FULL TRANSCRIPT: Trump Speaks At The Economic Club of New York

In the world, in the United States of America, 35%.

And actually, when you add all those numbers, you get close to 50. But much, much higher. Nobody’s ever seen a new earner all the way down to 21%, which everybody said was impossible to do. And I don’t know if I’ve ever realized this, but you end up being able to do that.

And I got it done to 21%. I cut a record number of job-killing regulations. In four years, we cut more regulations than any president in the history of our country by far. I’m proud to be the only president in modern history to achieve a net regulatory reduction during my term.

And that was a substantial reduction. For every regulation we had, we cut more than 5.5 regulations. We had at least American heterogen within three years. We had an increase in domestic oil production by 47%, and we were just getting started.

The price of gasoline was $1.87 a gallon. Doesn’t that sound good right now? We negotiated and renegotiated more than 50 very great issues. Other countries that were taking advantage of us, as they all do, to protect the American worker and to open foreign markets.

And we did a great job. I ended up the worst trade deal ever made in the history of our country, replaced it with the USMCA, perhaps the best trade deal we’ve ever made in the history of this country. I stood up to China like no one else before me. No one came even close.

Protecting American Industries

And I saved the US auto industry from obliteration with a 27.5% tariff on all Chinese cars. That remains in place to this day. They want to take it off, but they can’t because, number one, it’s too much money, and number two, we would be invaded by Chinese cars on top of the other invasions that are taking place. Without it, our auto industry would be dead.

And now I am going further. We will bring our automaking industry to the record levels of 37 years ago, and we’ll be able to do it very quickly through tariffs and other smart use of certain things that we have that other countries don’t. For four straight years, I fought for American workers like I would fight for my own family. I took care of our economy like I would take care of my own company.

In every decision, I asked, will I create jobs here, or will I be sending jobs overseas? Will it make America richer and stronger, or will it make our country weaker and poorer? I always put America first every single time. And when our country was hit by the China virus, we saved the economy.

We rescued tens of millions of jobs. And after COVID, I handed Kamala and Joe the fastest and strongest recovery ever recorded, nothing even close, with 1.4 percent inflation. The 30-year mortgage rate was at 2.4 percent, and the highest stock market in history. This is despite the pandemic.

To date, I handed them back the highest stock market to date after having just suffered, with the rest of the world, a pandemic the likes of which nobody had ever seen before. We did an incredible job. And remember, far more people died of COVID under Biden-Harris than under President Trump. Many, many more people.

Criticizing Current Administration

We delivered an economic miracle, which Kamala and Joe turned into an economic disaster, just like they turned the border, and indeed the whole world, into a catastrophic surrender. Starting on day one, Kamala launched a war on American energy and orchestrated a nation-wrecking border invasion, with illegal aliens pouring in from countries all over the world. You know, they came in from countries that nobody ever heard the name of that country. Those countries, from their prisons and jails, there is a difference, from mental institutions and insane asylums, as well as record numbers of terrorists, human traffickers, and sex traffickers.

Numbers that we’ve never seen before taking place over the last three and a half years. Then Kamala cast the deciding votes on trillions of dollars in wasteful spending, which together with their terrible energy policies gave us the worst inflation perhaps in the history of our country. Nearly two-thirds of the jobs created under the Harris-Biden administration were bounce-back jobs. Bounce back.

They were bounce-back jobs that I handed them from before the pandemic. This happens with pandemics. You have bounce-back jobs. The pandemic comes and it goes, and those people go back to their jobs.

And just last week, Joe Biden admitted that on social media. I don’t know if he knew what he admitted, but that’s what it said. I don’t know who drew it. Perhaps that person is no longer employed by the Democrats.

But right now, it’s even worse than that. Under Kamala Harris’s policies, three million workers are now missing from the job force compared to 2020. Three million workers, that’s a lot. Over half a million fewer people have full-time jobs today than just one year ago.

And 100 percent of the net job creation in the past year has gone to illegal migrants. Think of that. One hundred percent of the jobs created under this administration has gone to illegal migrants that came into our country. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris formed the worst presidency and vice presidency by far in the history of our country.

Election Stakes

This election will decide whether we reward Kamala Harris with re-election and four more years of crime, economic calamity, and international humiliation, or whether we change that direction and once again build the greatest economy in the history of the world, which we had during the Trump administration. Kamala Harris is the first major party nominee in American history who fundamentally rejects freedom and embraces Marxism, communism, and fascism. You’re learning about this. You’ll find out nobody knew who she was just a few months ago.

They didn’t know who she was. She’s promising communist price controls, wealth confiscation, energy annihilation, reparations, the largest tax increase ever imposed, and mass amnesty and citizenship for tens of millions of migrants who will consume trillions of dollars in federal benefits and destroy Social Security and Medicare. They will be destroyed. They’re already putting them into your Social Security and Medicare rolls.

I am promising low taxes, low regulations, low energy costs, low interest rates, secure borders, low, low, low crime, and surging incomes for citizens of every race, religion, color, and creed. My plan will rapidly defeat inflation, quickly bring down prices, and reignite explosive economic growth. Kamala Harris will take more money out of American pockets. My plan will leave the typical family with many thousands of dollars, more than they have right now.

Trump’s Energy Policy

First, I will end Kamala Harris’s anti-energy crusade and implement a policy of energy abundance, energy independence, and even energy dominance. We have more liquid gold under our feet than any other country, including Russia and Saudi Arabia will be using it. My plan will cut energy prices in half or more than that within 12 months of taking office. It will be an economic revival of our country like no one has ever seen before.

Energy was what caused our problem initially. Energy is going to bring us back. That means we’re going down and getting gasoline below $2 a gallon, bring down the price of everything from electricity rates to groceries, airfares, and housing costs. That’s why OPEC and the Arab nations, and we’re very honored to have some of my friends here with us today from that part of the world, but they’re working very hard despite being here, that I not be your president.

They don’t like me. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris can’t bring down the price of anything because her energy policies are driving up the cost of everything. Everything is up, way up. Starting on day one, Harris and Biden opened up the Russian pipeline called Nord Stream 2, which nobody had ever heard of until I got involved and said, what about Nord Stream 2?

And nobody knew what I was talking about. Largest pipeline in the world, Russian pipeline. But I had it closed. It was shut down. Putin was not happy. We shut it down. They came along, and the Keystone XL pipeline was shut down by them. So they shut down the Keystone, and they immediately gave Russia the right to start rebuilding the Nord Stream 2, the biggest pipeline you’ve ever seen.

We reentered the horribly unfair to the United States. Through them, when they came back, Paris Climate Accord, so unfair to us. We paid trillions of dollars. Other countries pay nothing.

As soon as he came back, he went back into it. I got us out of it and reduced the area of the federal lands available for drilling by 80 percent. I did that. If I was president, oil production today would be four times higher than it is right now.

Would have been four times higher. Right now, we’d be doing four times as much. And remember, we had ANWR, perhaps the largest drilling site in the world in Alaska, which everybody wanted to get approved, but they weren’t able to do it. Ronald Reagan fought so hard to get ANWR.

He couldn’t do it. And it was easier in those days than it is today, with all of the environmental concerns. But they came in, and the first few days in office, they terminated ANWR, amazingly. Biggest drilling site, we think, in the world.

Bigger than Saudi Arabia. Bigger than Texas. We got it, and they terminated it. Under the EPA’s so-called power plant rule, more than 50 power plants have been shut down since she took office, and virtually all coal-fired power plants will be shuttered in the next couple of years, setting the stage for a catastrophic energy shortfall, which we already have, that will make inflation far worse than it has ever been.

Energy and AI

They want to close down our power plants, and we don’t have power already to address this dire energy crisis that Kamala and Joe have created. I will immediately issue a national emergency declaration to achieve massive increase in domestic energy supply. What you’re going to need, electricity is desperately needed for AI. AI, controversial, but we got to be the top of it.

And we would need, hard to believe, twice the electricity that we currently have right now for everything in order to be dominant. And China is already building massive electricity-producing plants. We haven’t even thought about it. We will think about it, and I’ll get it done on an emergency basis, so we’ll be the leader in AI and every other form of technology.

With these sweeping authorities, we will blast through every bureaucratic hurdle to issue rapid approvals for new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new electric plants, and reactors of all types. Prices will fall immediately in anticipation of this tremendous supply that we can create rather quickly, and we’ll be the leader instead of the laggard.

Green New Deal and Inflation

Second, to further defeat inflation, my plan will terminate the Green New Deal, which I call the Green New Scam. Greatest scam in history, probably.

A $10 trillion scam that we waste. We throw it like throwing money right out the window. It actually sets us back as opposed to moves us forward. And we send all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act, which the Democrats agreed after it was approved that it wasn’t for that purpose.

It was for other purposes, like giveaways. Kamala spent $7.5 billion to build eight charging stations. Think of a charging station like a fuel pump with electricity coming out of it. Eight charging stations in the Midwest for electric vehicles cost billions and billions of dollars.

$7.5 billion, they think, but the costs are still going. And three of them don’t work and never will, probably. Other than that, it’s worked out quite well. I will end the electric vehicle mandate, stop the appalling waste, and save taxpayers an estimated $1 trillion.

Regulatory Reform

Third, I will launch a historic campaign to liberate our economy from crippling regulation. My first term, I pledged to cut two old regulations for every one new regulation, and we did much better than that, as I’ve said. Yet over the past four years, Kamala has added $6,300 a year in regulatory costs onto the backs of the typical American family. Think of that.

To stop this onslaught at lower prices, I’m pledging today that in my second term, we will eliminate a minimum of 10 old regulations for every one new regulation. We’ll be able to do that quite easily, actually. And instead of attacking industries of the future, we will embrace them, including making America the world capital for crypto and Bitcoin.

Government Efficiency Commission

Fourth, at the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement. That’s nice. Smart guy. He knows what he’s doing. He knows what he’s doing.

Very, very much appreciated. I will create a Government Efficiency Commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government and making recommendations for drastic reforms. We need to do it. Can’t go on the way we are now.

And Elon, because he’s not very busy, has agreed to head that task force. Be interesting. If he has the time, that would be a good one to do it. But he’s agreed to do it.

In 2022, fraud and improper payments alone cost taxpayers an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars. As the first order of business, this commission will develop an action plan to totally eliminate fraud and improper payments within six months. This will save trillions of dollars. Trillions.

It’s massive. For the same service that you have right now, trillions of dollars is wasted and gone and nobody knows where it went. Further taming inflation and bringing prices way down.

Tax Cuts and Social Security

The fifth pillar of my plan is to make the Trump tax cuts permanent. They are massive tax cuts, biggest ever, permanent. And to cut taxes even more. And we will have no tax on tips, something which they copied four weeks after I said it. She got up and said, no tax on tips.

I said, I just said that. She is actually copying a lot of my plan. In fact, we’re going to send her a MAGA cap sometime in the next week. We’re having a special one made.

But we also know she doesn’t mean it. She’s going to stick with what her whole life has been about. And also, no tax on Social Security benefits. People on Social Security have been wiped out by inflation and now on top of it, we tax their benefits.

We’re not going to tax their benefits. We have so many different ways of making so much money. This country, the potential is so incredible. We don’t have to take it away from people on Social Security.

We’re not going to do that. We’re going to save Social Security. She’s going to destroy Social Security. Under the Trump administration, we proved that targeted tax cuts do not increase the deficit. They reduce the deficit by growing the economy and raising revenue.

After we gave the massive tax cuts, we took in the following year with a much lower rate, billions and billions of dollars more than we did the previous year with a high rate. Think of that. So with a much lower rate, we took in more money because people were incentivized.

Corporate tax revenues are 31% higher today than before my tax law was signed. With all of those cuts, 31% higher. To further support the revival of American manufacturing, my plan calls for expanded R&D tax credits, 100% bonus depreciation, expensing for new manufacturing investments, and a reduction in the corporate tax rate from 21% to 15%, solely for companies that make their product in America. You have to make your product in America.

If you outsource, offshore, or replace American workers, you’re not eligible for any of these benefits. In fact, you will pay a very substantial tariff when a product comes in from another country that’s made in another country and comes in. There’ll be a big tariff on that product because we want to make our goods in America, and most of them we can.

America First Manufacturing Policy

My message is simple. Make your product here in America, and only in America. We are not going to be taken advantage of anymore just as we made great inroads and progress four years ago. We made tremendous inroads on this subject. We’re not going to watch our wealth and jobs get ripped away from us and sent to foreign countries, which is what’s been happening for many, many decades with us.

China was built on doing exactly what we’re going to be doing and what I started doing four years ago. What we’re putting forward is the most pro-American manufacturing and jobs policy. In modern history for any country, this plan will bring jobs and growth into our country at levels never seen before. Every business on Earth will flock to America from Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and all over the world.

By contrast, comrade Kamala Harris wants to sacrifice our wealth, kill the economy, and drive jobs overseas to punish businesses more. Businesses will leave. They’ll leave America. They’re international companies.

They report to their shareholders, and they will leave America if her plan, even in a small form, comes to the fore. Her tax plan, which includes the promise to end the Trump tax cuts, which again by itself would be a massive tax increase, would increase taxes by over $5 trillion, a record many times over. It would result in the largest small business tax hike in history, massively raising taxes on 25 million small business people and raising small business tax rates to 43% and higher. In other words, 20% higher than communist China.

Kamala is also vowing to raise the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. We’re bringing it down to 15%. But she really is looking to raise it to 40%, 45%, or even 50%. You know that.

All you have to do is follow her past path. Radically raise the capital gains tax rate, which she wants to do, and they don’t even want to give a number. And for the first time ever, impose a 25% tax on unrealized capital gains. So if you happen to have a lot of wealth but no cash, you’re in a lot of trouble.

This will lead America into a 1929 depression, and it will be a depression and a territory that we have not seen for a long time. There’s a gentleman that happens to believe that, Scott. These policies, especially the tax on unrealized capital gains, would decimate the U.S. economy.

Companies and innovation would flee from America to other countries. Venture capital markets would disappear. The stock market would be annihilated, and investors assess the tax liabilities of large shareholders. The seniors and senior pensions would totally go up in smoke.

They’d be worthless. These are not the policies designed to create a prosperous America. These are policies to turn the United States into Venezuela on steroids. Even if for this reason alone, Kamala Harris must be defeated decisively this November.

Has to be defeated. Cannot have her be the President of the United States. Under Kamala, the United States is becoming a third-world banana republic. She and her party are censoring speech, weaponizing the justice system, and trying to throw their political opponents, me, in jail.

This hasn’t happened. I didn’t do that to Crooked Hillary. I said, that would be a terrible thing, wouldn’t it? Putting the wife of the President of the United States in jail.

But they view it differently, I guess, nowadays, but that’s okay. And they always have to remember that two can play the game. Nobody ever thought this was possible. This is how you create massive capital flight and turn once-prosperous nations into absolute ruins.

I will have no higher priority as President than to restore the fair, equal, and impartial rule of law in America. We have lost the rule of law. Who would have thought?

Encouraging Domestic Production

Number six, under my leadership, America will encourage domestic production instead of punishing it. As you know, our country’s vast manufacturing wealth was created at a time with very little domestic taxation, few regulations, and most revenue came from tariffs from other countries. That was when we were at the wealthiest ever, proportionately. We were the wealthiest country ever during those days. That was before income tax came along.

Now we foolishly do the opposite. We impose lower tariffs and no tariffs on foreign producers. We have the lowest tariffs of any nation in the world, and we relentlessly punish our own companies for doing business in America. You do business in America, you’re punished tremendously.

I had many, many companies come to me, sir, I can’t compete. They’re sending kitchen cabinets, washers and dryers, everything. I can tell you, every motorcycles. They’re sending them here, sir.

We can’t compete. And I made it so they could compete and thrive. Every one of those people, we should get them up and talk to you one day, because every one of those people comes up to me, and every time I see them, they hug me, they kiss me, they love me, because I save their businesses.

I intend to reverse this model and once again turn America into the manufacturing superpower of the world. We can do that just with being intelligent. The key to this effort will be a pro-American trade policy that uses tariffs to encourage production here and bring trillions and trillions of dollars back home. And you know what? We deserve it.

We’ve been helping other countries get rich at our expense. For the last 50 years, we’ve been pouring our money into other countries, getting nothing, nothing for it. We protect them militarily. We do so much for them.

We get nothing. My plan is that if you open your factory in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, anywhere else in our country, you don’t pay a tariff tax. You don’t pay a tax to make the product here. But if you move your production outside of the United States and send it back here, which people are doing now, and I stopped it.

I stopped it cold. But they’ve changed that already. Then you’ll have to pay a very substantial tariff to get your product back into the country. The result will be that everybody in the world will want to be here and they want to produce here.

They’re going to want to produce their product in America. It’s going to say made in the USA. We will be able to build ships again. We will be able to build planes again.

We will be able to build our military again from within, all from within. We will create the biggest, greatest, and strongest middle class in the history of our country. We will have tens of millions of high-paying jobs in manufacturing, transportation, defense, as well as all of the sales and support of export jobs. Our auto industry will be the biggest beneficiary.

In short, it will be a national economic renaissance just by using our heads, by being smart, by not letting other countries take advantage of us. They’ve been doing it for so long. It’s so sad to see. And I know them all, and they laugh at us behind our back.

They can’t believe how stupid our leadership has been for so many years. We will ensure that the United States has a giant steel industry, an aluminum industry, a manufacturing base, and a defense base. We want an industrial base that can take care of our defense needs 100 percent. And you can call it what you want.

Some might say it’s economic nationalism. I call it common sense. I call it America first. This is the policy that built this country, and this is the policy that will save our country.

Historical Perspective

In the words of a great but highly underrated president, William McKinley, highly underrated, the protective tariff policy of the Republicans has been made and made. The lives of our countrymen sweeter and brighter. It’s the best for our citizenship and our civilization, and it opens up a higher and better destiny for our people. We have to take care of our own nation and our industries first.

In other words, take care of our country first. This is when we had our greatest wealth. He was assassinated, and he left his group of people that followed him. Teddy Roosevelt became a great president, spending the money that was made by McKinley.

So McKinley got a bad deal on that one. He built tremendous wealth. They had the Tariff Act of 1887, and they had a committee that studied, what are we going to do? They had a big problem, a problem like I hope to have with this country someday. So much money was coming in from foreign countries that they didn’t know how to spend it. They had no idea. So they set up a committee. We’ll set one up with the people in this room.

How do we distribute the wealth that we have? And Roosevelt built dams and built railroads and did national parks, but he did it with the money that was made with tariffs from McKinley. So you have to remember that. Very highly underrated, a very underrated president.

Let’s give them both credit. Smart tariffs will not create inflation.

Tariffs and Inflation

They will combat inflation. I had almost no inflation, and I had the highest tariffs that anyone’s seen, and they were going a lot higher. Foreign nations will pay us hundreds of billions of dollars, reducing the deficit and driving inflation down. It will largely reduce our deficit.

In my first term, we imposed historic tariffs with no effect on consumer prices or inflation. The anti-tariff people, many of them, I believe, honestly work for these other countries in some form, get tremendous amounts of lobbying money and other money because it doesn’t make sense what they’re saying. But we had no inflation, and we had protection, and I saved so many industries. I saved the steel industry.

But Biden and Harris are letting it go. They’re letting it go. It’s so easy to keep. A combination of fair trade tax cuts, regulatory cuts, and energy abundance will allow us to produce more goods better and cheaper right here in the USA than we’ve ever done before. And foreign nations will respect us again. I got along great with foreign nations, and I taxed the hell out of them. And they liked me. Maybe they respected me.

And Viktor Orban, a very strong man, he’s the Prime Minister of Hungary, he said the only thing missing from the world right now is President Trump. He kept the world safe because everybody was afraid of him. I don’t like that term, but that’s the term he used. I would like to say respected him and respected our country, but he didn’t say that.

He said everybody was afraid of him. He said China was afraid, Russia was afraid. They were all afraid. Kim Jong-un, I got along great with him, and I tried to explain to the fake news media that getting along with people in foreign countries is a good thing, not a bad thing.

It’s a very good thing. It’s a smart thing. We will require all essential materials for our national security to be produced here in the United States, creating millions and millions of new manufacturing jobs. You know, when we built the F-35, we have the wings built in one country.

We have the tail rudders built in another country. We have the seats built in another country. We have the electronics built in seven different countries. What the hell would we do if there’s a war, and we’ll end up plighting half of those countries?

Foreign Policy and National Security

And we don’t want to have a war, because right now we’re closer to World War III than we’ve ever been in our lives. With Russia-Ukraine, which would have never happened if I was President. With October 7th and Israel, the whole Middle East is blowing up. Would have never happened.

They would have never happened. Respectfully, Iran was broke. They had no money for Hamas. They had no money for Hezbollah. It wouldn’t have happened. There would be peace in the Middle East, and Iran would be a big beneficiary of that peace. It’d be good. But all of these things that happened.

And inflation would have never happened. And Afghanistan would have never happened. The worst withdrawal in history, I believe the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country. In fact, that’s what caused President Putin to go into Ukraine, when he looked at how incompetently that was handled.

He looked at it and he said, man, they’re incompetent. That was the most embarrassing day in the history of the United States of America. Airplanes taking off with many people sitting on the wings of the plane and the side of the plane and the wing. And you see them dropping off the planes at 3,000 feet.

They thought it was their trip to freedom. There’s never been anything like that. And I think there’s no greater embarrassment. By the way, we lost 13 incredible soldiers. I got to know the families very well. I spent a lot of time with them four days ago in Arlington Cemetery. Three years ago, they were celebrating three years, honoring their children. And yeah, that’s right, they call them their children.

They still call them – they always will call them their children. They’re gone. Many of those people there should have never left from there. They should have left from Bagram, the big airbase. But many of those people that were so badly hurt, they don’t talk about them. No legs, no arms, obliteration of their face, their entire body. And nobody mentions that. We left Americans behind, large numbers.

We left $85 billion worth of equipment behind. Because we took our military out first. A child would know you don’t. You take your military out last.

And just remember one final point on that, because it’s a little bit different from our subject, but not really, because it’s all about our country and common sense. For 18 months, I spoke to the leader of the Taliban. The press was very upset that I spoke to him. His name is Abdul.

I said, Abdul, don’t do this, Abdul. Don’t do this. But why, but why? He said, do you send me a picture of my home? I said, Abdul, you’re going to have to figure that one out for yourself. But don’t do this, Abdul, because it’s going to end badly for you. But for 18 months, we didn’t have one soldier shot at or killed in Afghanistan. And then we took our soldiers out.

We had a very, very disgraceful – a disgraceful election. And this group came in, and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing, and they still don’t. They’ve gotten worse. You know, with experience, you’re supposed to get better.

They got worse. They’re worse now than they ever were. And we’re going to turn our country around. We’re going to become a major producer of rare earth minerals.

We’re going to create jobs and making it really – and us – truly self-reliant. Remember the rare earth where we have to go to China? We have sites that are tied up with more than anybody else has. They’re environmentally protected.

We have sites that are phenomenal. Everything you want in terms of rare earth, and we can’t use them because of environmental protection. But we’re going to end that very quickly as soon as I get to office.

Housing Affordability

We will make housing much more affordable. As inflation is tamed, interest rates will dramatically fall. They’ll be down very, very low. We’ll get them down. We’re going to get them back down to 2.4 percent and even lower than that for a period of time.

Reducing mortgage rates is a big factor. We’re going to get them back down to, we think, 3 percent, maybe even lower than that, saving the average homebuyer thousands of dollars per year. They can now go out. Young people will be able to buy a home again and be a part of the American Dream.

We will eliminate regulations that drive up housing costs with the goal of cutting the cost of a new home in half. We think we can do that. The regulations alone cost 30 percent. Regulation costs 30 percent of a new home.

And we will open up portions of federal land for large-scale housing construction. These zones will be ultra-low tax and ultra-low regulation. One of the great, really small-business job creation programs it will be of all time. We’re going to open up our country to building homes inexpensively so young people and other people can buy homes.

You can’t buy them anymore. Millions of Americans will take part in setting these safe and beautiful communities, reviving the frontier spirit, and really, as I said, reviving the American Dream. It’s about the American Dream. It’s all about the American Dream.

We don’t talk about American Dream with these people in our office. They don’t want to talk about the American Dream because they’re the exact opposite. They’re the exact opposite.

Immigration and Housing

We also cannot ignore the impact that the flood of 21 million illegal aliens has had on driving up housing costs. That’s why my plan will ban mortgages for illegal aliens in California. They’re passing a law where they’re going to give illegal aliens money to buy a house. But our soldiers, our veterans that are laying on the streets, they can’t have them. You have soldiers right now laying on the streets of different cities, all Democrat-run.

They’re laying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels. And you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers as they walk by into a luxury lobby. Is there something wrong with that thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?

If Kamala is allowed to continue to let our country be invaded, we will face a fiscal armageddon. These migrants are consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits. You saw in Colorado this week a group from Venezuela, rough ones, rough ones. They took over large sections of a town, large sections of an area of Colorado, Aurora.

Has anyone been there? I think you’d better stay away for a little while. They had AK-47s, the ultimate guns, AK-47s. They can blow lots of people away real fast. And the sheriff didn’t want to touch them. Nobody wants to touch them. The sheriff is, 18 Venezuelans attacking my building. Would you please come over and straighten out the situation?

He’s got a deputy. You know what they say? Well, no thanks. Let’s call in the military. They’re taking over. And I said this four years ago when I realized they wanted open borders, and it’s happened. It’s happening now in Chicago. They’re taking over sections of Chicago.

What’s happening in New York and Los Angeles and many other cities is not even describable. They’re tough. They’re tough and they’re smart and they’re vicious. Don’t forget, they come from the prisons and they’re the bad criminals on the streets.

Caracas, Venezuela, has almost no crime. Next year, I’m going to suggest that the Economic Club hold its meeting in Caracas because we’ll be safer than we are in our country if they win. We’ll be far safer. But crime in Venezuela is down 72 percent because they’ve taken all of their criminals off the streets.

Not all of them. They still have some left, but they’re coming in rapidly by bus and by plane. They’re coming into our country and we’re dumping them in our country. And they say, if you come back, we will kill you.

And they’re not going back. We got them. But they’re going back. If I’m president, I guarantee you that. They’re going back fast. And now Kamala wants to give them food stamps, housing assistance, welfare, Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, and destroy all of those programs. You will destroy those programs. That is why I will ask Congress to pass legislation barring all taxpayer-funded benefits to illegal aliens.

And by the way, when you do that, they won’t come. They’re coming now because they realize they’ve never seen wealth like this. They’re getting things that they could never get. They’re coming for that reason.

If you stop that, you’ll have — you’ll be dropping the flow by 80 percent, I think even more than that. They’re coming because they’re taking care of their — let’s put them in a luxury — let’s put them in the Waldorf Astoria. That’s a nice place. I will stop the invasion and send criminal, illegal aliens back home.

America’s Sovereign Wealth Fund

And when we do all of this, we will be so successful. We’ll create America’s own sovereign wealth fund to invest in great national endeavors for the benefit of all of the American people. Why don’t we have a wealth fund? Other countries have wealth funds.

We have nothing. We have nothing. We’re going to have a sovereign wealth fund, or we can name it something different. I’ll talk about it with Mr. Paulson, who’s in the audience, and a lot of other friends of mine. And we’ll name it something that’s appropriate. Sovereign wealth fund wouldn’t be appropriate, but it’s going to be the same thing. We’ll put tremendous amounts of money through all this money that will be taken in through tariffs and other intelligent things, and we’ll have the greatest sovereign wealth fund of them all.

And we should have. And that will be used to do things that will be great for our country, including to invest wisely invest and build it up bigger and stronger and better than any place on Earth. We will build extraordinary national development projects and everything from highways to airports and to transportation, infrastructure, all of the future. We’ll be able to invest in state-of-the-art manufacturing hubs, advanced defense capabilities, cutting-edge medical research, and help save billions of dollars in preventing disease in the first place.

And I’m very honored to have been endorsed last week by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. That was a great endorsement, and he’s very much into helping people. He’s very much into helping people. I’ve known him a long time. That was a great thing when he did that. That was not easy. For a Kennedy to be endorsing a Republican, that was not easy.

But these are not Democrats. These are radical left lunatics, and you can’t let them run your country. We will invest in new and modern agricultural techniques so we can have safe, healthy, high-quality foods for our families. That’s where Bobby is so interested, foods.

He says we’re putting a lot of bad foods in our body. You look at other countries, which do far less, and they’re actually much healthier than we are. This Wealth Fund will return a gigantic profit, which will help pay down national debt. We’re going to work on national debt very strongly, by the way.

We’re going to have so much money coming in. We’re going to work on national debt. We’re at close to $36 trillion right now. We’re going to work on getting it down.

And it is many of the people in this room who will be helping to advise and recommend investments for this fund. This is how we will end the era of inflation, mayhem, and misery under Kamala Harris, the worst Vice President in the history of our country, and unleash a new era of safety, prosperity, and success for our workers, our families, and our businesses. And I’ve done it before. We did a great job, and now we really know our job well.

I know the smartest, the best people. We have the best people. We have people that — many in this room, they know exactly what we want to do. You know, it’s interesting having experience, because I won an election.

Conclusion of Speech

I went to Washington. I was only in Washington 17 times. I never stayed over. That’s according to the fake news, but I think they’re right.

So I got to know Washington well, and I know the smart ones and the dumb ones. I know the ones that can help make us great and the ones that can only take us into bad territory. I got to know a lot of people, probably as many as anybody at that level. And we have incredible talent, and we’re going to be using that talent.

We had some incredible talent, much of it sitting up here and sitting down here. They did a great job on trade. Bob Lighthizer, so many other people did such a great job. We rebuilt our military.

We rebuilt our entire military, did a great job. We have great generals — not the television generals, not the generals that took us out of Afghanistan in 24 hours and left that horrible situation, but we have great generals. We defeated ISIS. It was supposed to take five years.

It took me four weeks. Four weeks. Our generals did a great job. We have great people in our military, and our military is not woke, believe me. You couldn’t get these guys to be woke. Some of the guys on top are woke, but those aren’t the ones that are great. So we’re going to do things that we didn’t do even the first time. We had a great presidency.

We were — there was an article written the other day that the Trump presidency was a great presidency. With victory on November 5th, which will go down as the most important day in the history of our country, inflation will be gone, our energy will be unleashed, our economy will be set free, our sovereignty will be restored, our citizens will thrive, growth will come roaring back, and America’s future will be brighter than ever before. So I want to thank you all. This has been a lovely experience.

It was years ago that I was here. We talked about what we were going to do, and we did just about everything we said. And if you’d like, we’ll take a few questions, Bob. Great.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

BOB: Thank you very much, and we’re now moving, as promised, to the question-and-answer portion of the program.

Q&A Session

Our four very able questioners today are H. Rodgin Cohen, the senior chair of Sullivan & Cromwell, Sander Gerber, founding and managing partner, CEO and CIA of Hudson Bay Capital, Mr. John Paulson, founder of Paulson & Company, and Reshma Sanjani, founder and CEO of Girls Who Code and Moms First. They’re going to go in alphabetical order, and therefore, Raj, you have the first question.

H. RODGIN COHEN: Thank you, Bob, and thank you, Mr. President. Thank you. I would like to ask about the United States economic sanctions programs. These programs have been used, as you well know, to advance our national security interests, our foreign policy objectives, but they also have economic implications. And the most recent was the program against Russia in response to the Ukrainian – their invasion of Ukraine, where, for once, we got the support of all our allies. So my specific question is, would you strengthen or modify any of these economic sanctions programs, particularly Russia, including the pipeline you mentioned?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, it’s a great question. The problem with what we have with sanctions – and I was a user of sanctions, but I put them on and take them off as quickly as possible because, ultimately, it kills your dollar and it kills everything the dollar represents, and we have to continue to have that be the world currency. I think it’s important. I think it would be losing a war. If we lost – if we lost the dollar as the world currency, I think that would be the equivalent of losing a war.

That would make us a third-world country, and we can’t let it happen. So I use sanctions very powerfully against countries that deserve it, and then I take them off. Because look, you’re losing Iran, you’re losing Russia, China is out there trying to get their currency to be the dominant currency, as you know better than anybody. All of these things are happening.

You’re losing so many countries because there’s so much conflict with all of these countries that you’re going to lose that, and we can’t lose that. So I want to use sanctions as little as possible. One of the things that we have with tariffs is that I’ll say to them, you don’t honor the dollar as your world currency. Is that right?

You’re not going to do it? No, we’re not. I said, that’s okay. I’m going to put tariffs all over your product, and they’re going to say, sir, we’d love to honor the dollar as the world currency.

You know, tariffs, in addition to monetary and the money that we’ll take in, which will be bigger than you’ve ever seen in this country before, gives you tremendous political power for something like that, as an example. I stopped wars with the threat of tariffs. I stopped wars with two countries that mattered a lot. A lot of people would have been killed.

And I threatened tariffs coming into the United States if they don’t make peace. And we made a lot of – we didn’t have conflicts like you have right now. We had very intelligent people. But the biggest threat you have is you lose that currency and we have lost something that you’ll never get back.

And we can keep it if we’re smart, but they use it too much. And then they just forget about it. And these countries, like Russia – it’s going out now and doing its own thing, and they’re going out bragging about how they don’t need us anymore, et cetera, et cetera. The sad part about Russia is that Ukraine would have never happened if I was President, so we wouldn’t really have to be talking about sanctions.

But it did happen. And one of the things I’m going to do – a little bit relevant to your question – is if we win, I believe I can settle that war while I’m President-elect, before I ever get into office. I can get that war settled and get that war stopped, because it’s a horrible, horrible war. And far more people are killed in Ukraine – far more people than you’re realizing.

They’ll knock down this massive building – amazing the size of these buildings – they’ll knock it down. They’ll say, nobody was injured. No, a lot of people were killed. The real numbers are far greater than what people are looking at.

So I think it’s a very important thing. Sanctions have to be used very judiciously, and you can win. We have things much more powerful, actually, than sanctions. We have trade.

But we cannot lose our dollar standard. Very important. Thank you very much. Great.

SANDER GERBER: Thank you, Mr. President, for all the details on your economic policy. As you alluded to, tariffs are the other side of sanctions. And given that China is our major trading partner with our largest imbalance and possibly our chief security – national security threat to the United States, how can we better institutionalize trade policy and national security policy to be coordinated?

DONALD TRUMP: So I had a great relationship with President Xi of China – really very close relationship. Now, look, he likes China, I like us, so – but I don’t want to sound foolish. He was my dear, dear friend. He’s a tough guy. He’s a fierce person. I say, very smart.

You know, when you say, he’s smart, the fake news goes crazy. He said, President, Xi is smart. And I say, yeah, well, he controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist. He’s smart.

But we had a very good relationship with China until COVID. And when that came in, it was a whole different ballgame, as far as I was concerned. You know, we made a great China trade deal, maybe better than the USMCA, and I’d never talk about it, because what happened with COVID, for the whole world – $60 trillion in, you know, deaths – 70 million, 60 – nobody even knows how many deaths. And it all came out of Wuhan.

So it changed my relationship. But I think I have a great relationship with China. I had one before, and they respected us, but they respected us because they no longer thought we were fools. They used to think we were fools.

Because we built China, they would take over $500 billion a year and use it for their military and other things. And we got nothing out of that. We got some cheap product. We got – you can buy 19 pencils instead of two.

Who the hell cares? You can buy 16 dolls for your daughter instead of two nice dolls. And we got very little out of that relationship. They got a tremendous military power, and they still have it today.

But I believe we will have a very good relationship with China and with a lot of other countries that we’re not getting along with too well today. And things are going to straighten out. We’re going to get them straightened out very quickly. Very important that we get along with the rest of the world.

You know, we have things today called nuclear weapons. I rebuilt our whole military, including our nuclear capability. And so I got very familiar with it. And I say this often because I had an uncle who was the longest-serving – I believe the longest-serving.

I was told that by MIT. But he was their 39, I guess, or 41 years longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. And nuclear was something he knew a lot about. We used to talk about it.

I’d say, Uncle John, there’s no way. He was telling me about this incredible power that was being unleashed, potentially. And I say, Uncle John, you could never – and you know what? He was very modest, because I’ve seen the destructive capability.

And this world is going to have to get along, because if that’s ever unleashed, we already have too many countries that have at least remnants of it, some of it. But probably five countries, if you think. And Kim Jong-un, when I was – went to the White House after winning in 2016, I sat with President Obama, which is a ritual. And you sit and you talk.

And I said, What’s the biggest problem? He said, North Korea is the biggest problem. I don’t think it’s solvable. I said, Have you tried calling him or talking to him? And actually, the answer was yes, and he wasn’t responded to. But I did, and we were very safe. It started off a little rocky, if you remember. Little Rocket Man, I called him, and he called me things too.

He’s got a red button on his desk. I said, I have a bigger red button, and my red button works, I said. And then it started getting a little nicer, and then one day I got a call that they’d like to meet. And it was a great thing.

We had a great meeting. We had two meetings – actually, two great meetings, summits. And we had no problem with them. Now they have a problem because they’re not liking this administration.

They don’t respect this administration at all. So we have to get along. We have to get along. We can’t have World War III. You’re going to end up in World War III, just like you should have never had Russia go in. It would have never happened if a competent person led us. It would have never happened. He led them into it.

And I’m not blaming Biden. But you know what? What he was saying was exactly the wrong thing. I said, we’re going to have an invasion because of a lot of the rhetoric. It was stupid rhetoric. But it would have never happened. Not only for that reason, oil was down low. You know, oil was almost at $100 a barrel.

So Putin is one of the only people – I mean, it’s – nothing’s easy in life. But Putin at $100 a barrel – war works. At $40 a barrel, it didn’t work at all. So we’re going to get back to an intelligently run place, a place where other countries aren’t using the word – nuclear.

That word was never talked about during my – because I knew the power of it. And I talked to Putin about it. I talked to President Xi about it. I think we were going to do – you remember the talk where we were going to reduce nuclear capability substantially – all three of us.

We’re going to start it. We’re going to reduce very substantially. And then we had the election, and after the election, they didn’t talk about that or anything else, frankly. But we have to be very, very careful, because the destructive capability of nuclear – when people talk about global warming, I say the ocean is going to go down one hundredth of an inch within the next 400 years.

That’s not our problem. Our problem is nuclear warming. And we’d better be smart, and we’d better have smart people at the top that know how to deal, because these people don’t know how to deal. Putin came out today.

He endorsed Kamala. And I didn’t know. Was I supposed to call him up and say, thank you very much, I appreciate it. But he endorsed Kamala. I have a feeling. I don’t know. I don’t know exactly what to say about that. I don’t know if I’m insulted or he did me a favor.

But we have to get along with the world. We can’t have war because of the destructive capability. You can be the head of the biggest bank wherever the hell Jamie is sitting. You can be the head of the biggest bank in the world, and a couple of nukes in your bank doesn’t mean a thing.

You got to get along. This is such an important job. It’s a dangerous job too, a very dangerous job. If you look at statistically, being President is very dangerous. That throbbing feeling I have, oh, that throbbing feeling. No, it’s a very dangerous job, and you have to do it right. And if you don’t do it right, bad things will happen to the world, things like you’ve never seen before. Okay, thank you very much.

JOHN PAULSON: John Paulson behind me to your right, Mr. President. Hi, John. First let me thank you for your presentation today. President Trump, in the last fiscal year, the fiscal deficit under the Biden administration was approximately $2 trillion. Under the policies you’ve announced, the deficit would come down from items such as increased revenues from tariffs, as well as eliminating the tax incentives for the Green New Deal. These gains would be mitigated by decreases in revenues from policies such as no tax on TIFs. Overall, what do you estimate will be the impact of the fiscal deficit from your policies?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, we just hit record highs at numbers that nobody ever thought possible. You’re right, over $2 trillion. Nobody thought that was a number that was – I mean, you could go back four years. Nobody thought a number like that would be possible. It’s crazy. It’s like – it’s just horrible, actually.

But yeah, we’re – $2 trillion – and I view it as profit and loss to a certain extent. A lot of people say, oh, it’s trade. You know, you have many people say trade deficits don’t matter. I think they matter a lot.

I think they matter a lot. We’re going to have tremendous growth. This – what I’m talking about is all about growth. The tax is relatively minor compared to the growth. We’re going to make our money back on growth. We’re going to also – I mean, we’re going to grow like nobody has ever grown before. I think if this all works out, you’re going to have the auto industry come back to America. Right now, China is building two auto factories in Mexico – massive auto factories.

And they think they’re going to make their cars in Mexico and send them back into the United States with no tax. It’s not going to happen. Under this administration, it’s going to happen. And they wanted to do that during my administration.

I said, if you do it, we’re going to put a 200 percent tariff on every car and you’ll never be able to see it. There will never be one car coming across our border. And if I would have let them do it, we would have had these two factories. Well, now they’re building massive factories – more than two – and they’re going to kill Detroit.

And the head of the union, the United Auto Workers in Detroit, has done a terrible, terrible job – just a terrible job. But we’re going to bring tremendous growth back. And remember, we’re also taking in a certain percentage – I won’t name the percentage today, but it’ll be a certain tariff percentage, which will be higher than people had heard in the past. And we will be bringing in billions and billions of dollars, which will directly reduce our deficits.

Okay? Thank you very much. Good job you’ve done, by the way. Very good.

RESHMA SANJANI: Thank you. President Trump, you talked about how the increase in the price of food, gas, and rent is hurting families. But the real cost that’s breaking families’ backs and preventing women from participating in the workforce is child care. Child care is now more expensive than rent for working families and is costing the economy more than $122 billion a year, making it one of the most urgent economic issues that is facing our country.

In fact, the cost of child care is outpacing the cost of inflation, with the majority of American families of young children spending more than 20 percent of their income on child care. One thing that Democrats and Republicans have in common is that both parties talk a lot about what they’re going to do to address the child care crisis, but neither party has delivered meaningful change. If you win in November, can you commit to prioritizing legislation to make child care affordable? And if so, what specific piece of legislation will you advance?

DONALD TRUMP: Well, I would do that. And we’re sitting down. You know, I was somebody. We had Senator Marco Rubio. And my daughter, Ivanka, was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue.

I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that – because child care is child care. It’s – couldn’t – you know, it’s something – you have to have it. In this country, you have to have it. But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to, but they’ll get used to it very quickly.

And it’s not going to stop them from doing business with us, but they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. And those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re going to have – I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care. I want to stay with child care.

But those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just told you about. We’re going to be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world. Let’s help other people.

But we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about make America great again. We have to do it, because right now we’re a failing nation. So we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Secretary.

BOB: Thank you very much, Mr. Trump. It’s great that you accepted our invitation to be with us today. Thank you, Raj, Sander, John, and Reshma, for your questions. The President is now going to be leaving the building, and so we want to all stay seated while he and his team leave. But as he leaves, let’s all say thank you one more time for him accepting our invitation to be here today.

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