White House: President Trump Participates in a Rose Garden Club Dinner with American Farmers

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump.

God bless the USA.

Thank you very much, everyone. What a nice group. What is that noise? I hear the noise of a crane or something. I love that noise.

That means money. You hear that? It just started when I started speaking, so I guess they probably don't want to hear. So tonight we have a very special group of people.

It's called farmers and ranchers and the people that I love. I love you all.

A special, special group. And I want to welcome you to the Rose Garden Club, which is a special place. We just developed it, really. This used to be grass and it was unusable. And I have my friend over there.

Did I do a good job in the office with you today? Did I make you satisfied? He's a good man. We've dealt successfully together for a long time.

Oh, that's so much better without that noise. Thank you very much for turning that stupid machine off. But I want to welcome you to the Rose Garden Club. It's an incredible place. And this used to be grass, beautiful grass, but it was useless.

You couldn't stand it. It was always wet. You know, this used to be a wetland and the grass was wet. If it rained 7 days before, the grass was soaking wet. And we'd have reporters there, female reporters, would be holding their shoes like this, destroyed, ruined.

Men too. So we finally, after about 150 years, we decided to do something about it. And we put a beautiful stone that matches the White House. And people are loving this whole experience. We never had experience like this.

We never had tables. We couldn't do anything. We never had press conference. Now we use it for pretty much everything. It's one of the most active places in the White House.

We're delighted to be joined by some of the hardest working, most dedicated patriots in our country. That's called the American farmers. We have great, great, incredible people.

And I love you for a different reason. I think I get about 98% of your vote, at least. We're trying to figure out who the other 2% were. But the country was founded by farmers. 250 Years later, you are the growers, the ranchers, the agricultural producers.

You feed the nation and you power the entire world. And tonight I want to just say thank you. And that's why you're here. You're at this very incredible place called the White House. And really, I have a great respect for you people.

You built America. You really did. You feed it and you built it and you're unbelievable people. And thank you very much. Earlier today in the Oval Office, it was my honor to sign an executive order directing federal agencies to accelerate agricultural innovations.

That give farmers and ranchers the necessary resources to ensure American crops are the healthiest and the most abundant and the most affordable. And we're always working for the farmer. We want to make it better and easier for you. A lot easier for you. We're pleased to be joined tonight by Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Ralston.

And Brooke is a friend of mine. And we talk all the time about affordability because when we came in, Prices were through the roof. And you see, they're coming down very fast, Brooke. Good job. Eggs, I think, were 4 times higher than they are right now.

And it was my first day in office, and we had a news conference. And the fake news, which is around here someplace, they're always around someplace, unfortunately. But the fake news said, eggs, why are they so high? I said, what do you mean? Explain to me what's going on with eggs.

There were 4 times they were so high, like at a record high. Now, I was only there for 1 day. And I said, I've only been here for 1 day. Give me a break. And now Brooke went, we worked very hard on it.

And they're actually at a very low price right now. So it's really great. People are eating a lot of eggs. But Brooke Rollins has done a fantastic job. We have our Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessenti's central casting.

I say, he's totally central casting, right? He's a great guy. He's done a good job. How's our economy doing, Scott? Pretty good, right through the roof.

It's potentially, I think we have almost $19 trillion being invested. As an example, Sleepy Joe Biden, his administration, you know what it had? Less than $1 trillion for 4 years investment in the country. We have $19.2 trillion for 12 months. It's a big difference.

You see that all the factories being built all over the country. Nobody, you will never have seen this and you may never see it again. I don't think anybody's ever seen anything like it. We have our Secretary of the Interior, Doug Burgum, who's another star. He's a big star.

He's helping me with all the fountains and all the statues all over Washington and they're really looking good. We caught some people. Vandalizing our beautiful reflecting pool. We have the reflecting pool. They took a cutter, a box cutter or something very sharp.

Can you imagine? Where do these people come up with this? And they threw a little fertilizer in the water, which is not good. Fertilizer doesn't go well with water. Clear, beautiful water.

It doesn't work well. But they caught them. They actually caught them. And those guys have some problems ahead of them. But they did some damage.

But it looks beautiful. I just looked at it, Doug, and it looks beautiful. And they're going to fix it. They cut the bottom with a knife and pulled it and tried to do it as much damage as possible. These are sick people, but none of them are in the farming community.

You're lucky if you did have— you wouldn't put up with them very long, I don't think. But Secretary of Health and Human Services, and most people don't know what this meant. He's a very high-quality person. He's very brilliant, very difficult. Sometimes he gets a little difficult to handle, but he's just a man that nobody knows.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nobody has any idea who he is. Nobody has any idea. Now, he's very popular. He's very popular. He just wants people to be healthy, and he loves the farmers, Bobby, right?

He loves the farmers. And CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz, who's great. Who's a great man. Thank you, Ahmed. Thank you, Dr. Oz.

Thanks as well to, we have a lot of governors and senators here. I won't introduce all of them. Some of them I don't like, so I'm not going to introduce the ones that, and some of them I like a lot. Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen is here. Jim, where are you?

Jim, thank you, Jim. Nice to see you. Senators John Boozman and John Hoeven, Roger Marshall, Joni Ernst. Where are you guys? I'm sitting, I'm having dinner with a couple of you.

Hi, fellas. Representatives Austin Scott, Celeste Malloy. Thank you very much. You're real farm people. They are at the top.

They're always calling me about the farmer, along with Joni. And we also have with us President of the American Farm Bureau, Zippy Duvall. I've known Zippy for a long time. Zippy is a zippy. He's amazing.

Thank you very much, Zippy. It's good to see you. Look good. Under the last administration, Sleepy Joe Biden and the radical left Democrats. I changed the name.

It's dumb. I use it. I will probably always, until they become reasonable, I'll use a U instead of an E. It's very simple. Most people don't know there's a B in dumb. So it's a very simple change.

I take out the E. And they put in the EU and they're Democrats because their policies are so dumb. So that came out a little while ago and they hate the farmer too. So do you know that they hate you? You know that, don't you? Anyway, the Democrats, they gave us the worst inflation in the history of our country, 48 years to be exact.

And they crushed farmers with the burdensome restrictions. And my first term, we had an agricultural trade surplus. Biden took that surplus and turned it into a $50 billion agricultural trade deficit. We had a big surplus with the farmer and he took it in. I couldn't believe it.

I was watching it happen with a rigged election and he turned it into a $50 billion trade deficit. We had a deficit in agriculture, the worst we've ever had under Biden. He failed to negotiate a single trade deal on your behalf during a 4-year period. That's because he had no idea where the hell he was. And in his last year, farm bankruptcy rose to the highest levels ever, more than 55% up.

One of the things I did for the farmers, I don't know if we get to it, but in the great big beautiful bill, so many farmers, they love their children and they want to leave their farm to the children. And the children love the farm and they don't want to move into the big city because they're very smart. They want to stay at the farm. But a lot of the farmers are cash rich in some cases, and others are really land rich. And the ones that are land rich were having a little problem.

They'd leave their farms and their children would have to go out, borrow a lot of money to pay the estate tax or the death tax, a nasty tax. And it would be like 55%, 60% in some cases. And they'd end up losing the farm. They'd go out, borrow the money, and the banks would end up owning the farm. And they did terrible things to themselves.

It'd be, you know the story, it's a terrible thing, but there'd be suicides. They lost their farm. It was taken away. And I ended in the great big beautiful bill, the death tax on farms and small businesses. So if you like your children, good.

If you don't like your children, I would say leave the farm to somebody else. Does anybody here not like their children? Please raise your hand. Nobody. That's good.

I've never seen, you know, with all the times I've said that, I've never seen anybody raise their hand. Although there's some cases, I'm sure, where they don't. But you don't have the estate tax to pay now, so your children can live happily ever after, and they can enjoy being a farmer, and they can enjoy doing what they love to do. But now you have a president that fights for the American farmer, and after years of getting ripped off by other countries on trade. We've reduced the agricultural trade deficit just this year by 42%, opening markets to the American exports.

And all over the world, we're opening up markets for the farmers. And we have another one, a new market coming up, and that's called the lovely country of Iran. It's a beautiful place. Would anybody like to go there? The Islamic Republic of Iran.

They're having a hard time with food, and we're going to be taking some of their money and we'll spend it. And we're going to be buying wheat, soybeans, and corn, a lot of it. And that process is going to be starting pretty soon. It's going to be pretty big, too. I think it's going to be very big.

We have an expanded market, dairy in Europe and the dairy market. As you know, in Europe, we've opened it up because they had it closed in Asia. South America. Australia is now allowing US beef into its market for the first time in more than 25 years. And China is committed to purchase at least $17 billion in US agricultural products, in particular soybeans.

So I just left President Xi 3 weeks ago, 3 or 4 weeks ago, and he's agreed to purchase $17 billion worth of mostly soybeans and different things, but mostly soybeans. I terminated the insane electric vehicle mandate, where they wanted your tractors within 5 years to be all electric. That's just what you want. It's an electric tractor. Would anybody like an electric tractor?

Because typically it's not the greatest. You run out of fuel. If you're out in the field someday and you're running a little low on juice, you'll never get it started. You might as well abandon it. So ridiculous.

But I ended the electric vehicle mandate, which would have gutted the ethanol industry forever. And I saved your ethanol industry. And I think everyone knows that. Maybe nobody more so than Joni and some of the great senators that we just mentioned. Senator Marshall has been calling me all the time.

You got to save the ethanol. So we did, right? We did. We saved it. We saved it.

So it's very important. And the Democrats don't even know what ethanol is. We eliminated unnecessary restrictions on sales of E-15, and I made it clear that I will sign a bill allowing E-15 all year round. And that was something that was very important to the farmers. I also repealed the Biden administration's ridiculous Waters of the United States rule.

It sounds so beautiful. The Waters of the United States. It sounds so beautiful. The Waters of the United States. It's a killer.

It absolutely destroyed you and your businesses. Had a good name and everything else was bad. When I did that, I said, I'm going to be killed by the fake news media with this one. I'm destroying the waters of the— think of that, the title. And when I did it, I was surrounded by farmers when I signed it.

And half of them were crying. They said, you've saved our business, sir. Pretty amazing, right? We passed the largest tax cuts in American history and made the small business tax deduction permanent. Benefiting 98% of farmers and ranchers to help keep your family farms in good shape.

But really, it was a fantastic thing that we did for the farmer. I took a lot of heat because sometimes there is a group of people that are the exact opposite of the farmers. And what's good for the farmers is not good for them. But I am pro-farmer. I will tell you right now, I am pro-farmer.

And yesterday, we also called on Congress to pass a supplemental funding bill that will provide $11 billion in relief towards specialty crops and helping our great agricultural producers rebound from the losses that they had due to the Biden administration's horrible, horrible rules and regulations. So we're going to be getting an $11 billion payment in relief to our farmers. And Brooke, you'll distribute that money hopefully equitably. You'll do it equitably and you'll do a great job with it. I just want to tell you, you're special people and you have been right from the beginning.

From the day I ran, for some reason you like me. I came from the city, a city slicker. And from the day I ran, you liked me. And from the day I ran, I liked you. And we won Iowa and we won Nebraska.

We won everything. We won everything there is to win having to do with the farms. And now I think We're more popular than ever before. And you have an interesting industry because you go up and down. It's like a little bit of a yo-yo.

But if you remember, last time I got you $28 billion because you were taken advantage of by a lot of countries, including China. And I took $28 billion out of— $28 billion out of the tariffs. And I made you all whole. Beyond whole, I think. But we made you whole.

And now even just in talking here, we're doing the $11 billion relief. To help you get through a pretty difficult period of time. We're never going to let you down. We're never letting the farmer down. We let the farmer down.

We're letting our country down. And we're doing great. Just so you understand that 2 years ago, we had a dead country. We were a dead country. We were a laughingstock all over the world.

We had a man that couldn't walk down those 2 steps. We had a man that couldn't sign a document. He had to use an auto pen. You saw the auto pen over there. He was an autopen.

We call him the autopen president. And think of it, like 96% of the things he signed, he couldn't sign his name. What happened was a rigged election. But think of it, 2 years ago, we were a country that was laughed at all over the world. The King of Saudi Arabia said to me, Mr. President, a year ago, this was when I was with him a year ago, he said, a year ago, you had A dead country.

We never thought you'd come back. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world. We are the hottest country anywhere in the world. We have the strongest military. We took over Venezuela in less than one day.

And the oil is flowing. And we're getting along with them great. We're going to, by the way, help them with their big— they had a tremendous earthquake last night that you read about. Massive, like a massive in Caracas. But we're going to help them out.

But we did that. And Iran, effectively, within a week and a half, we knocked out their entire military, their leadership, their aircraft, their navy. They had 159 ships within 1.5 weeks. They were all at the bottom of the sea. And then I have to listen to the fake news.

Oh, they're much better today than they were then. These people are crazy. They want to make a deal with us very badly. And we Probably will. I think we will.

But the strait is open. Yesterday they took out 19 million barrels of oil. That's the most in the history of the strait. And the oil prices are dropping like a rock. And as goes oil, so goes everything else, including all of your products.

You have to spend a lot of money for your tractors. Now you're going to be spending much less than you were spending just a few weeks ago. And with all of the— Scott will tell you this— with all of the things you hear about. We had to go and make a U-turn. We had the best numbers we've ever had.

And I called in Scott. I called in Howard. I called in a lot of the people standing right there. I called in our great Secretary of the Interior, Doug. And I said, here's the story.

We just hit records. Our country is doing better than it's ever done. The stock market, we've had 73 all-time highs in less than a year and a half. Think of that. 73 Days we hit highs.

But we had just hit the highest we ever were. And it was 3 months ago, 3 and a half months ago. And I said, well, here's the story. We're doing great, but now we're going to have to make a U-turn. We're going to have to journey down to the Islamic Republic of Iran, because if we don't do it, they're going to have a nuclear weapon.

And if they have a nuclear weapon, the world is at great danger. Israel is gone. The Middle East is gone. But the The world is in great danger. And I said, we're going to journey down.

We're going to do what we have to do. And we did. We knocked the hell out of them. And now we're negotiating from a position of pure strength. Pure strength.

They know that. And the straits are already open. And we're setting records of the strait. But we had to do that. We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon.

You want to see problems, right? You know that. You want to see problems? You give them a nuclear weapon, they'll use it within the first hour. And we're not going to let that happen.

So we did that. They will not have a nuclear weapon. And they've agreed to that. 100% Agreed to that. But very importantly, though, we have the hottest country right now anywhere in the world.

We have the strongest military in the world. I rebuilt the military in my first term. We have the strongest military anywhere in the world. We have the hottest country anywhere in the world. We're doing things that nobody believed.

We're building more factories now than at any time in the history of our country. We're leading China by a lot on the AI. It's an AI revolution. We have the car companies pouring back into our country because of tariffs, because they don't want to pay the tariffs. So they're moving in from Canada, from Mexico, from Germany, from Japan, from South Korea, from all over the world.

They're coming in. But we're building more factories than at any time and plants. Than at any time in the history of our country. And as far as I'm concerned, you are the people. You are the very special ones.

You're the chosen ones. You're the farmers. And you're the ones that keep it all going. So I'm with you 1,000%. Brooke, great job you're doing.

If she doesn't do a great job, let me know. I will fire her immediately. Now, she's fantastic. And thank you very much. Have a great time.

Turn on some music. Let's have a little music, right? For the farmers. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.