TRANSCRIPT: President Trump Speaks to Diners at a Restaurant in Iowa, 1.27.26
[Video]
Unidentified: Come here, girls.
Unidentified: Come here, real quick.
Unidentified: Come on, come on.
Unidentified: So Melania [Inaudible]
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: On three. One, two, three, Iowa.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: Sir, I want to introduce you to some of our great crew here.
President Trump: Hi, everybody.
Unidentified: Our biofuels guys.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: I love you.
Trump: I love that hat.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: There we go.
Unidentified: Cameras ready.
Trump: How are we doing, everybody?
Unidentified: Good.
Unidentified: Good.
Trump: The country is doing well. We are [Inaudible] $18 trillion being invested. [Inaudible]
Unidentified: [Inaudible]
Trump: Wow.
Unidentified: [Inaudible]
Trump: Come on, give me that one. [Inaudible] [Laughter]
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: Thank you very much.
Unidentified: Thank you, Mr. President.
Trump: Thank you.
Unidentified: Thank you, Mr. President.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: This is where it began, right?
Unidentified: Yeah.
Trump: Who would've thought? [Inaudible]
Unidentified: Thank you.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: [Inaudible] we were up $18 trillion and they said we were down $4 trillion. We ended up winning [Inaudible] kicked the bucket and we sued them.
Unidentified: We've got some no tax on tips [Inaudible] here.
Trump: No tax on --
Unidentified: [Inaudible]
Trump: You know who gave me that idea, a waitress, because a waitress said, sir, we shouldn't have to pay tax on tips. I said, guess what, [Inaudible]. Come on, let's have a picture. Come on.
Unidentified: Get the farm team in here.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: Thank you, Mr. President.
Unidentified: Thank you.
Unidentified: Thank you.
Trump: Thank you very much. Thank you [Inaudible]
Unidentified: You know this handsome devil.
Trump: I do, indeed.
Unidentified: Right.
Trump: First -- this is the first person in the whole country that endorsed me. I told him [Inaudible] you doing OK?
Unidentified: Yeah, I'm doing great.
Trump: He was the first one, the whole country [Inaudible] you said, if that guy runs -- I didn't even announce. He endorsed me before I announced. That's even better.
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Trump: Are you going to be [Inaudible]
Unidentified: Oh, yeah.
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Unidentified: [Inaudible] got the picture on the tractor up front when you drove in.
Trump: Oh, yeah. Really?
Unidentified: Yeah.
Trump: Right.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: Oh, good. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thanks. Thank you [Inaudible]
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: Thank you very much.
Trump: Hi, everybody. Hey, everybody. Look who we have --
Unidentified: [Inaudible]
Trump: -- a little press. [Inaudible] press. I wish they were more honest. That's OK. How are you? Nice to see you. I love this. Look at that hat. I love that. Beautiful. Look at that.
Unidentified: Praying for you, sir.
Trump: Thank you very much.
Unidentified: God bless you.
Trump: Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. See you later. Hello, everybody.
Unidentified: Hello.
Trump: So what do you think? Should I talk to them for a little while? So it's always -- it's always exciting. You all doing all right? You going over to the speech? You going over to the speech? Good. We're going to have a good time, nice -- nice group of people.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: We'll do whatever is appropriate. You know, we secured the border. Remember that, we secured the border. We did things that nobody thought was possible. We had 25 million people come through the border. When I took over, it was a mess. You take a look at what we did, pricing. So you had gasoline at $4.50. Now it's at $1.99 in many places, a gallon, $1.99.
Unidentified: $1.89 in Iowa, sir.
Trump: That's right. And -- what are you here?
Unidentified: $1.89.
Trump: $1.89. And he's a very honorable man. He doesn't make up stories. $1.89. When I took over, you were $4.50, $3.50, $5.00, all over the place. No, we have prices coming way, way down, but remember, we secured the border. Crime is down all over the country. We just had a crime report coming out from, I think one of the networks, which they hate to hear this, but crime is the lowest number ever recorded.
So you know what they say. And you know, we -- we talk about Minnesota, but in Minnesota, you probably read, their crime is way down. You know why, because we took out thousands of criminals out of Minnesota and that's why it's good. So anyway, but we have -- uh, Tom Homan is over there. We all love Tom.
Unidentified: Yeah, Tom's great.
Trump: And he met with the governor, met with the mayor. He's going to meet with the mayor, I guess, and uh, it's -- it's going very well. But remember this, even Minnesota, their crime is down. And you know why it's down, because of what we did. We took out thousands of criminals, career criminals, bad criminals, people that came in from Venezuela. By the way, how did we do in Venezuela?
Not bad, right? But people that came in from -- think of it, people that came in from countries all over the world, they came from the Congo, they came from all over the -- all over South America, all over Latin America, all over Africa. They came from everywhere and they came out of prisons in many cases. They came out of mental institutions in many cases.
And we're getting them out and we got a lot of them out, but we have now the safest country we've ever had. Washington DC went from being a crime-ridden place to a place that has virtually no crime --
Unidentified: That's right.
Trump: In a period of a couple of months. So it's -- uh, we're very proud of what we've been able to do. And this is a state that's been with me all three times, right?
Unidentified: Since the very beginning, boss, very beginning.
Trump: [Inaudible] I'd like to give it another one too, if you want to know the truth.
Question: Mr. President, why did you decide --
Trump: Yeah, I'm going to do a lot of traveling. I think so. I mean, I like -- I like traveling to places. I love -- I love this place. This was the beginning of my politics, right?
Unidentified: That's right. That's right.
Trump: And treated me well right from the beginning.
Question: Mr. President, what's your message for farmers?
Question: Mr. President, do you feel that the --
Trump: Say what? Wait.
Question: Mr. President, why did you decide to shake up your leadership team in Minnesota and send Tom Homan --
Trump: I do that all the time. I shake up teams. Everybody here, these are a lot of owners of farms and places and you shake up your team.
If they can't do the crops fast enough, they go -- look, we have an incredible team. We did something that nobody said was possible. We didn't go back to Congress and ask for legislation. We closed the border. And in the last eight months, they have -- and this is actually hard to believe, nobody crossed the border, right, nobody.
They say nobody. I don't even know if that's possible, but you know, it's Democrats that do the report. It's a very liberal group that does that report. It's a very important report. And for nine months, I guess eight months, nine months, we have nobody coming into our country unless they come in legally.
We want them to come in legally. You need people to work for you. But uh, we did something that I would say people thought that was absolutely impossible and we were able to do it. So we're very honored by what's happened to our country. In addition, we have $18 trillion coming in building plants, building auto factories, building AI factories like no -- no other country in the world has done what we've done in the last year and I think it's the most successful first term president. There's never been a year like this in the history of the country for the first term. [Inaudible]
Unidentified: Thank you, sir.
Trump: And he's been with me from the beginning, this guy. Make sure -- take good care of him. He's been with him. So I -- you know, I'm going around and I'm going around because hopefully we win the midterms. And it's very scary because like, it's two out of 50 years or something like that.
Unidentified: That's right. That's right.
Trump: For some reason, when a president wins, Republican or Democrat, even if they're a good president, and hopefully I'm a great president, based on the first year [Inaudible]] and we had a great first term too, people don't -- we rebuilt our military. We had phenomenal financial numbers, but I think this term is blowing away really every term.
Unidentified: That's right.
Trump: But traditionally, when a president gets elected, out of I think 50 years, they've had two. That what, I don't understand.
Unidentified: You're going to be the next.
Trump: We've had two, so we have to -- and one was by unusual circumstance. So uh, there's something psychological, if you win the presidency -- whether you're a Republican or Democrat. With that being said, the polls look very good, everything looks very good and you have great Congressmen here and Congressmen and women here and we love Iowa.
We love Iowa. And I think I just -- didn't I just give -- didn't I just give the farmers $12 billion, right?
Unidentified: $66 billion in total.
Trump: Well, I gave total $66 billion.
Unidentified: That's right.
Trump: But just recently, we gave the farmers $12 billion because they were treated unfairly by foreign countries. I said, how much? They said, $12 billion. I said, they got it. You know where I got it, tariffs.
I got it from the tariffs. Without the tariffs -- without the tariffs, we wouldn't have -- and again, you know, most of these -- we right now have more factories and plants being built in our country than we've ever had before that came in, because they're coming because they don't want to pay the tariffs. So I said, if you build here, you don't have to pay tariffs. So it's great.
Question: Mr. President, you talked a lot about --
Question: Mr. President, with the current value of the dollar, do you think it's declined too much?
Trump: No, I think it's great. I mean, the value of the dollar, look at the business. No, dollars -- dollar is doing great. You know, it's very interesting, if you look at China and Japan.
I used to fight like hell with them because they always wanted to devalue their yen. Do you know that, the yen and the wan, and they'd always want to devalue it. They devalue, devalue, devalue. And I said, it's not fair that you devalue because it's hard to compete when they devalue, but they always fought. No, our dollar is very good.
Question: You talk a lot about Minnesota, Mr. President. some of your own administration officials have labeled Alex --
Trump: By the way, this is ABC fake news, this one. She hasn't asked me -- she hasn't asked me a good question in years. I think a nice woman, but I don't really like her too much. Go ahead. What? What? What did you say?
Question: [Inaudible]
Trump: I'd say ABC is about as bad as they get.
Question: Would you like to see the dollar's value decline more? Would that be --
Trump: No, no. I'd want it to be just seek its own level, which is the fair thing to do. You could have it -- I could have it go up or go down like a yo-yo. I'll give you an example, unemployment, I could create the greatest unemployment numbers or employment numbers ever.
All I have to do is hire three million people and put them into the federal government and you have 10 people, you know, for one job, right? That's right.
And what we've done is we've cut the federal employees and they've gone to the private sector. But if I wanted, I could hire a million people tomorrow, put them in the federal government and she'd be writing a story, unbelievable employment, unbelievable employment. But we have great unemployment numbers.
Unidentified: Yeah.
Trump: I think they're great. Is there one number that's bad? Can you tell -- is there one number that's bad? There's not one.
Question: Do you agree -- do you agree with the assessment from some of your own officials that Alex Peretti is a domestic terrorist or an assassin?
Trump: Well, I haven't heard that, but certainly he shouldn't have been carrying a gun. But all of -- hey, look, bottom line, everybody in this room, we view that as a very unfortunate incident. OK? Everyone, unless you're -- you're a stupid person, uh, very, very unfortunate incident. I don't like that. He had a gun. I don't like that he had two fully loaded magazines. That's a lot of bad stuff. And despite that, I say that's a very unfortunate incident.
Question: You said that you are the de facto president of Venezuela. I don't know, maybe you were joking when you said that. Is the US a de facto member of OPEC right now?
Trump: Well, I'll tell you what, we are a very strong presence in Venezuela. We're going to get a lot of money for Venezuela.
Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, with the exception I think of our country and it's bigger than Saudi Arabia. And we had a very strong moment with Venezuela a couple of weeks ago and we are working beautifully with Venezuela. I will tell you, they're going to do better now than they ever did, than they've done ever at any point.
And we're going to be making a lot of money for them and a lot of money for our country. We have a very good relationship with the leaders of Venezuela and we're going to keep it that way.
Question: What are your plans for -- Mr. President, what are your plans for Cuba, Mr. President?
Trump: Well, we're going to see what happens with Cuba. I don't know, anybody interested in Cuba in this room? Not too many people. This is not a Cuba room, but that's all right. There are plenty of them around, especially in Miami. And Cuba will be failing pretty soon. Cuba is really a nation that's very close to failing. You know, they got their money from Venezuela. They got the oil from Venezuela. They're not getting that anymore.
Question: You were talking about the polls earlier. Clearly, your base is with you strong in support --
Trump: Stronger than -- by the way, our base – Our base -- our base is with us. I think they're the best poll numbers, the real poll numbers. I think we have the best poll numbers we've ever had. Think of it, if I were to run again, if I run again, would you -- would anybody be happy? You know, so we have the best poll numbers we've ever had. Thank you all very much. I appreciate it.
Unidentified: Thank you, Mr. President.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Question: Mr. President, did you hear from here from Greg Abbott saying you need to recalibrate your response? What did you make of that, sir?
Trump: No, I didn't hear that. Did you?
Unidentified: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: Can I pray for you real quick?
Trump: Absolutely, come on.
Unidentified: All right. Lord, God, give you thanks for this president, Lord. Thank you for [Inaudible] pray for continued wisdom, pray for discernment, pray for hope, pray for more peace, Lord, and just pray for just protection against the world, the devil's flesh and all principalities, Lord. Thank you. In Jesus name we pray.
Unidentified: In Jesus name. Amen.
Unidentified: Amen.
Unidentified: Amen. Praise God. Praise God for you.
Trump: Big, strong guy, huh? Like to have his muscles.
Unidentified: Praise God for you.
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Trump: Thank you very much.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: Thank you all. Great people here. Great -- great people in Iowa. I hope you give them –
I hope you give them the respect because they are amazing people. This is what built the country whether we like it or not, built the country.
Unidentified: Moving in the right direction.
Trump: Thank you all.
Unidentified: Can you sign my hat, please?
Trump: Yeah, I will.
Unidentified: Praise for you.
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Trump: Central casting. I could take a picture [Inaudible]
Unidentified: Thank you so much.
Trump: Thank you. Thank you very much, appreciate it.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Trump: OK. [Inaudible]
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: And we pray for you too, and your wife.
Unidentified: Thank you, Mr. President.
Trump: [Inaudible] thank you very much.
Unidentified: Thank you, sir. Thank you for being here.
Note: [Crosstalk]
Unidentified: These are the fighters that make it happen, sir.
Trump: [Inaudible] early in the beginning right?
Unidentified: Yes, sir.
Trump: Thank you very much. Thank you, everybody.