WATCH LIVE: President-Elect Trump Holds Press Briefing At Mar-A-Lago With SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son

So it's an honor to be with you. We'll discuss a couple of points, we'll take some questions later if you'd like. I'm sure you might have one or two. I'd be shocked if you didn't. I'd be very impressed. But I'm honored to welcome one of the most accomplished business leaders of our time, the founder and CEO of SoftBank. Everybody knows Masayoshi Son. Masa runs one of the largest companies in Japan and among the most successful investment and technology companies anywhere in the world, one of the most successful investors in the world. And we've just concluded a very productive meeting. And today I'm thrilled to announce that SoftBank will be investing $100 billion in America, creating 100,000 American jobs at a minimum. And he's doing this because he feels very optimistic about our country since the election. And many other people are also coming in with tremendous amounts of money. You probably noticed that a poll was just taken. Business is literally in 39 years, there's been nothing like it. It's been the biggest increase. Small business owners gave it a 41% jump. It's the biggest jump that we've had in 39 years. Nobody's ever seen anything like it. And they're very optimistic. This historic investment is a monumental demonstration of confidence in America's future, and it will help ensure that artificial intelligence, emerging technologies, and other industries of tomorrow are built, created, and grown right here in the USA. One of the beautiful things about Masa is he's very much involved with emerging technology, probably knows it maybe better than almost anybody. So it's a great honor. And some of you remember after the 2016 election, also SoftBank committed to invest $50 billion in our country, and they did. And I'm very pleased to say that they kept that promise in every way, shape, and form. And now they're looking to do $100 billion. And I've looked at their books, they do have the possibility of doing more. I'm going to ask him to do a little bit more. But first I'm going to ask him to speak and just to say a few words. Masa, please.

I'm going to ask him right now. Would you make it $200 billion, Masa? He can ask, believe it or not, he can actually afford to do that. Would you do that?

That's good. All right, $200 billion. He'll make $200 billion investment. He is a great negotiator. He's a brilliant guy and did an unbelievable job. And the people of Japan and all over the world, they're very proud of him. They have tremendous respect for him. So when he does what he just did, and I would be surprised if it wouldn't go to $200 billion. When you say you'll try, I know you'll do it.

You'll have my support. All right, you have our country's support.

Say to the people of Japan who are all watching.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Great job. Thank you. It's amazing. It's a great gentleman, a great leader, and a great investor. So to have that offer made, and we have so many companies coming in now that will be announcing, or that will announce themselves. We don't have to be with them to do it, but they'll be announcing. And as I said, small business optimism took a 41-point jump. 41 points. It went up 41 points. That's unheard of. And that's the biggest they think in recorded history, but they know at least a minimum of 39 years. So that's great. But on behalf of the American people, I want to thank Masa for his faith in what's happening with our country and what's happening with the world. There's a whole light over the entire world. Many people, some reporters in speaking to, they said, you know, it actually is true. A couple of them are not necessarily friends of mine, but they said it is actually true that there's a light shining over the world. We're trying to help very strongly in getting the hostages back, as you know, with Israel and the Middle East. We're working very much on that. We're trying to get the war stopped, that horrible war that's going on in Ukraine with Russia-Ukraine. We're going to... we've got a little progress. It's a tough one, it's a nasty one. It's nasty. People are being killed at levels that nobody's ever seen. You know, it's very flat fields, and the only thing that stops a bullet is a body, a human body. And the number of soldiers that are being killed on both sides is astronomical. I've never seen anything like that. And rapidly, I get reports every week, and it's not even... you know, it's like just they're going down. Nobody's seen anything like it. It's a very flat surface, a very flat land. That's why it's great farming land. It's the bread basket for the world, actually. But it's very flat, and there's nothing to stop a bullet but a body. There's no protection, no nothing. And what's happening there is far worse than people are reporting for both sides. So we're going to do our best, and we've been doing our best, and we'll see what happens. But since the election, I've been working every day to put the world at ease a little bit, to get rid of the wars. We had no wars when I left office, and now the whole world is blowing up. But there's great optimism, and you saw that by SoftBank. Starting on day one, we'll implement a rapid series of bold reforms to restore our nation to full prosperity. We're going to go full prosperity and to build the greatest economy the world has ever seen, just as we had just a short time ago. We had it in my term. We had the greatest economy that the world had seen. We were blowing away everybody. Our country was doubling up on China, doubling up on everybody, and everybody knows it. And then we had to slow it down with COVID, unfortunately, at the end. But even then, I gave it back with a substantial increase of the stock market, bigger than it was pre-COVID. So it was pretty amazing. Already, preparations are underway to slash massive numbers of job-killing regulations, eliminating 10 old regulations for every new one. You put a new regulation on, you have to get rid of 10. And we'll be able to do it. And that was about the percentage we had. We cut more regulations than any president has ever cut, by far, actually, by approximately five times. Some of those regulations, unfortunately, were put back on, but we'll catch up very quickly. We'll catch up with it. One of the things I'd like to ask the Biden administration, as you probably heard, there are two events that took place. We're talking about a friendly takeover, a friendly transition, as they like to say. This is a friendly transition, and it is. But there are two events that took place that I think are very terrible. One is that if people don't come back to work, come back into the office, they're going to be dismissed. And somebody in the Biden administration gave a five-year waiver of that, so that for five years people don't have to come back into the office. It involved 49,000 people. For five years, they don't have to go. They just signed this thing. It's ridiculous. So it was like a gift to a union, and we're going to obviously be in court to stop it. The other thing is really terrible. We spent a tremendous amount of money on building the wall. The wall was designed specifically by the border patrol because it's very hard to climb. They need to have see-through. They need it to be steel because you can't get... it's very powerful steel. It's very hard steel. It's a special type of steel, but very, very hard to cut. Inside the steel, as you know, we pour concrete, and that's a great concrete, which is a very strong concrete. Very, as though you were building about a 60-story building. It's very powerful concrete. They've made tremendous technology advances in the word concrete. Who would think that? But I know that from the construction industry. Today, what you can do with concrete is incredible. So we have a very strong concrete, and then we have rebar. We put rebar inside the concrete, and the rebar likewise is very hard to cut. So it's a very expensive process, very expensive wall. And then we put an anti-climb plate on the top. You saw that. And I didn't like the look of it, but then when I watched, we had people testing. We had mountain climbers actually testing, and they were not able to get over the anti-climb plate. So I said, all right, I guess we're going to put it on, that plate on top, which I never loved the look of it, but it works so unbelievably well, you have to do it. So we spent a lot of money on building it, and we have hundreds of miles that we put up. A lot of people don't realize, but we did 571 miles of wall. That's why we had such good records, in addition to the fact that Mexico helped us with their military. They kept people out, and they were actually very good under the past leader. But now, we ordered an additional 200 miles of wall. It's very expensive, and now it's about double the price of what it would have been six years ago. And the administration is trying to sell it for 5 cents on the dollar, knowing that we're getting ready to put it up. And what they're doing is really... it's almost a criminal act. They know we're going to use it, and if we don't have it, we're going to have to rebuild it. And it'll cost double what it cost years ago. And that's hundreds of millions of dollars, because you're talking about a lot of wall. I built much more than I said I was going to build. But then after it was built, I said, you know, we can do some more, because it sort of like water, people flow through, and that will pretty much really take care of it. And what happened is, they just, as you see, they're trying to sell it for 5 cents on the dollar. And that's really... that has nothing to do with a smooth transition. That has to do with people really trying to stop our nation. And all it means really is that we're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more, not even talking about the time. Time would be pretty long, but we'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on building the same wall that we already have. And people have already come back to us that have deals at 5 cents and 4 cents, and one guy at 3 cents on the dollar. And they offered to sell it back to us at more money than it costs us to build, substantially. Can you believe it? So they make a deal with the United States to buy it for pennies, and then they call us and they say, 'Do you want to buy it back? We'll sell it back to you for hundreds of dollars a foot.' Hundreds of dollars, from pennies to hundreds of dollars a foot. And we can't let this take place. Now, we're going to go... I spoke with the Attorney General of Texas, I spoke to the senators of Texas, I spoke to a lot of people, and hopefully they'll be able to stop. We're going to be, you know, having a restraining order. But just think about how ridiculous it is. And this is just people that don't want this country to succeed. And this has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican. This has to do with common sense. We won on common sense, and this is maybe one of the most egregious examples I've seen. So the people that are buying it, are trying to buy it, are trying to make a deal with us to sell it back at hundreds of times more, hundreds of times more than we paid. And this is all because the Democrats. So I'm asking today, Joe Biden, to please stop selling the wall. We're going to use that to create a strong barrier. And it worked. That's why our numbers were so good. It really worked, and it worked well. And it's very expensive to do. And I'm asking Joe Biden to stop his people from giving it away. It's something that people can't even believe is happening. So hopefully Joe will be able to stop it. We'll soon unleash American energy, and this will be done at levels not seen before, issuing quick approvals for pipelines, drilling, and other infrastructure. It'll be clean energy, and we'll bring in the price of electricity, and we're going to bring it down fast. We're also going to create clean coal. Clean coal is something that has really taken over. We have coal that will last for over a thousand years. We have so much coal, and with a process, it becomes clean coal. It's very powerful energy, unlike wind. It's very, very powerful. And we're going to be doing a lot of clean coal for the people of West Virginia and others, Wyoming, so many states. We have great states, and they'll be happy to hear it. But we're going to be very much into clean coal. I don't ever use the word coal, I use the word clean coal. And I'll keep my promise to pass historic tax cuts for American families, workers, and businesses that create jobs in America. As you know, we're giving tax cuts if they do it here. We brought it down from 44%, 42%, some in some cases it was 39%. We brought it all the way down to 21%, and now we're bringing it down to 15%, but only if they make their product, their car, or whatever they're doing in the United States, in the US. And people are thrilled. I've had the smartest people on Wall Street call me. They said, 'Where'd you get that idea?' And it doesn't seem that complicated, right? But it's... nobody... it's like the paper clip. Nobody ever thought of it. One guy thought of it. Everybody looked at it, they said, 'Wow, that was a good idea. Why didn't I think of it?' But we're bringing it down six more points, and that will put us really at the best level we've ever had for bringing in business. We've never been down to that level. We'll be among the lowest-taxed states, and a lot of businesses are going to come in. Between that and our taxing and tariff policies, we're going to have business like nobody's ever seen in this country before. That's why we're, you know, having a 41-year record in optimism from small businesses and big businesses. And I'll keep my promise to pass historic tax cuts for families, workers, and businesses that create jobs in America. Any business that invests $1 billion or more in the United States will be eligible for fully expedited permits and approvals, including environmental approvals from the federal government. So when companies come in, if they're going to invest a billion dollars or more, there'll be many of them, and they'll go into Detroit and they'll go into a lot of places where we want them. You saw how well I did with the auto workers. We did unbelievably. You saw how well we did with the Teamsters and also the non-union. We're record 98%, 97%. Nobody's ever got numbers like that because we're bringing business back, and they're all coming back. I'm not... we lost them over years of stupidity. I call it the years of stupidity, the decades of stupidity. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk has been working very hard with various people, including Vivek, we're going to eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. I can only tell you, I'll give you a little early report: they're finding things that you wouldn't even believe. So we're looking to save maybe $2 trillion, and it'll have no impact. Actually, it'll make life better, but it'll have no impact on people. It's not like we're... we will never cut Social Security, things like that. It's just waste, fraud, and abuse. And we'll immediately restore the sovereign borders of the United States and stop illegal immigration, which is costing us, I believe, trillions of dollars a year. I think it's a cost that nobody's ever seen anything like it. I don't know how... how can you be satisfied releasing prisoners into the United States? Think of this: you're releasing prisoners from jails all over the world, not just in South America. From the Congo, I would talk about it all the time. They're a very big sender of people. But from all over the world, they're sending prisoners out of their jails. Some of their jails are empty, and they will be empty soon if this ever continued. I spoke with the president of Mexico, and as you know, I spoke with Justin Trudeau of Canada, and we told them it's not fair, not right. You can't let these people come into our country. And they understand. They're very much... and they're going to have to stop this from happening. They're going to have to stop it. We lose a lot of money to Mexico. We lose a lot of money to Canada, tremendous amount. We're subsidizing Canada. We're subsidizing Mexico. That can't go on. And I get along with the people of Mexico and Canada very well, but we can't let that happen. Why are we supporting and giving other countries hundreds of billions of dollars? It's not fair, it's not right. And the people of Mexico and Canada fully understand that. We've talked about it before, but now we're doing something about it. We started, and then we had to fix the COVID situation, and that's what we did. But now we're doing it. We're doing it from the beginning. Howard will be largely in charge. We'll be working on it together. Howard's terrific. He's done a fantastic job, and he's really helped us a lot with transition. I think we have fantastic people coming in. So all of these policies will help us rapidly defeat inflation, create millions of new jobs, and put money in the pockets of the hardworking families of our country. Pay off debt. We're going to be paying off a tremendous amount of debt. We have $36 trillion, you know, we don't want to be there. And we're going to be using a lot of the money that we make. We're going to be opening up a lot of businesses. They're going to be pouring in because of our tax policy. And we're going to use the money that we made to pay off debt and to reduce taxes. We're going to further reduce taxes. If you remember, when we reduced them last time, that brought a tremendous amount. We brought it down to 21%, and that was the biggest tax cut in the history of our country. And nobody ever thought this would happen, but this is what's supposed to happen. We actually ended up taking in more revenue at 21% than we did at 40%, which was pretty amazing. But this would be the most exciting and successful period of reform and renewal in all of American history, maybe of global history. The Golden Age of America, I call it. It's begun. So it's the Golden Age of America, and that's what it's going to be. And we hope we don't have any intervening problems, because things happen. Like out of nowhere came the China virus. Out of nowhere came other things. We don't want to have... you know, when I left, we had no wars. We had no problems. The Middle East was good. We did the Abraham Accords. We did things that nobody thought were even possible. But think of it. Four years ago, we had no wars. You didn't have Russia going into Ukraine. They wouldn't have done it. They weren't even thinking about it. When they saw what happened in Afghanistan, I think they got an idea, but they wouldn't have done it. They would have never... President Putin would have never gone in. And now you look at all those people are dead. All those cities are destroyed. You know, it's nice to say they want their land back, but the cities are largely destroyed. They've left Kyiv because probably maybe they want to use it or occupy it, but they haven't done it. They've done a lot of damage, but relatively compared to the other cities, very little. But many of those cities are gone. Those beautiful towers, those beautiful buildings that they had are now laying on their sides, destroyed, totally destroyed. The turrets and all of the magnificent thousand-year-old, 2,000-year-old structures that were very strong are blown to smithereens. You look at some of those cities, and not one building standing. So you know, when you say take over the country, take over what? Take over what? That's a hundred-year rebuild. It'll take a hundred years to rebuild it. You can never have it the way it was. What a shame. It should have never happened. It would have never happened if I were president. That war would have never happened, nor would Israel have happened with the attack on Israel. So we're inheriting big challenges at home and all over the world. Again, we had no wars. We had no problems. We had no inflation. We had no inflation. We had it less than 1%, perfect number. And then we had inflation the likes of which I say I don't believe the country's ever seen inflation like that. They say 38 years. I don't know. I think it's probably ever. But we're going to take care of all of it. We're going to get the prices down by energy. The energy is going to come in. We have more energy than anybody else. We're going to use it. We don't have to buy energy from Venezuela when we have 50 times more than they do. It's just insane what we're doing. So we will not rest until America is richer, safer, and stronger than it has ever been before. And we have a big head start. Last time we didn't, and last time we didn't know the people, we didn't know a lot of things. But by the time we got it up and going, it was incredible. Again, we built the greatest economy in history for that period of time, and we'll do it again, I believe substantially more so, because we understand. Number one, the people of Washington, I know them. I didn't know any of them virtually. I relied on other people for recommendations. Some were very good recommendations. We had some great people. Bob Lighthizer, I thought, was great. We had a lot of great people. But we had some people that I wouldn't have used in retrospect. And now I know them better than anybody, better than they know themselves. So once again, I'd like to thank Masa for what he's done with that investment, which will end up being $200 billion, I believe. But I just want to thank him. Just an outstanding man. When you have that kind of brain power wanting to invest in this country, and that's money that he can't invest elsewhere, so that's a big investment. But it makes me feel very good. Makes me feel that we're absolutely on the right track. So thank you to Masa, and we'll take a couple of questions. Yeah, please.

Jeff, you tell us what you said to Prime Minister Netanyahu on your call Saturday, and have you spoken to President Putin since your election?

Well, I'm not going to comment on the Putin question, but I will comment on Bibi. We had a very good talk. We discussed what is going to happen, and I'll be very available on January 20th. And we'll see. As you know, I gave warning that if these hostages aren't back home by that date, all hell's going to break out. And very strong. But we generally just discussed, I asked him where are things. Mike Waltz is... they're doing a great job, by the way. Everybody is very happy. I think he's doing a fantastic job. But he was very much involved in the call. But it was a recap call more than anything else.

How do you plan to stop the ban on TikTok next month?

We'll take a look at TikTok. You know, I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok because I won youth by 34 points. And there are those that say that TikTok has something to do with that. Now, Joe Rogan did, and some of the other people that were recommended by my son Barron. He knew names. I said, 'Who is that? Tell me who's that.' You got to be kidding. I can't believe you don't know. And I did those interviews, and it was actually sort of cute, do you want to know the truth. But we did them, and that had an impact. But TikTok had an impact. And so we're taking a look at it. But you know, we won youth. Republicans are always 30 points down in youth. I don't know why. But we ended up finishing... there was one poll that showed us down about 30. We were 35 or 36 points up with young people. So I have a little bit of a warm spot in my heart, I'll be honest.

Are you entertaining the idea of preemptive strikes against Iran's nuclear facilities?

Against who?

Against Iran's nuclear facilities.

I can't tell you that. I would... I mean, it's a wonderful question, but how can I... am I going to do preemptive strikes? Why would I say that? Can you imagine if I said yes or no? You'd say that was strange that he answered that way. Am I going to do preemptive strikes on Iran? Is that a serious question? How could I answer a question like that?

Say, would you be in support of Israeli strikes on Iran's...

How could I tell you a thing like that? No, it's just... you don't talk about that before something may or may not happen. You know, just... I don't want to insult you. I just think it's just not something that I would ever answer having to do with there or any other place in the world.

Can I ask just clearly, do you believe there's a connection between vaccines and autism?

Well, I don't look... right now you have some very brilliant people looking at it. I had dinner the other night with the head of Pfizer, the head of Eli Lilly, and RFK, as you know, and Oz, and other people within the administration that are involved in the medical. And we're looking to find out. You know, if you look at autism, so 30 years ago we had, I've heard numbers of like one in 200,000, one in 100,000, and now I'm hearing numbers of one in 100. So something's wrong. There's something wrong, and we're going to find out about it.

Can I follow up on Robert Kennedy? He's on the Hill today, he's meeting with senators. What do you say to people who are worried that his views on vaccines will translate into policies that will make their kids less safe?

No, I think he's going to be much less radical than you would think. I think he's got a very open mind, or I wouldn't have put him there. He's going to be very much less radical. But there are problems. I mean, we don't do as well as a lot of other nations, and those nations use nothing. And we're going to find out what those problems are. And another thing that came up, the dinner was fascinating because I had Bobby, and I had again the head of Pfizer, you know who that is, he's a highly respected man who has run an incredible company. Likewise with Lilly, the top two people. And we had the head of the industry also, so all companies were represented. And I said, 'Let's have it out now a little bit.' And you know what came out of that meeting is that we're paying far too much, because we're paying much more than other countries. And we have laws that make it impossible to reduce. And we have a thing called the middleman. You know the middleman, right? The horrible middleman that makes more money, frankly, than the drug companies, and they don't do anything except they're a middleman. We're going to knock out the middleman. I'm going to be very unpopular after that. I don't know who these middlemen are, but they are rich as hell. We're going to knock out the middleman. We're going to get drug costs down at levels that nobody has ever seen before. And that really, I tell you, we spent more time talking about that with Bobby and with the executives and Oz, all of them. We spent more time talking about that than anything else.

Thanks, President Trump. What about the polio vaccine?

Well, I'm a big believer in it. And I think everything should be looked at, but I'm a big believer in the polio vaccine.

The Salk vaccine. Do you think schools should mandate vaccines?

Do you think schools should mandate vaccines? I don't like mandates. I'm not a big mandate person. So, you know, I was against mandates. Mostly Democrat governors did the mandates, and they did a very poor thing, you know, in retrospect. They made a big mistake having to do with the education of children. You know, they lost like a year, two years of their lives. The mandate was a bad thing. I was against the mandate.

So is that something you... Mr. President, do you expect Ron DeSantis to appoint Lara Trump to Marco Rubio's seat?

No, I don't. I probably don't, but I don't know. Ron's doing a good job. That's his choice, nothing to do with me. Lara is unbelievable. I mean, she was incredible, the job she did at the RNC as chairman, along with Michael Whatley. The combination, but I could just speak for Lara, she is so highly respected by women. I mean, even her workout routines are through the roof. She lifts 150 pounds. I don't know how the hell she does it. She's a bad example for men and women because I wouldn't be able to beat her, I don't believe. I try like hell. But no, she's an incredible woman. And you know, it's funny. People often times talk about nepotism. I never had... when I put her there, people said, 'How did you get her to do it?' You know, she could have run for the Senate in North Carolina. Ted Budd would be the first to say, and he wouldn't have run. Nobody would have run. And she just said, 'No, I want to really focus on my children when the election and my family.' She has a great family. When the election started getting closer, I asked her would she go to Washington and work on the, you know, as chairman of the committee, along with Michael Whatley. And they did such an unbelievable job, especially on cheating. They stopped it, or at least they stopped it. Too big to rig, and we won in a landslide. You know, we won tremendously. She did an amazing job. Now, Ron is going to have to make... because Marco has been really a star already, and we haven't started. But you know, we see signs of... from some people, very early, we see signs of stardom. And Marco has done incredibly. He's sort of born for it. It was such an easy decision. The Marco decision was such an easy... but he leaves a vacancy in Florida, and Ron's going to have to make that decision, and he'll make the right decision. I also know that Lara's got so many other things. I mean, she's got so many other things. People want her to be on television. They want to give her contracts. You know, her predominant thought is our country and her family. Those are her thoughts. But she's got so many other things that she's talking about. He'll make the right decision.

Mr. President, should senators who oppose your nominees, your cabinet nominees, should they be...

Primary, if they are unreasonable, I'll give you a different answer, an answer that you'll be shocked to hear. If they're unreasonable, if they're opposing somebody for political reasons or stupid reasons, I would say it has nothing to do with me. I would say they probably would be primaried. But if they're reasonable, fair, and really disagree with something or somebody, I can see that happening. But I do believe that if they're unreasonable, I think we have great people. I think we have a great group of people. Pam has been unbelievably received. You take a look, Pam Bondi. So many have been just unbelievably received. I think Pete Hegseth is making tremendous strides over the last week. He's going to be great. Look, he went to Princeton, he went to Harvard, he was a great student there. But he really was, from the first day I met him, all he wanted to talk about was military. He's just a military guy. I think it's a natural. This was my idea. And you know, Pete Hegseth gave up a lot because he was going big places in Fox, big places, a lot of money. And he didn't even hesitate when I said, 'Do you want to do this?' He said, 'Absolutely.' I said, 'You know, if it doesn't work out, you'll never have the opportunity that you have right now in terms of the world of entertainment or business, whatever you want to call it. You'll never have that opportunity again. In fact, it could be just the opposite because it's nasty out there.' He said, 'I don't care, I have to do it for my country.' He gave up a tremendous amount. If this didn't work, it would be a tragedy. But that's what he loves. He loves the military. I never talked to him about anything else. He'd talk about the military. He'd come to see me about a soldier that was unfairly treated and could I help. That's the only thing I virtually ever talked to him about. And I always remembered it. I've seen him many times and I don't think I've ever had a subject on anything other than military with him. That's where his love is. And he didn't say, 'Well, I'd like to think about it, I'd like to talk to my family.' He said, 'Not even a contest.' And you know, he was going through the roof over there. He was doing great. They have the number one show that Saturday and Sunday with Will and Rachel. That was great chemistry. And if this didn't work out for him, it would be actually sort of tragic.

Would you consider pardoning Eric Adams?

Yeah, I would. Yeah, I think that he was treated pretty unfairly. Now, I haven't seen the gravity of it all, but it seems, you know, like being upgraded in an airplane many years ago. I know probably everybody here has been upgraded. They see you're all stars and they say, 'I want to upgrade that person from NBC.' I'm going to upgrade him, and that would mean you'll spend the rest of your life in prison. I don't know, somehow, I hope I would. I mean, I'd have to see it because I don't know the facts. I think he was treated, you know, it's very interesting. When he essentially went against what was happening with the migrants coming in, and you know, he made some pretty strong statements like, 'This is not sustainable.' I said, 'You know what, he'll be indicted soon.' And I said it not as a prediction, a little bit light-heartedly, but I said it. I said, 'He's going to be indicted.' And a few months later he got indicted. So yeah, I would certainly look at it.

Mr. President, can I ask a question about the drones in Syria? Are you planning on pulling them when you get into office, or will you...?

Well, you know, we had 5,000 troops along the border, and I asked a couple of generals. So we have an army of 250,000 in Syria, and you had an army of 400,000. They have many more people than that. Turkey is a major force, by the way. And Iran is somebody I got along with great, but he has a major military force, and his has not been worn out with war. It hasn't been worn out with all of the other things. I mean, he's built a very strong, powerful army. And so we have 5,000 soldiers in between a 5 million person army and a 250,000 person army. And I asked the general, 'What do you think of that situation?' He said, 'They'll be wiped out immediately.' And I moved them out because, and I took a lot of heat. And you know what happened? Nothing. Nothing. I saved a lot of lives. Now we have 900. They put some back, but 900. If you're talking about two sides, one of the sides has been eventually wiped out. But nobody knows who the other side is. But I do. You know who it is? Turkey. Okay, Turkey is the one behind it. He's a very smart guy. They've wanted it for thousands of years, and he got it. And those people that went in are controlled by Turkey, and that's okay. It's another way to fight. But no, I don't think that I want to have our soldiers killed. But I don't think that will happen now anyway because the one side's been decimated.

Mr. President, are you concerned about more unrest in that region, or do you think it will calm...?

Well, nobody knows what the final outcome is going to be in the region. You know, nobody knows who really the final... I believe it's Turkey, and I think Turkey is very smart. He's a very smart guy, and he's very tough. But Turkey did an unfriendly takeover without a lot of lives being lost. I can't say that Assad was a butcher. What he did to children, you remember, I attacked him with the 58 missiles. Unbelievable missiles coming from ships 700 miles away, and every one of them hit their target. But I did that. That was the red line in the sand. Obama drew it, and then he refused to honor what he did. He said, 'If anybody goes across the red line,' and Assad killed many more children after that, and Obama did nothing. But I did. I hit him with a lot of missiles. In fact, President Xi was sitting here the night he was in that dining room having chocolate cake. Remember the famous chocolate cake? But that's when I explained what we were doing as the missiles were shot, and it was amazing as to precision because every one of those missiles hit its target from a long distance away. Had President Obama drawn the line and where it meant something, you wouldn't have even had Russia there. But in the end, I never understood why Russia went there. They were not getting very much out of it. But now their time is taken up with Ukraine, and we'd like to get them to stop on Ukraine and Ukraine stop also. As you know, when I went to the cathedral, which is fantastic, the job that they've done in France and the job that Macron, you know, and Manuel did, he did a phenomenal job on the rebuilding of that cathedral. It's magnificent, and they did the right thing. And they had great respect for our country. They treated me, meaning I'm the country, I'm the representative of our country, and we were treated with great respect. And one of the people that came to pay his respects is, as you know, Ukraine's Zelensky, and he would like to have peace. He wants peace. Everyone's being killed. It's the worst carnage that this world has seen since World War II. I've had pictures of fields where bodies are lying on top of bodies. It looks like the old pictures of the Civil War where just bodies are all over. If you saw those pictures, you'd feel more strongly about it. It's got to stop, and we're trying. We're going to see. We're going to be talking. We'll be talking to President Putin, and we'll be talking to the representative Zelensky and representative from Ukraine. We got to stop it. It's carnage.

What about the fear here at home of the drones? Thank you. Good to see you. Can you comment on the drones that are flying around New Jersey and ports? It seems like the American people have a big disconnect. The government knows what is happening.

Look, our military knows where they took off from. If it's a garage, they can go right into that garage. They know where it came from and where it went. And for some reason, they don't want to comment. And I think they'd be better off saying what it is. Our military knows, and our president knows. And for some reason, they want to keep people in suspense. I can't imagine it's the enemy, because if it was the enemy, they'd blast it out. Even if they were late, they'd blast it. Something strange is going on. For some reason, they don't want to tell the people, and they should, because the people are really... I mean, they happen to be over Bedminster. You know, they're very close to Bedminster. I think maybe I won't spend the weekend in Bedminster. I've decided to cancel my trip.

Have you received an intelligence briefing on the drones?

I don't want to comment on that.

Have you been... do you have any reason to think they're... two quick questions. First, on vaccines, do you want RFK Jr. to revoke any vaccines?

No, I want him to come back with a report as to what he thinks. We're going to find out a lot. We're doing two things. We're going to have tremendous cost savings, we come out of this, that's a minimum. And we're also going to have, and I think, very serious discussions about certain things, whether it's pesticides. You know, Europe doesn't use pesticides, and yet they have a better mortality rate than we do. They don't use pesticides. In fact, they use it as an excuse not to take our farm products. We spend billions and billions of dollars on pesticides, and something bad's happening. Again, you take a look at autism today versus 20, 25 years ago, it's like not even believable. So we're going to have reports. No, nothing's going to happen very quickly. I think you're going to find that Bobby is much... he's a very rational guy. I found him to be very rational. No, nothing, you're not going to lose the polio vaccine. That's not going to happen. I saw what happened with the polio. I have friends that were very much affected by that. I have friends from many years ago, and they have obviously, they're still in such good shape because of it. You know, that was... and many people died. And the moment they took that vaccine, it ended. Dr. Jonas Salk did a great job. So I don't anticipate that at all. But we're going to look into finding why is the autism rate so much higher than it was 20, 25, 30 years ago. I mean, it's like it's a hundred times higher. There's something wrong, and we're going to try finding that. We're also going to find out why are we paying more than other countries. And we were in the process of doing that through transparency and other things. We were doing a good job in that first term. And we brought it down. We got the $35, all of the different things. We got, you know, we were the ones that got all of that done. Every one of those things, we got them done. I said, 'You know, I hope I win because otherwise somebody's going to take a lot of credit for what we did.' But now what happens is we're going to have a big conversation on price. Why is it that Germany and UK and other countries are paying so much more for the same box of medicine made in the same plant? Why is it that we're paying many times more? And I know the answer, because our government didn't do what they were supposed to do. And what I put in place was terminated unexpectedly by the Biden administration, and they shouldn't have terminated it. It would have had a huge impact.

And Mr. President, one quick question on Ukraine. You mentioned that some of the areas are already decimated. Do you believe that Ukraine should cede territory to Russia?

Well, I'm going to let you know that after I have my first meeting. But a lot of that territory, when you look at what's happened to those... I mean, there are cities that there's not a building standing. It's a demolition site. There is not a building standing, so people can't go back to those cities. There's nothing there. It's just rubble. Just like when I knocked down a building in Manhattan, which is actually... this is worse, actually, because we do it step by step. This thing has just got demolished. And by the way, in those buildings are many people. Many people were in those buildings. You know, when they say the number in Ukraine is going to be a much higher number of deaths, it's going to be a much higher number than you're hearing. You know, they're big buildings. That's what I did very well. And these are very long buildings. They're 15 to 20 stories high. They're massive buildings. I was surprised, I said, 'How big?' And they're flattened like a pancake. One or two bombs hit them, and they just collapse. And they'd say nobody was hurt. Well, nobody knows who was in those buildings. There were a lot of people in those buildings. They're going to find that when they start doing the removal. Many more people are being killed in the Ukraine war with Russia than is being reported, and that includes soldiers. The soldiers are being... it's a carnage that we haven't seen since the Second World War. It's got to be stopped, and I'm doing my best to stop it.

Yeah, please go ahead. You had a meeting with Mrs. Abe yesterday, but Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba is hoping to have a meeting anytime soon.