Trump's Remarks in Press Conference; July 14, 2020

[mahatmakanejeeves]

OAN gets in a question about the Railroad Retirement Board.

REMARKS

Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference
Issued on: July 14, 2020

Rose Garden

5:29 P.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you very much, everybody. Please. I hope it’s not too hot. But it’s pretty warm. Thank you.

So, we’ve had a big day in the stock market. Things are coming back, and they’re coming back very rapidly — a lot sooner than people thought. People are feeling good about our country. People are feeling good about therapeutics and possible vaccines. But we’re going to go over quite a bit, and maybe at the end, we’ll take some questions if we have time, if it’s not too hot.

{snip}

And the World Trade — World Trade is terrible. That deal is terrible. And the World Health is a terrible deal. We’ve been very tough on the World Trade Organization, and we’ve been, I guess, as tough as you can get on World Health. We withdrew our money. We told them we’re getting out. It doesn’t mean that someday we won’t go back in. Maybe we will, when it’s correctly run. But they made a lot of bad predictions, and they said a lot of bad things about what to do and how to do it. And they turned out to be wrong, and they were really a puppet of China.

And make no mistake: We hold China fully responsible for concealing the virus and unleashing it upon the world. They could’ve stopped it. They should’ve stopped it. It would’ve been very easy to do at the source when it happened.

In contrast, Joe Biden’s entire career has been a gift to the Chinese Communist Party and to the calamity of — of errors that they’ve made. They made so many errors. And it’s been devastating for the American worker. China has taken out hundreds of billions of dollars a year from our country. And we rebuilt China. I give them all the credit in the world. I don’t give the credit for the people that used to stand here, because they allowed this to happen where hundreds of billions of dollars were taken out of the United States Treasury in order to rebuild China.

There’s no company and no country in the world — no country in the world has ever ripped off the United States like the incredible job that they did on this country and the people that ran it. Possibly, it’s one of the reasons — certainly, it’s one of the very big reasons — trade and things related to trade — that I got elected in the first place. I’ve been talking about it for a long time, along with many other subjects, frankly.

Joe Biden supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization — one of the greatest geopolitical and economic disasters in world history. If you look at China, if you look at the moment they joined the World Trade, they were flat lining for years and years and years and decades. And then, all of a sudden, they joined the World Trade Organization, and they went like a rocket ship. They were given all sorts of advantages. They were considered a developing country. As a developing country, they got tremendous advantages over the United States and other countries. And they took advantage of those advantages, and — and then some.

Biden personally led the effort to give China permanent, most-favored nation status, which is a tremendous advantage for a country to have. Few countries have it. But the United States doesn’t have it. Never did. Probably never even asked for it, because they didn’t know what they were doing.

As Vice President, Biden was a leading advocate of the Paris Climate Accord, which was unbelievably expensive to our country. It would’ve crushed American manufacturers while allowing China to pollute — pollute the atmosphere with impunity. Yet one more gift from Biden to the Chinese Communist Party.

They took all of the advantage away from us. They took everything away. They don’t have oil. We would’ve had to close up tremendous amounts of our energy to qualify, eventually, not too far into the future. We would’ve had to do things that would have been unbelievably destructive to our country, including the possible closing of 25 percent of our businesses. Think of that. And it was going to cost us hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars for the privilege of being involved in the Paris Climate Accord.

And you just have to look at what took place this year in Paris and France, where money was being sent to countries all over the world, and the people of France didn’t want to take it, and they didn’t, and they did a lot of rioting. They had their taxes raised. We would have had to raise our taxes. And it was a disaster. I’ve been given a lot of credit for what I did there. It took a certain amount of courage, I guess, because it sounds so nice — the Paris Climate Accord — but it wasn’t good for us at all.

America lost nearly 10,000 factories while Joe Biden was Vice President. Think of that: 10,000 factories. He wrote something today, and he made a statement today that I wrote down. It’s pretty accurate.

So Biden was here for 47 years. Eight years — the last eight years, not long ago — as Vice President, he said, “One in five miles of our highways are still in poor condition.” Well, we’re doing a good job in highways, but why didn’t he fix them three years ago? Why didn’t he fix them?

“Tens of thousands of bridges are in disrepair and on the verge of collapse.” Well, it’s probably not a right number, but we have bridges that should have been fixed. Why didn’t he fix them? He was there for eight years with President Obama. Why didn’t they fix them? Tens of thousands of bridges. This is what he wrote: “High-speed broadband. We want high-speed…” Well why didn’t he get it? Three years ago — it’s not a long time.

And he didn’t do any of the things, but now he says he’s going to be President, and, as President, he’s going to do all the things that he didn’t do. He never did — never did anything, except make very bad decisions, especially on foreign policy.

So Joe Biden and President Obama freely allowed China to pillage our factories, plunder our communities, and steal our most precious secrets. And I’ve stopped it largely, but I’ve stopped it. And it wasn’t easy, because you talk about a certain power of the telephone and the calls, where they would call and say, “No, we don’t want to do that.” And other countries would call on behalf of China. But I did it. I did what has to be done. And you just take a look at what’s gone on. And take a look at the kind of — at the numbers where they devalued their currency in order to pay the tariffs.

Now the Democrat Party is calling for defunding of our military. Think of that: defunding. They want to defund our military when China is building a massive military. They’re building a massive military, and Biden wants to defund our military. And the world needs American strength right now more than ever, and we’ve got it.

We’ve — we’ve got now, soon — as it — all this equipment comes in, all made in the USA — we’ve got the newest, most incredible weapons anywhere in the world. We have the best tanks, the best ships, the best missiles, rockets. We have the best of everything. We have the best fighter jets — the F-35, the F-18. All of these assets are being built. Tankers — incredible tankers. Bombers. Hope we don’t have to use them, but we have the most incredible military.

When I came in, the military was totally depleted. It was — it was at a level that was just absolutely incredible. And you know the statements. I made the statements before I told you what generals told me about our military. And I’ll make them again. If somebody needs them, we’ll give them to you. Very well documented.

As Vice President, Biden opposed tariffs, and he was standing up for China. He didn’t want to do anything to disrupt the relationship with China, even though China was taking us to the cleaners. He opposed my very strict travel ban on Chinese nationals to stop the spread of the China virus. He was totally against it. “Xenophobic,” he called me. “Xenophobic.” A month later, he admitted I was right.

We would’ve had thousands of people additionally die if we let people come in from heavily-infected China. But we stopped it; we did a travel ban in January. Nancy Pelosi was dancing on the streets of Chinatown in San Francisco a month later, and even later than that, and others too. They all thought what I did was a terrible mistake.

We would have lost — in fact, Dr. Fauci said you would’ve lost thousands of additional people if President Trump had to do that. And I was a crowd of one, because even experts didn’t want to do it. They thought it was a mistake. And then I did Europe when I started seeing what was going on in Italy and Spain and France and other countries in Europe. I did a ban on people coming in from Europe. That would have been disastrous for our country also.

And we saved tens of thousands of lives, but we actually saved millions of lives by closing — by closing up, we saved millions, potentially millions of lives. Could be — a number that we’re actually working on — but it could be 2- to 3 million lives. So we’re at 135,000, which is terrible; one is too much. But we would’ve had millions of people dead from this curse that came at us.

But we did what we had to do, and now we’ll put out the flames as it — as it happens. We have to get the schools open. We have to get everything open. A lot of people don’t want to do that for political reasons, not for other reasons.

But if we had listened to Joe Biden, hundreds of thousands of additional lives would have been lost. And if you look at the job he did on swine flu — I looked at a poll — they have polls on everything nowadays — and he — they got very bad marks on the job they did on the swine flu, H1N1. He calls it “N1H1.” H1N1. He got very poor marks from Gallup on the job they did on swine flu. And they stopped, very early on, testing. They totally stopped it. They just said, “Stop.”

And, frankly, if we didn’t test, you wouldn’t have all the headlines because we’re showing cases. And we have just about the lowest mortality rate. But if we did — think of this: If we didn’t do testing — instead of testing over 40 million people, if we did half the testing, we would have half the cases. If we did another — you cut that in half, we would have, yet again, half of that.

But the headlines are always testing. Now, the testing is a good thing, but at the same time, it’s — it’s fodder for the fake news to report cases. So we’re doing 40 million-plus, going to be very close to 45 million people. And when I turn on the news, I see, “cases, cases, cases.” They don’t talk about deaths being cut down to a level that — actually, “tenfold,” they use. I got that from one of the very respected media outlets — “Tenfold.” Cut tenfold. Yes, but they don’t talk about that; they talk about cases. And the cases are created because of the fact that we do tremendous testing. We have the best testing in the world.

We now make ventilators for the world. We had very few ventilators. There wasn’t one person in any hospital anywhere in this country that needed a ventilator that didn’t get it. And that was because we mobilized to a level — using the Purchasing Act, in some cases — we mobilized to a level that nobody thought possible.

Nothing has happened like that since World War Two. Our task force has done a great job. Mike Pence worked so hard and gets so little credit. Sad to see that, actually. But he works so hard, and gets so little credit. The governors would tell us — we’d be on the phone with 50 different governors; they’d all tell us what a great job — “Great job.” And then they’ll go to the media and say, “Well, they didn’t do such a good job.” Well, we did a great job.

We made a lot of governors look fantastic. We did in New York — what we did in New York was one of the most incredible things: 2,800 beds in Javits Center, but the governor used very few of them, unfortunately. Then we moved in our great hospital ships — one of our two great. We moved one also to Los Angeles.
And we could have used that for our senior citizens. We could have used it for other people. They could have used it instead of sending our seniors back into nursing homes that were infected, where you lost thousands of people. Thousands of people in New York died because of poor management by the governor. And it’s a very sad thing to see and very sad to watch and very sad to look at those statistics.

{snip, and this is nowhere near the end of his rant. He goes on and on and on.}

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, go ahead.

Q I just wanted to — Ruth Bader Ginsburg was hospitalized today with an infection. I wanted to know if you had any reaction to that news?

THE PRESIDENT: No, I — I wish her the best. I hope she’s better. I didn’t hear that, actually. She was just hospitalized? No, that’s too bad. No, I wish her the best.

She’s actually given me some good rulings. Okay? So you know that, right? People were surprised. No, I wish her the absolute best.

Please.

{snip}

OAN, please.

Q Thank you, Mr. President. Your administration has taken tangible steps to ensure that Chinese companies are not taking advantage of our U.S. stock markets, our —

THE PRESIDENT: It’s true.

Q — our trade. Last week, your administration sent a letter to the Railroad Retirement Board alar- — asking them to reconsider investments in Chinese defense fund — firms.

THE PRESIDENT: Meaning “not to invest”?

Q Correct.

THE PRESIDENT: That’s correct.

Q So, where is that request now? And are you taking tangible actions to ensure that U.S. investments don’t continue to fund —

THE PRESIDENT: Yes.

Q — defense firms in China?

THE PRESIDENT: Yes, and you’ll see more coming. This was a very important bill that we signed. But you’re going to see more coming over the next short period of time. But, yes, we don’t want them investing in Chinese military companies. Okay?

Q (Inaudible) I mean what actions can be taken to ensure that does not happen?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you have a lot of actions we can take, including the — including the increase. You know, right now people don’t know: China is paying a lot of tariffs. We made a China deal, and they bought just — I think the third-highest amount of corn ever in our — in world history. They just bought from us the highest amount, which is great for our farmers.

But I view it differently than I did before I made the deal. When I made the deal, I thought this was a great deal. After what happened to us — what happened to the world, coming from China — I view it much differently. But we can impose massive tariffs on China if we want — and other countries, if we want. And we’ll see. We just want to be treated fairly. We want a level playing field. Our farmers were never treated properly by anybody, and they were targeted by China.

You know, I paid our farmers $28 billion over a two-year period because they were targeted to that amount of money — to that exact amount of money: $28 [billion]. It was $16 billion, and it was $12 billion — $28 [billion] over a two-year period. And we gave $28 billion to our farmers. That’s why they’re all here.

And now they’re doing very well. Our farmers are doing very well because we made really great trade deals. USMCA just kicked in. The China deal — they’re buying a lot. They are buying a lot. Yeah, we’ll say that: They’re buying a lot. A lot of people ask, “How are they doing on the trade deal?” They’re buying a lot.

So I want to thank everybody and we’ll be having these conferences again.

I — we’re going to be signing an immigration act very soon; it’s going to be based on merit. It’s going to be very strong. We’re going to work on DACA because we want to make people happy. And I’ll tell you, even conservative Republicans want to see something happen with DACA.

The Democrats had their chance for three years to do something with DACA, and they always turned it down. They always turned it down. They used it as politics. I’m using it to get something done.

But we’ll be signing a very powerful immigration act. It’ll be great. It’ll be merit-based. The country has tried to get it for 25 or 30 years. It’ll be strong on the border, but you’ll come in legally, and you’ll be able to come in legally.

And very importantly, we’ll be taking care of people from DACA in a very Republican way. A Republicans — I’ve spoken to many Republicans, and some would like to leave it out, but, really, they understand that it’s the right thing to do.

So we’re going to be taking care of DACA. We will be doing for DACA what the Democrats had a chance to do and they never did it. Okay?

Thank you all very much.

END

6:33 P.M. EDT

[samnsara]

1. so glad this rambling mess will be saved forever...

[mahatmakanejeeves]

2. "... it was one of the most rambling performances of his presidency."

“Even for a president who rarely sticks to the script and wanders from thought to thought, it was one of the most rambling performances of his presidency.” Trump is in total meltdown. #HeMustGo.

Link to tweet

[lunasun]

3. And we tax payers foot the bill for this conference

#HeMustGo