Well, thank you very much everybody. Thank you. Anytime. You're ready. Are you ready?
It's an honor to have these very distinguished people alongside of me. Not behind me. Alongside of me. I would never say behind me because they're not behind anybody. They're great. This morning, I'm thrilled to sign the Secure America Act to immediately and fully fund the Department of Homeland Security through the end of my term. So, we won't have that to be talking about anymore, Lisa.
We'll give the heroes of ICE and Border Patrol, and that's what they are. They're heroes 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? Right here.
Mike, you're doing an incredible job.
Just 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 Blanch. 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's Mark?
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 because he just wanted to serve the administration.
Amazing. As well as Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Senate Majority Whip John Barasso, who's here, I think. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Mr. President, and John is, you're incredible. From day one, we got along.
Thank you, Mr. President. Absolutely.
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 it looks better now that he did it.
We're going to win the game tonight, Mr. President.
Tonight with the baseball.
And House Majority Whip Tom Emmer, who is an unbelievable leader actually. It'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, you have your chance now, Tom, because people have really found out about it. Wow. I want to thank you.
No, but he's working with our people. They look like Elliot Ness. It looks like Elliot Ness in the gang up there, right? They're finding billions of dollars of fraud. And Tom Emmer is really helping us. Thanks, Tom.
Thank you. 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 who's here. Hi, Rand. Boy, oh boy. It's nice to have Rand.
It's a good thing to have Rand. He knows what's important. Eric Schmidt has been an incredible senator wherever you may be, Eric. He's tall enough. He's usually not too hard to find. And Bernie Moreno. Is Bernie here?
Where's Bernie? Hi, Bernie.
Absolutely. So, how's the race going in Ohio?
You're very popular there and you'll drag every Republican.
So, well, I love Ohio. We won by a lot, but you ran an incredible race. It was a big assist.
They weren't giving him a big chance and he ended up winning quite easily, right? So, thank you.
It was great. We're also pleased to be joined by Representatives Lisa McClain, Jodey Arrington, and Jody, where's Jody?
President, you're doing a great job. Your favorite budget chairman.
Garbarino, Laura Lee, thank you. Riley Moore, a newcomer who's doing really well. Guy Reschenthaler, Derek Van Orden, as well as Angel Suster, Chris Story. 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, 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 of 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, 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. 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, and 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 is 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, 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 in. So we sand blasted the surface. We fumigated it. We took out 11 dumpsters, big dumpsters full of garbage. It was all garbage. Some of the garbage was there for years. It was all disgusting. It had, it was, it smelled. And anyway, we took 11 dumpsters of garbage out. It's with shovels. We had a shovel inside of what's called a pool or a lake and got it clean. We then fumigated it. We then sand blasted the entire thing. We washed it, cleaned it, scrubbed it, sand blasted it. Then we gave it a test. So we rinsed it out and we gave him 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 'cause 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 3 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 a, 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 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, 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 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. Well, 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, 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 know. 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 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. I'll give you an example. In 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. Tough people. They're bad people. Some of them had records 22, 23, went in, 28 arrests and rough arrests for murder. And we got, 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 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 5,000 almost 5,000 people out of Washington DC. They'll never come back.
In addition, the National Guard and we work 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. 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 earlier in the process, but if, I got a call from your governor, I got a call from Steve.
They called me together actually and they said
They said we've never had a Mardi Gras like that. They had the lowest crime they've ever had in the history of the Mardi Gras, which has been going on for a long time. They usually see, they said they usually have numerous numbers of murders and they had none. But beyond murders, they, I heard it was the best like the best you've ever had.
It really was. A great Super Bowl, too.
And Memphis and that's going to be great for the Super Bowl 'cause we'll keep it that way. I think you're bidding on the Super Bowl coming in 2031.
Yeah. And it's going to be now you can really say it was a safe city. And the other one is Memphis. We, crime is down 77%. Can you believe it? People are calling me up. Friends were leaving Memphis. They were all leaving and now they're staying and the governor's everyone's thrilled. It's amazing. And if they would call me for Chicago, we'd straighten out Chicago so fast. Would straighten out New York fast. Would straighten out Los Angeles fast. We do it really well. And part of it is you have to get the really bad ones. You have to get the career criminals out because they will, they'll hit you hard. And they ought to get rid of, by the way, cashless bail. And you ought to do that as soon as possible. Mark Wayne.
Where they walk in, they commit a crime, they go out, they in the afternoon, they commit another crime, and sometimes those crimes are murder.
