Us what they have to go through to keep us safe, the support and resources they need to defend our borders, protect our homeland, and to keep America safe. I want to thank Speaker Mike Johnson. He's incredible. Where is Mike Johnson? Mike, you're doing an incredible job. You have not a big majority. Rather have 40 or 50. I don't think you'd know what to do. We have He'd say, 'What are we doing?' He's done an amazing job. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, and Todd is up, and I hear he's got tremendous support in the Senate. And he's got tremendous support everywhere, actually. He's doing a fantastic job. And Secretary of Homeland Security Mark Wayne, where is Mark Wayne? He gave up his Senate seat. He had a guaranteed seat for the next 40 to 50 years.
And he gave it up to be Homeland Security cuz he just wanted to Yep. They're amazing. Amazing. As well as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, who's here, I think. And John is You're incredible. From day one we got along, right? First day I met him. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, one of the bravest people. And what he went through is incredible, incredible. And he's I actually think he looks better now than he did.
Oh, is it tonight? And House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who is uh an unbelievable leader, actually. He's just so highly respected, and he's in Minnesota, and he's ripping them because he knows what's going on. I mean, it's uh Uh you have your chance now, Tom, cuz people have really found out about it. So, I want to I want to thank you for the No, but he's working with our with our people. They look like Eliot Ness. It looks like Eliot Ness and the gang up there, right? They're finding billions of dollars of fraud. And Tom Emmer is really helping us. Thanks, Tom.
And thanks as well to Senators Lindsey Graham, who had a big victory last night. He won by a lot. And no runoff, no nothing. Had a lot of very capable people running against him, and he just blew them away. So, Lindsey Graham, congratulations. And Chuck Grassley, Rand Paul was here. Hi, Rand Paul. Oh, boy, it's nice to have Rand.
It's a good thing to have Rand. Do you Do you know what's important? Eric Schmitt has been an incredible senator. Wherever you may be. Yeah, he's tall enough. He's usually not too hard to find. And Bernie Moreno. Is Bernie here?
Where's Bernie? Hi, Bernie. What a job, right?
So, how's the race going in Ohio?
Well, you're very popular there, and you'll drag every Republican across the
So. Well, I love Ohio. We won by a lot. But you ran an incredible race. It was
They weren't giving him a big chance, and he ended up winning quite easily, right? So, it's you. It was great. We're also pleased to be joined by Representatives Lisa McClain, Jodey Arrington, and uh Jodey, where's Jodey?
Right here, Mr. President.
You're doing a great job, Jodey.
Thank you, Mr. Budget Chairman.
Garbarino, Laurel Lee, thank you. Riley Moore, a newcomer who's doing really well. Guy Reschenthaler, Derrick Van Orden, as well as Angel Sister, Chris Stewart, you know that.
Fantastic. And we appreciate it. Chris, we appreciate it.
For more than Thank you very much. Appreciate it being here. Gone through a lot. For more than 100 days, congressional Democrats tried to block all funding for the Department of Homeland Security in a reprehensible attempt to throw open the borders of the United States of America. They want to drag us straight back to chaos and crime and the crooked Joe Biden administration, one of the most corrupt administrations, probably the most corrupt ever. Nobody's ever seen anything like it, and we're not going to let them do that. I have to say that Washington just had some crime numbers out, and it's the lowest number best crime numbers that we've had, they say, in 58 years. Uh so, we went from being a crime-ridden city, our capital, being a crime-ridden place to being uh among the safest cities in the country. I'm so happy, and you're you're big beneficiaries because most of you live here, you hear all the time, the press, the media, and even actually some of the media, a couple of people that I would not suspect, couple of people truly treat me unfairly, but they came up and they thanked me because it's so much We have a safe city now. Uh we also have a beautiful city. We had 22 fountains. Uh every one of them didn't work. One of them uh the the Probably the best was one that hasn't worked for 50 years. That was about the the best. They've all been out of commission for 50 years or more. Can you imagine that? Uh they were graffiti-strewn, grass-strewn, grass growing through the cracks, and they were in terrible shape, and all 22 have now been opened, and the most magnificent possibly of all, the one in front of Union Station is beautiful. You see that? It was all graffiti all over the place. We uh through a lot of work, we got it looking maybe better than it was the day they put it in. But the one that they're all talking about is the almost 2,500 ft long, that's taller than any building in the world, actually. There's no building that's 2,500 ft tall, I don't think. But it's like twice the height of the Empire State Building as an example, and much wider. So, uh we just got that open. Last night we went to do it before July 4th, and it is incredible. It's called uh it was originally called 1922 was built it was called a reflecting pond or the reflecting lake some people called it, but uh it was supposed to be a reflection. It never worked from 1922 because it was stone on the base and no matter what it always leaked cuz you have stone and you have lots of crevices we have nice stone out there, but if you go between the stone it leaks. And uh so it never really worked very well. And it was a bad color was gray. It's concrete and stone so it was gray. And I had the idea along with uh some great people that work for us Doug Bergum was fantastic. His group Greg everybody. And uh we worked very hard. But it was going to cost $400 million and we did it for about $10 million. It was going to take 4 years to build and we did it in like a month month and a half. And we would have had a construction site out there for years. And it wouldn't have worked when they built it. So when they told me what they were going to do I said that's not a good idea. I've built many many many swimming pools as a builder built hundreds of them. And I got one of our contractors I had them take a look. And he said oh we can do a great job if you could just give us a decent surface the surface was it so we sandblasted the surface. We fumigated it. We took out 11 uh dumpsters big dumpsters full of garbage. It was all garbage through and some of the garbage was there for years. It was all disgusting and it it would it smelled. And anyway we took 11 dumpsters of garbage out. It's uh with shovels we had a shovel inside of what's called a a pool or a lake. And uh got it clean we then fumigated it. We then uh sandblasted the entire thing washed it cleaned it scrubbed it sandblasted it. Then we uh gave it a test and we rinsed it out, and we gave them a beautiful surface, and then they put a [clears throat] swimming pool topping, but industrial strength. It's industrial strength. It's used for tanks and lots of other things to hold water. And we worked out the ratios of expansion and contraction, because you know, believe it or not, when you have something that's 2,500 ft long, there's tremendous expansion and Who would think of this? Only person that does it like me. And they have a lot of expansion and contraction. So, when we're putting the surface down, we'd leave areas that can expand and contract a little bit, cuz it expands over a foot and a half. Can you believe it? So, it would have ripped it apart. So, we left areas of expansion and contraction. This we were testing it for 3 weeks, 4 weeks. Works It works great. And we just opened it last night, and people are going wild over it. So, it's going to cost 400 million, and we did it for 10, probably 10, if you take away a couple of things. We did a much bigger job than originally planned, cuz once we put that in, it looked so good, the sidewalks outside didn't look good anymore. You know, they looked like they were in good shape, but when you do something new in this basis, you do something new, the thing that you thought were good, you save it. So, we ended up uh sandblasting, steam cleaning, and sandblasting the sidewalks around it. And we had a lot of areas that were in bad shape. We had to fix them. We patched them, and you can't even see the patch. We have granite surrounding the pool, and the granite's great, but it was filthy, dirty, disgusting. And it was broken in some cases. We We were able to carve out pieces from other pieces that were identical, and put them in, and you can't even see the seam. And uh it's like a beautiful It's It's in better shape than it was when it was built. I told you, from 1922, never worked, because it always leaked. Cuz it had a stone base. The water leaked through the stone. So, we're very proud of it. It's going to be great. Now, we're doing a new surface on the World War II fountain cuz the surface is so bad. And that'll be done during the next couple of We're going to start in a week or so and finish it very quickly. But we've done a great job and the city is everyone's coming up to me saying, 'The city is so beautiful.' So, we [clears throat] have 22 fountains that none of them worked. The The earliest, I'm telling you, is 50 years. The 50 years Uh some of them haven't worked for 100 years. But we have uh fountains that were not working and were disgusting and dirty. And uh they're all beautiful now, every one of them. We also took care of a lot of the monuments, not fountains, but monuments and they're all in good shape. Some of them are being finished up now. And it's incredible. And my goal was to get it all done along with interior and others that worked with us to get it done before the July 4th date. July 4th was a very important date. So, that was our That was the date we looked at and we we did a We did a hell of a job. But everybody's looking at that reflecting pool. They can't believe it. Reflects. We used a dark blue. It's called American flag blue. I wanted to go light, but they said, 'Sir, light doesn't reflect. And light shows leaves and garbage if garbage.' One man said, 'Sir, when you leave, it'll be strewn with garbage again.' You don't want that. So, when I'm here, it'll be perfect. When I leave, I said, 'You're right about that. You're probably right.' Depending on who's president or who's running it. But it's really beautiful. It's something for you to see. It's incredible. It's the largest It's the longest pool in the world by three or four times. It's You know, it's really pretty amazing. That's where Martin Luther King made his great speech. And they say he had a million people. And I made a speech there for July 4th a few years ago and they said and I was packed. And they said I had 25,000 people. They said he had a million, but when you look at the picture
I said, 'Well, wait, the people are even tighter at mine. I had more people than him, but they said I had 25,000 and he had a million, but I'm not going to argue with Martin Luther King cuz I love him.'
But the Secure America Act provides $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to Border Patrol to ensure these critical law enforcement agencies with the necessary resources to do their jobs protecting our borders and getting criminal aliens out of the country. And starting on day one of my administration, we took the most dangerous, unsafe, violent, and open border people out of this country. We got them out. Um I'll give you an example in Washington over five I don't even know if you know this. It's not just police. You have criminals. You have career criminals. There's nothing you can do to make them nice. They're tough people. They're bad people. Some of them had records 22, 23. One had 28 arrests. And rough arrests for murder. And we got uh we took out almost 5,000 people out of Washington, D.C. And if you remember, so 2% of the people create 91% of the crime. When you hear that number, it's great. I love that number because you can handle 2%.
If it's 91 create 91, that's no good. Too many people. But 2% of the people and we got we took uh uh 5,000 almost 5,000 people out of Washington, D.C. They'll never come back. In addition, the National Guard and we worked with the police department, law enforcement was great. And we have a very safe city. Everyone's going out to eat now. Restaurants were all closed. They were all closing. The few that were open were closing. And now you can't get a restaurant in Washington. Everyone wants to have a restaurant there. It's a whole different So, it's very something we're very proud of. New Orleans, the same thing, by the way. It's a little a little earlier in the process. But, if I got a call from your government, I got a call from Steve. They called me together, actually, and they said uh
