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The Situation Room

Trump Addresses United Nations General Assembly; Trump Ready for Strong Tariffs Against Russia; Trump Dismisses Climate Change as "a Con Job". Aired 10:30-11a ET

Aired September 23, 2025 - 10:30   ET

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

[10:30:00]

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. PRESIDENT: -- to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs, which would stop the bloodshed, I believe, very quickly. But for those tariffs to be effective, European nations, all of you are gathered here right now, would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures.

I mean, you're much closer to the city. We have an ocean in between. You're right there. And Europe has to step it up. They can't be doing what they're doing. They're buying oil and gas from Russia while they're fighting Russia. It's embarrassing to them. And it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it, I can tell you that. They have to immediately cease all energy purchases from Russia. Otherwise, we're all wasting a lot of time.

So, I'm ready to discuss this. We're going to discuss it today with the European nations, all gathered here. I'm sure they're thrilled to hear me speak about it, but that's the way it is. I like to speak my mind and speak the truth. As we seek to reduce the threat of dangerous weapons today, I'm also calling on every nation to join us in ending the development of biological weapons once and for all. And biological is terrible, and nuclear is even beyond. And we include nuclear in that. We want to have a cessation of the development of nuclear weapons.

We know, and I know, and I get to view it all the time. Sir, would you like to see? And I look at weapons that are so powerful that we just can't ever use them. If we ever use them, the world literally might come to an end. There would be no United Nations to be talking about. There would be no nothing.

Just a few years ago, reckless experiments overseas gave us a devastating global pandemic. Yet, despite that worldwide catastrophe, many countries are continuing extremely risky research into bioweapons and man-made pathogens. This is unbelievably dangerous.

To prevent potential disasters, I'm announcing today that my administration will lead an international effort to enforce Biological Weapons Convention, which is going to be meeting with the top leaders of the world by pioneering an A.I. verification system that everyone can trust. Hopefully, the U.N. can play a constructive role, and it will also go be one of the early projects under A.I. Let's see how good it is, because a lot of people are saying it could be one of the great things ever, but it also can be dangerous, but it could be put to tremendous use and tremendous good, and this would be an example of that.

Not only is the U.N. not solving the problems it should too often, it's actually creating new problems for us to solve. The best example is the number one political issue of our time, the crisis of uncontrolled migration. It's uncontrolled. Your countries are being ruined. The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders.

In 2024, the U.N. budgeted $372 million in cash assistance to support an estimated 624,000 migrants journeying into the United States. Think of that. The U.N. is supporting people that are illegally coming into the United States, and then we have to get them out.

The U.N. also provided food, shelter, transportation, and debit cards to illegal aliens. Can you believe that? On the way to infiltrate our southern border. Millions of people came through that southern border. Just a year ago, millions and millions of people were pouring in, 25 million altogether over the four years of the incompetent Biden administration.

And now, we have it stopped, totally stopped. In fact, they're not even coming anymore because they know they can't get through. But what took place is totally unacceptable. The U.N. is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them. In the United States, we reject the idea that mass numbers of people from foreign lands can be permitted to travel halfway around the world, trample our borders, violate our sovereignty, cause unmitigated crime, and deplete our social safety net.

We have reasserted that America belongs to the American people, and I encourage all countries to take their own stand in defense of their citizens as well. You have to do that because I see it. I'm not mentioning names. I see it, and I can call every single one of them out. You're destroying your countries. They're being destroyed.

[10:35:00]

Europe is in serious trouble. They've been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody's ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe. Nobody is ever -- and nobody is doing anything to change it, to get them out. It's not sustainable. And because they choose to be politically correct, they're doing just absolutely nothing about it. And I have to say, I'm not going to be surprised if they do. I'm not going to be surprised if they do.

And I have to say, I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor -- terrible, terrible mayor. And it's been so changed. So, changed. Now, they want to go to Sharia law. But you're in a different country. You can't do that. Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe if something is not done immediately. They cannot -- this cannot be sustained.

What makes the world so beautiful is that each country is unique. But to stay this way, every sovereign nation must have the right to control their own borders. You have the right to control your borders, as we do now, and to limit the sheer numbers of migrants entering their countries and paid for by the people of that nation that were there and that built that particular nation at the time.

They put their blood, sweat, tears, money into that country, and now they're being ruined. Proud nations must be allowed to protect their communities and prevent their societies from being overwhelmed by people they have never seen before with different customs, religions, with different everything. Where migrants have violated laws, lodged false asylum claims, or claimed refugee status for illegitimate reasons, they should, in many cases, be immediately sent home.

And while we will always have a big heart for places and people that are struggling and truly compassionate, answers will be given. We have to solve the problem, and we have to solve it in their countries, not create new problems in our countries. And we are very helpful to a lot of countries that are just not able to send their people anymore. They used to send them to us in caravans of 25,000, 30,000 people each. These massive caravans of people pouring into our country, totally unchecked and unvetted. But not anymore.

According to the Council of Europe in 2024, almost 50 percent of inmates in German prisons were foreign nationals or migrants. In Austria, the number is 53 percent of the people in prisons were from places that weren't from where they are now. In Greece, the number was 54 percent. And in Switzerland, beautiful Switzerland, it's 72 percent of the people in prisons are from outside of Switzerland.

When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who repaying kindness, and that's what they did, they repaid kindness with crime, it's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. See, I can tell you. I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.

In America, we've taken bold action to swiftly shut down uncontrolled migration. Once we started detaining and deporting everyone who crossed the border and removing illegal aliens from the United States, they simply stopped coming. They're not coming anymore. We're getting a lot of credit, but they're not coming anymore. This was a humanitarian act for all involved, because on the trips up, thousands of people a week were dying. Women were being raped. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. Raped. Horribly beaten. Raped. On the trip up, the journey up, it was a long walk. It was a long, arduous journey, indeed. But it was also a historic victory against human trafficking throughout the region.

What we did was a victory. And we saved so many lives of people that wouldn't make the journey. That journey was loaded up with death. Loaded up with death. Dead bodies all along -- all along the roads of jungles to get up. They go through jungles. They go through areas so hot you couldn't breathe. They were dying of suffocation. Areas so hot that you couldn't breathe. Dead bodies all over.

By them not coming, we're saving tremendous numbers of lives. My people have done a fantastic job in doing what they did. And the American public agrees with it. I mean, I was very proud to see this morning I have the highest poll numbers I've ever had. Part of it is because of what we've done on the border. I guess the other part is what we've done on the economy.

[10:40:00]

Joe Biden's policies empowered murderers, gangs, human smugglers, child traffickers, drug cartels, and prisoners, prisoners from all over the world. The previous administration also lost nearly 300,000 children. Think of that. They lost more than 300,000 children, little children, who were trafficked into the United States on the Biden Watch, many of whom have been raped, exploited, and abused, and sold. Sold. Nobody talks about that. The fake news doesn't write about it.

With many others, young children who are missing or dead. And we found a lot of these children, and we're sending them back. And we've been sending them back to their parents. They said -- nobody knows who they are. They said, Where do you come from? And they'll give us a country, and we'll find out, and we'll figure it out, and we'll bring them back to their homes. And the mother and father rushed to the door, and their tears in their eyes. They can't believe that they're seeing their son or daughter, their little son or daughter again. We've done almost 30,000 of them so far.

Any system that results in the mass trafficking of children is inherently evil. Yet that is exactly what the globalist migration agenda has done, and it's what it's all about. In America, those days, as you know, are over. The Trump administration is working, and we are continuing to work, to track down the villains that are causing this problem, and also, as I said, to get back the 30,000. We've already returned. Now, I think we're going to have another. We're going to find a lot. You're not going to find all of them. Three hundred -- more than 300,000. They're lost or they're dead. They're lost or they're dead because of the animals that did this.

To protect our citizens, I've also designated multiple savage drug cartels as far as -- and you see this, and you see it happening right before your eyes. Let's put it this way. People don't like taking big loads of drugs in boats anymore. There aren't too many boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela. They tend not to want to travel very quickly anymore.

And we've virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea. We call them the water drugs. They kill hundreds of thousands of people. I've also designated multiple savage drug cartels as far as foreign terrorist organizations, along with two bloodthirsty transnational gangs, probably the worst gangs anywhere in the world, MS-13 and Tren de Aragua. Tren de Aragua is from Venezuela, by the way.

Such organizations torture, maim, mutilate, and murder with impunity. They're the enemies of all humanity. And for this reason, we've recently begun using the supreme power of the United States military to destroy Venezuelan terrorists and trafficking networks led by Nicolas Maduro.

To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs into the United States of America, please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That's what we're doing. We have no choice. Can't let it happen. They're destroying -- I believe we lost 300,000 people last year to drugs, 300,000. Fentanyl and other drugs. Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000 Americans. We will not let that happen.

Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We're getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they're a joke. They don't work. They're too expensive. They're not strong enough to fire up the plants that you need to make your country great. The wind doesn't blow. Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate. And they have to be rebuilt all the time, and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. And it's actually energy -- you're supposed to make money with energy, not lose money. You lose money, the governments have to subsidize. You can't put them out without massive subsidies.

And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they have very few wind farms. So, why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what they use? Coal. They use gas. They use almost anything, but they don't like wind. But they sure as hell like selling the windmills.

Europe, on the other hand, has a long way to go, with many countries being on the brink of destruction because of the green energy agenda. And I give a lot of credit to Germany.

[10:45:00]

Germany was being led down a very sick path, both on immigration, by the way, and on energy. They were going green, and they were going bankrupt. And the new leadership came in, and they went back to where they were, with fossil fuel and with nuclear, which is good. It's now safe, and you can do it properly. But they went back to where they were, and they opened up a lot of different plants, energy plants, energy-producing plants, and they're doing well. I give Germany a lot of credit for that.

They've said this is a disaster, what's happening. They were going all green. All green is all bankrupt. That's what it represents. And it's not politically correct. I'll be very badly criticized for saying it, but I'm here to tell the truth. I don't care. It doesn't matter to me.

I'm in New York City. I'm feeling a lot safer. Crime, we're getting crime down. And by the way, speaking of crime, Washington, D.C. Washington, D.C. was the crime capital of America. Now, it's a totally -- after 12 days, it's a totally safe city. Everyone's going out to dinner. They're going out to restaurants. Your wife can walk down the middle of the street with or without you. Nothing's going to happen. My people have done a fantastic job.

And yes, I called in the National Guard, and the National Guard took care of business. And they weren't politically correct, but they took care of business. We got 1,700 career criminals out, brought them back to where they came from, the countries where they came from, or put them in jails.

Washington, D.C. is now a totally safe city again. And I welcome you to come. In fact, we'll have dinner together at a local restaurant, and we'll be able to walk. We don't have to go by an armor-plated vehicle. We'll walk right over there from the White House. They've given up their powerful edge, a lot of the countries that we're talking about, in oil and gas, such as essentially closing the great North Sea oil. Oh, the North Sea. I know it so well. Aberdeen was the oil capital of Europe.

And there's tremendous oil that hasn't been found in the North Sea. Tremendous oil. And I was with the Prime Minister, I respect and like a lot. And I said, you're sitting with the greatest asset. They essentially closed it by making it so highly taxed that no developer, no oil company can go there. They have tremendous oil left. And more importantly, they have tremendous oil that hasn't even been found yet. And what a tremendous asset for the United Kingdom. And I hope the prime minister is listening because I told it to him three days in a row.

That's all he heard. North Sea oil, North Sea, because I want to see them do well. I want to stop seeing them ruining that beautiful Scottish and English countryside with windmills and massive solar panels that go seven miles by seven miles, taking away farmland. But we're not letting this happen in America.

In 1982, the executive director of the United Nations Environmental Program predicted that by the year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe. He said that it will be irreversible as any nuclear holocaust would be. This is what they said at the United Nations. What happened? Here we are. Another U.N. official stated in 1989 that within a decade, entire nations could be wiped off the map by global warming. Not happening.

You know, it used to be global cooling. If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler. So, now they could just call it climate change because that way they can't miss climate change, because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change.

It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world in my opinion. Climate change, no matter what happens, you're involved in that. No more global warming. No more global cooling. All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong. They were made by stupid people that have cost their country's fortunes and given those same countries no chance for success.

If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. And I'm really good at predicting things. You know, they actually said -- during the campaign they had a hat, the best-selling hat, Trump was right about everything. And I don't say that in a braggadocious way, but it's true. I've been right about everything.

[10:50:00]

And I'm telling you that if you don't get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. And if you don't stop people that you've never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail. I'm the president of the United States, but I worry about Europe. I love Europe. I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration.

This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake, and they cannot let that happen any longer. You're doing it because you want to be nice, you want to be politically correct, and you're destroying your heritage. They must take control strongly and immediately of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it's too late.

The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions, and they're heading down a path of total destruction. You know the carbon footprint was a big, big thing a few years ago. I remember hearing about the carbon footprint, and then President Obama would get into Air Force One, a massive Boeing 747, and not a new one, an old one with old engines that spew everything into the atmosphere.

He'd talk about the carbon footprint. We must do something. Then he'd get in, and he'd fly from Washington to Hawaii to play a round of golf. And then he'd get back onto that big, beautiful plane, and he'd fly back, and he'd talk about, again, global warming and the carbon footprint. It's a con job.

At extreme cost and expense, Europe reduced its own carbon footprint by 37 percent. Think of that. Congratulations, Europe. Great job. You cost yourself a lot of jobs, a lot of factories closed, but you reduced the carbon footprint by 37 percent. However, for all of that sacrifice and much more, it's been totally wiped out, and then some by a global increase of 54 percent, much of it coming from China and other countries that are thriving around China, which now produces more CO2 than all the other developed nations in the world. So, all of these countries are working so hard on the carbon footprint, which is nonsense, by the way. It's nonsense.

You know, it's interesting. In the United States, we have still radicalized environmentalists, and they want the factories to stop. Everything should stop. No more cows. We don't want cows anymore. I guess they want to kill all the cows. They want to do things that are just unbelievable. And you have it, too.

But, you know, we have a border, strong, and we have a shape, and that shape doesn't just go straight up, that shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere. And if we had the most clean air, and I think we do, we have very clean air. We have the cleanest air we've had in many, many years. But the problem is that other countries, like China, which has air that's a little bit rough, it blows. And no matter what you're doing down here, the air up here tends to get very dirty because it comes in from other countries where their air isn't so clean. And the environmentalists refuse to acknowledge that.

Same thing with garbage. In Asia, they dump much of their garbage right into the ocean. And over about a one-week and two-week journey, it flows right past Los Angeles. You've seen it. Massive amounts of garbage, almost too much to do anything about, flowing past Los Angeles, past San Francisco. And then somebody would get in trouble because he dropped a cigarette on the beach. The whole thing is crazy.

The primary effect of these brutal green energy policies has not been to help the environment, but to redistribute manufacturing and industrial activity from developed countries that follow the insane rules that are put down to polluting countries that break the rules and are making a fortune. They're making a fortune. European electricity bills are now four to five times more expensive than those in China, and two to three times higher than the United States. And our bills are coming way down. You probably see that our gasoline prices are way down.

[10:55:00]

You know, we have an expression, drill, baby, drill. And that's what we're doing. We're going to be much lower a year from now. But they've come way down over the last year. As a result, every air conditioner is like very uncommon to see one in some of these countries because the electric costs are so high.

So, while the U.S. has approximately 1,300 heat-related deaths annually, that's a lot, Europe loses more than 175,000 people to heat deaths each year because the costs are so expensive you can't turn on an air conditioner. What is that all about? That's not Europe. That's not the Europe that I love and know, all in the name of pretending to stop the global warming hoax.

The entire globalist concept of asking successful industrialized nations to inflict pain on themselves and radically disrupt their entire societies must be rejected completely and totally, and it must be immediate. That's why in America I withdrew from the fake Paris Climate Accord, where, by the way, America was paying so much more than every country. Others weren't paying. China didn't have to pay until 2030. Russia was given an old standard that was easy to meet, the 1990 standard.

But for the United States, we're supposed to pay like a trillion dollars. And I said, this is another scam. The fact is, the United States has been taken advantage of by the world for many, many years, but not any longer, as you probably noticed. I unleashed massive energy production and signed historic executive orders to hunt for oil, but we don't have to do much hunting because we have the most oil of any nation anywhere, oil and gas in the world.

And if you add coal, we have the most of any nation in the world. Clean -- I call it clean, beautiful coal. You can do things today with coal that you couldn't have done 10 years ago, 15 years. So, I have a little standing order in the White House, never use the word coal, only use the words clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better, doesn't it? But we stand ready to provide any country with abundant, affordable energy supplies if you need them, when most of you do.

We're proudly exporting energy all over the world. We're now the largest exporter. In the United States, we want trade and robust commerce with all nations, everybody. We want to help nations. We're going to help nations, but it must also be fair and reciprocal. The challenge with trade is much the same with climate. The countries that followed the rules, all their factories have been plundered. It's really sad to watch. They've been broken. They've been broken by countries that broke the rules.

That's why the United States is now applying tariffs to other countries and much as these tariffs were for many years applied to us, uncontrollably applied to us, we've used tariffs as a defense mechanism under the Trump administration, including my first term where hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs were taken in. And by the way, we had the lowest inflation and now we have very low inflation.

The only thing different is that we have hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into our country. But this is how we will ensure that the system works for everyone and is sustainable into the future. We're also using tariffs to defend our sovereignty and security throughout the world, including against nations that have taken advantage of former U.S. administrations for decades, including the most corrupt, incompetent administration in history, the sleepy Joe Biden administration.

Brazil now faces major tariffs in response to its unprecedented efforts to interfere in the rights and freedoms of our American citizens and others. We censorship, we pressure weaponization, judicial corruption, and targeting of political critics in the United States.

I have a little problem saying this because I must tell you, I was walking in and the leader of Brazil was walking out. We saw him and I saw him, he saw me and we embraced. And then I'm saying, can you believe I'm going to be saying this in just two minutes?

But we actually agreed that we would meet next week. We didn't have much time to talk about, like about 20 second. They were in retrospect. I'm glad I waited because this thing didn't work out too well. But we did talk. We had a good talk and we agreed to meet next week, if that's of interest. But he seemed like a very nice man. Actually, we -- he like me, I like him.

But if you -- and I only do business with people I like. I don't think -- when I don't like him, I don't like him. But we had, at least for about 39 seconds --

[11:00:00]