Read the full transcript of President Trump remarks at the Business Roundtable Quarterly Meeting, March 11, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction and Welcome
[UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:] For a conversation with Chuck Robbins of Cisco. I’m delighted to ask you to join me in welcoming back to the Business Roundtable the President of the United States.
[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:] Thank you very much. It’s a good group out there. Don’t get better, actually. Thank you very much.
[CHUCK ROBBINS:] Mr. President, thank you for being here. Thank you for coming back to the Business Roundtable. We’re very honored that you would agree to accept our invitation in the first BRT meeting after your inauguration.
[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:] That’s true. Actually, that’s true, and I have a lot of friends in the audience, a couple that I don’t like particularly much, but for the most part, very good.
[CHUCK ROBBINS:] And as we were talking about backstage, this is the largest attendance that we’ve ever had at a Business Roundtable meeting.
[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:] It’s a great honor. Thank you.
[CHUCK ROBBINS:] So, if you don’t mind, we’ll jump in.
[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:] Okay.
Ukraine-Russia Ceasefire
[CHUCK ROBBINS:] So, first of all, congratulations on the ceasefire between Ukraine and Russia today. That was hugely significant, as you know.
[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:] Well, it’s Ukraine, but we hope to get Russia. It turned out to be the, you know, I’ve been saying that Russia has been easier to deal with so far than Ukraine, which is not supposed to be the way it is, but it is, and we hope to get Russia. But we have a full ceasefire from Ukraine. That’s good. That’s very good.
Trade, Tariffs, and Government Spending
[CHUCK ROBBINS:] And then this, the people in this room, we’re going to tie us back together. The people in this room obviously are very interested in all the conversations going on around trade and tariffs that are important here. And then you’ve also had a large scale effort to root out wasteful spending in the federal government. And I believe there’s a thread that kind of ties all that together, and I’m just curious if you could share with us what that is.
[PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP:] Well, it’s basically Make America Great Again. We have a bloated, very dishonest, in many cases, federal government and bureaucracy that’s been a long time coming. Somebody should have done this many years ago, and we’re cutting numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. Doge, as we call it affectionately, you’ve been all hearing that term a lot.
Elon Musk and Government Efficiency
Elon’s been doing really a fantastic job. He suffers a little bit because of it. People go after him. But actually, I think in the end, it’ll maybe reverse itself and be just the opposite. That’s happened before. There’s people that they tend to go after one group or another, but basically it’s the other you have. They go after conservatives, and when somebody stands up and fights, it ends up their business ends up doubling.
You could see that just a little example. Goya Foods. He was just a wonderful man, the owner and family and largely Hispanic foods. And they went after him because he supported me, and this was the end of the first term, and he fought back, and it ended up that he ended up tripling his business, and it’s today a much bigger business that it was before.
And there are many examples of that, and maybe it’s gonna be that way with Elon. When I saw what was happening with this, you know, the concerted effort by paid jet. I think they’re paid agitators. And when I saw what was happening, I said, I want to buy a Tesla. And we just went to the front. He had four beautiful cars there, and I bought one in front of the press. It’s a very public purchase, and they’re beautiful and do a great job. Very good competitors with Mary and everybody else.
You know, he’s done a great job, and he shouldn’t be sacrificed or have to suffer because he wants to help government. It’s not that he’s a Republican, which is, you know, not the strong. I mean, I don’t. Sometimes I’m not even sure what he is in terms of his philosophies, but he’s a great guy. He’s a patriot. He wants to see the country straighten out, and he’s done a fantastic job with DOGE.
Government Waste and Fraud
We’ve found massive fraud, abuse, waste, and we had many, many jobs where there was nobody working but getting a check. We had contracts that expired years ago, but they were continuously being paid. Probably, I’ll bet you it’s $500 billion, perhaps, if you add it up so far, and we’re trying to get to a trillion dollars. That’s a big number.
And he did have an ability to do something that a lot of people didn’t think of. He’d come in with bigger ideas. We’d say, we want you to cut down the size of your agency by 2%, and we thought that was good. He came in, he said, 80%. I said, what the hell’s going on? 80%? And largely, and we had to do it carefully, and we had some little hiccups, not big hiccups, but we saved a tremendous amount of money for the future.
This is going into the future, and in some cases it would be 80, and in some cases it would be 5% or 2% or 3%, depending on the agency. You’re all great professionals atop, and you can almost look at some of the agencies and see which ones had to be cut and which ones didn’t, also in terms of their importance and in terms of being current.
Investment and Economic Growth
So we saved a tremendous amount of money, and I don’t know if it’s going to reach a trillion, but it’s going to reach a lot. It was an honor to have Michael there yesterday.