had a very good relationship with President Xi and with President Putin.
Talk about the larger powers.
House Galling In 00:00:38
But I've always had a very good relationship with President Xi of China.
He's an incredible man.
What he's done is amazing.
He's highly respected by everybody.
And I do now.
I mean, now I have good, it was very severely interrupted.
We're going to leave President Trump's remarks here to keep our commitment to live coverage of U.S. Congress.
You can continue watching on our companion network, C-SPAN 3, as we take you live now to Capitol Hill, where the House is galling in for general speeches.
The House will be in order.
The Chair lays before the House a communication from the Speaker.
Thank you.
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