Donald Trump4:18
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 straight back to chaos and crime, 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 we've had they say in 58 years. So we went from being a crime-ridden city, our capital, being a crime-ridden place to being among the safest cities in the country. I'm so happy and 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, a 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. We also have a beautiful city. We had 22 fountains. Every one of them didn't work. One of them, the probably the best was one that hasn't worked for 50 years. That was about the best. They've all been out of commission for 50 years or more. Can you imagine that? 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, though, the one in front of Union Station is beautiful. You see that? It was all graffiti all over the place. We 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 foot long. It'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. Much wider. So, we just got that open last night. We went to do it before July 4th, and it is incredible. It's called, it was originally called 1922 was built. It was called the reflecting pond or the reflecting lake some people called it, but it was supposed to be reflection. It never worked from 1922 because it was stone on the base and no matter what it always leaked because you have stone and you have lots of crevices and we have nice stone out there, but if you go between the stone it leaks and so it never really worked very well and it was a bad color. It was gray. It's concrete and stone, so it was gray. And I had the idea along with some great people that worked for us, Doug Bergam, fantastic, his group, Greg, everybody. And 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 four 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 built many, many, many swimming pools as a builder. I built hundreds of them. And I got one of our contractors. I had him 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 inside. So we sand blasted the surface. We fumigated it. We took out 11 dumpsters, big dumpsters full of garbage. It was all garbage. And some of the garbage was there for years. It was all disgusting and it was it smelled. And anyway, we took 11 dumpsters of garbage out with shovels. We had a shovel inside of what's called a pool or a lake and got it cleaned. We then fumigated it. We then sand blasted the entire thing, washed it, cleaned it, scrubbed it, sand blasted it. Then we gave it a test. So we rinsed it out and we gave them a beautiful surface. And then they put a 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 would leave areas that can expand and contract a little bit because it expands over a foot and a half. Can you believe it? So I would have ripped it apart. So we left areas of expansion and contraction. This we were testing it for three weeks, four weeks. Works. It works great. And we just opened it last night and people are going wild over it. So, it was 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 because once we put that in, it looks so good. The sidewalks outside didn't look good anymore. You know, they look like they were in good shape. But when you do something new in this business, you do something new, the thing that you thought were good, you'd save it. So, we ended up sand blasting, steam cleaning, and sand blasting 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 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 it's like, it's in better shape than it was when it was built. I told you from 1922 never worked because it always leaked because it had a stone base. The water will leak 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 because the surface is so bad. And that'll be done during the next couple of weeks. We're going to start it in a week or so, 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 have 22 fountains that none of them worked. The earliest I'm telling you it's 50 years for 50 years. Some of them haven't worked for hundred years, but we have fountains that were not working and were disgusting and dirty and 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 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." And you don't want that. See, when I'm here, it'll be perfect, but 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 were 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 because I don't. But the Secure America Act provides $38 billion to ICE, $26 billion to Border Patrol to ensure these critical law enforcement agencies of the necessary resources to do their jobs, protecting our borders in 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. I'll give you an example. Washington over five. I don't even know if you know this. It's not just policing. 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 at 28 arrests and rough arrests for murder. And we took out almost 5,000 people out of Washington DC. 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 could handle 2%. That's