President Donald Trump: Thank you very much.
Sharyl: Thank you for joining us.
Trump: Thank you.
Sharyl: Is there anything new on the Russia development? Because I understand probably by the minute there are things happening.
Trump: I think it's going well. I think it's a tough situation that we're in. You know, I inherited a mess from him in so many ways. Whether it's the wall or the economy or anything you want to talk about. It's tough. This was a very tough one. Ukraine, Russia, should have never happened. It would've never happened, but it did. And we have to see what we can do to save a lot of lives and to stop paying billions and billions of dollars. Also, it's a massive amounts of money, $350 billion we've spent on that. And, we're gonna try and do something about that. But more importantly, right now, you have a lot of people dying. You are losing probably 2000 people a week in shooting soldiers, Russian and Ukrainian, and whatever we can do to stop it. We're trying to do that.
Sharyl: Are you speaking to Putin in the last days or hours? Personally?
Trump: Well, I don't wanna say it, but we are dealing with him and I think, I think it's going reasonably well. It's a very complex situation, you know, it's a bloody terrible war. And I do think it's going well. As you know, we have a ceasefire agreement with the Ukrainian group, and we are trying to get that with Russia too. And I think thus far it's gone. Okay. We will know a little bit more on Monday, and that'll be, hopefully good.
Sharyl: I'm not understating the complexity of all this, but as a candidate, you said you would have this war settled in 24 hours?
Trump: Well, I was being a little bit sarcastic when I said that, what I really mean is I'd like to get it settled and I think I'll be successful.
Sharyl: What's the plan if Putin doesn't agree to a cease fire?
Trump: Bad news for this world because so many people are dying. But I think, I think he's going to agree. I really do. I think I know him pretty well and I think he's gonna agree.
Sharyl: It's been a tumultuous week with confusion over tariffs, with the financial markets. A lot of regular people don't understand tariffs and how they work.
Trump: Well, they're a beautiful thing, for us.
Sharyl: Can you explain for people who aren't really plugged into this, maybe with a specific product example, how we are supposedly getting ripped off by tariffs and how it can be fixed and when we would, when we would see the benefits of it?
Trump: Well, we as a country have been ripped off for years and years, decades and decades. And you've covered it on your show. I've seen it. Canada’s a disaster for us. We lose close to $200 billion with Canada. Nobody did anything. Nobody says that with Canada, that they charge, our farmers think of this. They have four dairy products, some dairy products, 270% tariff. Nobody knows that. Nobody talks..
Sharyl: Can you break that down to like common terms. So our farmers may have a product such as what, and we sell it to Canada?
Trump: So we wanna sell milk into Canada, and they throw a 270% price increase on the milk.
Sharyl: Which means we don't have much of a market, in Canada?
Trump: Which means we don’t sell milk in Canada, it's almost, it's called a monetary tariff. But they have a lot of non-monetary tariffs too. That's things unrelated to, you know, they'll have a standard that they'll say you didn't meet or something that's called a non-monetary
Sharyl: So you put a tariff on what, for example, to try to counter the milk tariff?
Trump: Well, I can put a tariff on anything, but in the case of Canada, I put it on steel and aluminum.
Sharyl: Because they wanna sell their stuff to us?
Trump: We have a lot of tariffs, that we're going to be putting on. It really hits on April 2nd. And actually we've been very consistent. I think a lot of people are loving what I'm doing. The real business people are loving it. We're gonna make America rich again, but we're gonna have tariffs on automobiles. We're gonna have tariffs on steel, we're gonna have tariffs on aluminum and copper and many, many different things. And they're gonna be very consistent and I’ve been very consistent. I did give General Motors and our Big 3 actually, a month of relief because they would've had a very unfair disadvantage over other car makers, which I didn't want. So I did that, and I think it was something I did from the fact that, you know, I want to take care of our car companies. But you have, and you've been reading about it and seeing it. We have companies moving into the United States at levels that has never been seen before. We have many, many car factories going up.
Sharyl: If I understand it correctly, the benefits that would come from some of that may largely be down the road, which leads
Trump: Well, no, I think, I think immediate. Look, when you're building those plants, a lot of money comes in from those plants. You know, you're using companies, subcontractors, contractors, concrete companies and steel companies. And you're gonna see it initially, but you're gonna see it more down the road when they open up. And I would rather have that, by the way that I could get, you get money or you get jobs. And I'd rather see the jobs the biggest hit is when they move in. So you have the biggest chip maker in the world coming in with $200 billion. You know that you saw that number one in the world by far. Mr. Wei, most respected, one of the most respected people in business. Forget about chips from Taiwan. He's coming in, he's spending hundreds of billions of dollars, and he'll be spending it largely in Arizona. But these companies are coming in at levels that people haven't seen. And they're coming in because of the tariffs, and they're coming in because of me too. But they're coming in because of the tariffs, the incentive. Because if he doesn't, they're gonna have to pay very substantial tariffs for the privilege of selling their product in the United States.
Sharyl: Well, I simply mean it may take some time, obviously, for the plants to be built
Trump: It will.
Sharyl: And the people to be hired.
Trump: It will. But remember, the building of the plant is a lot of money also.
Sharyl: Point taken, as a society. I'm positing we've largely been convinced by our political leaders in the past that it's okay to kick the can down the road and not fix a lot of important things. It's very easy to paddle the kayak toward the waterfall with people telling you, you're never gonna hit the waterfall.
Trump: Sure.
Sharyl: It's hard to change directions. And I'm wondering, do you think American society today has the guts and the grit to go through any pain that there could be to try to fix big things?
Trump: So I think our economy's gonna roar. I think our stock market's gonna do great.
Sharyl: How long would you suggest people may have to wait before they say on a daily basis? “Wow.”
Trump: Well, look, I think they're seeing a lot of things happening. I think they're seeing the numbers. Look, Apple got up and said, ‘we're investing 500 billion’, not 500 million. That's a lot of money too, but $500 billion in the United States. They never did that. They built their plants in China. Now they're building their plants in the United States. And that's because of me, policy also, but also because of me. But you see all these companies, we have news conferences sometimes, and sometimes I just say, announce it. I don't have enough time for the news conferences. But the kind of money being invested in the country, we've never seen anything like it.
Sharyl: I would say the border has to be very early in this administration. The single most tangible, quick impact people saw.
Trump: Yeah.
Sharyl: I think 96% or above decrease in illegal border crossings and the mass deportations. I don't know how many of those, are you satisfied with how that's going so far?
Trump: Yeah, I think they're doing an incredible job. And it's a tough job too. We have 99% improvement from Biden. And that was his better. You know, he started around the election working a little bit harder, and they got a little bit better, was horrible still. So we're comparing it to his best time, comparing it to the worst time. It's like, it's not even, you can't calculate it. How much better? So we have now the best border we've ever had, and we did that in a period of five weeks. Pretty amazing actually.
Sharyl: Does that imply that we don't need to add a bunch of money and forces? In fact, maybe you could draw down or reappoint the force and manpower that's down there and we don't need new laws and new money?
Trump: Well, you don't need very many new laws, because I did it without new laws. I did it twice without new laws. I had the best border ever. And now I think we're gonna beat those numbers. I actually think these numbers might be slightly better and we're gonna get 'em better yet. And I said, during the speech on Tuesday night, I said that ‘you didn't need new anything. You just needed a new president for that.’ I said, ‘close the border.’ And they closed the border. He could have done the same thing. I think he wanted open borders. I don't know if he did, but somebody in there that ran the operation, nobody really knows who was running it.
Sharyl: More with President Trump from the White House, after a break.
