WHEN: Today, Monday, March 11, 2024
WHERE: CNBC’s “Squawk Box”
Following is the unofficial transcript of a CNBC interview with Former President of the United States Donald Trump on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Monday, March 11, his first interview since President Biden’s State of the Union address.
Following are links to video on CNBC.com: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/03/11/former-president-donald-trump-china-is-right-now-our-boss.html, https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/03/11/former-president-donald-trump-i-consider-facebook-to-be-an-enemy-of-the-people.html and https://www.cnbc.com/video/2024/03/11/former-president-donald-trump-on-crypto-not-sure-id-want-to-take-it-away-at-this-point.html.
All references must be sourced to CNBC.
JOE KERNEN: I believe on the “Squawk” news line, we are joined by former President Donald J. Trump, DJ T45 It is good to welcome you. It’s been a while, Mr. President.
FORMER PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Good morning. Nice to be with you.
KERNEN: The this is the first interview I’ve been told since you became the presumptive nominee. I’m not I’m not sure that that prior to last week, you weren’t already the presumptive nominee. But I think this is your first interview since the State of the Union as well. So can we just start with with your your vision for this country after watching the State of the Union. How does it differ from what you heard from President Biden, President Trump?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, I heard a very angry man who’s losing badly in the polls, who’s willing to weaponize government like has never taken place in this country. It has taken place in third world countries, quite often actually and they will use the Justice Department to sue opponents like me, because I’m his only opponent other than life, life itself. And frankly, you know, I saw a very angry and confused man. I assume he’s going to be the candidate. I think it probably maybe it was a terrible performance, but I think it was probably good enough to get him over the heap, to get him over the, you know, the barrier as to whether or not he’s going to be their, their nominee. I was saying that’s been it for a long time. I find it hard to believe, but I think he probably will and we’ll see what happens. But it was really a speech on division and hate more than anything else. Starts off by talking about stickers, you don’t want to really talk about stickers even though it’s true that they put a little bit less than a bag but you have you have more interesting examples of inflation and other things that he was trying to point out than that. You could you have a lot of you have a lot of big league things you can be talking at, like energy, prices through the roof and food prices through the roof. But no, it was probably the worst State of the Union ever made. According to many that’s not according to be although according to me, it was also but I haven’t heard too many of them.
KERNEN: There are stark policy differences obviously Mr. President, but one thing that I think that at least the perception is that there’s not a whole lot of difference between what you think we should do with entitlements or non-discretionary spending and what President Biden is proposing. It’s almost a third rail of politics. And we’ve got to what a $33, $34 trillion total debt built up and very little we can do in terms of cutting spending. Discretionary is not going to help. Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy. When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help. You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything. This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.
KERNEN: Mr. President—
PRESIDENT TRUMP: But I think history will give us the credit.
KERNEN: I’m sorry to interrupt, we’ve got Jay Clayton here, is here. I know your work with with Jay was at the SEC we want to I want to get Jay to talk to you about regulation, etc. But before I turn it over to Jay, I just wanted to ask you about something very specific for regulation and that is Bitcoin and I have in the past I don’t know if you recall, but I said you gotta get you got to look at this closely, Mr. President, and you know, the current SEC commissioner Gary Gensler finally allowed for these spot ETFs and now we see Bitcoin at almost 72,000. But it’s almost as if it’s in spite of some of the efforts over regulation of maybe the Biden administration. You have any thoughts now on on crypto?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, it’s taken his own life. You know I do little things sometimes for fun and you know, make money with it and but I have fun with it too.
KERNEN: You mean you bought Bitcoin?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, no but sometimes we’ll let people pay through Bitcoin, or we’ll let people get involved in a new, you know, if you think of it it’s an additional form of currency and I used to say, you know, I want one currency I want the dollar. I don’t want people leaving the dollar and I feel that way, but I will tell you, it has taken on a life. I did a thing that people smile at but it was wild. We did a thousand sneakers so limited-edition sneaker run the last one, and you could go through, you know, our crazy new currencies because that’s what I call them. They’re crazy, whether it’s Bitcoin or others, and so many people were buying these things when ultimately, the last pair of sneakers sold for approximately I hear $450,000 was a limited edition or run they were gold. They were, you know, nice, cute. And we thought it was just a very small thing. It was a branding thing and it was, had a good time with it. The last pair sold for $450,000, people were going crazy for these sneakers you probably were too. Everybody was – every friend I have was calling me for a pair of sneakers. So it just took off. And I noticed that so many of them were paid for with the new currency, it’s a new cryptocurrency and I couldn’t believe the amount and I’m saying you know this thing is really and other things I do, people are using it. And you know, I would be – I’m very much a traditionalist, I like staying with the dollar you know – make the dollar the choice. I hate when countries go off the dollar. I would not allow countries to go off the dollar because when we lose that standard, that will be like losing a revolutionary war, that will be that will be a hit to our country just like losing a war and we can’t let that happen and too many countries now are fighting to get off the dollar and frankly and I know Jay feels strongly about this and Jay did a fantastic job by the way in a group when there’s always scandal and problems Jay went through for years. There wasn’t one scandal. I don’t know, Jay, maybe you can tell me but there wasn’t one scandal that is most scandalous position because it involves massive amounts of money with Jay Clayton we had no scandals, zero nothing whatsoever. So I thought it was great. But I have seen there has been a lot of use of that. And I’m not sure that I’d want to take it away at this point.
JAY CLAYTON: Hey, Mr. President, thank you for that, that was nice. Before you came on, I was saying to Joe, look, your regulatory agenda in a second term would be one of pro-growth not anti-consumer, not anti-competition, but pro-growth. Mostly because, you know, we don’t have a lot of fiscal tools left. Do you want to talk about the pro-growth agenda that you had in the last term?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah. Number one, we don’t have a choice. It has to be that – we don’t have a choice. It’d be nice to say let’s get nice and nice and conservative and let’s not grow, if we don’t grow you know, we have $35 trillion out there. We have to grow our way out of it more than anything else but we also have to cut spending and we can cut spending massive amounts of waste. Look, we give foreign countries trillions and trillions of dollars a year and when you want to cut them you met with levels it’s crazy. When you want to cut some of these foreign countries, many of whom don’t like us, many of whom almost all of them take advantage of – everybody takes advantage of the United States and I had that very much stopped but they very much take advantage of the United States. I mean China until I came along, China was killing us, China was taken out 300 – just in terms of numbers you know, we’re just it’s $507 billion a year. Now under Biden it’s worse. It’s gotten much worse. No country can sustain when, we can’t sustain that. When a country just rips us off like China then what I did is that the tariffs and the tariffs were forcing companies back to the United States. We want those companies that go to China and many other countries, not only China, the European Union rips us almost as bad as China, but they do it with a smile. Nobody thinks that the European Union that way, you know, they say oh, they’re wonderful, but they really take advantage of us and until I came along, they took advantage of us militarily, as you know. NATO was a total disaster for us, we were paying almost – so think of it, European Union we were paying almost all for their military we were paying close to 100% until I came along. I said I’m not doing it. You’re gonna have to pay, we’re not doing it anymore. They said would you protect us if we don’t, I said if you’re delinquent, they said yes. I said if you’re delinquent, you’re not going to be protected. And $400 billion came in like clockwork, Obama, Bush, everybody else. They did absolutely nothing.
SORKIN: Mr. President, I just wanted to ask you, though, you’ve also talked about proposing a 10% tariff, if you will. I wanted to ask you about that because the center right American Action Forum, which is a think tank, said that they thought the plan would quote distort global trade discourage economic activity and have broad negative consequences for the U.S. economy.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, they’re wrong. It would distort international trade. It would bring it back to the United States. We have companies, if you look at India, you look at China, you look at so many different countries, they’re smart, much smarter than our country. We were getting ready to do this and I had it just about set –
SORKIN: But you don’t think it would result in higher prices for American families? By some estimates, it could be the equivalent of $2,000 a family according to the economist.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, I think taxes could be cut, I think other things could happen to more than just that. But I’m a big believer in tariffs for two reasons. Number one, I fully believe in them economically when you’re being taken advantage of by other countries. For instance, China was taking advantage of us on the steel they were destroying our entire steel industry, which was never doing very well over the last 25 years anyway, but you know, because it’s been eaten alive by foreign competition, and they were dumping steel. I put a 50% tax on China’s steel coming in and every person in the steel industry when they see me they started crying. They were to hug me, they would kiss me, sir you saved our industry. I put a very strong 50% tariff on dumping steel, on their dumped steel. And by the way it nothing was perfect. Frankly, the tariffs should have been higher. I was getting ready to do that by the way but the tariffs should have been higher. This saved a whole industry but one thing let me just say beyond the economics, it gives you power in dealing with other countries because China would come in and said no, no, no more tax. They were absolutely fine for me to deal with because they were so petrified of me putting on additional tariffs. And we don’t use that, China is right now our boss. They are the boss of the United States, almost like we’re a subsidiary of China and that’s because the Biden administration has been so weak.
MELISSA LEE: Mr. President is there no concern that China could impose retaliatory tariffs or retaliatory actions that would make doing business in China difficult for American companies, which are dependent on China for growth?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: That’s ok, yeah sure they might do that.
LEE: So tell Starbucks, tell McDonalds that is going to be all of a sudden maybe more difficult to do business there.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Sure but they didn’t do it with me. You know, we went through years and they didn’t do it with me. And they never pulled that trigger. That’s a big trigger for them to pull. But even if they do, let American companies come back to America. If you want to sell a car in China, you can’t okay, you pay a massive tax or massive tariff. If we make our cars, we can’t sell in China, they charge tremendous tariffs. Well, they’re very smart. They’re saying, come over to this country. Look at Apple. I’ve had a great relationship with Apple and everybody over there was fine. But I said you got to build your plants here. They built a big plant in Texas. I was working on that very, very hard with various companies that they build in China because if they build in China, they have no tax on it so they make it in China. I said we want you to make it here. They were coming back, they did. They came back with a very big plant here said I’m not doing this unless you – the whole topic of tariffs to me is so simple. Number one, it’s great economically for us and it brings our companies back because if you charge tariffs to China, they’re going to build their car plans here and they’re going to employ our people. They’re right now building big plants because of Biden. They’re building big plants in Mexico. So they build a big giant of plants in Mexico then they sell it across the border with very little tax. It’s ridiculous. We want them to build their plans in the United States. We don’t want to get cars from China. We want to get cars made by China in the United States using our workers but it also gives us a big political power. Tariffs are tremendously powerful in terms of stopping wars, because they don’t want tariffs. And frankly, I made them sing, I made other countries sing with the threat of tariffs. And if you don’t have tariffs, we have nothing whatsoever on them. We have lost such an opportunity when I’ve seen if you want to build a Harley Davidson as an example. I said, How are you doing in India? They were in the White House. How are you doing an Indian no good, why they have a 100% tariff, but more than that even and therefore we basically get it because you have to double and triple the price in India. It’s just so what are you going to do? Well, they want us to build a plant in India that way we don’t have so they go they go and they build a big plant in India. We started under me we started doing the same thing here. And we have the pot of gold. We have the best pot of gold, but eventually we won’t have that because our country is going down and we’re not going to have it. We’re losing our economic power.
SORKIN: Mr. President, we’re talking about China. I want to ask you about perhaps one of the biggest business stories and policy stories of the moment and that is TikTok. You have called TikTok a national security threat. At one point you said that they are quote, “data collection threatens to allow the Chinese Communist Party access to Americans personal and proprietary information.” And yet it appears that you’ve now reversed your view on banning TikTok. Why is that?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: So I had it done. And then Congress said well they never they ultimately usually fail. They are a good like, extremely political and they’re extremely subject to people called lobbyists who happen to be very talented, very good and very rich. I could have banned TikTok I had his banned just about I could have gotten it done. But I said you know what, but I’ll leave it up to you. I didn’t push him too hard because you know, let them do their own research and development. And they decided not to do it. But as you know, I was at a point where I could have gotten it done if I wanted to. I sort of said, You guys decide you make that decision because it’s a tough decision to make. Frankly, there are a lot of people on Tik Tok that love it. There are a lot of young kids on TikTok who will go crazy without it. There are a lot of users. There’s a lot of good and there’s a lot of bad with TikTok. But the thing I don’t like is that without TikTok, you can make Facebook bigger and I consider Facebook to be an enemy of the people along with a lot of the media. what Facebook did was lockboxes with a $500 million Zucker bucks lockboxes that he put in, I mean I consider illegal but you know they, you know they put people in jail when they spend. They put people in jail when they spend more than $5,600 in a campaign. They to jail if they’re $200 Look at Dinesh D’Souza they put him in jail over a couple of 100 bucks. And yet here’s the guy spends $500 million and he doesn’t go to jail.
SORKIN: But do you believe that TikTok is a national security threat or not? Because if it is, and I believe that your emergency powers order that you had put in place at the time suggested that it was was that not true?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I do believe that I do believe it and we have to very much go into privacy and make sure that we are protecting the American people’s privacy and data rights. And I agree but you know, we also have that problem with other you have that problem with Facebook and lots of other companies too. I mean, they get the information, they get plenty of information and they deal with China, and they’ll do whatever China wants. You know, if you look at some of our American companies, when you talk about high highly sophisticated companies that you think are American they are not so American they deal in China and China if China wants anything from them, they will give it so that’s a national security risk also, but when I look at it, I’m not looking to make Facebook, double the size. And if you if you ban TikTok Facebook and others, but mostly Facebook will be a big beneficiary. And I think Facebook has been very dishonest. I think Facebook has been very bad for our country, especially when it comes to elections.
SORKIN: Mr. President, you met recently with Jeff Yass he is s a hedge fund manager has a stake in TikTok. He’s a huge GOP donor Steve Bannon has suggested that you’ve been paid off to switch your view. How did you your view change? How did that come about? And did you have a conversation with Jeff Yass about it?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, I didn’t I met with him very briefly I made a speech and I said hello to him and his wife was lovely. And actually, her primary thing was on education. She wants choice, as I do. And she mentioned to me more than anything. You know, we talked about education. It was a meeting that lasted for a few minutes. Now the only one I met was I met them both and I never I don’t think I ever met him before. But he never mentioned TikTok. She did mention her school choice and that’s what her whole in fact she said my whole life is based around school choice was a very important thing to her and I agree with it.
KERNEN: Mr. President I think you also had a meeting with Elon Musk recently, I saw a piece written that Silicon Valley, uncharacteristically, I’m not saying it’s you know, 100% behind your candidacy, but certainly, there seems to be a sea change to some extent this time around. What did you what an Elon Musk tell you? You think you eventually get his support in some way whether it’s just verbal or monetary?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I don’t know. Look, I’ve been friendly with him over the years. I’ve helped him when I was President. I helped him I’ve liked him. We obviously have opposing views on a minor subject called electric cars. I’m all for electric cars, but you have to have all of the alternatives. Also, you can’t just go to electric. I mean, you have a grid system in this country that’s obsolete. And a disaster is one of the things we worked on a lot. Is our grid system that can’t produce the electricity it doesn’t get distribute the electricity and you know the electric cars are not even a possibility to go all electric is Biden. All electric mandate is by very, very stupid people. First of all, they don’t go far. They cost too much and they’re all going to be made in China. And the auto workers are going to vote for Trump. I don’t know about their top union people because they’re just riveted into Democrats they have no idea why they’re like blind sheep. But the auto workers are gonna vote for Trump because they understand look at my numbers in Michigan, I’m leading him by 12 or 14 points. It’s always hard for a Republican but not now. We’re leading in a lot of places that Republicans don’t lead and including with African Americans. We are we have numbers with the African American population. The black population, the Asian population, Hispanics, we have numbers like nobody’s ever seen before. So I think we’re gonna have a very good election and I think that’s probably why Silicon Valley is but I think they’re also with me because, you know, I want to help businesses. They saw what happened. We had and you know, that just prior to this horrible scores coming in and the gift of China, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world. There was never an economy. Blacks were doing the best they’ve ever done. Hispanics, women, Asian men, with a diploma from MIT without a diploma at all, from a high school, every single group, every single group was doing great. And that’s the way it is. And we had the greatest economy ever and we were getting ready to pay off debt. We were drilling. We were doing this think of it. I got Anwar approved. It’s bigger, perhaps close, but probably bigger than Saudi Arabia in Alaska. And one of the first things Biden did is end iy. Reagan tried to get it he couldn’t get it done. Nobody got it done but me and nobody else could have gotten it done. Anwar is the biggest probably the biggest site J if you look remember, we celebrated that when nobody could believe I got it done. And they were getting ready to start drilling and they were doing it it’s going to be great for Alaska. Tremendous economic development for Alaska, but I got it done. And they ended it. We were going to pay off debt. We were going to do things that were incredible. And then we had an election that I will be very nice on this show it didn’t go too well.
CLAYTON: Let me ask you about that. Mr. President. Something that I want you to comment on that I that I’ve said on this program is that we have this tendency to want to import European regulation to the US thinking that European style regulation, whether it’s around the environment, whether it’s around how we deal with national security, financial matters, and like, can you comment on that because I think the U.S. is different. Ad you know, we have to play to our strengths can you give us your thoughts on that?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well the last thing we should be copying – yeah, I think you’re right I think, you know, they – we have a tendency to follow them a little bit amazingly in regulations because they’re doing so badly. They do so badly. They’ve become a socialist state. And, you know, they’re not doing great. And you look at what happened, I’m gonna – believe it or not, I was very friendly with, but I disagreed with her in allowing 2 million illegal aliens we would say or migrants or you call them anywhere you want. There’s about 19 different names now and everyone becomes obsolete within about two weeks. But Sheila allowed 2 million people coming from – now they like to call them neighbors, you know, the new name by the Democrats is we’d like to call them neighbors. So they want to call the people that are flowing into our country and in many cases, killing people, neighbors. But, you know, Europe, what they did – what Germany has done to itself between that and their energy policies has been a disaster for Germany, nobody talks about it. And they totally reverse course, amazingly, they totally reverse course. So we shouldn’t be following them. We have to go by our own. We need guys like Jay Clayton and others. Jay did a fantastic job in deregulating so much at the SEC and so much of you know, of what he did. It was a big deregulator. And again, he did it with – it was a beautiful thing to watch. That agency ran so – you know, I had a lot of great people. We never talk about those people and I think that’s natural. We talked about some of the ones I didn’t like and some of the ones I had in there I didn’t like, but mostly I had fantastic people because, you know, we got – and you can check every record and nobody was even close – I did the biggest cut in regulations. We gave the biggest tax cut in history, and we gave the biggest regulation cut in history. We gave a tax cut, which by the way is coming up. It’s going to be very bad, I think for the Democrats, but it’ll be very bad for this country if that’s not extended – the Trump tax cuts. But they are the biggest tax cuts in history. The other one is we gave the biggest regulation cuts in history. Jay was a part of that from what he was doing. But we gave them on the environment. We gave them on so many different things. We had plants built in Louisiana, that were refineries that were absolutely dead for 14 years. And I got them approved in one day. I’ve got two plants in Louisiana, massive plants –
LEE: Mr. President –
PRESIDENT TRUMP: –like three Empire State Buildings laying on their side. These were the biggest plants. I got them done and literally got them done in one day. They were waiting for 14 years for permits. I got them done in one day.
LEE: Mr. President, you mentioned earlier about the country losing economic power, and some might cite the downgrade of the United States credit rating as one example of how we are losing some of our economic power. When Fitch downgraded the U.S. to a double A over the summer they specifically cited the increasing polarization, declining governance over the past 20 years. But more specifically, they cited the January 6 insurrection. Under your presidency, if you are reelected, what can you tell us about how stable the U.S. will be? Especially as it appears that you’re stoking some political divide. You held a rally in Waco, Texas, and you’re sort of playing to this polarization of groups here.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, when I had the rally in Waco, we had 100,000 people show up, and that’s where they wanted the rally. You know, I’m like the businessman politician. You go where the people are, and I go to places – we had a tremendous rally this weekend. We’re having rallies in Michigan, the rallies are bigger than they’ve ever been. We have – as soon as the season gets a little bit warmer when we can do the outdoors – right now there’s no arena that can hold the number of people –
LEE: Does it matter to you, though, that we are downgraded, that we’ve been downgraded, and that our credit rating could be at further risk? Should there be further political polarization?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Sure, but it is not because of January 6. We get downgraded because of incompetent people, very incompetent people doing incompetent things. And as far as the dollar is concerned, we’re losing countries. We lose Iran, we lose this one. We have Russia, that’s out. We have many, many countries that we throw out of the system, and we can’t lose that system. That system is very— the dollar. That system is a very important system to the vitality and strength of our country. If we ever do lose that, they take out Russia, China would love to be, you know, the leader of the pack is Janet. Because they’d love to take it over. And it will be possible to take it over if we’re not strong. We have to hold countries in and if countries want to get out, we’re gonna have to say, Well, if you want to get out of our system, and go to let’s say, a Russian version or your own version, then we’re not going to do any trade with you. And they’ll be back in about two seconds. But it depends on who’s posing that statement to whoever it is the leader – like you’re dealing with Macron or you’re dealing with the leaders. You have to be able to talk to them properly. Our people don’t know how to talk to him. Our people are like we go there hat in hand like beggars. Our country is no longer respected. The people representing us are not respected. I just had Viktor Orban, a tough man from Hungary. He was at my place in Florida and I get along with him very well, friendly, but I have respect for him. He made this statement. I thought it was a wonderful statement, he said we will solve the problems of the world if Donald Trump comes back. He said Russia was afraid of him, China was afraid of him. We had no problems whatsoever under Trump, and now we have Israel being attacked, which by the way would have never happened. We have Ukraine and Russia fighting. That would have never happened. All of those dead people in blown up cities because Ukraine is now just like a demolition site, what they’ve done to Ukraine. None of that would have happened. All of those people would be alive today if the election results were, let’s say correct.
SORKIN: Mr. President, given how a country – given how divided it feels this country is, I want to play you just a piece of tape from Ken Langone, who I believe supported you in the last election, who was on “Squawk Box” earlier. About a month, month and a half ago now. And I want to show you what he had to say because I think it represents a lot of voters out there and I’m just curious if you would react to it, and explain sort of how you feel about it to the voters. Look at this if you could for a second.
Sound from Ken Langone: I worry if Trump wins, that it’s going to be four years of getting even. And that’s scary, because we’ve got serious issues coming up that need to be addressed.
SORKIN: What do you think of that, Mr. President? Because I think that there is a feeling that there is still an anger and a frustration that you have about certain issues.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well look, I’ve never been a fan of Ken. I never – I don’t know if he supported me. Maybe he supported me because I was the only one that he could support because that is the reason. But I’ve never been a fan. I’ve been a fan of Bernie Marcus. A big fan, Bernie Marcus is a big fan of mine. And that was the side that I chose. And, frankly, you know, he’s right in one sense. People think that there’s going to be revenge and I say no, the revenge is going to be success. There’s not going to be revenge in a revenge stance. It’s really going to be success. We’re going to turn our country around. We’re going to bring sense and – common sense, you know, people say you’re conservative. I’m not conservative. You know what I am? I’m a man of common sense. And a lot of conservative policies are common sense. We’re not gonna have open borders. You’re gonna have to come in legally. We’re going to close up the borders. I had the best border – I had the safest border in the history of our country. And it was – all he had to do is he could have gone to the beach like he likes doing, looks good in a bathing suit. If he would’ve left everything in place, including the people that were doing it, I had the best border in history. We built 571 miles of wall. I got Mexico to give us massive numbers of free soldiers. Now there is a case of tariffs. I said, if you don’t give us the soldiers, we’re gonna put a 25% tariff on your cars. They laughed at me when I said I want 28,000 soldiers. And I like, you know, the President of Mexico. I think is a very good guy. He happens to be a socialist, but you can’t have everything. But they laughed at me. I said, I want you to give us 25, 28,000 soldiers on our borders to stop the people that are coming in with the caravans. And they laughed at me. I say that’s okay. You don’t want to do it, right? Yeah. I’m going to put a 25% tariff on all of your products including all of the cars that you’re selling. You know, they stole, they took like we were babies, 32% of our car manufacturing business over the last 30 years. 32% is now being made in Mexico and getting bigger all the time. And now as I told you before, with China going in building plants there specifically to sell into the United States, I would say to China, if you’re building a plant on our border, to build cars in Mexico and to sell them into the United States, I’m putting a 50% tariff on all those cars. And you know what, they would stop building their plants in about two – but we don’t do that. We have stupid people running our government, to be honest.
KERNEN: Mr. President, we will see. I know you’ve got a lot going on. You’ve got the campaign, you’ve got the legal issues, people sometimes wonder you know how to prioritize and you just keep charging –
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, the legal issues aren’t legal issues. They are Biden issues. Biden put Fani, beautiful Fani, who’s turned out to be now a corrupt District Attorney, but in my opinion, they’re almost all corrupt. All of the stuff that you see, is weaponized government. And the DA in New York is being run by the DOJ. They put their top person into the DA’s office. All of this stuff and frankly, I get a lot of credit for it. I think I’m much more popular now because they did it and it backfired on them. They’ve weaponized our government. Think of it. They put Colangelo, one of their top people – like the top person – into the DA’s office to go get Trump. They deal with Letitia James a real lowlife. They put people with her, they’re dealing with her all the time to go get Trump. These are the Democrats. The prosecutors and judges in New York – our country could fall because of it, that’s how bad it is. And companies are moving out of New York, because of what they’ve done to me. And I’m gonna end up winning on appeal. And if I didn’t win on appeal on these ridiculous decisions, if I didn’t win on appeal is the most ridiculous decisions and putting the Miss Bergdorf Goodman, a person I never – I never met, I have no idea who she is. Except one thing. I got sued. From that point on I said, Wow, that’s crazy. What this is. I got charged. I was given a false accusation and had a post a $91 million bond on a false accusation. People aren’t moving into New York, because of the kind of crap they’re pulling on me. I feel like I’m a pioneer. What’s happening is we have to be very careful. You know, we have a very fragile country. People are rejecting it and they are watching. Normally somebody would be out of office if stuff like that happens. My numbers are much higher than they would have been had this not happened. But you have to be able to speak about it. It’s a very dangerous thing. Very, very dangerous thing for our country, what they’re doing. It’s the weaponization of the DOJ, the FBI, etc.
KERNEN: Well, we appreciate all the time you’ve given us this morning, Mr. President. I look forward to another conversation in the not too distant future.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you very much, Joe. Thank you, everybody.
