President Trump in CPAC Speech Says Deregulation Is as Important as Tax Cuts
President Donald J. Trump in his speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference today spent seven minutes discussing his deregulatory agenda, ending the war on energy, getting out of the Paris climate treaty, the harmful effects of Paris, and the positive effects his policies are having on property owners and workers. Notably, he said that in his opinion getting rid of job-killing regulations had just as big an impact on the economy as the tax cuts. The president spoke for more than an hour, and one of the longest interruptions for applause was when he said Paris would have been a disaster.
Several videos of the entire speech are available on the Internet. Here is one on YouTube. The transcript is available on the White House website. Here is the section beginning at about 7 minutes into the video:
And we’ve, at the same time, eliminated a record number of job-killing regulations, and people are going back to work. (Applause.) Right? People are going back to work. So — and you know, the fake news always — if I say something that’s like, a little off, next day headline, “He misrepresents…” — I have to be careful.
But in the history of Presidents, no President — and I’m saying no President. Now, maybe they’ll find I was off by two but we’re here one year. (Laughter.) No President — well, I read it in lots of good papers, actually. (Laughter.) But they’ll change the story when I say it. No President has ever cut so many regulations in their entire term, okay — (applause) — as we’ve cut in less than a year. (Applause.)
And it’s my opinion that the regulations had as big an impact as these massive tax cuts that we’ve given. So I really believe it. (Applause.)
We’ve ended the war on American energy. We were in war. And we’ve ended the war on beautiful, clean coal. (Applause.) One of our great natural resources. And very important for our defense — coal — very important for our defense. Because we have it. We don’t have to send it through pipes. We don’t have to get it from foreign countries. We have more than anybody. And they wanted to end it. And our miners have been mistreated and they’re not being mistreated anymore. We’re doing tremendous business. (Applause.)
I was in Vietnam, and the Prime Minister and the President of Vietnam were there. And we have a massive deficit with them, like we do with everybody else because these Presidents have just let it go to hell. We have the worst trade deals you’ve ever seen. So we’re changing it.
So I said, we have too big of a deficit with Vietnam; I’m not happy. He said, “Well, but we’re going to…” — I said, “Buy coal. Buy coal.” They use a lot of coal. Buy coal. And he said, “You know, we have bought coal from West Virginia and other places, and it’s the finest coal we have ever used.” It’s interesting. And West Virginia now is doing great. You look at what’s happening in West Virginia. You look at what’s happening in Pennsylvania. You look at what’s happening in Ohio. (Applause.) And you look at what’s happening in Wyoming. You look at what’s happening all over. It’s like a — it’s like a different world.
And remember this: Virtually, as soon as I got into office, we approved the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline, which would never have been approved. (Applause.) And we announced our withdrawal from the totally disastrous, job-killing, wealth-knocking-out — you know, it knocked out our wealth, or it would have. They basically wanted to take our wealth away. They didn’t want us to use our wealth power. We knocked out the Paris Climate Accord. Would have been a disaster. (Applause.) Would have been a disaster for our country.
AUDIENCE: USA! USA! USA!
THE PRESIDENT: You know, basically, it said, you have a lot of oil and gas that we found — you know, technology has been amazing — and we found things that we never knew. But we have massive — just about the top in the world — we have massive energy reserves. We have coal. We have so much. And basically, they were saying, don’t use it, you can’t use it.
So what it does is it makes us uncompetitive with other countries. It’s not going to happen. I told them, it’s not going to happen. And, you know, China, their agreement didn’t kick in until 2030. Right? Our agreement kicks in immediately. Russia, they’re allowed to go back into the 1990s, which was not a clean environmental time.
Other countries, big countries — India and others — we had to pay, because they considered them a growing country. They were a growing country. I said, “What are we?” Are we allowed to grow too? Okay? (Laughter.) Now, are we allowed to grow? (Applause.) They called India a “developing nation.” They called China a “developing nation.” But the United States, we’re developed — we can pay.
So, folks, if you don’t mind — I’ll tell you what — it’s amazing how many people understood the Paris Accord, because it sounds so good. It’s like some of the environmental regulations that I cut — they have the most beautiful titles. And sometimes I’d say, “Look, I’m just going to close my eyes and sign this because, you know what, I’m going to get killed on this one.” And I get so much thanks. The country knows what I’m doing. We couldn’t build. We couldn’t farm. If you had a puddle on your land, they called it a lake for the purposes of environmentals. (Applause.) I mean, it’s crazy. It’s crazy.
And I’d sign certain bills and I’d have farmers behind me and I’d have house builders, home builders behind me. And these are tough people, strong people. They fought hard. They’ve worked all their lives, hard. And they’d be — half of them would be crying because we gave them their property back. We gave them the right to earn a living. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t do what they had to do. We gave them their property back. We gave them their dignity back. (Applause.)
By the way, you don’t mind if I go off script a little bit because, you know, it’s sort of boring. It’s a little boring. (Applause.) Got this beautiful speech, everything is wonderful but a little boring. We have to, you know —
But we gave them their dignity back. And that’s why our country is doing record business. We’re doing record business. We’re doing business — and you have to look at the fundamentals. Companies are pouring back into this country. They’re pouring back. Not like — I mean, when did you hear about car companies coming back into Michigan and coming to Ohio and expanding? (Applause.) When did you hear — you never heard that. You hear they’re leaving. I’ve been talking about it for 20 years.