Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Remarks by Trump, Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing, 04-02-20
REMARKS
Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing
HEALTHCARE
Issued on: April 3, 2020
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
April 2, 2020
5:22 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. Thank you very much. Good to be with you all. We’re in a very critical phase of our war against the coronavirus. It’s vital that every American follows our guidelines on the “30 Days to Slow the Spread.” The sacrifices we make over the next four weeks will have countless American lives saved. We’re going to save a lot of American lives. And we’re in control of our own fate very much so. Maintaining social distance, practicing vigorous hygiene, and staying at home are your most effective ways to win the war and to escape danger.
{snip}
I’d like now to invite SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza, who’s doing a fantastic job — she’s going to be very busy in the next little while — and Secretary Steve Mnuchin to say a few words about these vital initiatives. And then we’ll get on to the attack of the virus itself.
And please, if I might, Steve and Jovita.
ADMINISTRATOR CARRANZA: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President and Mr. Vice President, Secretary Mnuchin, Ivanka Trump, and all who I have been working closely with in this effort. Small Business is the backbone of the American economy, and the President has put the nation’s 30 million small businesses front and center in the response effort, and we are working hard to get money to them quickly.
{snip}
Thank you, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Jovita. Very good. Thank you.
SECRETARY MNUCHIN: Thank you, Mr. President, thank you, Mr. Vice President, and thank you, Jovita. Mr. President, you’ve made it clear to us we now need to execute. We need to get money to small business and American workers, and that’s what we’re doing.
{snip}
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mr. President.
{snip}
Let me also say, today you’re going to hear from Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, but someone that the White House Coronavirus Task Force directed to work with FEMA on supply chain issues. And in recent weeks, he’s been leading a working group, in conjunction with FEMA, that literally has identified millions of medical supplies around the nation and around the world. And we’re grateful for his efforts and his leadership.
{snip}
Jared?
MR. KUSHNER: Thank you, Mr. Vice President. And thank you for your great leadership on the task force, and thank you to Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci as well. It’s been an honor working with you these past few weeks.
{snip}
MR. NAVARRO:
{snip}
Now, what’s going to happen tomorrow is the President is going to sign another order which is in the works. This is interesting: There is a black market springing up, which you have described, where we’re having people bid against each other. Brokers come in; they’re bidding and bidding on all this different PPE. It’s driving the price up. And guess what? You know where it’s going? The domestic sources here are being exported.
When President Trump heard about that, he said, “That’s not going to happen anymore under my watch.” So tomorrow, we’re bringing that order. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to empower Customs and Border Protection, with the help of people like the Post Office and express mail consigners like UPS, to basically deal with that issue.
So we are going to crack down unmercifully. And I would say to the hoarders out there and the brokers that are trying to make money off of the misery of people in this country, around the world: That’s got to stop. And if you’ve got inventory, what you need to do is pick up a phone and not call somebody out in — around the world. You call FEMA and say, “We got some stuff. We’ll give it to you at a fair price,” and be done with that, because that stuff has absolutely got to stop.
{snip}
Now the beauty of this President is because of his leadership, we were able to solve that problem in two phone calls. Two phone calls. The first one went to Phebe Novakovic at the General Dynamics. “Phebe, can you call Tom Kennedy at Raytheon? I need you guys to basically scoop up all the Tyvek suits you can and find any gloves you can.”
This President, under his leadership and the voluntary efforts, and the pride and patriotism you talked about it earlier, that — we had 4,000 Tyvek suits delivered to the New York PD within 16 hours. That’s — that’s a new record in Trump time.
{snip}
Q But states are bidding against each other.
THE PRESIDENT: No, no. If we’re bidding against each other, I said find out who it is. And usually, they know. Everyone knows. And we’re notified and we get notified, and we’ll either drop out or they’ll drop out. But we have another problem: There are 151 countries out there, beyond the states. There are 151 countries that have this problem. And they’re ordering too. It’s really a mess.
Now, in a little while, the hardest thing to get are the ventilators because they’re — you know, it takes a while to build them. And we have a lot. We have thousands of them being built right now. In a little while, they’ll be worth about five dollars. But right now, they’re very valuable. And we’re going to have a lot of them being shipped.
And, in fact, that’s why General Motors called up before — Mary. That’s why others called up two days ago. They called up that they’re all in production. And they’ll start — they’re starting to arrive in a week and a half. But there’ll be a time when we’re going to build stockpiles.
By the way, the states should have been building their stockpile. We have almost 10,000 in our stockpile. And we’ve been building it, and we’ve been supplying it. But the states should be building.
We’re a backup. We’re not an ordering clerk. We’re a backup. And we’ve done an unbelievable job. Like, for instance, who ever heard of a governor calling up, “Sir, can you build us a hospital of 2,500 rooms?” And we built it. “Can you build us four medical centers?” We built it. “Can you deliver a ship — a hospital ship — with 1,000 rooms?” And we did it. And we did it in Los Angeles, too.
We’ve been an unbelievable — we’ve done an unbelievable job — these people. And so — and thousands of people behind them. But we’re a backup. Ideally, those hospitals would have had all this equipment. Ideally, those states should have had all this equipment, and I think they will the next time.
You know, you heard the case where thousands of ventilators could have been had at a very inexpensive price three years ago. And a certain state decided not to exercise that right because they wanted to build a road or they wanted to build something else because it’s big money. You’re talking about — I think it was a billion dollars.
But you’re talking about a lot of money for something that may never happen. Because normally, on a ventilator — other than a pandemic or an epidemic — you wouldn’t — you wouldn’t need anything like this. Hospitals have three ventilators — big hospitals — and they get by with it. And now they want thousands. I mean, they want thousands of ventilators. You call up a governor and he’ll say, “Sir, could you send us 40,000 ventilators?” Nobody has ever heard of a thing like this.
So, they’ve done some job. Let me just tell you, when Secretary Mnuchin spoke, they want you to call not “.com” but SBA.gov — okay? — for the application and for information. Okay? So it’s SBA — small business — SBA.gov, okay? If you don’t mind.
Yeah, let’s go. Please.
{snip}
You also have a situation where, in some states, FEMA allocated ventilators to the states. And you have instances where, in cities, they’re running out, but the state still has a stockpile. And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile; it’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use. So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local — local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.
The same thing with the masks. So the N95 mask is actually an item that wasn’t used as frequently in the medical profession before this. It was used mostly for diseases. So speaking to a lot of the doctors and hospital administrators, they would say they used actually a very low percentage of the N95 masks.
What the President and the Vice President were able to do with Congress was to get the waiver so that you could expand the pool because a lot of the masks were used to — for the construction industries. Now there’s a much bigger pool of masks in the country. There was a stockpile. They distributed that based on where they anticipated a lot of the need would go. But a lot of that still is stuck with the states and it hasn’t trickled down to the right places within the states.
{snip}
Q I really want to ask you about masks, but I also just wanted to follow up on a couple of hanging threads there. On just the question earlier about the bidding, what happens though when states are bidding against each other on those markets?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, they have that, and they have to work that out. What they should do is they should have — long before this pandemic arrived, they should have been on the open market just buying. There was no competition. You could have made a great price.
The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money because they thought this would never happen. And their shelves, in some cases, were bare. And, by the way, in some cases they weren’t. They were beautifully serviced. They did a good job. But in some cases, their shelves were bare.
So the best thing they can do is when times become normalized — and they will, hopefully soon — and actually, you’re going to have a lot of excess material because so much is being done right now in terms of protective gear, protective outfits. A lot is being done. It’s going to be — within six months, it’s going to be sold for the right price. They got to stack up for the next time.
But we are doing that. And the Admiral has done a fantastic job. Senator Schumer wrote a letter today and he says, “You should put a military man in charge.” I said, “Well, Chuck, if you knew a little bit more, we have one of the most highly respected people in the military: the Admiral.” This is what he does too, very professionally. And he’s in charge. But Chuck didn’t know that.
{snip}
Q Mr. President, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. We haven’t heard you talk a lot today about what they’re going through. So what’s —
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I think it’s —
Q — your message to them? And —
THE PRESIDENT: I think they’re going through — I think it’s terrible.
So, look, four weeks ago, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world. The greatest in the world — greatest in the history of the world. We had the most jobs ever in the history of the United States. Almost 160 million jobs, right?
And then, one day, I get a call from Deborah, who’s fantastic, and from Dr. Fauci. And he said and she said, “We have a problem.” I said, “What’s the problem?” And they said, “We may have to close it up.” I said, “Close what up?” They said, “Close up the country.” And I said, “What’s that all about?” And we discussed today — and probably not since 1917; we came to that conclusion — and she is a fantastic person, a brilliant person, and this is what she knows. I said, “Has it ever been this bad?” And I think I can represent that you said “no.” And part of it — it’s a contagion. It’s so contagious.
It’s like, if you sneeze, I probably get it. Whoever heard of a thing like that? Okay? And this very talented reporter is bailing out. Okay? He’s out of here. I don’t blame you.
But it’s a very contagious thing, and — probably the likes of which we’ve never seen in terms of that.
But 1917 — so that’s over 100 years ago, but that was — you know, it’s been written about many, many times. That was a horrible — whether it was 75 or 100 million people — I’ve heard from 50 to 75, I’ve heard 75 to 100 — but it was tens of millions of people.
Now, we have the advantage of communication. This could have been just as bad. I mean, here we can read on the Internet. We can see what to do. We can have these meetings; they can watch on television, which they do. A lot of people are watching. A lot of people are watching. And they say, “Gee, social distancing.”
But in 1917, they didn’t have that option. You know, they didn’t know what to do. They just noticed people were dying all over the place. Think of it: 75- to 100 million people died. A lot of people in this country died.
I always — to me, it’s a great — it’s a great question: How come more people didn’t die in this country? And they say it actually started in this country and went to Europe. I mean, we lost a lot of people, but relatively, we lost very few compared to Europe. So this is a terrible thing that happened.
And what’s happening now, with people and jobs — so think of the position I’m in. We have built all together, everybody — not me, everybody — the greatest economy in history. And all of a sudden, people come in that we respect and we know. And here’s the thing: They were right. Everybody questioned it for a while. Not everybody, but a good portion questioned it. They said, “Let’s keep it open. Let’s ride it.” If we did that — you saw the other graph. And whether it’s true or almost true or maybe not true enough — the number was 2.2 million people would have died. 2.2 million people would have died in a short period of time. In fact, the graph could have been even shorter. I always noticed that that horrible one — where it goes high — it actually comes down a little bit faster. It might have been over faster and you would have lost 2.2 million people.
So they come in and they say, “We have to close up the country.” And I say, “You know what that does to this — to the fabric of this country, to people that had great jobs, great family, no problems with money?” Their 401(k) — everything is perfect, then all of a sudden, they go from that to having no job in one day. They never even thought of it. And then you see 6 million people unemployed. Unemployment numbers get released and you see 6 million people.
And it’s an artificial closing. It’s not like we have a massive recession or worse. It’s artificial because we turned it off. Think of all we’re doing. We’re saying, “Don’t go to work and we’ll pay you.” Everything is the opposite. It was always, “Go to work and make a lot of money and do well, and — the American Dream.” Because of a hidden enemy, we’re saying, “Don’t go to work and we’re going to pay you.”
Look at the money: $2 trillion. And we will probably do more. I think infrastructure would be a fantastic thing to do.
You want to get the restaurants back? You give deductibility. You understand what that is. You give deductibility for businesses where they go and they use the restaurants. The restaurants will be bigger and better than they were before. You know, people don’t know: A lot of restaurants closed when they ended deductibility. And then they started doing well, but they had fewer restaurants. But the boom of the restaurants is when they had deductibility, where corporations could use them. So — and entertainment. That was a great thing.
But they closed it, and then they closed it again. And it wasn’t the same. But if you want to get them back, you do that.
But infrastructure: We borrow our money now at zero. You know, if were paying 5 percent, 4 percent, 3 percent, it’s a different ballgame. We’re borrowing — we can borrow long term for zero — literally zero; you know that — because we’re considered the safe investment. All over the world, they want money in the United States. That’s where they want the money.
So I know better than anybody. I just — I know what they’re going through, and it’s horrible. But you know what I want to do? I want to be able to get them back fast. When this is over, it’s going to be a day we’re going to celebrate, because everyone is going to go to work and I think we’re going to have boom times. I think it’s going to be great.
And we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned about borders. We’ve learned about reliance on other countries. We’ve learned so much — so much that I think we really have a chance to be bigger and better and stronger. And I think it’s going to come back very quickly, but first we have to defeat this enemy.
So we will see you tomorrow. Thank you very much. Thank you.
END
7:38 P.M. EDT
Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing
HEALTHCARE
Issued on: April 3, 2020
James S. Brady Press Briefing Room
April 2, 2020
5:22 P.M. EDT
THE PRESIDENT: Okay. Thank you very much. Good to be with you all. We’re in a very critical phase of our war against the coronavirus. It’s vital that every American follows our guidelines on the “30 Days to Slow the Spread.” The sacrifices we make over the next four weeks will have countless American lives saved. We’re going to save a lot of American lives. And we’re in control of our own fate very much so. Maintaining social distance, practicing vigorous hygiene, and staying at home are your most effective ways to win the war and to escape danger.
{snip}
I’d like now to invite SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza, who’s doing a fantastic job — she’s going to be very busy in the next little while — and Secretary Steve Mnuchin to say a few words about these vital initiatives. And then we’ll get on to the attack of the virus itself.
And please, if I might, Steve and Jovita.
ADMINISTRATOR CARRANZA: Thank you. Thank you, Mr. President and Mr. Vice President, Secretary Mnuchin, Ivanka Trump, and all who I have been working closely with in this effort. Small Business is the backbone of the American economy, and the President has put the nation’s 30 million small businesses front and center in the response effort, and we are working hard to get money to them quickly.
{snip}
Thank you, Mr. President.
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Jovita. Very good. Thank you.
SECRETARY MNUCHIN: Thank you, Mr. President, thank you, Mr. Vice President, and thank you, Jovita. Mr. President, you’ve made it clear to us we now need to execute. We need to get money to small business and American workers, and that’s what we’re doing.
{snip}
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Thank you, Mr. President.
{snip}
Let me also say, today you’re going to hear from Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor to the President of the United States, but someone that the White House Coronavirus Task Force directed to work with FEMA on supply chain issues. And in recent weeks, he’s been leading a working group, in conjunction with FEMA, that literally has identified millions of medical supplies around the nation and around the world. And we’re grateful for his efforts and his leadership.
{snip}
Jared?
MR. KUSHNER: Thank you, Mr. Vice President. And thank you for your great leadership on the task force, and thank you to Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci as well. It’s been an honor working with you these past few weeks.
{snip}
MR. NAVARRO:
{snip}
Now, what’s going to happen tomorrow is the President is going to sign another order which is in the works. This is interesting: There is a black market springing up, which you have described, where we’re having people bid against each other. Brokers come in; they’re bidding and bidding on all this different PPE. It’s driving the price up. And guess what? You know where it’s going? The domestic sources here are being exported.
When President Trump heard about that, he said, “That’s not going to happen anymore under my watch.” So tomorrow, we’re bringing that order. And what it’s going to do is it’s going to empower Customs and Border Protection, with the help of people like the Post Office and express mail consigners like UPS, to basically deal with that issue.
So we are going to crack down unmercifully. And I would say to the hoarders out there and the brokers that are trying to make money off of the misery of people in this country, around the world: That’s got to stop. And if you’ve got inventory, what you need to do is pick up a phone and not call somebody out in — around the world. You call FEMA and say, “We got some stuff. We’ll give it to you at a fair price,” and be done with that, because that stuff has absolutely got to stop.
{snip}
Now the beauty of this President is because of his leadership, we were able to solve that problem in two phone calls. Two phone calls. The first one went to Phebe Novakovic at the General Dynamics. “Phebe, can you call Tom Kennedy at Raytheon? I need you guys to basically scoop up all the Tyvek suits you can and find any gloves you can.”
This President, under his leadership and the voluntary efforts, and the pride and patriotism you talked about it earlier, that — we had 4,000 Tyvek suits delivered to the New York PD within 16 hours. That’s — that’s a new record in Trump time.
{snip}
Q But states are bidding against each other.
THE PRESIDENT: No, no. If we’re bidding against each other, I said find out who it is. And usually, they know. Everyone knows. And we’re notified and we get notified, and we’ll either drop out or they’ll drop out. But we have another problem: There are 151 countries out there, beyond the states. There are 151 countries that have this problem. And they’re ordering too. It’s really a mess.
Now, in a little while, the hardest thing to get are the ventilators because they’re — you know, it takes a while to build them. And we have a lot. We have thousands of them being built right now. In a little while, they’ll be worth about five dollars. But right now, they’re very valuable. And we’re going to have a lot of them being shipped.
And, in fact, that’s why General Motors called up before — Mary. That’s why others called up two days ago. They called up that they’re all in production. And they’ll start — they’re starting to arrive in a week and a half. But there’ll be a time when we’re going to build stockpiles.
By the way, the states should have been building their stockpile. We have almost 10,000 in our stockpile. And we’ve been building it, and we’ve been supplying it. But the states should be building.
We’re a backup. We’re not an ordering clerk. We’re a backup. And we’ve done an unbelievable job. Like, for instance, who ever heard of a governor calling up, “Sir, can you build us a hospital of 2,500 rooms?” And we built it. “Can you build us four medical centers?” We built it. “Can you deliver a ship — a hospital ship — with 1,000 rooms?” And we did it. And we did it in Los Angeles, too.
We’ve been an unbelievable — we’ve done an unbelievable job — these people. And so — and thousands of people behind them. But we’re a backup. Ideally, those hospitals would have had all this equipment. Ideally, those states should have had all this equipment, and I think they will the next time.
You know, you heard the case where thousands of ventilators could have been had at a very inexpensive price three years ago. And a certain state decided not to exercise that right because they wanted to build a road or they wanted to build something else because it’s big money. You’re talking about — I think it was a billion dollars.
But you’re talking about a lot of money for something that may never happen. Because normally, on a ventilator — other than a pandemic or an epidemic — you wouldn’t — you wouldn’t need anything like this. Hospitals have three ventilators — big hospitals — and they get by with it. And now they want thousands. I mean, they want thousands of ventilators. You call up a governor and he’ll say, “Sir, could you send us 40,000 ventilators?” Nobody has ever heard of a thing like this.
So, they’ve done some job. Let me just tell you, when Secretary Mnuchin spoke, they want you to call not “.com” but SBA.gov — okay? — for the application and for information. Okay? So it’s SBA — small business — SBA.gov, okay? If you don’t mind.
Yeah, let’s go. Please.
{snip}
You also have a situation where, in some states, FEMA allocated ventilators to the states. And you have instances where, in cities, they’re running out, but the state still has a stockpile. And the notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile; it’s not supposed to be state stockpiles that they then use. So we’re encouraging the states to make sure that they’re assessing the needs, they’re getting the data from their local — local situations, and then trying to fill it with the supplies that we’ve given them.
The same thing with the masks. So the N95 mask is actually an item that wasn’t used as frequently in the medical profession before this. It was used mostly for diseases. So speaking to a lot of the doctors and hospital administrators, they would say they used actually a very low percentage of the N95 masks.
What the President and the Vice President were able to do with Congress was to get the waiver so that you could expand the pool because a lot of the masks were used to — for the construction industries. Now there’s a much bigger pool of masks in the country. There was a stockpile. They distributed that based on where they anticipated a lot of the need would go. But a lot of that still is stuck with the states and it hasn’t trickled down to the right places within the states.
{snip}
Q I really want to ask you about masks, but I also just wanted to follow up on a couple of hanging threads there. On just the question earlier about the bidding, what happens though when states are bidding against each other on those markets?
THE PRESIDENT: Well, they have that, and they have to work that out. What they should do is they should have — long before this pandemic arrived, they should have been on the open market just buying. There was no competition. You could have made a great price.
The states have to stock up. It’s like one of those things. They waited. They didn’t want to spend the money because they thought this would never happen. And their shelves, in some cases, were bare. And, by the way, in some cases they weren’t. They were beautifully serviced. They did a good job. But in some cases, their shelves were bare.
So the best thing they can do is when times become normalized — and they will, hopefully soon — and actually, you’re going to have a lot of excess material because so much is being done right now in terms of protective gear, protective outfits. A lot is being done. It’s going to be — within six months, it’s going to be sold for the right price. They got to stack up for the next time.
But we are doing that. And the Admiral has done a fantastic job. Senator Schumer wrote a letter today and he says, “You should put a military man in charge.” I said, “Well, Chuck, if you knew a little bit more, we have one of the most highly respected people in the military: the Admiral.” This is what he does too, very professionally. And he’s in charge. But Chuck didn’t know that.
{snip}
Q Mr. President, 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment last week. We haven’t heard you talk a lot today about what they’re going through. So what’s —
THE PRESIDENT: Oh, I think it’s —
Q — your message to them? And —
THE PRESIDENT: I think they’re going through — I think it’s terrible.
So, look, four weeks ago, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world. The greatest in the world — greatest in the history of the world. We had the most jobs ever in the history of the United States. Almost 160 million jobs, right?
And then, one day, I get a call from Deborah, who’s fantastic, and from Dr. Fauci. And he said and she said, “We have a problem.” I said, “What’s the problem?” And they said, “We may have to close it up.” I said, “Close what up?” They said, “Close up the country.” And I said, “What’s that all about?” And we discussed today — and probably not since 1917; we came to that conclusion — and she is a fantastic person, a brilliant person, and this is what she knows. I said, “Has it ever been this bad?” And I think I can represent that you said “no.” And part of it — it’s a contagion. It’s so contagious.
It’s like, if you sneeze, I probably get it. Whoever heard of a thing like that? Okay? And this very talented reporter is bailing out. Okay? He’s out of here. I don’t blame you.
But it’s a very contagious thing, and — probably the likes of which we’ve never seen in terms of that.
But 1917 — so that’s over 100 years ago, but that was — you know, it’s been written about many, many times. That was a horrible — whether it was 75 or 100 million people — I’ve heard from 50 to 75, I’ve heard 75 to 100 — but it was tens of millions of people.
Now, we have the advantage of communication. This could have been just as bad. I mean, here we can read on the Internet. We can see what to do. We can have these meetings; they can watch on television, which they do. A lot of people are watching. A lot of people are watching. And they say, “Gee, social distancing.”
But in 1917, they didn’t have that option. You know, they didn’t know what to do. They just noticed people were dying all over the place. Think of it: 75- to 100 million people died. A lot of people in this country died.
I always — to me, it’s a great — it’s a great question: How come more people didn’t die in this country? And they say it actually started in this country and went to Europe. I mean, we lost a lot of people, but relatively, we lost very few compared to Europe. So this is a terrible thing that happened.
And what’s happening now, with people and jobs — so think of the position I’m in. We have built all together, everybody — not me, everybody — the greatest economy in history. And all of a sudden, people come in that we respect and we know. And here’s the thing: They were right. Everybody questioned it for a while. Not everybody, but a good portion questioned it. They said, “Let’s keep it open. Let’s ride it.” If we did that — you saw the other graph. And whether it’s true or almost true or maybe not true enough — the number was 2.2 million people would have died. 2.2 million people would have died in a short period of time. In fact, the graph could have been even shorter. I always noticed that that horrible one — where it goes high — it actually comes down a little bit faster. It might have been over faster and you would have lost 2.2 million people.
So they come in and they say, “We have to close up the country.” And I say, “You know what that does to this — to the fabric of this country, to people that had great jobs, great family, no problems with money?” Their 401(k) — everything is perfect, then all of a sudden, they go from that to having no job in one day. They never even thought of it. And then you see 6 million people unemployed. Unemployment numbers get released and you see 6 million people.
And it’s an artificial closing. It’s not like we have a massive recession or worse. It’s artificial because we turned it off. Think of all we’re doing. We’re saying, “Don’t go to work and we’ll pay you.” Everything is the opposite. It was always, “Go to work and make a lot of money and do well, and — the American Dream.” Because of a hidden enemy, we’re saying, “Don’t go to work and we’re going to pay you.”
Look at the money: $2 trillion. And we will probably do more. I think infrastructure would be a fantastic thing to do.
You want to get the restaurants back? You give deductibility. You understand what that is. You give deductibility for businesses where they go and they use the restaurants. The restaurants will be bigger and better than they were before. You know, people don’t know: A lot of restaurants closed when they ended deductibility. And then they started doing well, but they had fewer restaurants. But the boom of the restaurants is when they had deductibility, where corporations could use them. So — and entertainment. That was a great thing.
But they closed it, and then they closed it again. And it wasn’t the same. But if you want to get them back, you do that.
But infrastructure: We borrow our money now at zero. You know, if were paying 5 percent, 4 percent, 3 percent, it’s a different ballgame. We’re borrowing — we can borrow long term for zero — literally zero; you know that — because we’re considered the safe investment. All over the world, they want money in the United States. That’s where they want the money.
So I know better than anybody. I just — I know what they’re going through, and it’s horrible. But you know what I want to do? I want to be able to get them back fast. When this is over, it’s going to be a day we’re going to celebrate, because everyone is going to go to work and I think we’re going to have boom times. I think it’s going to be great.
And we’ve learned a lot. We’ve learned about borders. We’ve learned about reliance on other countries. We’ve learned so much — so much that I think we really have a chance to be bigger and better and stronger. And I think it’s going to come back very quickly, but first we have to defeat this enemy.
So we will see you tomorrow. Thank you very much. Thank you.
END
7:38 P.M. EDT
