Jiang: As we inched closer to a government shutdown this morning, you said you might do a lot of layoffs. If DOGE is already reducing the federal workforce, why is it necessary to link more federal jobs cut to a shutdown?
Trump: Well, the Democrats want to shut it down, and so when you shut it down, you have to do layoffs. So, we’d be laying off a lot of people that are going to be very affected. And the Democrats, they’re going to be Democrats. As you know, this country, no country can afford to pay for illegal immigration, health care for everybody that comes into the country. That’s what they’re insisting. And obviously I have an obligation to not accept that. That would affect everybody.
When I see what we’re doing with AI and all the plants that are opening up in the country— $17 trillion is coming in. If you compare that to Biden, Biden had, in four years, less than a trillion. We have 17 trillion— more than that. I think it’s going to be much more than that, David. By the end of this year, I think it’s going to be far over that. It’s a record, it’s already a record in eight months. It’s a record by a lot. And so we’re doing well as a country.
So, the last thing we want to do is shut it down. But a lot of good can come down from shut downs. We can get rid of a lot of things that we don’t want. They’d be Democrat things, but they want open borders, they want men playing in women’s sports, they want transgender for everybody, they never stop and they don’t learn. We won an election in a landslide. They just don’t learn. So, we have no choice. I have to do that for the country.