Read President Trump’s Speech Declaring a National Emergency
President Donald Trump announced Friday morning that he’s declaring a national emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border and will be reprogramming billions in federal funds to build a wall.
Below, the full text of his remarks from the White House Rose Garden before he took questions from reporters.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Before we begin, I would like to say that we have a large team of very talented people in China. We have had a negotiation going on for about two days. It’s going extremely well—who knows what that means because it only matters if we get it done, but we are very much working very closely with China and President Xi who I respect a lot, very good relationship that we have. And we are a lot closer than we ever were in this country with having a real trade deal.
We are covering everything, all of the points that people have been talking about for years that said couldn’t be done, whether it was theft or anything, anything, the unfairness. We have been losing, on average, $375 billion a year with China. A lot of people think it is $506 billion. Some people think it is much more than that. We’re gonna be leveling the playing field. The tariffs are hurting China very badly. They don’t want them and frankly if we can make the deal, it would be my honor to remove them. But otherwise, we are having very many billions of dollars pouring into our Treasury; we have never had that before with China. It has been very much of a one-way street. So that’s happening. And the relationship with China is very good, but I think they finally respect our country. They haven’t respected us for a long time, not for a long time.
The U.K. and the U.S., as you probably have been seeing and hearing, we are agreeing to go forward and preserve our trade agreement. You know all of the situation with respect to Brexit and the complexity and the problems. But we have a very good trading relationship with U.K. and that has just been strengthened further. So with the U.K., we are continuing our trade. And we are going to actually be increasing it very substantially as time goes by. We expect that the U.K. will
