FULL TRANSCRIPT: Trump Attends Roundtable Discussion In Michigan

He’s taking, I hear he’s taking a lead. We’ll see what happens, but I hear he’s taking a lead.

So Mike, we’ll talk in a couple of minutes. How about we’ll go through it pretty quick, Dale, and then I’m going over to make a little speech in front of 10,000 people. You think this is an easy life I have, right? I go from here, I say, am I finished? They say, no, sir, you have one more speech. Oh, good. Where is it? What is it? 20 minutes, 30 minutes away. Is anybody going? Like, we’ll get you in 10,000 people. But so, Dale, go ahead, please.

Thank you. Dale, take it away.

DONALD TRUMP: You’re looking good, Dale. Look at the arms of this guy.

Teamsters’ Perspective

MIKE: Mr. President, real quick, one thing, before Dale begins, understand, Dale’s a third generation union worker, dedicated Teamster car hauler. So I know Dale has a lot of concerns about the auto industry. So, Dale, please.

DONALD TRUMP: A healthy looking guy, too.

MIKE: Yes sir. Go right ahead.

DALE: I believe Donald Trump will protect the Michigan auto industry. He will end the Harris electric vehicle mandate that has crippled Michigan. He has plans to impose 200% tariffs on all auto companies that want to ship our jobs out of the country. He will save our jobs. He will put American workers first.

I don’t know if you know, I don’t know if you heard, but us Teamsters here in Michigan love Donald J. Trump. We voted. We voted, and the results are loud and clear. Michigan Teamsters voted 62% Trump, 35% Harris.

President Trump, the Teamsters I work with have a message for you. They are voting for you because they know you’ll fight. You’ll fight and save their jobs. Fight and save America. Never back down. Never surrender. Fight, fight, fight.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, Dale, thank you. And I just want to say, you know, Sean O’Brien, right? Sean O’Brien, head of the Teamsters, and he’s a great guy. And they took a vote nationally, and I won by similar numbers nationally. And that’s an honor. I mean, that’s really an honor. I think it’s been many decades before they endorsed a Republican. I think they’ll start very soon. But we had rank and file Teamsters all over the country by numbers similar to that. And I have some good news for you on the automobile business in Michigan. I’ll wait until we finish up, maybe, and talk about it. Because you’re going to have a lot of competition in Mexico, and that competition is not going to happen anymore. But I want to thank you. I want to thank the Teamsters also.

I see another guy over there with that shirt. I can’t miss him, right? Thank you very much. I appreciate it.

Hi. How are you doing? Is it easy to work for or tough?

DALE: You see my grandbaby, too?

DONALD TRUMP: Oh, wow. Wow. Well, that’s good genes.

DALE: I got my little girl there, too. That’s good genes. That’s good genes, I can tell you. I look at him. You got the best. Thank you very much. Thanks, Dale. Appreciate it.

Howard Lutnick’s Perspective

MIKE: Mr. President, we also have with us your great friend, Howard Lutnick, CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald. Howard, based upon the last question, what are your thoughts about how what we can do to reverse course in the auto industry, save it, bring those jobs back here in America?

HOWARD LUTNICK: So, for those of you who remember, my firm is Cantor Fitzgerald, and we were located on the 101st to the 105th floors of the World Trade Center. So, I lost my brother, Gary. I lost my best friend. I lost 658 people that day. And so, I understand what it means to have jihad, right? And there’s a big difference between jihad and wonderful Muslim workers in Michigan. They are not the same thing. We need to crush jihad from this earth, and we need Donald J. Trump to do it.

So, I like, you know, my friend, the president, said the other day that tariffs are his favorite word in the dictionary. And what people should understand is that to protect, so what happened when Bill Clinton left office, he did NAFTA, which was another word to say gut Michigan, right? He let all the work go to Mexico, right? And he opened the door in a different kind of border opening. It was a work border opening.

And so, the tariff model is pretty simple. Lock that door. Bring it back here. Bring the jobs here. Bring the factories here. So, here’s an idea for you that we’ve talked about. Set significant tariffs out there. And if you open your factory here within two years, we’ll give you the credit for your tariff. But bring it here. Let’s employ our workers here. Let’s create power from our workers, who are the best. They are the core of America, right?

So, you know, when I first met Donald Trump, I didn’t really understand tariffs, and he taught me. And now, you know, I’m just trying right behind him to say, I love the way tariffs take care of America. They will build us. They’ll build us stronger. And I run his transition. And so, what does transition mean? That means when my friend becomes the 47th president of the United States of America.

I promise you, the greatest field of people ever to walk into a government is going to join him on January 20th. I have the best business leaders in the country. The best politicians who want to serve. The crowd amongst 80 million Republicans that we can have the best of the best join him to create the most extraordinary government you have ever seen to protect you and to build the America that he wants to build. They will be loyal to him. They will have fidelity to him. They will follow his policies. And this will be the most extraordinary government you’ve ever seen. And I am the proudest person to serve Donald J. Trump and help him be the 47th president of the United States of America.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, thank you very much, Howard. You know, he’s being very modest, I have to tell you. This guy is one of the leaders on Wall Street. One of the most respected people in all of business and certainly all of Wall Street. There’s nobody really like him. And he’s being very modest.

He lost, on that horrible day, he lost his entire firm, other than some people in Europe, a few, a small group. And he saw it happen. He was driving down the West Side Highway. And he’s always in the office at 6 o’clock in the morning. So he would have been there, this was at 8 o’clock. But his wife was just so angry at him because she wanted him to take their child to school because he just doesn’t do it and he won’t do it and he hasn’t done it for years. And this was the one day that he wasn’t there at 6 o’clock in the morning because he took his child to school. And at about 8:50, which is just as the plane was striking, he was driving down the highway looking at the World Trade Center.

This was the only day in years that he wasn’t in that building. And do you ever thank your wife and do you ever thank your child? But it was amazing. And there are miracles in life. We have miracles and we have help up there, Howard, in my opinion.

HOWARD LUTNICK: You and me together, baby, you and me together.

DONALD TRUMP: In my opinion. But just the end of that. So he lost, when he saw this, they had the top three floors, the top, great firm. And just, they couldn’t get out. There was no way they were getting out. Some of the people were calling their wives, their family. I think you were speaking to your brother, right?

HOWARD LUTNICK: Yeah, my sister spoke to my brother, she said goodbye.

DONALD TRUMP: Yes, speaking to your brother. Up there, they knew, they knew it was, probably knew it was the end. And Howard sought to rebuild the firm. And he spent a lot of time, a lot of everything, a lot of effort. Most people would have said it was an impossible thing to do. And he rebuilt it bigger, better, stronger. But the big thing is he gave a big chunk of it for a long period of time to the families of those that died in the building. And who would do that? Who would do that?

And so he rebuilt Cantor Fitzgerald into something bigger than it was, which was pretty hard to do. And there are a lot of people that love this guy. He’s a special guy, a real talent, by the way, a real talent, a brilliant business talent. So he is, he’s in charge with a couple of other people we have that are great, work along with him. But he’s in charge of that whole transition process, which is a very important process.

I love these exploding mics. No, it’s good for emphasis. It explodes every time. Yeah, right. It explodes every time you’re about to make an important point. So it’s OK. It’s not bad. I don’t know. Normally, I say don’t pay the guy that supplied the mics, you know. And then they say, Trump doesn’t want to pay. But, you know, it’s one of those things. I just want to thank you for doing a great job. You really have. And we’ll get on and perhaps we can ask Nancy. How are we doing? Good.

Healthcare Concerns

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you for having me. Good. Thank you. My name is Nancy Jaffer. I’m a Lebanese-American Muslim entrepreneur. I am a psychologist and a holistic wellness practitioner. I own a wellness center in Dearborn, Michigan. It’s called Evolution Empowerment. And I’m not really here to talk about the economy because with that regard, I have utter faith in you. And you’re golden to me. What I am here to discuss is the health crisis. And it is exactly that. It’s really a crisis in this country.

We are the sickest population in the world. And we find it status quo that we spend more money on health care than any other country. So we have a system that is looking to obtain lifelong consumers. We’re not really looking for cure or healing. And that’s very concerning to me. Before I became a holistic practitioner, I was a school psychologist. And I worked for the public schools for over a decade. And I was constantly frustrated with the incessant over-diagnosis and over-medicating and over-labeling of small children. I don’t know another country that finds it appropriate to give a five-year-old three different pharmaceutical drugs, including an antipsychotic. And this is to manage misbehavior. They are not looking for root cause.

We’re not looking for toxicity. We’re not looking for gut health issues or fluoride or food or diet and then getting into the food itself. I mean, we ingest poison. Countries all over the world would never accept their citizens to ingest what we take in every day and what our children take in every day.

DONALD TRUMP: You must love Bobby Kennedy, right?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I do. And the thing that I think is even more concerning is that we are inundated with these endocrine-disrupting chemicals. They have these long-term detrimental effects on the reproductive system of both men and women. Fertility rates are down. Sperm is lower than it’s ever been. It’s terrifying to me, honestly.

And my purpose is to constantly use every single opportunity to raise awareness about these topics and to hold our agencies accountable for the fact that we put them in place to protect us, not to harm us. So I also have a purpose to let people know that you don’t need to take a narcotic every time you feel a little pain. Or that you don’t need to be on three different antidepressants or anti-anxiety medications to mask a mental health symptom. And certainly to let parents know that it is not okay for birth control to be the first line of defense when your daughter has acne. When your 14-year-old daughter has acne.

I find our system archaic. I think it is toxic. And it’s corrupt, frankly. And what hurts me the most is that people who are out here giving Americans an opportunity to think differently and try natural routes are the ones that are being relentlessly censored. I see miracles, honestly, at my center every day. People heal rapidly before my eyes with no side effects. But nobody is talking about that. Because the chokehold that big pharma has and big agriculture has on us is criminal. And it needs to stop.

So when I heard about Robert Kennedy and Make America Healthy Again, I felt a glimmer of hope that I haven’t felt in a very long time. I have to say I am genuinely terrified for humanity in general. The world needs healing. And I can only hope that you and your campaign are the catalyst for that. Because I know for sure the other team is not.

DONALD TRUMP: And I think you should actually set up a meeting with Bobby Kennedy and the whole group. Because I see you’re into it. You have the same fervor that he has. And so I think it may be very interesting for all of you. Thank you very much.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you.

Law Enforcement Concerns

MIKE: Mr. President, we have with us Jim Taganelli. I got it right, didn’t I, Jim?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yes, sir.

MIKE: Jim is the president of the Police Officers Association right here in Michigan. He’s been in law enforcement here for decades. Jim, tell us about your concerns about public safety, not just here in Michigan. And tell us also about what it really means to have support for police officers. And when that support is not here, how it demoralizes the police force.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you, Congressman. Pleasure to be with you, sir. As you know, we’ve been endorsing you every time. And we’ll continue to. And we’ll never be out of your corner. We represent about 13,000 police officers in Michigan. That’s about three-quarters of the group. And I don’t know anybody here that would want to live or invest or work in a town where they’re not safe.

So no matter what you do, money-wise, no matter what you do with everything else in your life, if you don’t feel safe, you’re not going to want to go to the restaurant, you’re not going to want to pump gas in your own car. In our job, the open borders has been an issue with us. We talked about this a little before. But what’s happened is the honor and luster that came with the badge, the people that wore the badge. I’ll go back to the old West. The badge meant something. When people saw it, it meant something. When I was on the job, still pushing the car around. And that luster is tarnished. And to get the shine back is a lot harder than it is to lose it.

Here in Michigan, we have 700 fewer police officers than we had in 2020. And that’s a significant number when you look at it. It means everybody’s working more hours, mandated overtime and such. But the worst part of that is our academies that once had a waiting list are now empty or half full at best. And our best recruits, I was with some high school students the other day, the best recruits we have for police, it’s a different kind of a job. It’s a culture, I call it. It’s not for everyone. Everyone here shouldn’t want to be a police officer. Everybody, we don’t want you all to be police officers.

But the truth is when we go to high schools, just like the military, the kids that we need are not 28 years old. They’re 16, 17 years old. And our best recruiters over the years were their senior officers, their dad, their uncle, their grandpa, who are now telling them, you’re out of your mind, don’t do it.

We have no retirement health care, so if they retire at 55, they’re on their own until 65 when Medicare kicks in. They have no pensions anymore. They get a 401K, but I don’t know how long you’re going to live. That’s not a real way to retire at 55. And it’s really not wages that’s killing our recruiting. It’s the pensions, it’s the health care, but it’s that desire to become one, that desire to become a police officer.

The open border, what it really did was take the old stop police thing that we used to be able to get away with and just vaporized it. Nobody stops at the border. They don’t stop on Gratiot Avenue. They won’t stop out here on Adams Road either. And so what’s occurred, this year in 90 days, we had three police officers shot to death on the job, separate incidents, and not one of them had their gun out of their holster. These weren’t barricaded gunmen, wasn’t a bank robbery. These were ambushes. That’s in Michigan, three in 90 days. And they never fired a shot, never got their guns out.

So I like to borrow an old line, maybe J.D. Vance would like it, but it’s an old Marine. Chesty Puller once said, we’ve located the enemy, they have us surrounded. That’s how I feel right now. When we see you at a funeral, when we see you writing letters, when we see you hugging babies of fallen officers, I just want you to know that we feel like our arms are around those people. And I can’t begin to tell you how much that means to us.

The things that you do, we’ve got right now 16 officers indicted for felonies in Michigan that I think, if given enough money and time, you’d find that they were all innocent, or most of them. We do hire human beings. I can’t explain everything. But when you have that happen, and you see the bad guys just ignore you, and Anthony here will talk more about how it affects the people on the road, but we can’t hire anybody. And it’s not about money. People want to give money. I know you understand, you argue with these people, you say, just throw money at it, it’s stupid. But if we can’t get the right candidates, and we can’t get them because we’re not convincing them at a younger age that this is an honorable job. The honor’s gone.

I believe in it. I think people here believe in it. I know none of them want to be without police. But we need good people. And so the things that you do, the things that you talk about, qualified immunity, I think most people don’t know what it means. We understand it. I know you do. They think with qualified immunity means we can go rob a bank and not get in trouble. Nobody understands that that’s not the case. But the things that you do for us, the things that you say, the times that you and I have met before, you spoke at our convention. We did a big screen TV. The things you do really matter, and they do help us. And we’re all behind you, 100%.

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you. Jim, one thing we’re going to be doing, and we’re going to be doing it strongly, and I’ve wanted to do it and looked at it for a long time, but we have to do it, immunity for some of these — You said you have 14 people, and you don’t believe maybe one or two. I mean, maybe some are guilty of something, but I would bet you a lot of them aren’t. And they’re going through hell, and their pension’s going to be gone. Frankly, their family’s going to end up being gone, their car, their house, everything. So we want to do immunity. We also want to call for the death penalty for anybody killing a police officer. We’ll be pressing, and thank you for your support.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: We have an attorney general that’s after us right now.

DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, I know your attorney general.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: But most of these guys that do get found innocent are bankrupt.

DONALD TRUMP: That’s right. If they’re innocent, they have no money left. That’s right. We’re going to be looking at that very strongly, though, that police officers, if they’re doing their job, if they do their job, and if they make a mistake, even if it’s a mistake and that can happen. You were telling me, others were telling me, they have like a quarter of a second to make a decision. You would have a hard time with that. I mean, literally a quarter of a second to make a decision, and if it’s the wrong decision, their life is over.

And we have to help people out now. It’s time, so we’re going to do the immunity thing, and we’re going to fight alongside of them. We have to. We have to stop being politically correct. And you’re always going to have some bad apples, but they are very, very few. How many of the 14 would you say would be innocent?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Innocent? Innocent? Probably about 10 of them.

DONALD TRUMP: All right.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: And maybe the others are overcharged. There’s still a lot of work.

DONALD TRUMP: Yeah, yeah. It’s pretty tough stuff. It’s happening all over.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’s very expensive to defend yourself.

DONALD TRUMP: Well, they’re afraid to do their job, Jim. You’re right. They want to do their job, but they’re afraid to do their job. We’ll take care of it. Thank you, Jim. Thank you for the support.

MIKE: Mr. President, we have also with us Anthony Hall. Anthony is the president of the Livonia Police Officers Association. 20 years on the job, 10 years on SWAT in western Wayne County. Anthony, you’ve seen a lot. Talk to us about the morale for officers since Kamala Harris and Joe Biden came into office.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Yeah, so I’ve been on the job for 20 years now, and I have seven years left before I can retire. And since the new administration has taken over, we went from the middle of COVID where people were cheering as we were driving by their house during the lockdown when we turned on our lights and sirens to literally overnight having slurs or flipped off driving down the road, doing the same job we’ve been doing throughout the whole pandemic and throughout my whole career.

So I think one of the biggest things is over scrutiny of our job and our profession as a whole. After the George Floyd incident happened, it made being a police officer very difficult. And when something like that happens, you expect the pendulum to swing. And after Ferguson, the pendulum swung like it did, and then it returned back to its neutral. And after George Floyd, even now, the pendulum hasn’t come back to neutral. And I attribute that to the current administration’s opinion with all law enforcement. They lack support for everyone.

And when I say over scrutiny, I’m not saying not holding us accountable. We should all be held accountable. But now everybody’s a self-proclaimed expert in our field, right? So there’s a big push to have civilian oversight committees, civilians that don’t do our job on a day-to-day basis to tell us what we’ve done right and what we’ve done wrong. I have a lot of colleagues that have quit the job since George Floyd, just left the profession entirely, probably over a dozen that I know personally. So that’s a big thing.

And then another thing, too, I mean, now we have less people doing the job that we’ve been doing all along, but now we just have fewer officers. And then another thing to throw the wrench into it is the bond reform that the current administration’s changed because now we arrest somebody, and the criminal that we’ve arrested is made at home even before our officers are done with their shift. So, but hopefully in November we can change that.

Illegal Immigration and Crime

MIKE: Thank you. Mr. President, we also have up with here a friend of ours, former member of Congress, Mike Rogers, running for the United States Senate. Mike, you just heard from law enforcement. You heard from law enforcement in the state of Michigan. What are your thoughts about the support for law enforcement in the state of Michigan? And frankly, you’re going to be a United States senator pretty soon. That’s what people tell me. Your thoughts for around the country as well?

MIKE ROGERS: As my mother would say, from your lips to God’s ears. Oh, come on, people, lighten up. Let’s go. You’re here with the next president of the United States of America.

So not only do we have 700 fewer officers, we are 5,000 officers short across the state of Michigan. So the president rightly talks about qualified immunity for police officers, that the Democrats have been chipping away and chipping away. And that doesn’t mean you don’t get charged if you commit a crime. It means if you’re doing your job, they can’t take your house.

And so people are making the decision every day in this state about not going into the business or getting out of the business because they’re chipping away at their ability to protect their families as well as protect our community. I was an FBI guy and worked in street crime. I will tell you that the surge of illegal immigrants and the crime rate of illegal immigrants happening in our state, sexual assaults of young girls, a rape of a young girl in Oakland County. An illegal immigrant exposed himself to a nine-year-old girl.

MIKE ROGERS: And as we know, as former law enforcement guys, they’re on the path to do something really bad. All didn’t have to be here. 3,000 deaths of fentanyl here in the state of Michigan because of a wide-open border that we could close today. And it will happen when we elect Donald J. Trump.

Education Concerns

MIKE: Mr. President, we also have with us Tricia Auten. Now, Tricia, she’s a small business owner. The name of her business is Pretty Hunter. I’m going to let her talk about what Pretty Hunter is. I’m not a pretty hunter. I think Tricia’s a pretty hunter. I’m going to let her talk about that. But Tricia is also a mother of three, and she’s a candidate for the school board here in the state of Michigan. First of all, Tricia, explain to us what Pretty Hunter is, but then also really tell me about what’s on your mind about what the left is doing in our schools.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you for having me here this evening, congressman, and it’s such a pleasure to be in your presence, President Trump. So Pretty Hunter started for my quest for enjoying the outdoors. We live in the great state of Michigan. There’s a lot to enjoy. We design jewelry made out of once-fired bullets because last I checked, bullets don’t decompose. So I consider our company saving the earth one bullet at a time. And yes, it is hunting season here in Michigan, and beautiful as it is, we’re in archery soon, firearm season, but right now I’m hunting boats in the Walled Lake School District.

The question of what the left is doing wrong in the school system is very vast, so I’m going to try to keep this short and sweet. I can confidently tell you our schools have lost their way. The left has and is inundating our schools with DEI and ideological rhetoric, while frivolous spending on shiny new buildings with a fireplace and waste buckets shipped to Michigan from California. I didn’t know Michigan didn’t have any five-gallon buckets available for our schools. I’ll get to the bottom of that when I get on the board. Meanwhile, our children are not reading at grade level. They are unlearning how to critically think for themselves. This is unacceptable.

Across our nation and in my district of Walled Lake, our children are not thriving as I see it. They’re simply surviving. We are seeing influence as early as preschool that introduces hate, fear into these young minds, and it’s devastating for me to uncover this as I’ve begun to run for the board. Our children are being taught that they have privilege or lack thereof. Some are even being taught that they are less than because of the color of their skin or because of where or how they were born. President Trump, with you back in that Oval Office, I am confident that we can make our children’s future bright again.

And one last part. Because schools are focusing on these ideologies instead of focusing on academic foundations and hunting what is good in the world, we are ruining an entire generation of children. We are at a turning point in history right now. In my opinion, we simply need to get back to basics. Literacy, arithmetic, I don’t know, maybe even writing. Furthermore, we simply need to put EDU before DEI. Thank you.

UAW Worker’s Perspective

MIKE: Mr. President, last but not least, we have with us Tim Gregory. Tim Gregory is a UAW worker for 46 years with GM. 46 years.

DONALD TRUMP: He looks good. He looks good. He does look good. He looks young. Thank you.

MIKE: Tim, I know that for you, God comes first. Then your family, and then this country. I know that. But tell us how you truly believe that Donald Trump is the answer not just for Michigan, but for UAW workers to not only keep their jobs here in Michigan, but also to keep the auto industry alive and well in the United States.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thanks a lot for the introduction. Thank you for being here. First of all, I’d like to thank you, President Trump, for being so tenacious and not giving up when others would have. And also because of the years I have working through the UAW and General Motors, I think that your record shows that because you have a background of being in business, I think that you see the changes and where we need to go in order to grow the business and grow the jobs.

And I also see that your policies in the past and the policies you say you’re going to enact with the border, with China, with our energy resources, the direction you wanted to take from a long time ago back when you were president before, that’s why I think you’re best for this country, you’re best for the UAW, and you’re best for the workers.

And also I’d like to take this opportunity, and it’s not in my notes, but I just want to say that I’ve always thought you was the most genuine candidate. And as a regular Joe, as they introduced me as in the bio, I think that I appreciate that. I think you’re for the people and you’re for America. And that’s why I think you’re the best.

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you. Thank you, Tim. Well, I want to start by saying you look a lot younger than you must be because you’ve worked for the company 46 years. That’s a long time. You look like you’re 35 years old, I would say. What’s that all about? What are you doing? What are you doing? Well, you believe in God, that I can see.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I hear that once in a while.

DONALD TRUMP: But you’re very lucky in that sense. Thank you very much. I want to, it sort of pertains to what you’re saying. So I’ll just make this statement. A big thing happened over the last couple of days for Michigan and for Detroit and for the country. Howard knows all about this, but some of the biggest auto plants in the world were planned for Mexico. And I’ve been talking about it for the last year. I’ve been talking about the whole concept for 10 years, 15 years.

I mean, even as a private person, I couldn’t believe how they were just, how companies were and countries were coming in and stealing our jobs, stealing our plants. Everyone’s unemployed. Then they sell cars back in. Everyone, all they do is you get fired and then they make the car and they sell it into our country. We make a lot of money. We make nothing. We have unemployment. And I’ve watched this for 20 years. I’ve watched it for so long and it’s disgraceful.

And so I have good news for you. I’ve been talking about, in particular, one giant plant bigger than anything you’ve ever seen. And you know the story where a person I know is, he builds plants. That’s what he does. And I said, I want to see a plant, a big one, about a year ago, year and a half ago. And he said, okay, when do you want to go to Mexico? I said, no, I want to see one here. He said, we don’t build them here, big. We build them, but they’re little by comparison. China’s building the biggest ones in Mexico. I said, that’s not good. I don’t like that. And he said, well, that’s the way it is. I said, I’m not going to Mexico. I’m not going to look at them in Mexico. I want to see them here.

So anyway, time went by and I started thinking about it. And in speeches, I was, because it’s just an automatic instinct to me, I started saying, well, if they’re building a plant, they’re going to wipe out, you know, here. That means they’re building a plant. They’re going to send the cars into our country, one way or the other by the millions. And Detroit and Michigan, because, you know, you had many more, you probably 60% wiped out from what it was in its heyday, maybe more than that. I said, you’re going to get wiped out. The rest of it’s going to be, and then you have a union head who wants to build electric cars and they’re going to all be made in China. You know that.

And we have a thing called liquid gold. We have, which is oil and gas. We have a lot of it. And by the way, Brian, stand up for a second, if you would, please. This guy is like, he’s like you. He gets it so much. You know, each other, maybe he gets it so much. He gets it like nobody. So he’s been fighting against all of this nonsense for so long. And so the electric cars are good. And by the way, you know, Elon Musk is a great friend of mine. He gave me a tremendous endorsement. He’s right now campaigning in Pennsylvania because he thinks we have to win if we don’t win this election. Because, I mean, she’s a Marxist. This woman has no idea what she’s doing.

And we can’t let her be president. I don’t want to be rude about it. We can’t let her be president. This country is finished if that happens. I mean, beyond a normal candidate, this country would be absolutely finished if she got it. So we have to stop her. But what happened is I’ve been thinking about it and what it would do to the country. These are plants that are bigger than anything you’ve seen. They will knock out the cars. You press a button and the whole thing starts operating. And so I started talking about this, about what do you think, Brian, a year ago, less than a year ago, that I won’t let it happen a year ago, yeah? And I said, I’m not going to let it happen if they do this plant in Mexico, right near the border, and a couple of others.

I’m going to put giant tariffs on it for 100%. And if that doesn’t work, I’ll go to 200%. I don’t care. They’re not going to be selling cars here. Now, if they want to build their plant here, I hope here, but at least in the United States, someplace in the United States, that’s a whole different ballgame. But we’re not going to have them building them in other countries, sending them into the United States, taking all those jobs. So I’ve been announcing it, and I’ve been talking about it. And I saw the gentleman that builds the plants, because I was here a couple of weeks ago at the Detroit conference, as you know. And it was really the auto conference. And so I look in the audience, and there he is, the man that builds the plants. And I said, could I see you a minute before the speech? And after the speech, I saw him.

And I said, so how is that plant doing? He said, sir, they’ve decided not to build. I said, why? He said, because I think you’re going to be elected. And if you put tariffs on this plant. And that was easy. I didn’t even do anything other than say, I’m telling you, the man said it right over here. It’s the most beautiful word in the dictionary. You have other words that are damn nice, like love. But I tell you, I think it’s more beautiful than love, the word tariff.

And so here it works. Hey, Brian, here it works without even doing anything. They thought there was a chance. And they’re not going to spend $2 billion on building a plant and then have Trump get elected and put 200%. And if that wasn’t enough, I’d raise it. And again, the higher it goes, the more likely it is that they build in this country. But think of it.

So they stopped this giant plant just in the basis. Now, if I don’t get elected, they will start it up, as sure as you’re sitting there. These people have no clue. She has no clue what she’s doing. She wants to raise everybody’s taxes. She’s a disaster. And other than that, I like her quite a bit. But no, I don’t care even about like, dislike. Somebody has to come in. We did great the first time.

DONALD TRUMP: We did better the second time, as everybody knows. We got millions of more votes. And frankly, if I didn’t, and some bad things happened, and let’s not talk about it, because we’re going to make up for it this time. Too big to rig.

But I will tell you, if I didn’t do well the second time, I wouldn’t have done it. But I watched Biden and her, and now especially her, because she’s worse than Biden. I watched them, and I said, I got to run again. I got to run again. That’s what happened, because they said, they’re ruining our country with the open border.

I mean, 8,000, just the drug dealers, 8,000 drug dealers, 13,099 murderers in jail. They’re going to let them out of jail. Some with death penalties. They’re just going to say, well, this is easier. We’ll just send them to the United States, because their people don’t know what. But think of 13,000 plus people who murdered people, and they’re going to be let free in our country. And then you have their prisons are being emptied up, like Venezuela. They’re emptying up their prisons. Their crime is down 72% in Venezuela.

If they get elected, we’re all friends. If they get elected, we’ll all meet next year in Venezuela, because it’ll be the safest country, because they’ve emptied out. And let me tell you, it was a very unsafe country. Caracas, you couldn’t walk across the street. It’s sort of like some of our cities are getting, right? Our cities are getting like that.

So just the thought of me getting elected stopped somebody from destroying the rest of Detroit, from destroying the state of Michigan’s auto industry. And with your auto industry, so goes Michigan. I mean, it’s a big deal. And we’re going to bring, actually, we’re going to reverse that very easily.

He knows because he’s got a natural, you know, what he said when I explained it to him. So he’s a business, like, he’s a savant. Is that good? He’s a savant. He knows. It took me about two minutes. After about two minutes, he, oh, I get it. How long did it take you to understand the word tariff? Two minutes or less?

AUDIENCE MEMBER: From you, it took two minutes. It took very little.

DONALD TRUMP: He figured it out very quickly. He wasn’t exposed to it, frankly. He actually said, you mean you can really do that? He couldn’t believe it. And we have another one. Paulson, he sort of was like, he can’t even sleep at night. He’s so excited about it. But they have to be. And then we have stupid people that don’t know. You know, they say, oh, tariff. But they’re very stupid people.

We have a senator from Pennsylvania who decided not to run. He fought me all the way on tariffs. This guy fought me and fought me. His name’s Toomey. He fought me and fought me. And I wouldn’t endorse him. And he decided not to run based on that. And that’s good. Because all he did was, I said, so if China charges us 100%, can we, for a similar product, charge them 100%? No, sir. OK. Can we charge them 50% or 25%? No, sir. Why? It’s not free trade. I said, explain that.

I said, can we charge them 10%, 2%, or 1%? No, sir. It’s not free trade. I said, you’ve got to be kidding. And I said, I wouldn’t endorse you under any circumstances. Now, I don’t know if he really believed this. Because he’s not a stupid guy. Did he really believe this? Or was there something else going on?

But anyway, so we’re going to bring back the auto industry. But also, Tim, a lot of other industries. This pertains to many, many. We talk about cars because it’s so nice to talk about cars. It’s sort of the ultimate thing to manufacture. But we’re going to bring back a lot of industry. And it’s going to be a great, fantastic presentation. We appreciate it from everybody. From everybody.

Is that your father over there? Who is that guy, though, the good looking guy? Is he your father with that shirt on? I like that color. I’m going to wear a couple of them now, I think. I think I’m going to. I’ve got such support from the Teamsters. I’m going to have to wear that, I think.

But I want to thank everybody. And again, support. Always, you’ve been with me. And I appreciate it very much. Thank you very much. Thank you.

MIKE: Well, everybody, this concludes our town hall. Thank you so much for being here. President Trump, thank you.

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