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Trump Speaks at Mar-a-Lago. Aired 11:30a-12p ET

Aired January 07, 2025 - 11:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

DONALD TRUMP, FORMER PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES (R) AND CURRENT U.S. PRESIDENT-ELECT: If you invest over a billion dollars in the United States, we're going to give expedited reviews to everybody, because everyone's afraid they're going to come and get caught in the quagmire, which is very prevalent in the United States, unfortunately, the quagmire of environmental and various other regulations and rules.

[11:30:13]

And I made it a point of telling people, if you invest a billion dollars or more -- and we will do this for people with far less too, but we guarantee it. We're going to move them quickly through the environmental process, sometimes, people held up 12, 13, 14, 15 years.

I saw it with plants in Louisiana, where I got it approved in literally a week. They were through the review in one week after spending 14.5 years trying to get it and they were going nowhere. It was a terrible thing. So I have been a victim of that myself over the years. And I think I know all the games and all the tricks that are played.

And much of it is just done to stop progress. So we're going to be helping you and everybody else that comes to the United States and wants to invest their money that you don't get tied up for the rest of your life and you can't do anything.

This commitment further underscores that many of the greatest business leaders on Earth are seeing a very bright economic future for America. Since the election, as you know, very -- a lot of positive things have happened. We are inheriting a difficult situation from the outgoing administration, and they're trying everything they can to make it more difficult.

Inflation is continuing to rage and interest rates are far too high. And I have been disappointed to see the Biden administration's attempt to block the reforms of the American people and that they voted for. They just -- we had a landslide election. We won every swing state. We won the popular vote by millions and millions of people.

Nobody even knows how many people, millions. And they're still counting in some areas. You know they're still counting the vote in some areas. Can you believe this? What a place, what a horrible place. One of the things we're going to do is we have got to fix the election so that we get honest counts and they get done by 10:00 in the evening or something thereabouts. They have places where they're still counting votes. President Biden's actions yesterday on offshore drilling, banning offshore drilling, will not stand. I will reverse it immediately. It'll be done immediately. And we will drill, baby, drill. We're going to be drilling in a lot of other locations.

And the energy costs are going to come way down. They will be brought down to a very low level. And that's going to bring everything else down. That's what caused it to go up, along with the ridiculous spending on the green new scam, all this money, trillions of dollars. It's like throwing it right out the window what they're doing.

And they're trying to spend so much now. They're just taking money and giving it to anybody that wants it for any project at all if it's certified under the green new scam. And they don't work, and it's too expensive. And they told me that we're going to do everything possible to make this transition to the new administration very smooth.

It's not smooth, because they're doing that. They're playing with the courts, as you know. They have been playing with the courts for four years. Probably got me more votes, because I got the highest number of votes ever gotten by a Republican by far, actually, by a lot.

And we had a great election. So I guess it didn't work. But even to this day, they're playing with the courts. They have their friendly judges that like to try and make everybody happy on the Democrat side. It's called lawfare. It's called weaponization of justice.

And it's happened at a level nobody's ever seen before. So many -- I defeated deranged Jack Smith. He's a deranged individual. I guess he's on his way back to The Hague. And we won those cases. Those were the biggest ones. And the press made such a big deal out of them. But we did nothing wrong. We did nothing wrong on anything.

And the people saw that. When they vote to -- when a Republican -- it's not easy for a Republican. When the Republican wins the popular vote by millions and wins all seven of the swing states, people said, well, he could win four. We won all seven. And we won them by a lot. That tells you we won.

That tells -- and they have been watching this injustice. I call it the injustice department. What they have done is so bad. The whole world has watched that. And it took work, but it got me a lot of votes, because when explained -- I mean, we have a judge in New York who's a very crooked judge. I'm under a gag order. I can't even talk about aspects of the case that are the most vital aspects.

I'm under a gag. Do you know that? I'm the president-elect of the United States of America. I'm a former very successful president. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had borders that were sealed and beautiful. We had -- everything was good. We had no wars. We defeated ISIS. We had no wars.

[11:35:11]

Now I'm going into a world that's burning with Russia and Ukraine, with Israel. You took a look at that attack on October 7, the attack on Israel, with the horrible way they got out, not the fact that they got out. I would have been out before them, but we would have been out of Afghanistan with dignity and strength, as opposed to looking like a bunch of fools with 13 dead and many, many badly, horrifically injured.

Nobody ever talks about them, no arms, no legs. Nobody ever talks about them. The way they got out was outrageous, leaving billions of dollars of brand-new military equipment that I bought in the hands of the Afghans and specifically the Taliban.

It's the group. And we were doing very well. We would have been out. We would have been respected. I think it's one of the reasons. It was so badly handled, that withdrawal where people are jumping onto airplanes, falling off the sides of airplanes when they're 3,000 feet in the air. And nobody's ever seen anything like that, the worst.

And because of that, I think Russia went and attacked Ukraine. When they saw that, they said, these guys are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing. But we know what we're doing now. And that's going to all end. And we have a great military. I defeated ISIS. As you know, we were in no wars. I just finished a couple.

And we got also our soldiers guarding Syria and Turkey. We're in the middle. We had 5,000 soldiers. They would have been gobbled up with two armies. We had one army 300,000. We had another one 500,000 or 600,000 looking, getting ready. We had 5,000 people in the middle. I said to a general, how do 5,000 people do in that case? And the general just looked at me and said, not well, sir, not well.

And I took them out. And you know what happened? Nothing. I got criticized. I saved 5,000 lives, actually. And we did a great job. And we're going to do an even better job because now we have a tremendous amount of experience. We have people that I can rely on.

But the 625 million acres, people can't realize. It's like the whole ocean. Take an acre. An acre -- you have a house on a half an acre, or a quarter of an acre, or an acre. If you have an acre, you have a big deal. Now, you multiply that by 625 million acres. It's like -- feels like the whole ocean.

And that's our strength. People can say we manufacture, we don't manufacture. The thing we have, we have oil and gas, more than anybody in the world. We're going to have more of it too. But they took away 625 million acres of offshore drilling. Nobody else does that.

And they think they have it, but we will put it back. I'm going to put it back on day one. I'm going to have it revoked on day one. We will go immediately if we need to. I don't think we should have to go to the courts. But if we do have to go to the courts -- they try to be sneaky. They go in and they sign.

Remember, this is a man that said he wants the transition to be smooth. Well, you don't do the kind of things. You don't have a judge working real hard to try and embarrass you, because I did nothing wrong. By the way, I did nothing, absolutely nothing wrong. If I did something wrong, I wouldn't be standing here right now because I have won all these cases.

Nobody's ever won so many cases as I have against the Justice Department. I mean, Jack Smith had cases all over the place. People were being subpoenaed. Lives were being ruined. They were spending everything they had, money. We were helping them out. We had to. They were being -- they were subpoenaing people from -- that had no idea what they were even talking about.

That's a sick group of people. And it was all to influence the election. It was all a fight against a political opponent. We have never had that in this country. We have had that in certain countries. We have had that in third-tier countries. We have had that in banana republics. But we have never had that in a place like the United States.

I don't even know if it's been on a small level. I'm sure it has been on a small level, but this was the largest level ever. They brought this moron out of The Hague. He's a mean guy. He's a mean, nasty guy. His picture was perfect, because you look at his picture, you say, that's a bad guy with his robe, his purple robe.

And he executes people. He shouldn't be allowed to execute people because he will execute everybody. He's a nutjob. But we won all of those cases with him. And, I mean, I don't know the judge in Florida, but we had a brilliant judge in Florida that saw it right through it. And we won the case. She was a brilliant judge with great courage.

[11:40:04]

The left, as we call them, the radical left, they have a way -- they play the ref, and they play it very hard. They play the ref. They go and say horrible things about judges and prosecutors. And some judges and prosecutors say, look, the only way I'm going to get these people off my back is to give victory to them. They're playing the ref.

I think it's illegal what they do. It's almost like talking -- it's worse than talking to a judge. But the judge in Florida, Judge Cannon, was brilliant and tough, and she didn't stand for it. And I don't know her and never met her until the case. And I don't believe I said even one word to her. But she was very, very strong and very, very brilliant.

And her opinion was so brilliant that they dropped their appeal. They couldn't beat the appeal. So that's what we're up against. So they say we're going to have a smooth transition. And all they do is talk. It's all talk. Everything they do is talk. We're going to have a smooth transition.

And then they take 625 million acres and they essentially landmark it so you can't ever drill there again. Well, we're going to be drilling soon. We're going to be opening up ANWR. We're going to be doing all sorts of things that nobody ever thought was even possible.

But remember when -- and just to get off the subject, because I couldn't believe it when I heard it yesterday. I couldn't believe the size of it. I mean, you put down a map and put this up. It's just massive. And remember that that's worth probably, I mean, I have had estimates, $40 trillion to $50 trillion. That's more than our national debt.

Essentially, he's thrown it away. He's thrown it away. He's taken $50 trillion. So, if we owe $35 trillion, he's taken $50 trillion of value and thrown it right out the window. We can't do that. Nobody can do that. One other thing he did yesterday, which was in many ways worse -- it's hard to believe it can be worse.

He wants all gas heaters out of your homes and apartments. He wants them to be replaced by essentially electric heaters. I don't know what it is with electric. This guy loves electric. We're going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way. This guy loves electric.

And we don't have enough electricity. And then we have A.I., where we need more. And he wants to get -- he wants everybody to have an electric heater, instead of a gas heater. Gas heater is much less expensive. The heat is much better. It's a much better heat. As the expression goes, you don't itch. Does anybody have a heater where you go and you're scratching and -- that's what they want you to have.

They don't want you to have gas where you don't have the problems of the electric. And the source is plentiful. They're much cheaper to operate. They're much better. They work much better. They look much better; 60 percent of homes and apartments have gas heaters. He wants them all removed quickly. These people are crazy.

There's something wrong with them. There's something wrong with them. They also want to go back, and they have already started that, to when you buy a faucet, that no water comes out, because they want to preserve -- even in areas that have so much water, you don't know what to do. It's called rain. It comes down from heaven.

And they want to do -- no water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens, you're in the shower 10 times as long. No water comes out of the faucet. You want to wash your hands. They want to go back to even stronger than what they have right now.

I -- as you know, I ended that policy. You can have all the water you want. Makes no difference. It comes -- especially in certain areas, we have so much water. We don't know what to do with it. But these are all things. They want very, very little water to go into your dishwasher, almost none.

And you know what people do? They just keep pressing, pressing, pressing, keep it going. They end up using more water. Likewise, washing machines, they want in your washing machine to have very little water coming out of the washing machine. So, when you wash your clothing, you have to wash it four times, instead of once. You end up using more water. We're a party of common sense. And things that I'm telling you now is really all about common sense.

On January 20, we will turn the economy around very quickly, because right now we are -- when I think of our economy, I think about inflation. That's what we have. We have inflation, I believe, at a level that we never had before. There's never been anything like it. And over the next four years, the United States is going to take off like a rocket ship.

But, really, it's already doing it. If you take a look, just last month, SoftBank announced the $200 billion. I think it'll be 200. He said between 100. And I said, how about making it 200? And he sort of said yes. But let's say it's 100, but it might be 200, right, Brian, dollars in the United States, creating more than 100,000 jobs.

[11:45:09]

Hussain just announced a tremendous investment that he's going to make, and that's money that's in the bank. He's going to come and do it, and he will do a great job, and he will build the best centers in the country, I guarantee, because I know the way he builds.

Since my election, the stock market has set records. The S&P 500 index has broken above 6,000 points for the first time ever, never even close. In a single month, small business optimism soared 41 points. It's not at 41. It went up 41 points, and that's the largest in the 39-year history of the group that does it.

According to Gallup, the American people's confidence in the economy has just surged to the highest level in history. That's why I have a news conference like that. I take the greatest business leaders in the world. I say, hey, do you want to say you're going to invest the money? They're not looking for news conferences. They're saying, what am I doing here? They go in and they invest money, but it's good to know where the smartest businesspeople in the world are investing in.

They're investing in the United States. So we have done this all in two months of not being there. We haven't been there, and it's pretty amazing, and we think we're going to do some really great things, really great things. We're being respected again all over the world. The Panama Canal is a disgrace, what took place at the Panama Canal.

Jimmy Carter gave it to them for $1, and they were supposed to treat us well. I thought it was a terrible thing to do. It's the most expensive structure ever built in the history of our country, relatively. It would be the equivalent of over -- substantially over a trillion dollars today. We lost 38,000 people.

Think of it, 38,000 people, they died from malaria, mosquitoes. They were unable to stop the mosquitoes. They paid people five times more to take the job. Many of those people died. We gave it away for $1. But the deal was that they have to treat us fairly. They don't treat us fairly. They charge more for our ships than they charge for ships of other countries.

They charge more for our Navy than they charge for navies of other countries. They laugh at us because they think we're stupid, but we're not stupid anymore. So the Panama Canal is under discussion with them right now. They violated every aspect of the agreement, and it's -- they morally violated it also.

And they want our help because it's leaking and not in good repair. And they want us to give $3 billion to help fix it. I said, well, why don't you get the money from China? Because China has basically taken it over. China is at both ends of the Panama Canal. China is running the Panama Canal.

And they come to see this Biden, this guy who should never have been allowed even to run for president. Of course, she shouldn't have either, because that never happened. I had to beat two people, not one. But they want $3 billion to fix the Panama Canal that's run by China and makes a lot of money, China, one of the most profitable structures ever built, because you have ships lined up back to Florida, frankly, and they just keep going through, and the numbers are staggering, half-a-million to a million dollars a ship.

And they took it away from us, meaning we gave it to them for a dollar, but not going to be -- not going to happen. What they have done to us, they have charged us, they have overcharged our ships, overcharged our Navy. And then, when they need repair money, they come to the United States to put it up. We get nothing.

Those days are over. Working with the Republican majorities in Congress, we will cut taxes, slash regulations, raise wages, and boost incomes at a pace the world has not seen before, and certainly not from our country. We had a big chunk of it for the first three years of prior to COVID coming in my administration.

We had the greatest economy in history. We had the -- we cut the most regulations in the history of our country, and I did that all in four years by four times more than any other president cut. We did that in four years, and we were just getting started.

We will impose new tariffs so that the products on our stores will once again be stamped with those beautiful words made in the USA. And we are not treated well, as you know, by Canada. Canada is subsidized to the tune of about $200 billion a year, plus other things. And they don't essentially have a military. They have a very small military.

They rely on our military. It's all fine, but they got to pay for that. It's very unfair. I have so many great friends. One of them is the great one, Wayne Gretzky. I said, run for prime minister. You will win in a -- it'll take two seconds. But he said, well, am I going to run for prime minister or governor? You tell me.

[11:50:17]

I said, I don't know. Let's make it governor. I like it better. But, no, something is going to have to be done. Same thing with Mexico. We have a massive deficit with Mexico. And we help Mexico a lot. They're essentially run by the cartels. And can't let that happen. Mexico is really in trouble, a lot of trouble, very dangerous place.

And we're going to be announcing a future date pretty soon. We're going to change, because we do most of the work there and it's ours. We're going to be changing, sort of the opposite of Biden, where he's closing everything up, essentially getting rid of $50 trillion to $60 trillion worth of assets.

We're going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring. That covers a lot of territory. The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name. And it's appropriate. It's appropriate.

And Mexico has to stop allowing millions of people to pour into our country. They can stop them. And we're going to put very serious tariffs on Mexico and Canada, because Canada -- they come through Canada too. And the drugs that are coming through are at record numbers, record numbers.

So we're going to make up for that by putting tariffs on Mexico and Canada, substantial tariffs. And we want to get along with everybody, but they have to -- it's got to -- it takes two to tango.

We're approaching the dawn of America's golden age. It's going to be a golden age for America. We have things that nobody else has. We have more natural resources. We have, number one -- nobody knew that until I came along. I made us number one. We were number three. I made us number one in a very short period of time in drilling.

And you can talk about windmills. They litter our country. They're littered all over our country, like dropping paper, like dropping garbage in a field. And that's what happens to them, because in a period of time, they turn to garbage, the most expensive energy ever. They only work if you get subsidy. The only people that want them are the people that are getting rich off windmills, getting massive subsidies from the U.S. government.

And it's the most expensive energy there is. It's many, many times more expensive than clean natural gas. So we're going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built. You know, off the coast of New Jersey, they want to build like 200 windmills. The people are going crazy. Nobody wants them, and they're very expensive.

They don't work without subsidy. You don't want energy that needs subsidy. Energy is a good business. You don't need subsidy. But when you build these massive towers, they're 25 stories tall, 40 stories. They have one 70 stories tall. The blades, they take three ships to ship them. It's crazy. They're dangerous.

You see what's happening up in the Massachusetts area with the whales, where they had two whales wash ashore in, I think, a 17-year period. And now they had 14 this season. The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously. And they had actually over, I think, 125 or something, over a number of years, over a number of years.

And we don't want that to happen. It's a disaster from -- it's amazing the way a true environmentalist would say, oh, we love wind. It sounds good, but that's about where it ends. After 10 years, you have to redo them. And what happens is, they don't do that. They let them stand and they rust, and they say because of the environment. I'm not a believer in this.

But they say you can't -- because it's a certain fiberglass, that the blades cannot be buried in earth, that that's an environment -- so what do you do with them? What do you do with them? And I don't know if you have ever gone to Palm Springs, California, or any of these places where you have long-term windmills standing. They're a disaster. They're rusting, rotting, closed, falling down.

This is as you enter Palm Springs. And they put new ones next to them, because nobody wants to take them down, because why should they take them down? It's very expensive to take them down. And you can't do anything with them, because the blades, you can't bury them because of the environmental protection. We will look at that. It doesn't make sense, but that's what they say.

So we are at the beginning of a great, beautiful golden age of business. And I think we're also at a golden age of common sense, because everything I'm saying to you, from a simple water faucet that doesn't allow water to come out appropriately, to all of the other elements of what we do and what we're going to do.

[11:55:01]

To take $50 trillion to $60 trillion off our country's balance sheet, because some man that has no idea what he's doing, has no idea. You know it. I know it. The Democrats know it. What they did is a crime by allowing that to happen.

And I will bet you, if you asked him today, how much acreage did you submit, essentially, did you destroy, you destroyed the economic viability of drilling in the ocean. And with A.I. coming along and all -- a lot of people don't realize that A.I. is going to be a big thing, but you will need double the electricity, at least, that we have right now.

So, right now, we produce electricity for many, many different things. A.I. is a very big deal in terms of the future. China is already building electric facilities, big, bold electric facilities. And how they're being fired up? With coal. They're being fired up with coal. And we're going to build bigger and better ones.

People like Hussain that are doing the same thing as he is, I will bet they don't do it as well, because I know how he does it. But they're doing a lot of things. The problem is, they can't get their permits, because I say, build the plant with the building. So, with the structure, build the plant, because you have gone to grid.

The grids are old. So they said, that's a great idea. In other words, build your electric facility alongside of your plant. And you could have extra output if you want, because, once you build it, you can make it larger pretty inexpensively. You could have extra output, which you will sell to the public, but build it with the plant, and people are loving that idea.

So we're going to have a lot of fun making America great again, and it's going to happen, I think, very, very quickly. It's already happened. So I would say their. And this has been pretty openly reported by the news. There's never been anything like what's happened in the last -- since we won the election, a couple of months, since we won the election, the whole perception of the whole world is different.

People from other countries have called me. They said, thank you, thank you. The perception of the whole world is different. We're going to have to settle some big problems that are going on right now. We're going to have to settle up with Russia, Ukraine. That's a disaster. I look at numbers every week, the number of people being killed in that, where people don't know, mostly soldiers now.

But the towns have been obliterated. This was a Biden fiasco that he got as he got us -- he couldn't -- that should have never happened. If we had a real president, if we had a president that knew what he was doing, Russia would have never, ever gone in. But they did go in and we have a mess. The cities are all blown up. The people have largely left.

And the soldiers are killing each other at levels that haven't been seen since the Second World War. So we will have to get that one straightened out too. That's a tough one, much tougher than it would have been before it started. I can tell you that. The deal could have been made just by an average dealmaker. Deal could have been made of that.

So thank you all for coming. We will take a couple of questions. Yes. Go ahead, please.

QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you.

I wanted to touch on the world on fire that you mentioned, but let's start, if we could, with your references to Greenland and the Panama Canal and so forth.

TRUMP: Yes.

QUESTION: Can you assure the world that, as you try to get control of these areas, you are not going to use military or economic coercion?

TRUMP: No.

QUESTION: And can you tell us a little bit about what your plan is? Are you going to negotiate a new treaty? Are you going to ask the Canadians to hold a vote? What is the strategy?

TRUMP: Yes, I can't assure you. You're talking about Panama and Greenland. No, I can't assure you on either of those two.

But I can say this, we need them for economic security. The Panama Canal was built for our military.

QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)

TRUMP: I'm not going to commit to that, no. It might be that you will have to do something.

Look, Panama Canal is vital to our country. It's being operated by China, China. And we gave the Panama Canal to Panama. We didn't give it to China. And they have abused it. They have abused that gift. It should have never been made, by the way. Giving the Panama Canal is why Jimmy Carter lost the election, in my opinion, more so maybe than the hostages. The hostages were a big deal. But if you remember, and nobody wants to

talk about the Panama Canal now, because it's inappropriate, I guess, but -- because it's a bad part of the Carter legacy. But he was a good man. Look, he was a good man. I knew him a little bit, and he was a very fine person.

But that was a big mistake. Giving the Panama Canal to Panama was a very big mistake. We lost 38,000 people. It cost us the equivalent of a trillion dollars, maybe more than -- probably the most expensive. They say it was the most expensive structure, if we call it a structure, which I guess you can, ever built.

And giving that away was a horrible thing. And I believe that's why Jimmy Carter lost the election.