Transcript: President Trump Remarks in Dublin, Ireland – Sep 12, 2026

I said, put on a Make America Great Again hat and come on, let’s go. But she sends her regards, I have to say. My son, Don, is here — a great friend of yours.

Where’s Don? Don’s here with our whole group, our whole group of family, and we just got married. He’s happily married, which is nice.

He’s calmed down so much. It’s amazing. That’s a good sign. He’s like a different human being.

He had a lot of energy. Now he’s a little less energy. That’s a good thing. They have a very great relationship, and the kids are here, and they have a lot of wonderful people with us. Everyone wanted to come.

Usually, when you go to some of the places — I don’t want to name countries, but some of these countries are rough — and they want to come. They said, we’d love to go, any trip would love, and I notify them, how would you like to come? I can’t do it, but the answer is maybe I’ll take a pass.

Ireland’s Historic Ties to America

But from our country’s earliest days, the Irish have been great friends of America and produced some of the greatest citizens — really, really incredible people. I got to meet your president, Catherine Connolly, a little while ago, and she was terrific.

We talked about a lot of different things. We talked about the greatness of the people, but it was an Irish aide to General George Washington who first used the term The United States of America. And today, I’m proud to report that The United States of America is doing better, literally better than it’s ever done before. We have $21 trillion being invested. Can you believe it?

It used to be — you took all of our medical companies. We’ve got to get a couple of them back. You people did very well. You fleeced us, but that’s okay.

We were like a bunch of babies, but we’re not babies anymore. There’s a lot of room to go around, and our relationship with you is fantastic, actually — fantastic. And despite what you did to us on trade, you know what I’m talking about, all these are the greatest visit.

For those watching on television — you’ve got a lot of television back there, by the way — these are among the most successful business people primarily anywhere in the world. You’re among the most successful people in the world, so it’s an honor to be with you. But there’s never been a better time to do business in The USA. Less than two years ago, our country was dead.

We had a dead country. We had a president who didn’t know who the hell he was, what he was — had no idea. Couldn’t walk down a flight of stairs. Couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs. If he made a speech, which was very rare — like once a year, it was a lot — he could never find his way off the stage.

It was never pretty. But he was a great debater. Great debate. Remember the debate?

But we had a president who hurt our country, frankly, and now we have the hottest country anywhere in the world. We’re the hottest country in the world right now. I was with the King of Saudi Arabia not so long ago, and he said that. He was talking about a year ago, but at the time it was appropriate — now it’s two years ago.

But a year ago, you were a dead country. We thought you were finished as a country, literally finished. A lot of people thought that. And he said, now you’re the hottest country in the world, and we are the hottest country in the world.

America’s Economic Resurgence

In four years of the last administration, they got less than $1 trillion in new investment into our country. And think of it, we’re at now — the new numbers just came out — we’re at almost $21 trillion in sixteen months. $21 trillion — no country’s ever done that or come close to it.

Everyone’s coming back, and a big part of it is tariffs, because now if you build and you don’t send it in free of charge — you make it someplace else — you have to pay a tariff. So I said, there’s only one thing you can do to solve that problem: you have to build your plant, your factory.

You have to build it in The US. We have more auto plants being built than we’ve ever had. We have AI — we’re dominating AI. We’re leading everybody, including China.

I’m meeting with President Xi in a week and a half from now, and it’ll be great. But we’re leading in AI. We’re leading in everything, every category.

A Round of Golf with the Secret Service

And I’m hearing about a tent that’s in very weak shape. Walsh is known for cost cutting, and sometimes he’ll cost cut to a point where I said, Walsh, you’ve got to get structurally sound facilities. This tent is going to come down. If about nine monstrous Secret Service people rush up and grab people, they consider all of your talent, they consider you collateral damage.

They don’t give a damn about you. I was with the head of the biggest company in the world. We’re playing golf, and we have hundreds of Secret Service all over the course. In fact, they said, does Trump cheat?

I can’t cheat. You have 250 Secret Service agents running down. It’s not that I wouldn’t cheat, but you can’t move the ball. I don’t know if they play or not, but they know you’re not supposed to be moving the ball around, okay?

But the guy said, well, I’m a very big executive, so if something happens with the president, they see all these trucks and tanks — this is a big deal. And he said, what about me? Sir, I’m sorry, you’re considered collateral damage. You’re on your own, sir. He didn’t feel too good — he wasn’t sure if he should finish out the round, actually.

But they’re amazing. The Secret Service has been great, and they don’t play games, especially since Butler, Pennsylvania. They don’t play any games, I can tell you that. And we have Sean, the head of Secret Service, here. Where is Sean? He probably doesn’t want to say — he’s one of these guys.

He doesn’t want to be known. He doesn’t want to be seen. But he’s right there. He came to this visit — he doesn’t usually do it, but it happened to be Ireland, and he’s about as Irish as anybody in this room.

Irish Investment in America and the Stock Market

And it’s good to have him. He does a great job. I’m pleased to say that Ireland is now the sixth largest source of foreign direct investment in The United States, with nearly $392 billion invested in 2025. And because the market is the best market we’ve ever had, we hit 80 all-time highs during this period of about fifteen months. So your investment is up probably 60 or 70%, which means you’re going to be considered brilliant by your company or whoever you’re representing, because your investment, if you look over the last year and a half that I’ve been president, your numbers have practically doubled.

So congratulations on your genius. And you know what your genius was? Investing in Trump and investing in The United States. And before that, you should ask for a very substantial pay raise, if that’s the kind of remuneration that you get. But we are — we’re up, and people are really liking us right now. And 401(k)s are up about $4.546 million dollars. And these are people that are in the police forces, in some cases soldiers or accountants or lawyers or whatever. A lot of 401(k)s, millions and millions, and they’re up at record levels — never been so high.

So everybody’s benefiting. And under the Trump administration, our people are prospering at all levels like never before. The stock market is one of a kind. So again, record after record. Americans are working today at levels that we have never seen.

There are more people working in America and The United States today by far than at any point in the history of our country. That’s a great stat. There are some stats that you really don’t have to worry about too much in terms of defense, because the fake news back there, they always have a reason. However, when you say more people are working in The United States than ever before, there’s not that much they can say. It’s like a really good statistic.

We’ve removed one obstacle after another to investment in The United States, and that includes from people like yourselves, most of you from Ireland or foreign countries. It was a little bit tough, and we’ve removed all those barriers.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill”

Last year, I proudly signed the great big beautiful bill, which was about the biggest thing ever signed in terms of economic wealth and in terms of law, order, and safety. It’s the largest tax cut in American history. We passed no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and no tax on Social Security for our great seniors.

Nobody thought that was possible to get, and it’s had a tremendous impact, actually. Think of it — no tax on overtime, and the overtime business in The United States, they’re just working tremendous hours. They’re working harder.

They’re working more. It’s sort of the opposite of the communist philosophy, which is very prevalent in terms of some people running for office. But I don’t think they’re going to get too far. I talked about our country will never be a socialist country. And the reason I said that was very plain.

I never thought it would be, but I never had to worry about it, because they skipped socialism — they’ve come down to communism. You have the same thing a little bit. I’m reading some stories about you, but we’re shutting it down pretty good. We’re not going to have any communists running our country.

That, I can tell you. And for businesses like many of those here, we provided 100% expensing and bonus depreciation. So for those that are investing, they get one year — you write off the whole thing. If you build a building, if you build a plant, you write the whole damn thing off in one year. It used to take forty years, and it’s called one-year expensing, and it’s an amazing thing.

I did it in my first term. So in my first term, we had the greatest economy, even though we got hit at the end with COVID — we had the greatest economy we have had. And even with COVID, the stock market was the highest it had ever been when I left office. And then we had a rigged election, as you know.

It was totally rigged, but I won three times — I didn’t win twice, I won three times. But when I left office, we had the highest stock market in the history of our country. Now we have a stock market that’s much higher even than that.

But we had the highest stock market. It was, up until now, the most successful economy that we had ever had. But I believe you’re going to see that this is blowing it away. The press is trying to minimize it as much as possible, but at certain points you can’t, because you see the numbers — last week, a couple of days ago, they came out with 162,000.

They were projecting 25,000 jobs, and it turned out to be 162,000. And we have many more than that in the hopper, because we’re building plants, factories, auto. Auto plants are going through the roof. All the auto companies are coming in and building massive plants — Toyota, Honda. These companies are coming in building the biggest plants in the world.

General Motors and Ford are going wild, and they’re all doing things that nobody ever thought they’d see happening in The United States. There has never been anything like it in any country. So we provided the 100% expensing. It gets a lot of people to do things that maybe they would have waited for, but now they do it. They write off the entire cost of a factory.

They write off all of their equipment, everything else, in one year. And if you build your factory in America, you have zero tariffs to pay. Let’s say they’re paying 50% or 100% tariffs, but if they come into our country, they have zero tariffs to pay. That has been used on us by other countries, but I don’t think it’s effective.

I think we have the advantage. We have certain advantages that we would have lost over a period of time.

The 2024 Election

I actually think if I didn’t win, our country would be — I think, if we had Kamala, it’s another beauty. How about this? You’re beating Biden so badly, you’re winning the race, it’s over, you’re up by 25, 30. The race is over. And they say, let’s put somebody else in.

That’s like Dana White, the great Dana White, UFC — he’ll have a fighter getting the hell beat out of him, and they say, let’s put somebody else in. The guy on the other side said, what, so you’re winning, and then they put somebody in.

So the somebody was Kamala, and another beauty. She didn’t work too well. She didn’t play too well with our business people or anybody else, for that matter. And I hear — this is not even believable — I hear she’s doing well in the polls. Can you believe she’s doing well against other Democrats?

So we have — I would say this as a Republican — we should be so lucky. But you never know what happens. Politics is a funny business.

Manufacturing and AI Leadership

But factory construction is booming like it has never boomed. We’ve got so many things happening that nobody thought America would be in the position that we are now. And it took place much faster.

I will say this — I like to say that I’m good at whether it’s predicting or doing things, sort of a combination of both. But nobody thought, including me, that it could happen to this extent, this fast. But we work hard and we work smart. We’ve cut a record number of job-killing regulations.

That’s a big factor. In Europe, the regulations are through the roof. They can’t breathe. I’m not coming in to insult anybody, and I say it to anybody that would listen. They have regulations that are just unacceptable.

American Energy Dominance

They make it impossible for you to do business. We’ve unleashed our vast energy resources to make America the number one supplier of oil and natural gas on Earth. We’re bigger than Saudi Arabia now — Saudi Arabia and Russia combined, and soon it’ll be combined times two. And that’s not including Venezuela.

Venezuela’s Oil

As you know, we had a short military conflict — I call it that. They say, could you maybe not use the word war? Because when you use the word war, it’s a little different. So I call it a military conflict. I think Iran is a military conflict.

We’re knocking the hell out of them, but that’s a military conflict — it’s a larger nation. But with Venezuela, we took that over. We won the war. We’re working very well with the people that are now running it.

It’s millions and millions of barrels of oil every single day. Amazing. And we paid for the war many, many times over. But more importantly, long term, I think it’s going to be just incredible. It’s 65 billion barrels of oil.

It’s good for five hundred years. We’re very fertile — it’s one of the top two or three most fertile in the world in terms of oil. And we’re getting along great with the people. Venezuela is so happy now.

The big oil companies are moving in. They’re starting to drill. They’re starting to build their rigs, and massive rigs are being built. In Venezuela, the hunt for oil is very complicated — you spend billions and billions of dollars trying to find oil.

In Venezuela, you just go like this — there’s oil coming out of the ground. I don’t know if it’s good in terms of living, but boy, if you want oil, this place is unbelievable. There’s oil popping up over there. Let’s give it a shot.

They hit — sir, that’s good for 10 billion barrels. Okay? Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. You look at the ground, you don’t have to be too great at oil. If you know nothing about oil and you want to hunt for oil, go to Venezuela to get a lot of oil. You just look at the ground, you see oil all over the place, and you say, that looks like a good location to start.

Military Strength and New Defense Technology

But under our leadership, we’ve made record investments in the United States military. We’re the strongest military in the world by far, and we’re rapidly growing our defense industrial base.

As Ireland expands its military investment, we have many opportunities to expand our partnership. Ireland wants to buy our equipment — everybody does. Now what we’re doing, because the demand for our equipment is incredible — the Patriot missile, as an example — two and a half months ago, they shot 111 missiles at one of our aircraft carriers. 111 over the course of less than an hour.

Out of the 111 — and these things go from 4,000 to 8,600 miles an hour, think of what that is — 8,600, the speed of the missiles. And out of the 111, all 111 were knocked down. They never even got close to the ship.

Think of that technology. Five years ago, you couldn’t think of it. They had protection, but if you were hitting at 50%, you were lucky, and 50% is not very good if you’re talking about the kind of destructive capability that we talk about. So we have the THAAD system and the Patriot system. We have the Tomahawks for offense. Everybody wants our equipment, and what we’re doing is we’re forcing these companies — they’re great companies, but they’ve got to make it faster.

Some are building five, six plants, four plants, three plants. So we make the great equipment, but we are putting it out much faster. That process has already begun. Some of the companies were building brand new plants. We’re not just saying you have to go twenty-four seven in the same plant.

They’re building all these new plants with new ideas, new equipment, lasers to knock down missiles. The lasers for missiles are great, because they’re so much more cost effective. We have Gatling guns — the old-fashioned Gatling guns. It puts, literally, what’s called a wall of lead. If you have a — I mean, you have to see this stuff to believe it.

But if you have a hundred drones coming, you get one of these operated by a computer, and it’s considered a wall of lead. The drone just hits it up in the air way far away, like a wall, and you see these things just disintegrating. What that does is make it much more cost effective than sending a missile up to knock down a $35,000 drone with a very expensive missile. But we have other things coming online very soon that are unbelievable, between the Gatling and various computerized machine-gun-type equipment.

And I think especially the lasers — what they can do is melt them. It hits a wall and they melt, and you see them coming down. They look like they got poured out of a hot plate.

Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. So we have a lot of very good stuff, and your country and other countries are buying it in record numbers, and we’re way advanced on all military equipment. It’s one of the reasons Venezuela went so fast. They had defense from other countries, and the defense equipment obviously didn’t have any impact.

We lost no soldiers. It was a very violent, powerful operation. We lost no soldiers — think of it. So it’s pretty amazing.

But our equipment was good, and the defensive equipment that they had from other countries just didn’t work. It was no match for what we had. Everyone’s seen the dominance of the American military equipment all over the planet, and you see it now with Iran.

Clearing the Strait of Hormuz

We took over the Hormuz Strait. We cleared out all the mines. Even I said, well, how come they’re not shooting down our minesweepers? Sir, these minesweepers are underwater — they work underwater at all times. I said, why do you do that? Well, generally speaking, when there’s mines, there’s a lot of hostility outside.

I said, it makes sense, right? In other words, if there are mines in some waterway, generally speaking, when you see there are mines, there are people shooting at you. So if you’re underwater, they don’t know you’re there. But we knocked out and we took out every mine. There’s no mines in there.

Nothing. And we use a similar weapon to what we did with the drug boats.

Securing the Border and Cutting the Drug Trade

We’ve cut drugs coming into The United States through the Southern border. Nobody comes through The United States now.

It sounds ridiculous, but we had 25 million people coming through the Southern border over the last administration. And in the last sixteen months, zero people came in. The drugs are down about seventy-one percent — but they’re down 97% in the water, and we haven’t even focused on the land yet.

We’re just starting to focus. Water is a bigger problem, believe it or not, coming in through the Gulf — by the way, the Gulf of America. Have you heard of it? The Gulf of America was the Gulf of Mexico, and that’s the Gulf of America now. But coming in through the sea from the ocean, you’ve seen what happens.

For years, they would interdict — they would get the boat, take the guy, bring him to court in Miami or someplace. He’d be out by that evening, and by the following day he’d be sailing another boat loaded up with drugs. Each one of those boats can kill twenty-five thousand people.

On average, twenty-five thousand people. So that’s down — just think of this, ninety-seven percent. Before, it was unstoppable. It was just like musical chairs, being very nice about it. It’s a brutal thing.

But when you think about it, it’s not really brutal, because every boat — and we’ve got this figured out pretty closely — they’re very similar. They’re fast boats, but they’re not fast compared to missiles. They’re fast compared to other boats. But every boat kills twenty-five thousand people.

So if you figure you’re knocking out a boat, there’s nothing nasty about that. But we’ve got it down by 97%, and the only thing is we’re trying to figure out who are the three percent, because we consider them to be the bravest people anywhere in the world. When you look at what’s happened, drugs are down now in America and The United States by sixty-two — this is over a very short period of time, over sixteen, seventeen months. Drugs are down 67%.

Who would have thought that was possible?

Crime Reduction in Washington, D.C., and Other Cities

A couple of good examples also — crime in our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. was through the roof. It was a very dangerous place. And I sent in the National Guard, and these are rural people that are in based on merit. We won a case in the Supreme Court where everything we do is based on merit.

Our country was built on merit. It wasn’t built on, let’s say, diversity or various other things — it was built on merit. We won — people were surprised a little bit, but we won the Supreme Court. And we have a military that’s based on merit. They’re tough guys.

And we put them in Washington, D.C., and they worked with the police. And we have crime down in Washington, D.C. It went from an extremely unsafe city to one of the safest cities in the country and one of the safest capitals anywhere in the world. And that’s all been done well. After thirty days, it was good.

After sixty days, it was very good. And after ninety days, it was like people couldn’t believe it. We took out 5,000 hard criminals. We took them out, brought them back. Many of them came in through the open border stupidity of Joe Biden.

What happened with that border was just — people were not checking, not vetting, nothing. They come from jails. They come from insane asylums, mental institutions, drug dealers, murderers. I would say 11,888, six in my head — that’s the number.

Murderers. And of that, 50% or more murdered more than one. These people were allowed to come into our country. They’re not allowed anymore.

We took out over 5,000 hard criminals in Washington, D.C. We got them out. In getting them out, we weren’t nice about it either. We got them out. And there’s a statistic that I think is great, because it’s so doable.

2% of the people create 91% of the crime. Think of that. That’s so doable, because if I said 60% or 50 or 30 or 20 — it’s 2% that create almost all of the crime. So when you get rid of the 2%, and we got rid of them, all of a sudden you have very little crime.

So Washington has become a beautiful, safe city. We did it with Memphis also. And if a guy like — he’s a lousy governor, he’s terrible — but if a guy like Pritzker would ask us from Illinois to help him with Chicago, we would have no crime.

You’d have very little crime in Chicago or Los Angeles or New York. They’re run by Democrats — they’re called blue states, run by Democrats. The Republican states, the red states, are very, very safe.

But our country is doing incredibly well. We have the lowest crime numbers, the best crime numbers we’ve had in the history of our country. The murder rate — it’s a lousy thing to talk about — but the murder rate is down.

Lowest it’s been since the year 1900, a hundred and twenty-five years. That’s despite people coming in — now we’ve gotten a lot of them out. We’ve moved them out. We brought them back to the countries from where they came. They came from The Congo.

They came from all over Africa. They came from all over The Middle East, from South America. They came from all over, and there was no discrimination — they came from all over.

We got them the hell out.

Messages to Europe, the U.K., and NATO

And frankly, The United Kingdom has to do the same thing, I hate to tell you. They could watch what we’ve done, and so could other European countries. I love Europe. My mother was from Scotland.

My father was from Germany. I love Europe. I have a natural inclination, and I sort of hate to see what’s happening with Europe. I hate to see what’s happening on trade. I hate to see what’s happening on energy, and I hate to see what’s happening on immigration.

That immigration — what you’re doing to yourselves, you’re just killing yourselves. But we’re going to work with them, and we do work with them. Very disappointing in many ways — NATO didn’t want to help us with the Strait, even though we don’t get any oil from the Strait. We don’t need it.

We have a lot of oil. We have more oil than anybody, as you know. But we thought it was important, and they get a lot out there. They get fifty, sixty percent, 40% to different countries.

But I said, would you like to help us with the Hormuz Strait? No, we’d rather not get involved. I said, you’d rather — we give all that money to NATO. Indirectly, they’re saving us a lot of money, because I didn’t do a heavy sell, honestly.

I didn’t do a Trump kind of a sell. I just said, would you like to help us with the Hormuz Strait, Mr. President or Mr. Prime Minister? No, we’d rather not get involved, Mr. President. Oh, thank you very much.

But I put it down, because why the hell are we helping them? So you’ll be hearing that later.

Closing Remarks

But I just want to thank you. This country is a fantastic place. I love it. I have investments here, but that’s not why I love it. I like it because it’s special people. You have unbelievable people in Ireland. The hospitality of Irish people, and I’ve heard it for years.

They say you can’t generalize about groups of people, countries, but you can. People love coming to Ireland. You know why? Because they love you. They love the people.

There’s a friendliness. There’s also a vicious and a toughness — let me tell you. You are some of the most vicious b*s I’ve ever met. But when you want to be nice, there’s nobody nicer.

Okay? And I just want to thank you. It’s an honor to be here. I’m going to actually go now to Doonbeg. Shane is leading, and Rory is doing well, and you have about seven Irish golfers that are looking pretty good for the hunt, so we’ll take a look.

But it’ll be very exciting, and it’s an honor to be here. Mr. Ambassador and Lynn, have a good time. Enjoy yourselves. Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody.

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