| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
Venezuela's Control
00:05:55
|
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|
unidentified
|
Live at 2:30 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN 3, C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app, and online at C-SPAN.org. | |
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| President Trump and his cabinet officials held a meeting in the White House where they addressed an array of topics, including the state of affairs in Venezuela, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas. | ||
| This runs an hour and 20 minutes. | ||
| Well, thank you very much. | ||
| I think you probably noticed the cabinet room is getting more and more beautiful. | ||
| You can see the flags behind us of the different forces and the American flag and various others. | ||
| It's, I think, quite spectacular. | ||
| It's never looked this good. | ||
| And hopefully, we're going to do work that's never been as good. | ||
| So I think that's basically what's happened in our first year. | ||
| We've had an amazing year, and this will be our first cabinet after the year. | ||
| So we're starting our second year. | ||
| Tremendous progress has been made. | ||
| I want to thank my entire cabinet for 12 months of unprecedented achievements. | ||
| We really have. | ||
| I mean, it's unprecedented. | ||
| The numbers we've had on the economy and growth, you see them. | ||
| And that's despite a Democrat shutdown. | ||
| Without the shutdown, we would have picked up about a point and a half more than already high numbers, record-setting numbers. | ||
| So this has been, I think, and a lot of people say it, the most successful year of any administration in American history. | ||
| First year, there's never been a first year like this, including the fact that we put out Extinguished Eight Wars and another one we think is coming. | ||
| Steve Witkoff working very hard and Jared and everybody else, and I think it's coming. | ||
| It was just announced that the murder rate in our country is the biggest drop ever recorded. | ||
| It's at the lowest level in 125 years, first in recorded history. | ||
| It's the lowest in at least 125 years. | ||
| It's a wonderful thing. | ||
| And the crime is way down, and one of the reasons was we've taken a lot of bad people and gotten them out of our country. | ||
| In some cases, they're so bad that we put them in prison because we don't want them to even take a chance of coming back in, even though our border is very secure, record-setting secure. | ||
| We had zero illegal aliens being admitted into our country for the last eight months. | ||
| That's hard for even me to believe, but the people that make up the lists are supposedly nonpartisan, but I would say they lean toward the Democrat side. | ||
| And if they say that, I'm all for it. | ||
| As you know, we've had a situation take place with respect to Venezuela. | ||
| I want to just thank General Kaine and his staff. | ||
| The job that they've done is incredible. | ||
| Nobody's ever seen anything like it. | ||
| And once it did take place, I want to thank the leadership of Venezuela. | ||
| We're getting along really well with them. | ||
| The relationships have been very strong, very good. | ||
| And they have informed me that they feel this very good security, very strong security. | ||
| We're working with the various people involved, including Chris and Doug and everybody on the oil. | ||
| We have the major oil companies going to Venezuela now scouting it out and picking their locations and they'll be bringing back tremendous wealth for Venezuela and for the United States and the oil companies will do fine too. | ||
| Venezuela will actually make for themselves more money than they've ever made before and that's a good thing. | ||
| And the people of Venezuela were literally in the streets waving American flags. | ||
| They were so happy. | ||
| And the people in our country, like in the Doral section of Miami, which is considered little Venezuela, they're thrilled. | ||
| And I just spoke to the President of Venezuela and informed her that we're going to be opening up all commercial airspace over Venezuela. | ||
| American citizens will be very shortly able to go to Venezuela and they'll be safe there. | ||
| They'll be safe. | ||
| It's under very strong control. | ||
| And the people of formerly of Venezuela, some want to go back and some want to go back to visit and they're going to be able to do that. | ||
| So I've instructed Sean Duffy and everybody else concerned, including the military, that if you would, by the end of today, I'd like you to have the airspace over Venezuela. | ||
| Planes can go to Venezuela opened up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And I want to thank all of the people in Venezuela for what they went through. | ||
| And I want to thank the leadership for really they're doing a good job. | ||
| And just as I promised, we've defeated the Biden inflation nightmare and achieved explosive new economic growth. | ||
| The Atlanta Fed is predicting an astounding 5.4% GDP growth in the fourth quarter. | ||
|
First Time Ever Making More Steel
00:11:35
|
||
| And that's despite the fact that we had a Democrat shutdown. | ||
| We would have had that number would have been 7%, which is a number nobody's ever heard of. | ||
| And we've had, we've been given great national security because of tariffs. | ||
| And we've also been given unprecedented income because of tariffs. | ||
| Part of the income that we gave, $12 billion, we gave to the farmers of our country. | ||
| So that yesterday I was up in Iowa and they were very happy, Madam Secretary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, sir. | |
| They were very, very happy. | ||
| They were great. | ||
| So the GDP growth in the fourth quarter was great. | ||
| And it's going to be, I think we're going to have an amazing and incredible year. | ||
| Hopefully we won't have a shutdown. | ||
| We're working on that right now. | ||
| I think we're getting close. | ||
| The Democrats, I don't believe, want to see it either. | ||
| So we'll work in a very bipartisan way, I believe, not to have a shutdown. | ||
| We don't want to shut down. | ||
| And just yesterday, the SP 500 hit 7,000 for the first time ever. | ||
| There's never been any time at which it's done like that. | ||
| And the other stocks also, I think it was 52 times for the Dow had hit a record high. | ||
| But the 7,000 was not a number that was even thinkable if you go back a year ago. | ||
| And so SP hit 7,000 for the first time ever. | ||
| The stock market has set, it's actually 53, 52, 53 all-time record highs since the election, adding $9 trillion in value to savings, retirement accounts, and 401ks. | ||
| I mean, everybody benefits, but we have record, record stock markets. | ||
| Companies have never done well. | ||
| And most importantly, if you think about it, after four years in which Biden got much less than $1 trillion of investment into our country in just, actually it was taken over 11 months, even though we're 12 months. | ||
| In 11 months, we've taken in more than $18 trillion. | ||
| So they did less than $1 trillion, Scott, in a period of four years, and we've done $18 trillion in less than one year. | ||
| So there's never been anything like that. | ||
| No other country has done those numbers, by the way, in history. | ||
| Ten years ago, one country did $3 trillion. | ||
| No other, we did $18 trillion. | ||
| It's being invested now. | ||
| Thousands of businesses, plants, equipment all over the country are being built right now. | ||
| And they're going to be opening pretty soon. | ||
| And when they open, you'll see numbers like nobody's ever seen before. | ||
| The economy is doing amazingly well. | ||
| I wish the press would report it, but people are finding out. | ||
| They're seeing it. | ||
| It's becoming pretty evident. | ||
| It's hard to hide. | ||
| Biden inflation, which is really stagflation, cost the typical family $34,000. | ||
| Think of that, $34,000. | ||
| But after one year, growth in real incomes is outpacing inflation by more than $3,000 under Trump. | ||
| So one cost $34,000 and one made $3,000. | ||
| That's a big swing. | ||
| Gasoline has plunged to, think of this, over $4 a gallon, depending on where you are. | ||
| In California, it's $7,000, $8 a gallon. | ||
| I was in Iowa, and they had $1.85, because I had it at $199 a gallon. | ||
| And I was corrected by two farmers that said, I just bought my gasoline for $185. | ||
| So Chris, you have to be doing something right, you and Doug, right? | ||
| But I don't want to give you too much confidence. | ||
| You've got to keep it going. | ||
| We're drilling, I think I can say we're drilling more than at any time ever in the history. | ||
| We're taking out more energy out of our land, but specifically, if you look at oil and gas, we've never been anywhere even close. | ||
| Is that a correct statement? | ||
| That is correct. | ||
| All-time records. | ||
| Yeah, great. | ||
| It's a great job. | ||
| Well, it's supply and demand, so that's going down rapidly. | ||
| And, you know, when energy goes down, everything else goes down. | ||
| They tried to do their thing. | ||
| It was a disaster. | ||
| Then they ran back very late to the Trump policy, but they didn't do the Trump policy. | ||
| They cut leases. | ||
| They did everything that they could do, but they lost it. | ||
| And they were very high. | ||
| And we're now less than $2 in many areas, $2.30 a gallon average. | ||
| Grocery prices, airfares, hotels, car payments, and rent prices are coming down very fast. | ||
| And you don't hear the word affordability issued by the Democrats anymore. | ||
| Now they're going into other things because they're getting beaten badly on affordability. | ||
| Remember that when I was elected, I came into office. | ||
| I inherited a total mess, starting with eggs, which were four times higher than they were just a year before. | ||
| And Brooke got them down very quickly before Easter. | ||
| He said, they wanted me to buy plastic eggs for the egg hunt at the very famous egg hunt at the White House. | ||
| Sir, would you buy plastic eggs? | ||
| I would buy a lot of like 100,000 eggs. | ||
| I said, we're not going to buy plastic eggs. | ||
| And by the time we had the egg hunt a few months later, we had the prices down pretty good. | ||
| And now they're really low. | ||
| Now they're at a very low level. | ||
| So we really have, you don't hear the word affordability because we inherited very high prices and we inherited the highest inflation in 48 years. | ||
| I say the history of our country. | ||
| I think it sounds almost the same. | ||
| Actually, I think 48 years sounds actually worse for some reason. | ||
| So I'll go with the 40 because the press corrected me. | ||
| I said history and they said, it's not history. | ||
| It's 48 years. | ||
| I said, I'll accept that. | ||
| And we had the highest inflation in 48 years. | ||
| We have now very, as you saw yesterday with the Fed, I'm not a fan of his, he said that inflation essentially is not a factor. | ||
| It's really been pretty amazing. | ||
| I just put out a statement about his statements. | ||
| I won't repeat them here because they're too angry. | ||
| And thanks to our tax cuts, millions of Americans will soon receive record-setting tax refunds. | ||
| You're going to get a lot of tax refunds, with the average refund expected to be over $1,000 higher than it has been at any time. | ||
| So we're going to be getting some pretty good refunds, a lot of people. | ||
| If congressional Democrats had their way, Americans would right now be facing the largest tax hike ever. | ||
| You know, their proposal was to raise taxes very substantially. | ||
| And our proposal, which is in the Great Big, Beautiful New Deal, it's a new deal in its own way. | ||
| It's a Republican version of the New Deal. | ||
| Right behind you is a nice picture of FDR. | ||
| This is a much better deal than the FDR deal. | ||
| But we have the Great Big Beautiful bill, and it's given tremendous tax cuts and a lot of other things. | ||
| People are now finding out how good it is. | ||
| And it's just kicked in as of January 1st, by the way. | ||
| So we're really starting to see it. | ||
| Even though it's a month, we're really starting to see it. | ||
| The U.S. economy would be cratering if they had won this election, our country would be in very bad shape, would be maybe not much of a country anymore. | ||
| I don't think it would be a country anymore. | ||
| They were doing everything wrong, but they were going to give you the largest tax hike in history, and we're giving you the largest tax cut in history in the Great Big Beautiful bill. | ||
| In addition, I think it's very good. | ||
| I think it's very important. | ||
| You have no tax on overtime, no tax on tips, and no tax on Social Security. | ||
| But you also have, you're getting an end. | ||
| This is the first time this ever happened. | ||
| If you buy a car, you go out and borrow money, you get an interest deduction. | ||
| You take the interest rate, the interest that you're paying on the loan, you're able to deduct it for income tax purposes. | ||
| So that's a first ever. | ||
| And I think it's going to be great for everybody, including the car companies. | ||
| I was in Detroit three weeks ago. | ||
| I went to the Ford factory, spoke to the General Motors people. | ||
| It's all the same. | ||
| They're doing better than they've ever done. | ||
| The factory I went to was like a World War I, earlier than World War I factory opened up one of the oldest buildings, but one of the biggest. | ||
| And Ford was getting ready to close it a couple of years ago, and then they saw that I was doing well, and it looked like I would have a good chance of winning. | ||
| And they kept it going, barely going. | ||
| And last week they announced, during my visit, they announced that they're going to round the clock round the clock production. | ||
| They never thought it was. | ||
| I said, did you ever think? | ||
| I spoke with Bill Ford and the president of Ford. | ||
| They were both there. | ||
| And they said, we can't even believe it. | ||
| We were going to close this building two years ago and now it's going round the clock. | ||
| They said, we cannot, I mean, they wish, they said, we wish it was twice the size, but they're now building additional plants in the United States, as is everybody else. | ||
| You have AI building, but the car companies, I love the car companies, and you have them, they're all coming back. | ||
| They're coming back from Mexico. | ||
| They're coming back from Canada. | ||
| They're coming back from Japan. | ||
| And they're coming back from Germany all over Europe. | ||
| They're coming back. | ||
| They're building here because they want to avoid the tariffs. | ||
| They don't want to pay the 15%, in some cases 25% tariff could be a lot higher than that if it wasn't working. | ||
| So because of that, they're all coming back. | ||
| One statistic yesterday that Scott told me is that for the first time ever, tell them about the steel and Japan, that we are now making more steel. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
| So yesterday they reported for the first time in 26 years, the United States of America produced more steel than Japan. | ||
| And that is entirely driven by your tariffs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing people. | |
| He obviously said that much better than I did because I got no applause. | ||
| I'm giving you a home run after a home run. | ||
| He says, well, everybody. | ||
| I should have saved that one for myself. | ||
| No, but think of it. | ||
| First time, they read almost 30 years, but I guess it's what, 26, 27 years, that we are now producing more steel than Japan. | ||
| Japan being a big steel producer. | ||
| Japan and other countries really took our steel production away from us. | ||
| Now, if you think of this, three, four years ago, the steel companies were all closing up. | ||
| We worked a fantastic deal with U.S. Steel. | ||
| We saved U.S. Steel. | ||
| And now it's all coming about. | ||
| But we're, and that's just the beginning. | ||
| There are a lot of steel plants right now being built. | ||
| So that's an amazing, it's an amazing number. | ||
| Nobody would have believed that. | ||
| If you would have said that three, four, five years ago, people would have said, it's not a true fact. | ||
| So it has to be true, because otherwise you question me, you question me on everything. | ||
| I have to be extremely accurate. | ||
| I don't exaggerate it. | ||
| I don't want to exaggerate because you will call me. | ||
| You don't call other people, but you would call me under my most favored nation spa, which I think is the most important thing, Bobby, of all, what we've done, because we're bringing drug prices down by 80, 90%, depending on the way. | ||
| You could say 5, 6, 7, 800%. | ||
| Depends on the way you want to calculate it, right? | ||
|
London's Drug Price Revolution
00:07:41
|
||
| But let's go the old-fashioned way. | ||
| But drug prices for prescription drugs will be down 80, 90%, 75%, 68%. | ||
| They've only gone up. | ||
| For years and years and years, they've only gone up. | ||
| And now we're going to have essentially the most favored nation. | ||
| We're going to have the most favored price in the whole world. | ||
| Whatever the lowest price in the world is, that's what we're going to pay. | ||
| And I don't want to go into a big deal, but nobody else could have gotten this, but this administration. | ||
| I'm being very nice when I say that. | ||
| The cost of prescription drugs is coming down by tremendous, by a number that never was never even thought of. | ||
| This will have a huge impact on health care, by the way, because obviously drugs are a big part of health care. | ||
| And it will help repair some of the Unaffordable Care Act's damage that they've done because the Unaffordable Care Act, which is Obamacare, it's unaffordable. | ||
| It's not affordable. | ||
| And it's a disaster. | ||
| And hopefully we will be paying money directly to the people instead of giving the insurance companies the money. | ||
| They'll go into a health care savings account or whatever it is. | ||
| But think of it. | ||
| We pay the money, billions and billions, really trillions of dollars going to insurance companies. | ||
| We want that money to go to the people. | ||
| They buy their own health care. | ||
| And it's so popular. | ||
| The problem we have is the Democrats are owned by the insurance companies. | ||
| They're literally owned, lock, stock, and barrel by the insurance companies. | ||
| And they hate it. | ||
| But the people love it, including all Democrats. | ||
| So I think we'll perhaps be successful with it. | ||
| But it was an idea I had. | ||
| You know, I read the papers, and I'm reading one of the stories about the insurance companies, how much money they're making, where they received, you know, billions and billions of dollars for this stuff from the United States of America. | ||
| And their stock has gone up by 1,400%. | ||
| Think of it, 1,400. | ||
| One went up 1,700%. | ||
| Numbers went up. | ||
| If you go up a thousand percent, you're doing bad in that business, right? | ||
| And it's all because of the money. | ||
| Not all, but mostly because of the money the United States pays to the insurance companies. | ||
| They say, this is really, this is big stuff. | ||
| And I asked somebody, why don't we just pay the people directly? | ||
| And they said, that's a good idea. | ||
| You know, it's funny, it's a very complicated business, but actually, it's not so complicated. | ||
| And I went to Bobby and I went to Dr. Raz. | ||
| I said, can I talk to you guys about this? | ||
| Is this the kind of money the insurance companies get? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Why don't we pay the people directly? | ||
| And the primary answer was that the Democrats will never go along with it. | ||
| But the people go along with it, because I put it out, it went viral. | ||
| It went viral as Suzy went all over the place. | ||
| It became the biggest story. | ||
| I just said it. | ||
| And so I think we have a great situation if we can do it. | ||
| But if you think most favored nation policy for drugs will bring your drug prices down and levels. | ||
| So now if they're selling a pill for $10 in London and $130 in New York, the London price will go up to $20 and we'll go down to $20. | ||
| So we'll go from $130 down to $20. | ||
| And by the way, tariffs did it again because the drug companies said we'll do it begrudgingly, but they were okay. | ||
| But we'll do it, but no nation is going to approve it because even if you raise the price by, like on a pill, $10 to $20, you're doubling the price of their prescription drugs. | ||
| I said, no, they'll do it. | ||
| And when I got them on the phone, I said, if you don't do it, we're going to charge you very substantial tariffs, more money than that's going to cost you. | ||
| And they said, we'll do it. | ||
| And before, I don't know that any other president even tried to do it. | ||
| We can't find it. | ||
| But if they did try, they wouldn't have gotten through the companies. | ||
| They wouldn't have gotten through the company, and then they wouldn't have gotten through the country. | ||
| I spoke with Macron, he was the first one. | ||
| He was not at that time wearing sunglasses. | ||
| And he said, he said, no, no, Donald, I will not do this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I will not. | |
| I won't even consider you're asking me to double the price. | ||
| I said, you have no choice. | ||
| You have to do it because you guys have been ripping this off. | ||
| In other words, the whole world, we've been subsidizing the whole world on drug costs. | ||
| That's why they were $10 and we'd be at $130. | ||
| As an example, there were many examples. | ||
| I could give you examples, even worse. | ||
| He said, no, no, no, I will not do that. | ||
| And I said, yes, you will. | ||
| 100%, you'll do it. | ||
| He said, no, I won't do that, Donald. | ||
| You're asking me to double the cost of our prescription. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We will not do that. | |
| I bet, look, you've been ripping us off now for decades. | ||
| We're not going to do it anymore. | ||
| You can do it under Biden and Obama and other people. | ||
| You're not going to do it under us. | ||
| We won't do it. | ||
| I said, well, if you don't do it, I'm going to charge you a 25% tariff on all of your wine, champagne, and everything else you sell into the United States. | ||
| He said, like I said, I will do it. | ||
| That was the end of the conversation, right? | ||
| That was the end of the conversation. | ||
| So now we have favored nations that everybody said would be impossible to get. | ||
| And I then had the same conversation with 15 other countries. | ||
| Every one of them agreed. | ||
| After a short conference, they all said no. | ||
| And then within a matter of seconds, they said, we would be very happy to do that. | ||
| Thank you for asking in such a nice way. | ||
| And it's a great achievement. | ||
| I think it's going to be one of the best achievements we've had in this country in a long time. | ||
| So we're going to be knocking drug prices down at levels never seen before. | ||
| I want to thank the drug companies because once they agreed, they really did. | ||
| They felt it was very unfair. | ||
| One of them told me, it's actually a relief to agree because this has been just a rough thing for me, you know, to justify. | ||
| Because they couldn't justify it. | ||
| I said, how come in London I can buy something for $10 and in New York I have to pay $130 and they go, well, you know, it's research and development. | ||
| I said, yeah, but you have research and development from them. | ||
| Made in the same factory, made in everything. | ||
| This is where my friend, who's very successful, I told you, a seriously overweight person. | ||
| He takes the fat pill or the fat shot. | ||
| And he was in London and he said, costs $87 there, costs $1,300 in New York. | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| Call me up. | ||
| And I mean, I knew that, but he put it in a very blunt way. | ||
| I've known him a long time. | ||
| He's a crude individual, but smart as hell, made a lot of money. | ||
| But he just thought it was sort of ridiculous. | ||
| He happened to be in London and he got the shot, you know, Ozempic, I think, or one of them. | ||
| And I told him it wasn't working. | ||
| For him, it didn't work. | ||
| And he brought up a good boy. | ||
| I told him, he knows who I'm talking about. | ||
| He's going crazy. | ||
| Begs me not to mention his name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Not talking about me, Lee. | |
| It's not our great vice president. | ||
| No, but he begs me not to mention his name because he's become very famous without mentioning his name. | ||
| And he is actually a very well-known business person. | ||
| But he did make a point. | ||
| But I knew the point very well. | ||
| We were always paying far more than any other nation. | ||
| We were subsidizing the world. | ||
| Right now, there's no more of that. | ||
| So we're going to be bringing the drug prices down at numbers never seen before. | ||
| It's going to have a huge impact, positive impact on healthcare. | ||
| So with that, we are going to ask a couple of people to say a few words. | ||
|
Fighting for Sons' Return
00:03:22
|
||
| We're not going to go through the whole table because the last time we had a press conference, it lasted for three hours. | ||
| And some people said he closed his eyes. | ||
| Look, it got pretty boring. | ||
| I love these people. | ||
| I love these people. | ||
| But there's a lot of people. | ||
| It was a little bit on the boring side. | ||
| But I didn't sleep. | ||
| I just closed them because I wanted to get the hell out of here. | ||
| Some of them, I didn't sleep, by the way. | ||
| I don't sleep much. | ||
| But you know, it's funny. | ||
| Some of them got me in a blink. | ||
| You know, when you go like, they took me at the closed segment of my cycle. | ||
| And they said he's sleeping. | ||
| And besides that, Marco, between these two guys, if I was sleeping, they'd be waking me up very fast. | ||
| They'd be knocking me, come on, you got to wake up, boss. | ||
| But we've had great meetings. | ||
| Look, we're the most transparent presidency by far. | ||
| And I love going around the room, but we're going to pick a few people. | ||
| I think I would like to ask Steve if he could just give us a brief description of how well we're doing in the Middle East, because we have peace in the Middle East now. | ||
| There's a couple of little minor flames that we put out very easily. | ||
| And very importantly, we got our last hostage back, which is incredible, unfortunately. | ||
| We did something that nobody said could be done. | ||
| And I will tell you, Hamas was a big factor in getting all of the hostages back. | ||
| We were not happy with them, and they had to bring them back. | ||
| And they found the dead hostages, the bodies of hostages, and those parents wanted their sons back, I think in all cases sons. | ||
| But they wanted their sons and their family. | ||
| They wanted their sons back as much as the people that had living hostages that we got them back to. | ||
| So we got the 20, but remember, we got hundreds back previous to that. | ||
| But I always said getting those last 20 back is going to be very tough. | ||
| And we got them back and we got all of the bodies back also, which to those parents was just as important as getting back the son that was living. | ||
| Steve, could you give us a little description, please? | ||
| Well, your policy of peace through strength, that's what delivered them home. | ||
| Without that, without that pressure, it never happens. | ||
| We are in the second phase now. | ||
| We've stood up for the first time, Mr. President, on your behalf, a technocratic, all-Arab government. | ||
| We've got the terrorists out of there, and they're going to demilitarize. | ||
| They will, because they have no choice. | ||
| So, we expect that. | ||
|
unidentified
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The President. | |
| The President. | ||
| And now we want to get Hamas no guns, right? | ||
| They're going to give it up. | ||
| They're going to give up the AK-47s. | ||
| A lot of people said they'll never disarm. | ||
| Looks like they're going to disarm. | ||
| And they did help us with those bodies, getting them back. | ||
| And that family is so grateful to you. | ||
| They called. | ||
| I spoke to them. | ||
| Jared spoke to them. | ||
| You know, it's an amazing story. | ||
| He broke his shoulder. | ||
| But he went out there because he didn't want his friends to fight alone. | ||
| He would be alive today, but for that. | ||
| He had no reason to go out with a broken shoulder. | ||
| And he went out and fought them courageously. | ||
| And died. | ||
| And died. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| This is a great story. | ||
|
Working Together For Peace
00:03:45
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||
| And the parents are great. | ||
| They were the only ones who didn't, you know, they came back pretty rapidly, actually, considering that we had some back initially with the initial group. | ||
| After that, we had to get a lot. | ||
| That's a tough job. | ||
| That's a nasty job, too. | ||
| Who would want that one? | ||
| That's a nasty job. | ||
| Between Israel and Hamas working together, if you can believe it, they got them back. | ||
| And we got the last one back yesterday, and the parents are so happy. | ||
| It's amazing, actually. | ||
| We sent a message to the parents on your behalf, as you suggested, and they were so grateful. | ||
| I guess grateful to me is a much better word because it's hard to be happy. | ||
| But they were, actually. | ||
| I mean, they couldn't believe that they had their baby boy. | ||
| The mother said, my baby boy back. | ||
| It's a very terrible thing. | ||
| Steve, Russia, Ukraine, we've making a lot of progress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Could you explain that? | |
| The Ukrainians actually said that we've made more progress in the last, since Geneva, than they've seen in the last four years of that conflict. | ||
| So we had five Russian generals last Sunday in Abu Dhabi with Jared I and Dan Driscoll. | ||
| And we think we made a lot of progress. | ||
| The talks will continue in about a week. | ||
| But lots of good things happening between the counterparties discussing the land deal and working together. | ||
| We have a security protocol agreement that's largely finished, a prosperity agreement that's largely finished. | ||
| And I think the people of Ukraine are now hopeful and expectant that we're going to deliver a peace deal sometime soon. | ||
| And because of the cold, extreme cold, they have the same that we do. | ||
| I personally asked President Putin not to fire on Kiev and the cities and towns for a week during this. | ||
| It's extraordinary. | ||
| It's not just like cold, it's extraordinary cold, record-setting cold. | ||
| Over there too, they're having the same pile of bad weather, the worst. | ||
| But it was really, they said they've never experienced cold like that. | ||
| And I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kiev and the various towns for a week. | ||
| And he agreed to do that. | ||
| And I have to tell you, it was very nice. | ||
| A lot of people said, don't waste the cold, you're not going to get that. | ||
| And he did it. | ||
| And we're very happy that they did it. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Because on top of everything else, that's not what they need, is missiles coming into their towns and cities. | ||
| So I just thought I should say I thought it was a very good thing. | ||
| And Ukraine was Almost they didn't believe it, but they were very happy about it because they are struggling badly. | ||
| It shows, Mr. President, how you provide an overarching sort of presence in these negotiations. | ||
| The Ukrainians never thought it could happen. | ||
| The Russians are doing things maybe that people wouldn't give them the credit for doing, and I think it always comes down to your indomitable spirit. | ||
| Well, it was a good thing. | ||
| You know, if you think it's cold over here, they say in Ukraine you can add another 20% to it. | ||
| It was a very cold place anyway, but this was they see numbers that were so they'd never seen numbers like that, cold numbers like that. | ||
| So it was, I thought I should mention it. | ||
| Could I ask Scott Bessett? | ||
| We have so many things happening. | ||
| Could I ask you to maybe say a few words, please? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
| So the one big, beautiful bill that was passed on July 4th last year, we're starting to see the effects kick in. | ||
|
Every American Sees Gains
00:15:24
|
||
| You mentioned the great economy. | ||
| One of the things in the one big beautiful bill, Mr. President, it was an honor to host you and as you said, the best rapper in the world, Nikki Minaj, at yesterday's Trump Accounts Summit. | ||
| We've now had a million people sign up for Trump accounts just this week. | ||
| We think there will be 25 million families who are eligible. | ||
| The segment that you and she did has a billion hits, a billion hits on the internet. | ||
| So we're telling everyone, go fill out form 4547, trumpaccount.gov. | ||
| So thanks to you, the Trump Accounts, the next generation's America will benefit from today's record-breaking economy, record-breaking markets. | ||
| Sir, when we came in, the Biden administration had destroyed the American people with the three eyes. | ||
| Immigration, inflation, and interest rates. | ||
| Immigration, check you close the border. | ||
| The inflation, as we've heard, back down to target. | ||
| Prices are coming down, and interest rates, we hope there's more on the way. | ||
| We've got gains in wages, low prices, and I think 2026 is going to be the year for the Trump boom. | ||
| It's going to be a supply-side boom. | ||
| I enjoyed the trip out to Iowa in the diner. | ||
| The staff there was thanking you for the no tax on tips, and they're expecting big refunds. | ||
| From that, we saw the CEO of John Deere who said, thanks to your tariffs, new plants in Indiana and North Carolina. | ||
| Two massive plants being built by John Deere. | ||
| And he's the chairman and CEO, wonderful guy. | ||
| And I said to he was at the event we had in Iowa, which is appropriate, John Deere, Iowa. | ||
| But I said to him, so what are you doing? | ||
| He said, we just announced two massive plants. | ||
| In fact, they're going to have one plan for excavators. | ||
| And he said, there hasn't been an excavator built in this country in 50 years or something. | ||
| He said, they're taking it out of Japan and they're moving it into the United States. | ||
| Two very big plans. | ||
| I said, so why are you doing it? | ||
| He said, because of you and because of tariffs. | ||
| I said, if we didn't have tariffs, would you be doing it? | ||
| He said, absolutely not. | ||
| So it's very important. | ||
| And I hope we're going to be successful with the Supreme Court case because we're waiting. | ||
| And we're taking in hundreds of billions of dollars. | ||
| And we don't want to give it back, number one. | ||
| And number two, and you know, the people that are fighting us on that case, by the way, are China-centric. | ||
| These are people that are for China, but they're also outside of the United States. | ||
| These are countries that have ripped us off for years, for years and years, charging us tariffs. | ||
| And now we're doing an amazing job and we're getting it back. | ||
| We're getting it all back and then some. | ||
| And they're the ones that are leading that lawsuit that we have in front of the United States Supreme Court. | ||
| So it's a very important lawsuit for our country. | ||
| And hopefully it's going to work out. | ||
| We're waiting a long time, but hopefully it's going to work out. | ||
| We've taken in hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars. | ||
| And certainly we've taken in trillions of dollars of, you know, a big part of that $18 trillion that's coming in is because of tariffs that are coming in their building because they don't want to pay the tariff. | ||
| And the tariffs are very, you know, steep. | ||
| They could be much steeper. | ||
| You probably saw I put out a truth today. | ||
| And the tariffs could be much steeper. | ||
| We've been actually very nice about it. | ||
| But even being nice about it, we've taken in hundreds of billions of dollars. | ||
| And honestly, they've given us tremendous national security. | ||
| The power that we have because of that, they have given us tremendous strength and national security. | ||
| Go ahead, yes, sir. | ||
| And the IEPA power you used on the tariffs, as you said, we're bringing in tens of trillions of investments. | ||
| The tens of trillions of investments turns into factories construction, which turns into factory jobs, which turns into consumer spending. | ||
| You've right-sized the government. | ||
| So government employment is down. | ||
| Private sector is up. | ||
| Growth was a stunning 4.7, 4.8% in the past two quarters. | ||
| Biggest back-to-back gains in a decade. | ||
| And we are doing that with government finances improving. | ||
| So that will bring down the borrowing costs, the calendar year budget for 2024, 7% deficit to GDP, highest when we weren't at war, not in a recession, all the way down to 5.4% and getting better. | ||
| Biggest decline since 2014. | ||
| Generational gains in productivity, soaring productivity. | ||
| We're going to let workers pay record high prices, record high profits, and stock prices are soaring. | ||
| You've got a manufacturing renaissance, and all the key inflation metrics are trending lower. | ||
| Over the past three months, the consumer price index is just 2.1, and core prices are even lower at 1.6%. | ||
| And I think that that could trend below one, given energy, as you've talked about, the pharmaceutical discounts, and rents. | ||
| So we're expecting a great year in 2026, Mr. President. | ||
| And we're going to be announcing next week, I think, sometimes, Scott and Howard and everybody, we're going to be announcing the head of the Fed, who that will be. | ||
| And it'll be a person that will, I think, do a good job. | ||
| We're paying far too much interest in the Fed. | ||
| The Fed rate's too high. | ||
| Unacceptably high. | ||
| We should have the lowest. | ||
| And I think you read my statement today. | ||
| I put out a statement before the meeting. | ||
| But we should have the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world because a lot of these countries are successful only because of us because we allow them to have surpluses. | ||
| And without surpluses, some of the countries that you most respect financially that you say, oh, this one, that one, this one, that one, they're successful because we allow them to have surpluses. | ||
| And we could easily stop that with the powers that we have, but we don't. | ||
| We took some of it, but we took really just a small portion of it compared to what we could take if we wanted to. | ||
| We should have the lowest interest rate anywhere in the world. | ||
| They should be two points and even three points lower. | ||
| And if it was each point is the equivalent of, I would say, $500 billion. | ||
| So if you got two points low, you have a trillion dollars in saving. | ||
| And it's almost, if you call it just a paper expense, you can do it with a pencil. | ||
| It's not cutting. | ||
| It's not saying we have to get rid of jobs. | ||
| It's just like literally so easy to do. | ||
| But we have a guy that doesn't want to do it because he's, I think he's politically biased. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I believe he's politically biased because most smart people say it's not even a question. | ||
| But despite that, we were able to bust through. | ||
| It's like busting through a wall. | ||
| We're able to bust through a wall that we have the kind of numbers that Scott and Howard with the steel and other things talk about. | ||
| What would you say, Howard, in terms of how we're doing, generally speaking? | ||
| Great businessman, very successful guy. | ||
| He's doing a really good job. | ||
| What would you say? | ||
| Well, no one, before you walked in the door, no one thought our economy could grow 2%. | ||
| Fourth quarter, with the shutdown, 5.5%. | ||
| And that means the first quarter, you couldn't see the United States of America, with its $30 trillion economy, grow in the 6% range. | ||
| And no one thought that was possible. | ||
| That's how you get jobs. | ||
| That's how you get money down. | ||
| That's how you fix the deficit. | ||
| You are fixing everything with your policies. | ||
| You've changed America and created the golden age. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And with the help of the Fed, because we really, you know, we want help, not hindrance. | ||
| Why would the Fed hinder? | ||
| But with the help of the Fed, with the right choice, if we make the right choice, you know, a lot of times you make a choice, you think it's good, and it turns out to be not good. | ||
| But with the help of the Fed, we could hit numbers that have never been hit before. | ||
| We could hit 8, 9, 10. | ||
| There's no reason why not. | ||
| And, you know, I talk about, if you go back 20 years, 25 years, I'm old enough to remember. | ||
| When we had good news, when you announced good news, the stock market went up. | ||
| You announced anything good, the stock market went up. | ||
| You announced bad, the stock market went, and that's the way it should be. | ||
| But now it's over the last 15 or so years. | ||
| If you announce good news, that means they're going to raise interest rates because they want to kill it. | ||
| So you can never really be that successful because you announce all record numbers, great, great, great, because they're afraid of inflation. | ||
| But growth doesn't have to have any impact on inflation. | ||
| It can make inflation go down in many cases. | ||
| And you've seen that with us. | ||
| I mean, we're growing at a much faster rate than anybody thought was possible. | ||
| We have very controllable inflation. | ||
| With Biden, we were getting killed, and we had the worst inflation in 48 years in history, in the history of our country. | ||
| And that's with going down. | ||
| So growth is a great thing. | ||
| It doesn't mean inflation. | ||
| And I want to go back to a system where when we announce good news, they say that's great. | ||
| We can lower interest rates instead of raise interest. | ||
| And by the way, if inflation comes, we'll take care of it when it comes. | ||
| But, you know, they're trying to guess it, and they're trying to get it 10 years before in advance. | ||
| And, you know, we want to make this country greater than ever before. | ||
| And I think we're doing that. | ||
| But we want to make it that when we announce great news, everything goes up. | ||
| If we announce bad news, that happens too. | ||
| We bring it down and we control it. | ||
| We do what we have to do. | ||
| But we can have numbers in the upside like nobody's ever seen before. | ||
| I want to ask Bobby to say a few words, if you would, about some of the incredible things that we've been doing in your department with ours and everybody else. | ||
| Mr. President, we're in the process of implementing your great health care bill, which is going to increase affordability, drive down costs, and increase the quality of health care for every American. | ||
| You mentioned MFN, most favored nation. | ||
| We now have agreements with 17 drug companies. | ||
| And you asked us to do something, you know. | ||
| Clinton had promised to do this, Biden had promised to do this. | ||
| Obama, Bush had all promised to do it. | ||
| None of them succeeded. | ||
| It was regarded as impossible, and you made it 10 times harder. | ||
| As you said, not only do I want MFN, but I want them to all reshore their production to this country. | ||
| And they don't have any money to do it because we've taken it all from them. | ||
| And I want to make sure we continue to lead the world in innovation. | ||
| We succeeded in all of those goals. | ||
| And the proof that we did that is after we signed those agreements, the stock prices for those companies went up $1.3 trillion. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And they are reshoring. | ||
| Eli Lilly is building six new plants, including an API plant. | ||
| So the next time that we have a pandemic in this country, we're not going to be stuck buying API from China who cuts us off. | ||
| We're going to be able to make it right here. | ||
| Nova Nortis is building four new plants, and we are going to be releasing Trump RX so that every American can get the lowest prices in the developed world. | ||
| In some cases, they're going to be lower than the lowest prices in the developed world. | ||
| And that's going to be happening sometime, probably in the next 10 days. | ||
| So we're doing rural health care. | ||
| We sent out $10 billion last week. | ||
| The states have that money. | ||
| They're going to be giving it to rural hospitals sometimes in the next two weeks. | ||
| And we're going to revolutionize rural health care in this country. | ||
| You are putting, you are raising the influx of federal dollars to rural health care by 30% over the next five years. | ||
| So 30% every year, or more dollars, federal dollars, are going to be flowing to them. | ||
| It's going to allow them to rebuild their decaying infrastructure, to retain providers, and also to revolutionize the use of AI and other technologies, which is going to dramatically lower the prices for rural Americans and raise the quality of their health care. | ||
| Brooke and I released the dietary guidelines, which have received incredible acclamation from both sides of the aisle. | ||
| We are going to change the food culture in this country. | ||
| Brooke gives away $405 million a day to buy food for Americans. | ||
| And the WIC program, the Head Start program, SNAP, school lunches, the VA, and the military. | ||
| They're now going to be getting real food for the first time. | ||
| And Brooke came up with the ingenious idea of requiring every store in this country that accepts food stamps to double the amount of real food that they're selling. | ||
| And this is going to drive change in the market. | ||
| And it's going to lower the cost of meats, of proteins, of whole grains, of fruits and vegetables, so that every American will have in their reach an affordable meal that actually is real food. | ||
| 70% of American kids now are, 70% of the diet of American kids is now ultra-processed foods. | ||
| That's why we're spending $5 trillion in treating chronic disease in this country every year. | ||
| We are attacking fraud. | ||
| We have odds finding hundreds of billions of dollars of Medicaid, Medicare, fraud in states like Minnesota and California, and we are clawing back that money. | ||
| We also accomplished something that every American has promised, which is prior authorization. | ||
| Now we have 80% of the insurance industry that has agreed to eliminate prior authorization in almost all of their procedures. | ||
| So that every amidst this is going to dramatically change the experience of every American with the healthcare system. | ||
| When you go to your doctor at your point of care, before you leave that office, you will know whether the insurance company is going to pay for the procedure or not. | ||
| And that is going to, as I said, change the experience. | ||
| We're also doing price transparency, which you asked during your first term. | ||
| It never got implemented because the Biden administration never enforced it. | ||
| We brought more enforcement actions against hospitals in this one year. | ||
| And the Biden administration bought in four years, and we're doing a crackdown so that every American, when you go to a restaurant, you look at the prices before you buy the meal. | ||
| You ought to be able to do that when you go to a hospital. | ||
| And by the time that we leave office, every American is going to have that guarantee. | ||
| We're doing a lot of other stuff, but we were told to keep it short. | ||
|
Protecting Home Values
00:07:26
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| And the autism that's moving along, really has been out. | ||
| We're doing, we've commissioned now dozens of studies, maybe over 100, and we are going to get those done for you. | ||
| That's so important. | ||
| Also, Eli Lilly, Merck, Pfizer, every drug company, they're spending trillions of dollars right now, as we speak, building plants in the United States because they want to be able to save a lot of money on tariffs. | ||
| It'll be hundreds of percent, 100%, 200%, 300%, in two or three years from now. | ||
| So I said, you better have your plant built because in two years from now, before I leave office, it'll be a sad day, very sad day for me. | ||
| But before I leave, every one of these plants better be built because you're going to be paying 300% tariffs. | ||
| And they're all building their little hearts out. | ||
| I spoke with the head of Eli Lilly, who's a fantastic guy, a star, actually. | ||
| He's a star, very smart. | ||
| And he told me he's building six plants in the United States, big ones, in locations that I know very well, but all over the country. | ||
| Merck is building, and Pfizer is building, and every one of them is building, and foreign companies are building. | ||
| So it's an amazing thing that's happening, and you're doing a fantastic job. | ||
| I read an article today where they think Bobby is going to be really great for the Republican Party in the midterms. | ||
| So I have to be very careful that Bobby likes us. | ||
| But we're letting you do your job, right? | ||
| Thank you, Mr. Spread. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| You're doing a great job, you and Oz and the whole group that they're doing. | ||
| Marty McCary has done an incredible job at Afghanistan. | ||
|
unidentified
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That's true. | |
| Last month, we approved more gene and cell therapies than any time in history. | ||
| And we're making this a safe and productive and encouraging ecosystem for biotech so that China does not steal that industry from us. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| I'm going to ask our turnit to speak really quickly about housing because in my opinion you have very strong opinions on housing. | ||
| That's what I did for a long time. | ||
| I did good with it. | ||
| But you know, we've got to get interest rates down even lower. | ||
| They are now pretty low, but we've got to get them lower. | ||
| And I'm a big factor. | ||
| To me, the biggest factor is interest rates for housing. | ||
| Only in that, you know, you have a lot of people that have become wealthy in the last year because the house value has gone up. | ||
| And, you know, when you get the housing, when you make it too easy or too cheap to buy houses, those values come down. | ||
| I don't want those values to come down. | ||
| We have millions of people that own houses, and for the first time in their life, they're wealthy because the house is worth $500,000 or $600,000 or more or less, but more money than it's ever been worth before. | ||
| I don't want to do anything to knock that down. | ||
| And so I want to be very careful with this. | ||
| You know, you make housing, I can turn on housing immediately, but you make it too easy, and you're going to knock the value down of people that own houses. | ||
| For those people, those millions of people that own houses, we're going to drive those values up. | ||
| But we're also going to try making it easier for people to buy. | ||
| The best thing that can happen for both groups of people is lower interest rates. | ||
| And those interest rates are coming down and with a proper intelligent person at the Fed That person will be able to work with us to get interest rates and that covers all of the sins that covers everything lower interest rates keeps the values up for the people that have housing and lets other people buy housing and Scott if you could just expand quickly on that You did allude to when we first came in sir. | ||
| You know our fiscal house in America was a mess But because of your economic policies, the economy is thriving and I do have some good news to share as you said you know good news. | ||
| I hope this will make the interest rates continue to go down, But because of your policy, sir. | ||
| Home sales, in December they rose sharply to their strongest pace in three years. | ||
| A lot of people when we first came in, and particularly young people, were concerned and asking the question whether they would ever be able to afford to buy a house in America, which is the American dream. | ||
| The 30-year fixed mortgage rate dipped to a multi-year lows, driving monthly payments down for the two years at the lowest levels, so more people can get a mortgage now. | ||
| More families can be able to afford to get a home and achieve the American dream. | ||
| At HUD last year we helped the support of over one million people through FHA and Ginnie MAE to be able to buy a home. | ||
| 500,000 of those were first-time home buyers and hundreds of thousands of our veterans we supported, and so that's good news that millions of people in our country are now beginning to buy homes. | ||
| We also sir, saw that you are and we'll work with you making bold action to ban institutional investors from buying single-family homes. | ||
| Those homes are for the American people. | ||
| So sir, thank you for your leadership on that. | ||
| Also worked with Director Pulte over at FHFA to buy 200 billion dollars worth of mortgage-backed securities, driving down even more the cost to get a home, and so we're grateful for those actions. | ||
| Also, the One Big beautiful bill has been tremendous, making the low-income tax credit increase, working with secretary Beset at Treasury to produce more projects and more homes in America. | ||
| And the One big beautiful bill also made our beloved opportunity zones permanent, and the media doesn't talk about opportunity zones very much, but I'll do it today because I know that they have been transformative in our country, over 1 million people lifted out of poverty sir, in opportunity zones, 300,000 new units of housing in opportunity zones and a 3.4 increase in the value of houses. | ||
| And, by the way, we have to give him credit senator, he's a great guy. | ||
| Tim Scott came to see me first administration, first term, and he had this idea for opportunity zones and he gave me the idea. | ||
| We did it, we implemented it. | ||
| It's one of the most successful programs in the history of our country and nobody talks about it. | ||
| The press doesn't talk about it, but I want to just tell you, Tim Scott, senator South Carolina, did a great job right, did a good job. | ||
| He's a good man, and so those have been made permanent now will help millions of Americans to be able to afford to buy homes. | ||
| Also, the one big beautiful bill has been allowing HUD to make sure, working with Department OF Homeland Security, that every person that lives in HUD funded housing is an American citizen. | ||
| A blind eye has been turned, prior to us being here, to people living in HUD funded housing, but no more. | ||
| We're going to take account and transparency and make sure and sir, there's a lot of crime that goes on in public housing, but we're coming after the criminals and making sure that everybody in there is an American citizen. | ||
| So, thank you for your support. | ||
| We are now have taken possession of our new building in Alexandria and we're going to save the American taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| So sir, thank you for your support. | ||
| Thank you Scott, appreciate it. | ||
| One of the things God said, though, is, again, existing housing, people that own their homes, we're going to keep them wealthy. | ||
|
Transformation Of American Energy Grid
00:15:20
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| We're going to keep those prices up. | ||
| We're not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn't work very hard can buy a home. | ||
| We're going to make it easier to buy. | ||
| We're going to get interest rates down. | ||
| But I want to protect the people that for the first time in their lives feel good about themselves. | ||
| They feel like that they're wealthy people. | ||
| And I want them to understand it. | ||
| There's so much talk about, oh, we're going to drive housing prices down. | ||
| I don't want to drive housing prices down. | ||
| I want to drive housing prices up for people that own their homes. | ||
| And they can be assured that's what's going to happen. | ||
| Chris, could you say a few words about energy, please? | ||
| You bet, Mr. President. | ||
| I can say with confidence that your energy dominance agenda is firing on all cylinders. | ||
| The United States oil production today is greater than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, the number two and number three producers. | ||
| Our natural gas production today is greater than Russia, China, and Iran combined, the second, third, and fourth largest natural gas producers. | ||
| Huge production in the United States. | ||
| Secretary Bergham at the Interior Department has taken in more money on oil and gas lease sales in the first year of this administration than the entire four years of the Biden administration. | ||
| And beyond oil and gas, six new coal leases under this first year of this administration from the Interior Department, and coal production is growing again in the United States after years of decline. | ||
| And this beautiful clean coal was the MVP of the huge cold snap we're in right now. | ||
| I can say with some confidence, hundreds of American lives have been saved because of your leaning in and stopping the killing of coal and revitalizing coal. | ||
| Coal over the last few days where we're at peak demand and electricity has delivered 20 times more electricity than solar and batteries. | ||
| Think about that. | ||
| 20 times more. | ||
| Coal doesn't mind very cold weather. | ||
| Clean, you're not allowed to say the word coal without proceeding by saying clean, beautiful coal. | ||
| Clean, beautiful coal. | ||
| It's not affected by bad weather. | ||
| Rain, snow, sleet, freezing, freezing coal. | ||
| How does it react under freezing, freezing, cold weather? | ||
| It steps up and delivers big time. | ||
| In fact, what coal did during this storm was deliver massively more electricity than it was delivering a month ago. | ||
| Because we needed far more electricity. | ||
| Who can step up? | ||
| The windmills, by the way, are all frozen. | ||
| There's going to be no turn. | ||
| The windmills aren't turning. | ||
| The windmills that these fools paid for, the fool is this country. | ||
| Because the people that have the windmills get massive subsidy and they make a fortune on windmills that don't even work and they don't produce anywhere near what they should be. | ||
| And it's the worst, most expensive form of energy there is. | ||
| And by the way, Europe is destroying itself with the stupid windmills they're putting all over their beautiful areas of most magnificent landscapes in the world and they're just destroying. | ||
| Europe better get smart. | ||
| Between immigration and energy, they're destroying. | ||
| It's not recognizable. | ||
| They've got to smarten up before it's too late. | ||
| Please go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, in New England, with somewhat European energy policies at peak demand time, very cold in New England, wind, solar, and batteries that you were just speaking of delivered less than 3% of the electricity needed at peak demand time, and that's when it matters. | ||
| Because if electricity goes out when it's very cold, people die. | ||
| Over 200 people died in a smaller cold snap during the Biden administration. | ||
| This was massively larger geographically. | ||
| We have had no failure of the electricity grid, no failure of long-distance transmission lines. | ||
| Local distribution lines have iced up and come down, and we have people from all over the country working to get those back up because people need their lights back on. | ||
| But your energy policies delivered just a dramatically, dramatically different outcome for the American people. | ||
| If we'd continued the Biden-area policies for one more year, continued to shut down coal plants, continued these crazy climate restrictions that wouldn't even let power plants run at maximum, at maximum demand time, we hadn't liberated all the backup generators that are sitting there. | ||
| We gave up an emergency approval. | ||
| We had plants that were going to close coal plants that were modern and good and threw off very little problem and that were really powerful. | ||
| By the way, China does most of everything they're doing with coal. | ||
| Not that we want to copy anybody, but you know, they make the windmills, but they don't have a lot of wind farms. | ||
| Somebody ought to look at that. | ||
| How many wind farms are there? | ||
| Very, very few. | ||
| They make them, they sell them, they make a fortune, but they don't use them. | ||
| So the coal, I mean, I understand they're using it also as a great backup. | ||
| So you build a plant, but they have it as a backup in case of tragedy, in case of really bad weather, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| They actually store coal on the site of other plants so that if they need emergency energy, the coal is always going to be there, whereas other things aren't. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Coal just stepped up here to 25% of our electricity during this high demand time. | ||
| Natural gas, coal, and nuclear. | ||
| They were what run the American electricity grid. | ||
| The others are ornaments and often expensive orders. | ||
| We stopped plants from being demolished, right? | ||
| 17 gigawatts of coal generation plants were slated to close last year that were stopped from being closure by this administration. | ||
| If they were closed, we would be really tight on energy. | ||
| We would have had significant blackouts at these peak cold times and extrapolating from the last storm during the Biden administration, I think at least hundreds of deaths. | ||
| Because in the South, a lot of heating is done with electricity generation. | ||
| If those grids go down, people die. | ||
| So these, and going back to the Working Families Tax Cut Act, or the one big beautiful bill, that got rid of $500 billion of subsidies, energy subsidies, that do nothing but make energy more expensive and less reliable. | ||
| Under this administration, we've spent massively less on energy and we've delivered massively more on energy. | ||
| And when you have more energy at lower prices. | ||
| That's a fantastic job, you and Doug. | ||
| Doug said, you've got to get this guy, Doug. | ||
| You've got to get this guy, Chris, right, and get him as soon as you can. | ||
| I said, but I want you to run energy. | ||
| He said, well, I'm good at it, but he's better, right? | ||
| Can you tell me that? | ||
| So I gave him the land. | ||
| I gave you the energy, right? | ||
| And it's a great combination. | ||
| I mean, they literally have, I said, maybe we'll merge it in some way. | ||
| They said, we don't have to. | ||
| We get along. | ||
| They work together, right, with the land. | ||
| He's got the land and the energy. | ||
| He's got the knowledge to take it out. | ||
| It's been a good combination. | ||
| This administration, the whole administration, and your leadership has been very focused on energy because we can push down energy prices. | ||
| We can lower costs on Americans and we can raise wages by bringing jobs and opportunities here. | ||
| It is a transformation of American energy. | ||
| Thanks for your leadership. | ||
| He's one of the most respected men, people in the energy world. | ||
| And Doug told me about Chris Wright. | ||
| They said, if you could get him, what he gave up to do this job, you're making a little less money, but that's all right. | ||
|
unidentified
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You don't care. | |
| What you're doing is fantastic. | ||
| But he said he's the best in the world. | ||
| Other people have told me that. | ||
| The heads of the biggest companies have told me that. | ||
| And it's really panning out to be so. | ||
| We appreciate it very much. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| One of the things we're doing with energy, I think that's so important. | ||
| We have an old grid, been around a long time, and not really, can't be much expanded. | ||
| It can be fixed up a little bit, but can't be much expanded. | ||
| And we have some plants that are so big that the grid would never be able to hold it. | ||
| We're allowing them to build an electric producing plant, mostly electric, but electric, they can use nuclear to do it, they can use oil and gas, they can use coal, they can use whatever they want. | ||
| I think many are choosing oil and gas because it's there, it's dry, it's true, it's plentiful, it's inexpensive. | ||
| Some are going nuclear, some are going both, many are going all three. | ||
| But the plants, you know, you read, well, how do we ever fire those plants? | ||
| Because we need, to do this, we need two times the electricity we produce in one year for the entire country, which is almost hard to believe. | ||
| These buildings are so big, they're going up now. | ||
| So I did something that nobody thought was possible. | ||
| Also, when they build their building, they build their own electric generating plants. | ||
| And we are seeing some of the most incredible designs you've ever seen. | ||
| So we don't need the grid. | ||
| I read an article in the Wall Street Journal saying, oh, we're falling behind China. | ||
| We're not, actually. | ||
| We're leading everybody because I'm letting them build. | ||
| The government would never be able to do that. | ||
| Now, China is a different kind. | ||
| They build, they do things that you've got to hand it to them. | ||
| President Xi, they build vast amounts of energy. | ||
| They don't have certain constraints that we have in this country. | ||
| But we're more than topping them. | ||
| We're leading China by a lot on AI. | ||
| And it's primarily because I'm allowing them to build with their plant their own electricity. | ||
| If they had to rely on the grid, they wouldn't have any power. | ||
| You wouldn't have any power for anything. | ||
| And they're building the electricity. | ||
| And one of the reasons I'm able to do that is we have a very capable man in the room named Lee Zelton. | ||
| He may be in the room someplace. | ||
| Is it his normal place? | ||
| He's there. | ||
| He's always there. | ||
| Most reliable, solid guy. | ||
| And he's done an amazing job. | ||
| Could you just explain that? | ||
| And also, because of the fact he's so good, California has a problem. | ||
| The hardest permit to get when they lost 25,000 or so houses, which shouldn't have been lost. | ||
| They should have allowed the water to come down from the Pacific Northwest, which was very plentiful. | ||
| But they didn't do that. | ||
| They lost 25,000 houses. | ||
| Lee and his team gave them the most complicated permit within 20 days. | ||
| Everybody, every single house that burned down got the federal approval. | ||
| Unfortunately, it's well over a year, and the state and the city, that's Gavin Newscomb, and the city, the mayor who's grossly incompetent, by the way, they have been unable to give permits. | ||
| There are like three houses being built. | ||
| Out of thousands and thousands, they have no permits. | ||
| So I read about a week ago that it's possible because of what's happened, whether you declare national emergency or something. | ||
| These people are wanting, they're dying to build their house. | ||
| They want to do something that I could put somebody in charge from the federal government. | ||
| Congratulations, Lee. | ||
| And I'm putting Lee Zeldon in charge of getting them their permits. | ||
| City, federal, you can, you have the federal, you need the city and state. | ||
| And I hear you have great powers over them if we want, and we're going to give you that power. | ||
| We've already given you that power. | ||
| So Lee Zeldon is going to work with the thousands of people that are dying to build their house. | ||
| And I also recommend one other thing. | ||
| Give them the house plus a 10% bonus. | ||
| In other words, you get a bonus. | ||
| You can build your house 10% larger. | ||
| They've suffered so greatly. | ||
| They've waited so long. | ||
| And they should be given a bonus. | ||
| So I think, and I've heard this has been done before. | ||
| They get a 10% bonus. | ||
| They can build a house that's a little bit larger than what they had before. | ||
| And I'd like to have you take it over. | ||
| Mr. President, your great Secretary of State was looking for another job. | ||
| I was thinking about him, but he's pretty well booked. | ||
| He did a great job yesterday, but he's a little booked up. | ||
| Let's go, Lee, talk. | ||
| No more ideas like that, Lee. | ||
| When President Trump came into office, he immediately signed an executive order giving EPA 30 days to complete our phase one hazardous material removal so that the Army Corps could come in and complete their phase two debris removal. | ||
| So at first, the response was that that was going to be impossible. | ||
| Good luck trying to get it done maybe by the summer. | ||
| But we figured it out because operating at Trump Speed, the president was just sworn in. | ||
| We had to get it done, and we got it done in less than 30 days. | ||
| The Army Corps then came in and completed the debris removal. | ||
| So the federal government, while the governor has tried to accuse this president of not focusing with a laser on, putting all the weight of the federal government into getting this done, it happened from the moment he was sworn into office. | ||
| SBA came in. | ||
| I think it was about half of the disaster loan money. | ||
| Billions of dollars from last year went towards these residents and businesses. | ||
| So the full weight of this government. | ||
| But right after I was sworn in, which was actually a year ago today, my first trip was to East Palestine because the vice president never forgets his home state. | ||
| The second trip was going to Los Angeles. | ||
| There were people with contractors all over Palisades and Eaton ready to rebuild right then and there. | ||
| You're talking about a year ago. | ||
| And now the frustration, the passion that we all hear from all these Los Angeles residents. | ||
| And President Trump, he's made it clear to us that he's heard enough. | ||
| And the message should be heard loud and clear to that local leadership. | ||
| They should be motivated listening to this right now. | ||
| And when this cabinet meeting is over, if it hasn't been done already, is that they need to go into the office where these permits are just laying around, flip over tables if you have to. | ||
| Fire people if you have to and get all of these approvals done so that people can rebuild their lives. | ||
| It's been a year and this president has had enough. | ||
| So whatever you can do, you know, that's going to be very important. | ||
| And it's so sad, those people, we were there a few days after the fire. | ||
| You were there with me. | ||
| We were walking down the streets. | ||
| The people are devastated. | ||
| The love that they had for that property was everybody was going to rebuild and they thought they could do it immediately. | ||
| They should have. | ||
| We gave it to them so quickly. | ||
| But they can't get their permits. | ||
| They still can't build. | ||
| And they're losing spirit too. | ||
| I mean, a lot of people are losing spirit. | ||
| And the other thing I'd like to talk to you about and other people about that happen to be sitting around the table, they want to build a low-income housing project right in the middle of everything in Palisades. | ||
| And I'm not going to allow it to happen, okay? | ||
| I mean, maybe it's politically correct, maybe it's not. | ||
| I'm not going to let these people destroy the value of their houses. | ||
| I built a lot of low-income housing. | ||
| I made a lot of money building low-income housing. | ||
| I know more about it than anybody. | ||
| We're not going to build, we're not going to allow this guy to build a low-income housing project on top of everything else in the middle of that mess that was created by the fact that they didn't allow water to come down from the Pacific Northwest, okay? | ||
| And I'd like you to have that stopped and stopped immediately. | ||
| No financing. | ||
| That might be you, Scott, because they'll come to you for financing. | ||
| It's never going to be approved. | ||
| You would never, but Scott thought it was a horrible thing. | ||
| So there's going to be no financing for low-income housing. | ||
| Let the people build the houses and as fast as you can, help them, help the mayor and help the governor get their permitting done. | ||
|
Powering Economic Agenda Forward
00:11:49
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| Okay? | ||
| Yes, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Kelly, just, you know, I think you were just alluded to. | ||
| Are you helping some of the people out there with loans? | ||
| Yes, Mr. President. | ||
| Thanks to your leadership, you also helped put the fires out. | ||
| Your executive order got water to the scene in your earliest days of your presidency. | ||
| So you've been there from day one. | ||
| We've been out there twice now. | ||
| There had been no changes until your executive order this week that is allowing that permitting to happen quickly. | ||
| We have 16,000 structures burned. | ||
| We have put loans out on 12,000 of them for $3.2 billion. | ||
| More than half of all the disaster money delivered in America went to that area. | ||
| Now, because of the abject leadership, the failures of Gavin Newsom, they have not been able to rebuild. | ||
| Because of your leadership, they're going to be able to rebuild. | ||
| But that's not all you've done. | ||
| They'll take the credit for it, Watch. | ||
| It'll start and they'll take the credit. | ||
| Look at a great job we did. | ||
| It wouldn't get built in 20 years. | ||
| And it will be destroyed by building low-income housing next to luxury housing. | ||
| History says that doesn't work too well. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| We're going to make sure that doesn't happen, Mr. President. | ||
| But under your leadership, you've ended at least eight wars, okay? | ||
| But probably the most important and underreported war that this president ended was Joe Biden and the Democrats' war on Main Street and hardworking families. | ||
| We've seen it as I've gone across the country this month, 10 different states, and we saw it when we were together in Iowa. | ||
| Hardworking families, farmers, small businesses expressing gratitude, lined up to thank you. | ||
| I was out with our great vice president last week in Toledo, Ohio. | ||
| They are thanking this administration for getting Main Street back. | ||
| The Trump tax cuts, the tariffs, deregulation, it's all rocket fuel for hardworking families in Main Streets. | ||
| And I see it whether it's talking about small business expensing 100% accelerated from Made in America factories, the 20% pass-through, but it's also working families where they have expanded child tax credits, increased standard deductions, permanent low-income tax rates, health savings accounts, Trump accounts. | ||
| This president is delivering for Main Street. | ||
| It's the most underreported story in this country. | ||
| And I see it in Main Street businesses. | ||
| All-time small business confidence hit a record under this president last year after the Trump tax cuts. | ||
| All-time small business formation now at 36 million small businesses and a record $100 billion out from SBA because a record number of people want to invest in this country and hire. | ||
| And whether I've talked to manufacturers about tariffs, they know that this president is bringing manufacturing back, just like Prince manufacturing in Macon, Georgia, 500 employees machining parts for our defense, our agriculture, our automotive, our aerospace industry. | ||
| They're going to hire 500 more people this year because of tariffs, because of the Trump tax cuts, and because of SBA lending. | ||
| And I see this state after state as I've gone across the country, talked to hundreds of business owners, walked dozens of factory floors. | ||
| This is not being covered, but it's going on in America. | ||
| The number one problem is they need skilled workers. | ||
| This is something I'm working on with Secretary Chavez-Duramer. | ||
| I'm working across the administration to ensure that we empower our small businesses. | ||
| 98% of our manufacturers meet the small business definition. | ||
| So Ford has 5,000 small manufacturing suppliers. | ||
| The $18 trillion you brought in is creating an economic boom like none we've ever seen before. | ||
| We are going to have 7% GDP growth. | ||
| GDP now is probably underestimating where it is in 4Q. | ||
| But with interest rates going down, with regulation going down, these are all taxes on small businesses, and those are going away. | ||
| And thanks to President Trump, your leadership, we are seeing Main Street boom. | ||
| Hardworking families have $1,000 already in their pockets. | ||
| And when they get their $1,000 refund tax, I hope they all remember that every Democrat voted against them getting their tax refunds because this is what our administration is doing, powering your incredible economic agenda forward on Main Street. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Great job. | ||
| I do want to say that on my left I have a man who's doing a fantastic job and on my right also. | ||
| But we're spending a tremendous amount of time and effort on building our military. | ||
| We largely rebuilt the military during my first term, fortunately, and we're greatly, greatly enhancing, really enhancing it now. | ||
| We're going to be doing something new. | ||
| We're bringing back the battleship. | ||
| And I thought, like you remember the battleships from the great Iowa and Alabama and Missouri, those unbelievable scenes that you see victory at sea. | ||
| You'd see these incredible ships. | ||
| And I thought they were powerful, but the battleships that we're building are going to be 100 times more powerful than those beautiful works of art. | ||
| I mean, they were magnificent, all steel. | ||
| We have the steel now, and we're going to be doing that as an enhancement. | ||
| But our military is very, very strong. | ||
| You may want to say something about the large fleet of ships that's heading over to the Middle East. | ||
| Well, Mr. President, you had to, like so many other cabinet members have referenced, rebuild the perception of America. | ||
| And at the Department of War, that meant reestablishing deterrence. | ||
| What happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Ukraine, a war that never would have occurred, what happened on October 7th in Israel, never would have happened under President Trump. | ||
| So as a result, we're having to rebuild how our enemies perceive us. | ||
| And when President Trump said, we're not getting a nuclear, Iran, you won't have a nuclear bomb, he meant it. | ||
| And we sent those B-2s halfway around the world, and they never noticed. | ||
| When he said, we're not going to tolerate trafficking drugs anymore in our hemisphere, we treat them like the al-Qaeda of the Western Hemisphere, he meant it, and we're executing that. | ||
| When you said, Mr. President, we're securing the border, the military was proud to do their part alongside Homeland Security to do that. | ||
| Same thing with Iran right now, ensuring that they have all the options to make a deal. | ||
| They should not pursue nuclear capabilities. | ||
| We will be prepared to deliver whatever this president expects of the War Department, just like we did this month. | ||
| No other military in the world could have executed the most sophisticated, powerful raid, not just in American history, I would say in world history. | ||
| What those men did going downtown, another country, their most secure place, in the most secure base, in the middle of the night, without anybody knowing until those simultaneous bombs dropped three minutes before the helicopters dropped. | ||
| No other country could coordinate that. | ||
| No other president would have been willing to empower those warriors that way to be that effective. | ||
| And that sends a message to every capital around the world that when President Trump speaks, he means business and we are reestablishing deterrence at the War Department, Mr. President. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Great job, you're doing. | ||
| Just to finish up on that, the Somalian pirates over the years have pirated, stolen many ships. | ||
| They would get large amounts of money for the ship. | ||
| You know, you have a billion-dollar ship and the insurance companies didn't want to fight because, you know, some of those ships are very flammable. | ||
| They're carrying millions of barrels of oil. | ||
| Very flammable, very dangerous situation if they're shot at. | ||
| So they wouldn't fight. | ||
| We notified them a number of months ago. | ||
| Anybody that does that gets the same treatment as a drug dealer sending their drugs in from Venezuela or anybody else. | ||
| As you know, it's 97% down by water. | ||
| So the drugs coming in by sea or by water is down 97, 97%. | ||
| Now we're also starting, that was the more difficult route. | ||
| Now we're starting to do that by land also. | ||
| You'll see that happen as they come in and kill our people with drugs. | ||
| I think the real number is 300,000 people here, not 100, but whatever it is, it's a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people. | ||
| They're going to get hit. | ||
| But also we added to the list the Somalian pirates that go out on a boat, similar type boat, actually not quite as fast, not quite as nice as you can imagine. | ||
| But they get the same missile that we give to the people that are bringing drugs. | ||
| And so far we haven't seen anybody going out. | ||
| So the traffic is not being interfered with by people pirating our ships. | ||
| Not our ships, ships all over the world. | ||
| I said, make it for any country. | ||
| We're doing the rest of the world a favor. | ||
| It's a very effective favor, but we see very little pirating nowadays. | ||
| You used to have ships being taken every single, like two or three a week, these massive ships that be brought in to some place in Somalia, which I don't even know is it a country we have Ilan Omar left, and she gives us lectures on the Constitution of the United States. | ||
| These people are what they've done to rip off our country is terrible, but the pirating has essentially stopped. | ||
| They know that if anybody even makes a move toward a ship, they get the ultimate treatment. | ||
| They will go to wherever they want to go, but it's probably not going to be to heaven. | ||
| I can't imagine. | ||
| But they get hit very hard, just like a drug dealer, just like the boats, the ships that are coming in. | ||
| Every boat that comes in with drugs on it that we take out, we just save 25,000 American lives. | ||
| Each boat is the equivalent of saving 25,000 American, mostly American, but American lives. | ||
| So I just wanted to let you know that. | ||
| And Pete's been totally authorized to do that. | ||
| And they know what's going to happen. | ||
| And it seems that all of that brisk business that they had has been stopped and it's right in its foot. | ||
| So I just want to thank everybody for being here. | ||
| My cabinet has been amazing. | ||
| I like this much better than going around for three hours. | ||
| We'll pick on other ones. | ||
| Pam, you're doing great. | ||
| We're all doing great. | ||
| JD, if you'd like to say something, you can. | ||
| Would you like to really quickly? | ||
| He is, after all, the vice president of the American Safe. | ||
| It's okay, sir. | ||
| I'm here for the free coffee. | ||
| I just say it's an honor to serve with this group, and we're doing a lot of good for the American people. | ||
| We're very proud of it. | ||
| Yeah, we're very proud of the country. | ||
| We're very proud of you. | ||
| Thank you very much, everybody. | ||
| Thanks, everybody. | ||
|
unidentified
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Congratulations. | |
| Thank you, Putin. | ||
| Mr. President, I don't care. | ||
| Thank you, Mr. President. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Mr. President, we got it. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you, press. | ||
| Keep moving. | ||
| Thank you. Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, guys. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal, our live forum inviting you to discuss the latest issues in government politics and public policy from Washington to across the country. | ||
| Coming up Monday morning, Semaphore White House reporter Shelby Talcott discusses White House news of the week, including the latest on ICE operations, government funding, and rising tensions with Iran. | ||
| Then, former federal prosecutor Ankush Kardouri, now a senior writer at Politico magazine, discusses the impact the Minnesota ICE operations are having on cooperation between local and federal law enforcement. | ||
| C-SPAN's Washington Journal. | ||
| Join in the conversation live at 7 Eastern Monday morning on C-SPAN. | ||
| C-SPAN Now, our free mobile app or online at c-span.org. | ||
|
Understanding Orion's Environment
00:15:20
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| Democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
| We are still at our core a democracy. | ||
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
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As the crew of the Artemis II mission prepares to travel to the moon, NASA TV has been documenting their experiences. | |
| This segment explores the physical and mental challenges of the mission, highlighting the teamwork required for deep space exploration. | ||
| It's just over 20 minutes. | ||
| Artemis I. Artemis I was incredible. | ||
| It was an iconic mission. | ||
| I was able to watch the launch of Artemis I and I'll never forget I just turned into a small child and I just was screaming at the rocket for about 30 seconds. | ||
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That is our generation, the Artemis generation, that defines the starting point of our exploration future. | |
| Next thing is getting ready to fly the crew on Artemis II. | ||
| This mission paves the way for sustained missions on the moon and then Mars. | ||
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unidentified
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We've got spaceflight vehicles that are down at the Kennedy Space Center that are being built and innovated. | |
| We've got components of the rocket that are being assembled. | ||
| We have international partners. | ||
| We have commercial partners and industry partners. | ||
| We've got the designs ready to go, how we're building up the operations. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's real. | |
| The team is ready to go. | ||
|
unidentified
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Four names, four explorers, answering the call to once more rocket away from Earth in chart of course around the moon. | |
| This is the mission of Artemis II. | ||
| Never before had man traveled so far, so fast, or looked so closely upon another celestial body. | ||
| That's one small step for man, one scientist for man. | ||
| Apollo was so amazing because we didn't know we could do it. | ||
| The Apollo generation showed what was possible. | ||
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For me personally, I think it's an important endeavor to return to the moon. | |
| And as we look towards Mars, the moon is going to be an important staging area for us to learn quite a bit. | ||
| The longest we were ever on the moon as humans was 72 hours. | ||
| We have a lot to learn yet. | ||
| And if we leave the moon in Taurus Literal, we leave it as we came. | ||
| And God willing, as we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind. | ||
| The Artemis campaign is really a set of test flights. | ||
| We haven't been to the moon in over 50 years, and so there's a lot of new systems that we need to test out. | ||
| We're going to a new part of the moon, the South Pole that we've never been to before with crew. | ||
| The Artemis II mission is going to take the next step in our flight test campaign. | ||
| We're going to focus on what are the new systems that we need to test out so that we can fly crew to the moon and safely bring them back home. | ||
| That really sets us up for our big goal, which is the return of human crew to the surface of the moon. | ||
| It's so important what we learn in that mission to the moon because it instructs us on how we're going to get to Mars. | ||
| This is a generation-defining effort. | ||
| My name is Jeff Radigan. | ||
| I'm the lead flight director for Artemis II. | ||
| Here in Mission Control, I direct the operations of the spacecraft and communicate with the crew on board in order to have a successful mission, of the first mission back to lunar space in over 50 years. | ||
| We want to get back out to lunar space. | ||
| We want to fly around the moon. | ||
| And so to be a part of that is just very meaningful to me. | ||
| It's something I get excited about when I wake up in the morning. | ||
| It really is the next step in space exploration. | ||
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CC, go, got it, go. | |
| FIDO, go, prop, go, GNC, go, come back. | ||
| This room has a lot of historical significance. | ||
| We originally flew the space shuttle out of here, and we're looking forward to flying Artemis II out of this room here in the not-too-distant future. | ||
| Once the vehicle clears the tower, control of the spacecraft is handed over to Mission Control Houston. | ||
| At that point, the team in Mission Control, led by the Ascent Flight Director, will take over. | ||
| It's a very distributed team. | ||
| Think of it as a big pyramid. | ||
| At the top of it sits the flight director, but around him are specialists in every system on Orion. | ||
| They'll have teams in the front room that are working with the flight director. | ||
| They'll have teams in the back room that are supporting the front room operators to make sure that they're specialists in all of their systems, just in case we have a problem that we haven't seen. | ||
| And by the way, in my 20 years of human spaceflight experience, I guarantee you we're going to have a problem that we haven't seen. | ||
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My name is Natasha Peake. | |
| I'm a flight dynamics officer for Artemis II. | ||
| We are trajectory specialists when it comes to Orion. | ||
| Really, my job is to know where your spaceship is and where it's going. | ||
| And if we need to come home for some reason, come home early, or we get off track, our job is to figure out how to do that. | ||
| This mission is fundamentally different from a mission you might do in low Earth orbit in a lot of ways. | ||
| But one of them is that we're looking to rendezvous with the moon. | ||
| Every minute you wait to launch, the moon is moving. | ||
| So in order to rendezvous with it efficiently, we have to change the inclination of our orbit to make sure we line up with the moon. | ||
| In a month, you get about 14 days of a launch period. | ||
| Our team all hunkers down and for every day, we look at the open and close of the window and come up with a trajectory end to end from liftoff all the way through splashdown. | ||
| You know, I often talk about that launch ops is like a team sport. | ||
| It's certainly you have to produce on game day, but that the preparation for a championship begins in the off season. | ||
| We've made some significant upgrades since Artemis I, and that includes not just the software that you see out here running on the consoles, but it's also in our model and simulation environment. | ||
| The big difference between Artemis I and Artemis II is of course the crew and it's the systems, the new systems that are specifically in place to support a crewed flight. | ||
| And so we have new launch commit criteria, we have changes to our procedures, changes to our timelines, and we want to make sure that we've gone through those time and time again so that when launch day rolls around we're ready for anything that the hardware may throw at us. | ||
| We woke up this morning, went through medical checks, had breakfast as a crew while Charlie and her team were getting the simulated vehicle ready for launch day. | ||
| We got in our crew transfer vehicles, our CTVs, we came out to the pad, we went up two elevators to the 274-foot level and we met there, our Whiteroom close-out team. | ||
| So it was a great end-to-end run through of what we will do when we get on this vehicle and head to the moon. | ||
| There are no shortcuts. | ||
| I mean you have to do it all because on launch day that is game day and it is in all of our work together that gets us to a successful T0 and a safe and successful mission. | ||
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Hey Sam. | |
| What's going on? | ||
| Not much. | ||
| Long time to see. | ||
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Long time to see. | |
| The seriousness of what it takes to take the risk with humans in and of itself creates enough of a pressure for the entire organization, enough of a concern, enough of a sense of rigor. | ||
| Everything goes up a notch. | ||
| We have to have an atmosphere to breathe, a temperature to be able to control, to be able to take out the carbon dioxide, the humidity that's in the air, feed the crew, deal with a small environment, proving that we can fly by the moon and come back and have a safe re-entry. | ||
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There's an extra element when you have humans on board, the nuances by which the system operates, the understanding of what it is to live in this crew module that we have. | |
| Artemis II is also another flight test of the other systems that are required to enable human space exploration. | ||
| That is life support system, that is displays, that is the controllers, a stick that you need to fly a spacecraft. | ||
| All those pieces were not part of Artemis 1, but are really key for Artemis II, and the crew will need that capability to go forward to do human space exploration. | ||
| When you go to the moon, you're 250,000 miles away, and there's no choice. | ||
| It takes time to get home. | ||
| Everything we check, everything we try and make sure we understand, we double, we triple, we quadruple check because we want to make sure we get it right. | ||
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The mission will prove the Orion spacecraft is ready to keep astronauts alive in deep space and allow the crew and ground teams to practice operations essential to the success of future missions. | |
| This top portion is the crew module. | ||
| It's a pressurized area where the crew sits. | ||
| The bottom portion here with the solar arrays and the engines, primary engines, is what's called the service module. | ||
| The European Service Module, or ESM, will provide electricity, water and air to NASA's Orion crew capsule, as well as maintaining temperature for life support. | ||
| It's been a fabulous partnership with our ESA partners. | ||
| The agency made a decision a long time ago that we want to do lunar exploration as a global partnership. | ||
| Now that we're having crew, that's the new element for Artemis II and onwards. | ||
| We will really go into the testing of the life support systems and try to figure out how is that behaving with the astronaut in the loop. | ||
| How is the CO2 scrubbing working on the crew module site? | ||
| How are we providing the oxygen to the astronauts and the water? | ||
| That environmental control system is so complicated. | ||
| It's a series of chemical and mechanical and electrical engineering problems that all have to come together. | ||
| That spacecraft has to basically be a mini-earth. | ||
| And that Earth is basically driven by the elements of that life support system. | ||
| We also have crew interfaces with the crew piloting the vehicle. | ||
| Artemis 1 was uncrewed and so we're going to go do a checkout right at the beginning of the mission while we're in an Earth orbit to be able to ensure that the crew is able to successfully pilot the vehicle. | ||
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We're not just testing the systems in Orion. | |
| One of the key things we really want to do is we're going to do science. | ||
| When we think about Artemis II science, there are really three big areas that we're studying. | ||
| One is understanding the space environment. | ||
| The second is understanding how that environment interacts with life in humans and the systems. | ||
| And then the third is looking at the moon itself from a vantage point where humans haven't looked for over 50 years. | ||
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They're going to be describing what they see. | |
| They'll see things that human beings have never seen before. | ||
| They'll be describing, observing, and documenting what they see for the scientists back home. | ||
| They've done a significant amount of training in the field here on Earth, learning about geology and planetary scale processes. | ||
| They'll be looking for the evidence of those processes from orbit and describing to us anything unique that we maybe haven't been able to really sense with orbiters and robotic measurements. | ||
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We're also going to do human research on the crew members themselves. | |
| We haven't had data sets for over 50 years on how the physiology of the crew themselves adapts to the radiation environment, to the microgravity environment so far away from Earth. | ||
| When you think about Artemis II, we've never had humans get on top of an SLS rocket. | ||
| And when that rocket launches, 8.8 million pounds of thrust are going to defeat gravity for a 5.8 million pound vehicle. | ||
| So they're going to feel vibrations to hear sounds that no humans have ever experienced. | ||
| If you want to be an astronaut, that's the thing you've been waiting for your whole life. | ||
| Riding the elevator up the rocket, climbing in that capsule, very surreal. | ||
| I often say that the only reason anybody actually gets on a rocket is because it'd be too embarrassing to turn around and run away from the rocket. | ||
| Once the fire starts coming and the rocket starts vibrating and you lift off, it's a completely different experience. | ||
| When you put crew on a rocket, it's no longer a test flight. | ||
| This one needs to perform and will perform as good or better than the first one did. | ||
| No doubt about it. | ||
| Artemis II begins with the launch from Kennedy Space Center. | ||
| Getting them through that eight and a half minutes to get them to escape Earth will be the first big milestone. | ||
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First, you'll do about two minutes flight with the boosters. | |
| The boosters will separate, leaving you on just the core stage all the way through about eight minutes into the mission. | ||
| At that point, the upper stage will separate from the core stage and perform a perigee raise maneuver to keep you in a stable orbit. | ||
| The crew's going to be in a high Earth orbit checkout orbit. | ||
| So this is a highly elliptical orbit that just takes them up away from the Earth and then back down close to it. | ||
| From there, Orion backs away and separates from ICPS, preparing us for manual piloting by the crew of the Orion vehicle, imagining that they are approaching and docking with the upper stage of the rocket. | ||
| People have their hands on flying it for the first time. | ||
| And that'll allow them to see, do we have the pulse size correct? | ||
| Do we need to make the pulse size smaller? | ||
| Do we have enough thrust? | ||
| Does it have enough control authority to give us the rates and the movement that we need to in the vehicle when we need it? | ||
| We need to really understand how Orion is going to perform in order such that we can dock it on future missions. | ||
| We're going to fly information for a good two hours to ensure that we can do the checkouts to really understand the way this vehicle is going to operate. | ||
| As we do ascent and as we go through our ProxOps demo, it's going to be a long day for the crew. | ||
| It's going to be a long day for us on the ground. | ||
| Once we convince ourselves that the systems are solid, we will engage the Orion main engine and that will commit us to what we call translunar injection. | ||
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The translunar injection burn is the big burn that puts us on the path to the moon. | |
| For that flyby out to the moon, we're doing what we call a free return trajectory. | ||
| The idea there is that without doing any more major burns, you can just coast and the gravity of the moon will redirect Orion and bring it back to Earth safely. | ||
| Hey, Apollo 13, Houston, you have a go for it. | ||
| We have done a free return only one time and that was during Apollo 13. | ||
| We have designed deliberately to do a free return on this particular mission because again our risk tolerance, our willingness to take risks with the vehicle with the crew on board is much much lower for a crewed test flight. | ||
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| The next three days are spent in transit and so the crew has activities to again continue to check out the systems on the Orion that we weren't able to get to in the first day. | ||
| We need to go through checking out the radiation shelter that all of our stowage is in the right spot. | ||
| We need to check out the cabin to ensure that we can depress it to be able to dock within HLS in the future. | ||
| Then we're going to fly around the moon. | ||
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You'll fly by the moon at about flight day five. | |
| You'll be between 2,900 and 7,900 nautical miles from the lunar surface. | ||
| That'll be the first time we'll have four crew members being able to share the experience of seeing the far side of the moon together. | ||
| They'll be the most separated from Earth than any four humans could possibly be at that point. | ||
| We're going to turn the spacecraft so that you can have the best view of anybody of the moon in 50 years. | ||
| We want to ensure that we're getting the videos of the moon that all of us back here on Earth want to see and ensuring that all of our systems work on the far side of the moon as well the way we expect. | ||
| Once the crew flies past the moon, they'll begin the three-day journey home where they'll again begin to do some checkouts, including trying to take the cabin down to a lower pressure, which is needed for future flights. | ||
| Finally, as they get closer to Earth, they're going to prepare for re-entry. | ||
| We have to configure the cockpit, do our final targeting, final burns, get the crew in their suits, get them in their seats, and then they'll get into the re-entry sequence. | ||
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The back half of the crew module has the heat shield, which is covered right up until just before what we call entry interface when you're re-entering the atmosphere. | |
| At which point, the crew module separates from the service module, puts the heat shield towards the Earth, and then begins its entry. | ||
| The way Orion enters the Earth's atmosphere, it's a capsule shape, and when that capsule engages with the atmosphere, it hits it at tremendous speed. | ||
| The speeds that we're enduring produce temperatures as hot as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is close to the surface of the sun. | ||
| The way we protect and absorb that energy is we build a heat shield. | ||
| That heat shield serves as a function to transfer it and absorb that energy so that, you know, ultimately we can come down gently under shoots. | ||
| That 19-ish minutes is the most critical of a flight. | ||
| That heat shield has to work, the guidance has to put them in the right spot. | ||
| And if we're anywhere as close as we were on Artemis I, we're going to drop that capsule within a couple miles of the landing ship. | ||
| Splashdown. | ||
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We're going to land off the coast of San Diego in the Pacific Ocean and we're going to test out in real, real space, in real time, the recovery of crew from the capsule. | |
| So all of these are new things that we haven't had to do before in a long time. | ||
| They'll be recovered by our recovery forces and we'll see their smiling faces. | ||
| That's the mission. | ||
| That's Artemis 2. | ||
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We learned a ton on Artemis 1. | |
| A lot of just how the vehicle works and how to fly it, especially from our perspective. | ||
| When SLS cleared the tower at Pad B, we put Orion exactly where it needed to be. | ||
| The upper stage conducted a perfect burn. | ||
| Orion spent an incredible retrograde orbit around the moon, achieving a distance further than any spacecraft designed to carry humans had ever been. | ||
| And when it came back to Earth, it performed the first ever skip re-entry of a vehicle. | ||
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For Artemis I, the number one priority mission objective was a test of the heat shield on Orion for lunar return. | |
| Orion conducted the final major maneuver of its mission, a return trajectory correction burn of its thrusters to further fine-tune its path toward its splashdown side of the Pacific. | ||
| One of the biggest learnings we had from Artemis I was how the thermal protection system was able to perform during re-entry. | ||
| We looked at the heat shield and there were little chunks of that char that were missing. | ||
| And we didn't really understand that and we thought that wasn't predicted. | ||
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What happened is some of the heat shield material started to break off and that we think could happen a little bit but you don't want to happen too much. | |
| Our decision has been made first around safety on the heat shield as we understand and mitigate the risks that come with spaceflight. | ||
| Sometimes in space delays are agonizing and slowing down is agonizing and it's not what we like to do. | ||
| But from the crew perspective, the thing that we most asked our leadership for after Artemis I was root cause of the ablation of the heat shield. | ||
| We had an independent review team with a lot of outside experts and internal experts to look at this. | ||
| So we really appreciate the willingness to take the risk to actually slow down and understand root cause, determine the path forward, corrective action for Artemis II and Artemis III, so that when Victor, Christina, Jeremy, and I launch and land after a successful Artemis II, we will look to Artemis III to carry the torch forward and to put humans back on the moon, and that is really our ultimate objective. | ||
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Had the crew been on Artemis I in the Orion heat shield, they would have been safe. | |
| This was certainly an area that we knew we wanted to test out. | ||
| One reason why, of course, there were no crew on Artemis I so we could test out that heat shield. | ||
| But we wanted to make sure we understood that problem. | ||
| And we did an enormous number of tests to confirm that under specific conditions, yes, we can fly it safely. | ||
| But in the future, we want to take this learning and not only apply it to safely flying Artemis II, but to changing how we design and build the heat shield for the Artemis III and beyond. | ||
| This is what we do. | ||
| We are ready for it. | ||
| This is how we work. | ||
| This is how we learn. | ||
| It will be a 10-day journey going half a million miles, continuing to test out every bit of Orion, going around the far side of the moon, heading home through the Earth's atmosphere at over 25,000 miles per hour and splashing down in the Pacific. | ||
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Curry's going to have a horizon, they have a moon, so I feel pretty good about pressing into this opportunity. | |
| I think NASA is at its best when it has big ideas and bold exploration. | ||
| That's when the finest comes out of NASA. | ||
| That's when the finest comes out of America. | ||
| Their story is made up of the success of this institution that makes this country so proud. | ||
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For Orion, success means first we bring the crew home. | |
| Second, we demonstrate what we know already is a robust spacecraft that's ready for these Artemis missions. | ||
| We want to continue to explore. | ||
| We want to continue to learn. | ||
| We want to go beyond. | ||
| We want to go even further. | ||
| And through the success of this particular mission of Artemis II will help spur us on for the additional exploration and discoveries that are out there for us to find. | ||
| Our destiny is always to go and see what's further and what's next. | ||
| It's our generation's opportunity to have our own literal moonshot. | ||
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When we focus on one thing and we focus on it together, we can achieve anything. | |
| It's the lesson that we can do more together than we can as individuals. | ||
| It's a new beginning. | ||
| It's a rebirth of human exploration. | ||
| The question is no longer if we're going to return to the moon or reach Mars. | ||
| It's a matter of when. | ||
| It starts with one flight, one crew, Artemis II. | ||
| We all have batons, relay race batons, and they are there as a symbol of coming back from Artemis II and handing those batons to Artemis III and saying it's your turn to go. | ||
| That is what we live for. | ||
| We are ready. | ||
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Together We Can Achieve Anything
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America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation. | |
| From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein. | ||