Bloomberg Businessweek interviewed former US President Donald Trump at his golf club, Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, on June 25, two days before the first 2024 presidential debate and about two weeks before a failed assassination attempt. In a discussion focused on business and the global economy, Trump talked about the Federal Reserve, inflation, tax cuts, tariffs, Taiwan and his relationships with chief executives. The interview was conducted by Bloomberg Senior Reporters Nancy Cook and Joshua Green, Managing Editor Mario Parker and Businessweek Editor Brad Stone. Below is a transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for clarity, and annotated with several fact-checks by Gregory Korte.
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BLOOMBERG BUSINESSWEEK: Well, thank you for spending time with us. I want to start by asking a broad question: What kind of economy do you want for the American people in terms of innovation, opportunity and global competitiveness?
TRUMP: Well, I think manufacturing is a big deal, and everybody that runs for office says you"ll never manufacture again.
We have currency problems, as you know. Currency. When I was president, I fought very strongly and hard with President Xi and with Shinzo Abe, who"s a fantastic man-actually, you know the story there.
So we have a big currency problem because the depth of the currency now in terms of strong dollar/weak yen, weak yuan, is massive. And I used to fight them, you know, they wanted it weak all the time. They would fight it and I said, if you weaken it any more, I"m going to have to put tariffs on you. They went as far as they could with me, but I was very tough with it. Nobody talks about it now. And that difference is, you know, we have the spread is the biggest and I think they said 38 years.1 That"s a tremendous burden on our companies that try and sell tractors and other things to other places outside of this country. It"s a tremendous burden.
And I remember it"s one of the things I worked almost hardest on, to keep their currency up2. Because we, you know, we didn"t have the kind of a discrepancy that you have right now. And I think you"re going to see some very bad things happen in a little while. I"ve been talking to manufacturers, they say we cannot get, nobody wants to buy our product because it"s too expensive. You look at Komatsu and these tractor companies. They make a good product but you know-what it does is it forces, it"s going to force Caterpillar and these other companies to build, they already have plenty outside but it"s going to force them to build in other nations, which is what the other nations want. And it"s what we should want also in a different way, we should want that, we have to have that but I think you"re gonna see some very bad numbers coming over the next period of a year. It takes a while to have that happen. But it is really the discrepancy as an example between the dollar and the yen and the dollar and the yuan is unbelievable. With the dollar being high and with them being very low. I would always notice they fought very hard to keep their currency low.
It doesn"t sound good, but from a standpoint of what they do and making products, that"s how Japan was built. That"s how China was built. I think we"re in a very bad position.
1The dollar reached an all-time high of 8.7 yuan in 1994. It"s now at 7.3 yuan. During Trump"s time in office, the dollar declined 5.5% against the yuan.
2The Trump administration declared China a currency manipulator in 2019, the first such designation since 1994.
Has President Biden done anything good with the economy? Do you give him any credit at all?
Look, I would love to. I would love to see him ... but I just feel that everything he"s doing is the opposite of what should be done. I have no objection to the electric vehicle-the EV. I think it"s great. Elon [Musk, the Tesla chief executive officer] is fantastic. I think it"s great. I"ve driven them often and they"re wonderful. But you can"t have 100% of your cars electric. We can"t electrify our cities. We"re so far behind on just, you know, the basics, but it"s not that. The cars don"t go far enough. They"re very, very expensive. They"re also heavy. You know, they"re much heavier. They want to go to electric trucks. If you did electric trucks about double, because I"ve met a lot with the trucking industry. They"re two-and-a-half times the weight of the same truck with diesel.1 And who would think this? You would have to rebuild your bridges and your infrastructure, can"t hold the weight2-they"re massively heavier than not just a little bit, the batteries and all everything, the components are much heavier than diesel or gasoline. So I mean, these are problems that have big problems. You saw last week they announced that they opened up seven chargers for a course of $8 billion3. Seven. Seven chargers. It"s like, it"s like a pump at a gas station. They did seven chargers. They spent $8 billion doing it and that"s probably one hundred, one-thousandth of 1% of what you need. And I don"t even know-I"ve seen reports that if you were going to electrify the country, the country would have to go bankrupt. It would take $5 trillion4 to have the requisite number of chargers. These are things that are not complex to understand, and yet they don"t want to even talk about them, you know? They tell that the car companies-keep making the cars, we don"t care, they want to have 50% of the cars by the end of, by 2030 and substantially more than that-I think 75%-by 20325. Seventy-five percent. Not doable. Not sustainable-and by the way, they"re also giving massive amounts of subsidy that nobody really even knows about. But you"re talking trillions of dollars6. We have hundreds of thousands of electric cars right now that aren"t selling, and yet you don"t hear any complaints from the car companies. Normally, if a car doesn"t sell, you know, it"s a front-page story on Businessweek. Right? But they are not selling and the car companies are happy. They"re getting subsidized at levels never seen before.
1Trump is comparing the weight of the drivetrain and fuel components between long-haul diesel-powered and electric trucks. For shorter-haul trucks, the difference is smaller.
2Under current law, natural gas- and electric-powered trucks get a 2,000-pound exemption to their gross vehicle weight limit, to 82,000 pounds. A study by the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis found the increased weight would reduce the life cycle of pavement by less than 1%; the effect on bridges was also small but needs further study.
3The Federal Highway Administration says the program had up-front costs but the agency is "hitting our stride" in installing new charging stations.
4A study last month by the right-leaning National Center for Energy Analytics put the cost at $2.4 trillion to $3.9 trillion.
5The Biden administration goal is to have 50% of new vehicle sales be electric by 2030. Separately, the EPA has adopted emissions standards that, under some scenarios, would require 56% of cars sold in 2032 to be electric models.
6A Goldman Sachs report puts the price tag at $1.2 trillion for all Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, not just electric vehicles.
I want to ask you about inflation. Biden has really been hurt politically by inflation. Partly, it was caused by the pandemic but partly because of his stimulus. What would you have done differently?
So inflation was caused by energy. And what he did is he started immediately cutting my energy. We had it down to a level-we had it down to, at some points, $1.501. That was a little bit artificial because we had pandemics, we had a lot of you know a lot of things changed with a pandemic. You have the pandemic period of time and then you have the rest. But we had it down to $1.87. We had it very, very low and doing well and and not in unusual times.
When he came in, he was really starting to cut it back. I mean, he got rid of Anwar. Reagan wanted it. It was his biggest dream to get Anwar. Because Anwar could be the size of Saudi Arabia2, in terms of capacity in Alaska.
And he ended that which was just a terrible thing that he did that. But Anwar and he basically let it be known that the regulations, the rules, regulations, everything, so I cut regulations more than any president in history by far and I got the biggest tax cuts-more than any president including Ronald Reagan, which was second. We get tremendous tax cuts and incentives, you know, the one-year write-off. People, they were loving it. And we had it, pre-pandemic, and then we got it back to where the stock market was actually higher.
As I handed over, the stock market was substantially higher than it was previous to the pandemic or the China virus or Covid, or whatever you want to call it, many different names, but the stock market was higher than that period of time3, which was a rough period of time, and nobody knew, nobody knew anything. What was this? And I always say I did a great job in that but I never got credit. I got credit for a great economy. I got credit for what we did with the military, no wars, no. Russia took nothing from us, but they took a lot from everyone else. And that"s something you probably want to discuss later. But you know, the whole Ukraine thing was horrible-caused by oil too, because, you know, when oil gets up to $100 a barrel instead of $40 a barrel, he can prosecute a war. At $40 a barrel whether he listened to me and he does and he did, he would have never gotten in. I don"t care what it was about. And now we had the double incentive, a very expensive oil. He"s the only one that made money during the war, because he did. At those numbers that money was staggering. And to a large extent that war drove the prices up. So in one case, you want to have low energy prices, but in another case, you want to end a war but you can"t end a war at $100 because at $100, his incentives to end it is not great. So we have a whole set of macro issues that are also micro issues, they go into micro issues. And the end, the end of the result is the world is a mess. And we could end up-I gotta get that hat. [To an aide sitting in on the interview] Can you tell her to bring me that new hat? This hat says, "Trump was right about everything."
1The national average reached a low of $1.77 during the pandemic, according to the American Automobile Association.
2Saudi Arabia has more than 260 billion barrels in proven oil reserves, according to government and industry estimates. The North Slope of Alaska has about 10 billion. But the maximum daily production from Anwar could be about 1.4 million barrels a day-more than the US imports from Saudi Arabia.
3The S&P 500 was at an all-time high of 3,851 when Trump left office, up 13.7% from its pre-pandemic peak.
Can I ask you another question while we wait for the hat? As you know, the Federal Reserve controls interest rates. If you"re reelected, would you allow Jerome Powell to serve out his term through 20281?
Yes, I would.2 There"s a lot of false information on that. I"ve had my own disputes with him. But no, I would, I would let him serve it out especially if I thought he was doing the right thing. Right now, you have to keep rates where they are until you bring the economy and it could drop. Inflation is a country buster. It"s interesting. You study inflation more than I do but I"ve studied inflation plenty. And you look back to old Germany, you look back to so many countries, it eventually breaks a country. And so you know, you can"t. They have a dream that they want to lower interest rates but they are very tough right now. Now, I would have a plan to lower costs. It doesn"t have to be interest rates. Costs. Because if you could lower costs, you could then lower interest rates.
But interest rates are very high now and it"s hard for them. I know they want to try and do it. Maybe they will do it prior to the election, prior to November 5, even though it"s something that they know they shouldn"t be doing.
1Powell is serving a four-year term as chair of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors that ends in May 2026. His 14-year term on the Fed board ends in January 2028.
2Trump has said he would not reappoint Powell when his term expires, but also suggested when he was president that he could fire Powell.
Do you think they should hold off, sir? Do you think they should hold off on lowering interest rates until after the election?
Unless they cut other costs commensurate with interest, interest is a very big cost. So it"s hard. But yeah, there is: I have a plan to make up for that with energy cutting. Energy. We can cut energy way down. You know, I always say we have more liquid gold under our feet, which is true. We have more liquid gold than anybody. If we could get energy-energy is such a big cost and interest is such a big cost. But you know, the interest is sort of self-defeating because we have to pay bonds. The bonds are just, it"s eating us alive, the interest payments. I used to say when we had 1% bonds or things and less, I used to say: "Can you imagine if we were paying" and you know, at 1%, it sort of works.
Speaking of that, your gentleman on the cover [Trump is talking about a copy of the July 2024 issue of Businessweek, featuring on the cover Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE, which is on a nearby coffee table], who"s an incredible guy, a friend of mine, I think, I don"t know if you asked him that question?
I did not.
But he is a friend of mine. He is great. And his son is great, too. But he bought Tiffany. And I said, what interest rate? Oh, well, they actually paid me. So he was one of the few private individuals that was able to get-he bought Tiffany for whatever he paid. And then he renegotiated the price. But he was, he said, well, my deal was so good. I mean, they loaned me the money and they actually pay me for that.
I"m gonna get you guys a Coke. Would you please come in? Who wants something to drink? Anybody? A little Coke? Cokes and Diet Cokes. One thing I"ll say about a Diet Coke, I have never seen anyone thin have a Diet Coke. No, it"s always Diet Coke. And I say it sort of in a friendly way. But people drink a Diet Coke, I have never seen a thin person drink it. I"ve just never seen it. These guys come in and they order regular Cokes and they"re thin. So, I don"t know what"s going on with it? So go ahead.
What would you do if you"re reelected to nudge the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates faster?
Well, you have to get other costs down, you cannot suffer inflation. Inflation, and it really and it really and it truly is ... [An aide brings out a red MAGA hat] ... This is just, somebody just sent this.
Are you wearing that around?
I"m gonna start, somebody just gave it to me. Did you see that, Jason [Miller, a senior adviser]? So I gotta have to start wearing it. But you could do other things on the interest rates. Now, one of the things happening is that millions of people that are flowing in are costing the country a fortune, on top of all this. This is a new phenomenon. And I would say, you know, some people say it"s 16 million, 17 million, some people say it"s 9 million, 10 million. The 9 million, 10 million are way off1. It could be much, it could be more than 17. It could be 20 million, but it certainly will be probably 20 million by the time this character, who"s the worst president in the history of our country. He"s destroying our country. And by the time he gets out, which hopefully he gets out. If he doesn"t get out, I think you can fold up Businessweek because I don"t think it"s gonna be worth a damn. I think the whole country will go down the tubes. And, you know, there is a theory out there, because we"ve been doing very well in the polls. And it seems that when we do well in the polls, the market goes up2.
Scott, you have Scott [Bessent, CEO of Key Square Capital Management LLC] and they say the only reason the market"s doing well, it"s because I"m doing well in the polls and I"m gonna be president. But there are a lot of people out there with that, including some of the best, best and optimistic people, but nevertheless. I think that interest rates are very tough right now.
Getting money is very tough, you know, when, so we had it at 2.6% for a housing loan and people were buying a lot of houses. Now it"s really at 9 or 103. But it"s really got to be much higher than that because you can"t get money. So if you can"t get money, it"s higher than 9 or 10. That"s a lot-9 or 10. That made a big difference because people, they are just-it"s called the American dream. They want to be able to buy a house. They can"t buy a house.
1US Customs and Border Protection has reported 10 million border encounters since the beginning of the Biden administration. That number does not include border crossings that evade authorities, but also double-counts those who cross the border repeatedly.
2There"s no statistical correlation between the weekly movements in Trump"s odds of winning and the S&P 500 over the past year, according to Bloomberg Economics.
3The average rate on a new fixed-rate 30-year mortgage was 7.25% on June 25, according to Bankrate.
President Biden left in place many of the tariffs that you imposed on China. He"s pushed Made-in-America steel and directed billions of dollars to rebuilding American manufacturing and energy. Do you plan to undo all of the Inflation Reduction Act, or just certain parts of it?
Well, first of all, he had something called the Inflation Reduction Act, which wasn"t the right name. It increased inflation and not decreased. And they actually admitted that after they got the money, they should have never been able to get that money. I wasn"t there. They should have never, they didn"t need the money. We needed the money that I got originally or we wouldn"t have had a country. We would have been in a depression the likes of which you have never seen before outside of 1929. It didn"t get a lot worse than that. But if you didn"t do that, so the Inflation Reduction Act was-they named it that to try and get it passed. And then after they got the money they, I think they actually renamed it1 but it has nothing to do with inflation reduction. It has much more to do with the green new scam, which is what it really is.
No, we have to get down now to basics. We need energy at low prices. The advantage we have all over almost every country including the very large ones is that we have more energy than anybody. We have more of the real energy, the energy that works. Wind does not work. It"s too expensive. If you look at a kilowatt-hour, you can measure it different ways, you can measure it any different way but you look at the cost of wind compared to natural gas, which is clean, which we have so much-it escapes into the air. But if you look at the cost of wind, it"s so expensive. You look at the cost of solar. And you look at some of the solar and I"m a believer in solar but it takes so much room. It is totally inconsistent, you know, and it can only be used in certain areas where the sun shines nice and bright and consistently. I looked at a big solar area. It was miles up, you know, they talk about the environment. This thing is like miles square, it"s massive. And you say, is that like a good thing? And the windmills, you know what that is? I think they are so harmful. It always amazes me that people that consider themselves to be green, in terms of energy. They like wind and I think they like wind because it sounds good. But I see the windmills-you go out to places in California and others where they"ve been up for a while. They don"t last very long. You know people forget, you have to rebuild them all the time. It"s not like you have it and it"s good. They last for eight, nine years. And the ones in the ocean just get beat up by the saltwater especially. And they"re constantly replacing, you know, fixing them when you take them down. The blades are made out of a carbon material that they say environmentally they can"t bury them. They don"t know what to do with the blades. But you look at places in California where they"ve had these things up for a while and then they put the new ones next to the old ones at different colors and different shapes, it definitely looks like junkyards. It"s horrible, and if you face a windmill or anywhere near a windmill, your house is worth much less money than it would be worth. But it"s very inconsistent. And we"re gonna have to get back to basics, we"re gonna have to get back and you know, Germany tried this. Germany went and now they"re building just hundreds of coal plants and they"re building, I guess, they keep going back into the nuclear business2. But we have to get back into sanity.
1The law remains known as the Inflation Reduction Act, but Biden has said he regrets the name because "it has less to do with reducing inflation than providing alternatives where we generate economic growth."
2Germany still faces a legal deadline to phase out coal by 2038, but hopes to do so earlier, by the end of the decade. Until then, the country is expected to rely on coal as a backup to complement intermittent renewables; its last new coal plant was built in 2020. The country shuttered its last remaining nuclear plants in April 2023, and restarting them would be technically and politically challenging.
So you would dismantle it, Mr. President? The irony is that some of that money flows to the red states.
You mean, dismantle some of the things that were done? Like wind?
In the Inflation Reduction Act.
The problem with the wind is that it needs massive subsidy. And when I was president I was sitting next to a man, a very big man. We had the 40 biggest businesspeople in Europe. And I was sitting next to a gentleman whose sole function was energy and things like windmills. And he said, "No, we"re getting out of the business of windmills." I never forgot. He said, "I"m getting out of the business of windmills because they need subsidies. You can"t build them without subsidies." And you see that if you look at, if you look at New Jersey, where they were going to build, it is massive and they kept giving more and more subsidy and then ultimately they didn"t build them. The whole thing was canceled, which was a big, which made the people of New Jersey happy. It was a concerted effort. But wind is unbelievably expensive1. It needs subsidy. And this gentleman said, "I never want to be in any form of energy which needs subsidy." And he said wind needs great subsidy.
1In 2023 the cost of a megawatt-hour from offshore wind in the US was $143, and the cost of onshore wind was $48. For comparison, a megawatt-hour from a new coal plant costs $101, solar costs $59 and natural gas costs $45. That"s according to BloombergNEF"s benchmarks of the levelized cost of electricity, a measure of the unsubsidized net present cost of electricity generation over the lifetime of a project.
Back on China, economists have said about 60% tariffs on China would essentially end the US-China trade relationship. What would that mean for companies like Nvidia, Qualcomm, Apple who have supply chains there?
You know, I had it at 50% and I"ve never heard the 601 . And everyone always says, look at Smoot-Hawley and oh, look what happened. Well, Smoot-Hawley was after the Depression started. So if you go back, I told you to read about William McKinley. William McKinley made this country rich. He was the most underrated president. And those that followed him took the money. Roosevelt took the money and built, you know, the whole thing with the parks and the dams. But McKinley made the money and he was truly the tariff king. And I don"t do this based on my knowledge of him, although I"ve learned about him after the fact.
Tariffs do two things. Economically, they"re phenomenal. And a lot of people will say, Oh, that"s terrible. It"s very dangerous when you say that because you probably have your views and a lot. I can"t believe how many people are negative on tariffs that are actually smart people. It does two things: Economically, it"s great. And man, is it good for negotiation. I"ve had guys, I"ve had countries, that were potentially extremely hostile coming to me and say, "Sir, please stop with the tariffs. Stop." They would do anything. Nothing to do with economic, they would do-you know, we have more than economic, we have other things like let"s not go to war. Or I don"t want you to go into war in another place.
1Trump has denied a Washington Post report that he"s considering a 60% tariff on Chinese goods, telling Fox News, "No, I would say maybe it"s going to be more than that."
The companies that Mario mentioned, major American companies, underpinning our competitiveness and AI, would you give them relief or carve-outs from the tariffs, as I think you guys did with Apple?
Yeah, well, I did it with Apple. You know, Apple would come in. I tell you what: Tim Cook, I found him to be a very good businessman. Other people would hire people, they"d pay them millions of dollars, lobbyists and all to speak to me. Tim Cook, I knew him just a little bit. He would call me up, you know he is the chairman of Apple, "Could I come in and see you?" He is the chairman of Apple. I would say that"s impressive. He came-at least I don"t know what it is now but it was the biggest company. And I said, "Yeah, come in." And he said to me, "I need help," You have tariffs on 25 and 50%, depending on the category. He said, "It would really hurt our business. It would destroy our business potentially." I said, "Why is that?" Because if you built your plants here, you would have no tax. See, that"s the third thing that it does, it gets people to build here. And I could tell you, I could talk about this subject all day. We are so stupid, what we do. You know, I had no problems with China. I had no problems with Russia. I had no problems with anybody. Because we, at this moment, have a country that has a lot of economic power. We"re losing that power rapidly. Rapidly. We"re also losing our standard-you know, they"re going off the dollar. Look, you have Iran gone, you have Russia gone, you have Saudi Arabia now saying they"re gonna go both ways with China, and with us.
Would you defend Taiwan against China?
Look, a couple of things. No. 1, Taiwan. I know the people very well, respect them greatly. They did take about 100% of our chip business1. I think, Taiwan should pay us for defense. You know, we"re no different than an insurance company. Taiwan doesn"t give us anything. Taiwan is 9,500 miles away. It"s 68 miles away from China. A slight advantage, and China"s a massive piece of land, they could just bombard it. They don"t even need to-I mean, they can literally just send shells. Now they don"t want to do that because they don"t want to lose all those chip plants. You know, all those plants and they don"t want to do that. But I will tell you, that"s the apple of President Xi"s eye, he was a very good friend of mine until Covid that I really, you know, I was, I didn"t feel the same way. Same thing with Putin.
Putin and I got along very well, with our relationship. We were never in danger of a war. He would have never gotten into Ukraine. I said, don"t ever, ever go into Ukraine.
The oil prices. It was so crazy. The oil price was so crazy and it was always the apple of his eye. Just like with China. It"s the apple of China"s eye. It was the apple. It"s the apple of his eye. But the day I left they sent 28 bombers right over the top2 and they"ve been very aggressive ever since, they got ships all over the place. I wouldn"t feel so secure right now, if I was them, but remember this: Taiwan took our chip business from us, I mean, how stupid are we? They took all of our chip business. They"re immensely wealthy. And I don"t think we"re any different from an insurance policy. Why? Why are we doing this?
They took almost 100% of our chip industry, I give them credit. That"s because stupid people were running the country. We should have never let that happen. Now we"re giving them billions of dollars to build new chips in our country, and then they"re going to take that too, in other words, they"ll build it but then they"ll bring it back to their country.
1Taiwan produces 92% of advanced microchips, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
2Three days after Trump left office, China sent 13 planes into Taiwan"s Air Defense Identification Zone, followed by 15 more planes the next day. In Trump"s last year in office, Taiwan recorded 380 Chinese sorties into the zone, the largest number since 1996, according to an analysis by the Voice of America.
While we"re talking about Russia and the Ukraine war...
[Interrupts] I just think we have to be smart, but remember 9,500 miles away. You have to do double loads on airplanes to get them over, by the time they get over here, they have to leave. But it"s a very, very difficult thing. And the problem is that in three-and-a-half years, China has aligned with Russia, Iran and North Korea. And North Korea has a lot of nuclear weapons. I can tell you that. I don"t think that"s confidential. They have a lot. And this is a different world than it was three-and-a-half years ago. Three-and-a-half years ago, we were, you know, the worst thing that happened is we"ve allowed, because Biden is a stupid person. He"s forced Russia and China to get married. They"re married. Then they took in their little cousin, Iran, and then they took in North Korea. They don"t need anybody else. They don"t need anybody else.
It"s a very, very dangerous world. And I actually worry about the five months that we have left. Right, I think you could end up in a, you could end up in a World War III. The man is grossly incompetent and his people, they"re fascists, but they have no idea what they"re doing, So remember this: I had no war, I had no peace, I had no problem. We had no war. No war other than ISIS. I finished them off in a very short period of time. I was told it would take five years, it took me almost no time, we knocked them out. We got [Quds Force commander Qassem] Soleimani, we got [Islamic State leader Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi, Russia took no land. You know, that"s an interesting stat. They said with Obama they got this, with Bush they got this, and they could go back further than that. Every president gave a massive, meaning they were able to take, with me they took nothing.
Now people will write: Oh, Trump, Trump. But that"s the fact. You know, it"s funny. I laugh even as I talk about it, we did such a good job. Don"t get credit for it, but that"s all right, we did such a good job.
With all of these other presidents, they were just feasting on the world. With me, nobody feasted on the world. Iran was broke. You wouldn"t have had Israel. Iran had no money. They were down to $300 million. I think they were down to less than $300 million1. They would have had to deal, if the election weren"t rigged, they would have had a deal within one week, I would have had a deal and the basic deal is no nuclear weapons. I would have made a great deal with them-no nuclear weapons.
But when I came in, I saw what was happening, they were on the path to a nuclear weapon. I ended the Iran nuclear deal, which was very important to do, It was the stupidest deal. The problem is Biden has done nothing with it. I ended it. He"s done nothing with it. But we would have had a deal. So they were broke. They didn"t have any money for Hamas. And they had no money for Hezbollah or any of the 28 they call them-organizations of terrors.
They were all starving. And there were stories around the time that I was leaving that this and, you know, I had no terror for four years. I couldn"t talk about it. Because I don"t want to say there have been no attacks and then there"s an attack, right? That doesn"t play well. But we had no terror attacks during my, during my time in office.
1Iran had $13.7 billion in currency reserves in 2020, according to the International Monetary Fund.
On Russia, as a businessman, you"ve talked about ending the war in Ukraine. Have you thought at all about easing or eliminating the sanctions on Russia as part of the deal that you"ve talked about to end the war in Ukraine?
Yeah. So what we"re doing with sanctions is we"re forcing everyone away from us. So I don"t love sanctions. I found them very useful with Iran, but I didn"t even need sanctions with Iran so much. I told China, that and Russia is in a similar position. I told China... I made people aware and I don"t think China is bad. But I made people aware that China has been ripping off this country for 30 years, OK, under every president, and I"m the only one who took in massive amounts of money, hundreds of billions of dollars from China.
So much so that Biden, who got paid off by China, can"t even end the tariffs because the money is so big that"s coming in. And that was just the beginning. That was just the beginning. But I taught people that China"s hurting us. China built their military with the money they took out of the United States, right. So, I think Gordon Chang [conservative commentator and China hawk] said that the other day, said Trump"s the only one that understood China and he said a couple of things that are interesting. He said, when he started charging the tariffs, this massive amount of money that was cut, you know, we were taking in massive amounts of money. I gave the farmers $28 billion. They got $28 billion because China took advantage of our farmers. I gave it to them. Hence I won Iowa and every other place.
In your recent meeting with CEOs of the Business Roundtable, you pledged to lower the corporate tax rate from 21% to 20%, a drop just a single percentage point, is that because...
[Interrupts] It"s because I like, I like simplicity. I liked 20% better. I like 15% yet better, but I think that would be, you know, that"d be hard.
Well, my question was going to be: Is that the limit? Is 20% the limit of the tax cut you favor, or as president would you push for a larger cut?
Fifteen would get us down to being about the lowest. Look, when I did those tax cuts, this place started to boom. And as you guys know better than I do, we took in more revenues with much, much lower rate than we did with a much higher rate. Nobody could believe it. Everyone thinks, oh, well. It didn"t work that way. We would, you know, we had the thing where you were able to bring your money back from offshore. Nobody could bring their money back. You had to hire 15 different accounting firms in order to get your money back, it was so complicated. And the rate was too high.
They"re not going to give up half of their money in order to bring it back here. Like Apple brought back billions and billions of dollars and they started building. I said, "I"m gonna do something for you guys, but you have to build in this country." I want them to build here. That"s the other thing tariffs do. If you put tariffs on companies, they"re going to build here, because they"re not going to want to pay the tariff. You know, a bad things happening. A really bad thing is happening there in Mexico. China is building massive automobile plants. They"re gonna put the UAW out of work. They"re building them in Mexico to build cars to sell into the United States, what do we get out of it?
Now if they built those facilities here, but our people are so stupid, that wasn"t gonna happen in my day, you know why? Why I stopped all of that, they were all moving to Mexico. They were building in Mexico, they had no tax to pay, and they"re selling them in the United States. You wouldn"t have even had a car industry if I didn"t stop that.
Well, while we"re on the topic of CEOs, [JPMorgan Chase & Co. CEO] Jamie Dimon"s name has come up as a potential Treasury secretary in a second Trump administration, is he someone who you"re eyeing for the job?
Let me just say one thing first, so I had a meeting with them. First, I had a meeting with Congress, Republican Congress. It was like a lovefest, then I met with them and then I met with the US Senate, all Republicans, 49. And it was also a lovefest, but my best meeting of the three was with the executives. And Biden"s misinformation people put out a thing: Oh, he went on, he rambled. There was no rambling. This, you could say, this is rambling, but in order to get to the point, you have to, you know, this is a very complex subject, that a lot of people, most people don"t understand. But I just wanted to say, that that was the best meeting. They loved it. They were happy with. I mean, as an example, I brought the taxes down from 39% to 21%1. What"s not to love? I then said, I"d like to round it off to 20 for simplicity reasons, I mean, it is, you know, believe it or not, it sort of makes sense and it"s still a lot of money.
But I would like to get it down to 15, if we could, because that would put us in the absolute lowest in terms of incentive. But that meeting and we had, I don"t know, 70-all CEOs, the top guys, that was a lovefest, and I will tell you when I"m not loved because I feel that better than anybody. But that was a lovefest. And it was reported by some people, so wrong. Actually, CNBC called and apologized to me, because they found out. But we had a great meeting, Jamie Dimon was there. I have a lot of respect for Jamie Dimon.
1The top marginal corporate tax rate in 2018 was 35%.
A future Trump Treasury secretary?
He is somebody that I would consider, sure. He was at the meeting. Tim Cook was right next to him. You know, we had everybody.
Did they give you any particular advice or any particular ask that came out of that meeting?
No, no, the only thing that again, for some reason, the word "tariff" is, I usually use the word "tax" because it almost, the word "tariff" is a very complex word to some people. I started to tell you about William McKinley. So William McKinley was assassinated. As you probably know, they named Mount McKinley after him. Then they took the name off-that was not nice, because he made this country so rich. All he did was tariffs, we didn"t have an income tax. And they had, I guess, the Tariff Act of 18... You have to correct me if I, you know, whatever it is 1887 or "861. And they had a great symposium, where they called all the business leaders together.
And the sole subject was what do we do with all the money? ... If you look at some of the statements, Steve [Trump is speaking to adviser Stephen Miller, who is in the room], if you could get some, I am going to start using them in my speeches. But first have to think about the debate. But he had statements that we will not allow other countries to steal our treasure, steal our jobs. If they want to come in here, they can. We will welcome them with open arms, but they must pay for the privilege of stealing our jobs and stealing our treasure. And he got them to pay and all of that money built up and Roosevelt spent it. And Roosevelt got all the credit. I know how that works.
1It was the Tariff Act of 1890. McKinley was speaker of the House of Representatives in 1890. Democrats reduced those tariffs in 1894, but McKinley largely restored them as president in 1897.
And yet most of the CEOs are not in favor of tariffs.
It"s amazing. Do you know why? Because they don"t want to build plants in the United States. They"ve got plants in different countries. See, China was brilliant for years. This takes years but for years China got the stupid Americans to build over in China. And they did that by charging a massive 100%, 150-200% in tariffs1. So do others. Just a quick story: When I was with Harley-Davidson, I said, "How are you doing?" They were in the White House. And I said, "How you doing with everything?" They said, "Well, it"s hard to do business at certain places." I said, "You mean like India?" India"s an amazing abuser. One of the best. One of the best. Smart. I said, "Why? Let me guess: India"s tariffing you, right?" "Yes, sir-200%." Because they said-how many motorcycles do you sell in India? He said essentially none. I said, "Oh I see, they tariff you, right? And how much are you tariffed? 200%2. Oh, I see. And let me guess, they want you to build a big plant in India and you won"t have to pay the tariff?" "How did you know, sir?" I said, because I set it up. They end up building this massive plant in India3." They make motorcycles all over the place. They end up closing in Milwaukee, you know, and they closed a lot of it. I"m not sure if they closed a lot of it, all of it. And I said isn"t that a shame? It"s just so stupid. You understand? They put a massive tax on. And I cannot get people to understand this. We had this idiot senator from Pennsylvania [Pat Toomey], it"s a very dumb person. He said, "So let me ask you." He left because I wouldn"t give him an endorsement, because they can"t win If I don"t give them my endorsement, you do know that? You"ve seen that?
Even Bob Good is gone now. I mean, he had a 30-point lead4. I endorsed a guy that nobody ever heard of and he just won the race. But just to finish, incredible. You put the tariffs on and now they all come back to the United States and build. And it"s so easy. But what they"ve done is gotten rich by putting massive tariffs on and the US goes and they build plants in China. Now, they don"t like tariffs because they"ve already built their plants over there.
Hello, Mr. Lembcke. [Trump turns to his club manager, Bernd Lembcke, who is walking through the room]
Mr. Lembcke, these people from Bloomberg Businessweek. He"s been with me for over 20 years.
LEMBCKE: Very successful, he says about, about the revenue and then most importantly the profits.
TRUMP: It"s been a great club. You have two things. You have the best house and the best location, and we have the best managers, right?
LEMBCKE: Yeah, we have been together for 28-plus years.
TRUMP: He"s been the manager for 28 years, hard to believe, I opened it...
LEMBCKE: In two years it is our 30th anniversary of the club and the 100th anniversary of Mar-a-Lago. We have to celebrate about next year.
TRUMP: When I started, memberships were $25,000. And now what are they to join?
LEMBCKE: $700,000.
TRUMP: And what does it go to on October 1st? Or whatever.
LEMBCKE: In October we are going up to $1 million [per membership] because we have four memberships to sell, so we are not desperate.
TRUMP: But we have to talk big things. It"s still good, but we gotta go macro. Thanks, Bernd. Thank you.
1In 2016, China"s top tariff rate was 65%, according to a Bloomberg review of World Trade Organization data, with a trade-weighted average tariff of 6.2%.
2India"s tariff on motorcycles was 50% at the time, according to the New York Times.
3Harley-Davidson announced its India plant in 2010.
4Good"s largest lead in a public poll tracked by FiveThirtyEight had him up by 22 points last December.
So last question on the CEOs. The New York Times just ran an article stating that no Fortune 100 CEOs support you1. Why do you think that is?
Well, it"s a false article. No. 1, I don"t seek their support, And No. 2, they"re all calling and they all want to support me. And if you knew about politics, whoever"s leading gets all the support they want. I could have the personality of a shrimp, and everybody would come. And all of those people, of all of the people in the room. I have meetings set up ... In a way it"s tough. They all want to have a meeting. But I have many people supporting me. If you look at the list now, a lot of people they don"t know because they put it into a PAC where you don"t know.
I mean, you really don"t know. And it"s really hard to find out. People don"t find out, it"s amazing. But you know, they have a PAC where you can give somebody $100 million or $50 million. But we have tremendous support for business. But two things, I don"t seek it. I don"t care. And No. 1, if I seek it, it means you"re doing favors for them. And I don"t want that. Because I want to do ... I got pipelines approved and big, big facilities approved. LNG plants in Louisiana. I could have gone to those plants and say, hey, I"ll get it approved, la la la. I don"t do that. I get it approved. I didn"t know who owned it, I didn"t care. Guys would come see me two years later. "I own the company that built that pipeline, sir, that you approved." It was so nice, and we were gonna go, you know. Remember the Dakota Access Pipeline, I approved it. I didn"t call the company and say, hey, I"m gonna do you the biggest. They had built everything except for, it couldn"t be connected by 100 yards because of the river, the Indian River. I approved it.
1Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, endorsed Trump immediately after the July 13 assassination attempt.
So if we understand you, the support is private.
The point is nothing to do with me. Now I"m leading in the polls, if you"d looked at Rasmussen, I am leading by 10 points1, that"s a lot. Best poll is Rasmussen, do you guys do polls? Yeah, a little bit, right?
1Trump led Biden by 9 percentage points in the most recent June poll from Rasmussen, which has consistently found higher leads for Trump than other pollsters.