PoolReport - Remarks by President Trump Before Marine One Departure
POTUS on Baltimore
Baltimore has been very badly mishandled for many years. As you know, Congressman Cummings has been there for a long time. He’s had a very iron hand on it. It’s a corrupt city; there’s no question about it. All you have to do is look at the facts. The government has pumped in, over the years, billions and billions of dollars to no avail – to absolutely no avail.
Baltimore is a – it’s an example of what corrupt government leads to. Billions of dollars have been given, and I feel so sorry for the people of Baltimore. And if they ask me, we will get involved. But we’re already involved from the standpoint that, over many years, billions and billions of dollars have been given to Baltimore. It’s been misspent. It’s been missing. It’s been stolen with a lot of corrupt government. And as you know, Cummings has been in charge.
Now, I will say this: I think that Representative Cummings should take his Oversight Committee and start doing oversight on Baltimore. He’d find out some real things.
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the people of Baltimore are very thankful – they have let us know by the thousands of people – because of the fact that finally somebody is pointing out how corrupt Baltimore is, how billions and billions of dollars have been stolen. And the ones that like it the best – what I'm doing – are African American voters. Those are the ones.
POTUS on China
So the talks are moving very well with China, but they were often with China. But China always makes a new deal at the end, or seems to. We’re taking in billions and billions of dollars from China in the form of tariffs. Our people are not paying for it. China reduced their currency. They devalued their currency, and they’re pumping money into the system in order to pay for it.
They had the worst year in 27 years. They’ve had a terrible year because of the tariffs. A lot of companies are moving out of China. You’ve never seen this before. The United States is doing phenomenally well and we’re taking in tens of billions of dollars for – from China.
We’re giving some money to our farmers who have been really targeted by China to do a number on them, and – because they like me. The farmers like me and I love the farmers. And I will say that the farmers are very grateful. The most they’ve ever spent on agricultural product is $16 billion. So when they pulled out, I took just a small part of the money that China is paying us, and I gave it toward the farmers and the farmers are very happy.
POTUS on the FED
The Fed moved, in my opinion, far too early and far too severely. It puts me at a – somewhat of a disadvantage. Fortunately, I’ve made the economy so strong that nothing is going to stop us. But the Fed could have made it a lot easier. I would like to see a large cut, and I’d like to see immediately the quantitative tightening stopped. It should be stopped. For them to have done quantitative tightening and also higher interest rates simultaneously, I think, was a big mistake.
I also think that had they not done it – as good as we’ve done, we’ve set a record, as you will tell, as you will say, in the stock market. We have the all-time high in the history of the stock market. I think I would have been 10,000 points higher and I think we would have been in the fours with GDP.
President Obama had zero interest rates; we have normalized interest rates. With zero interest rates, anything happens. And yet we still blew his economy away.
POTUS on NK
My relationship with Kim Jong Un is a very good one, as I'm sure you've seen.
We'll see what happens. I can't tell you what's going to happen. I know one thing: that if my opponent was President – if she won – you would be in a major war right now with North Korea. And we are nowhere close.
So we'll see. I have a good relationship with him. I like him; he likes me. We'll see what happens.
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