Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office during a meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, President Trump responded to multiple questions about Elon Musk's attacks on the Big Beautiful Bill.
00:01Mr. President, can we follow up on the autopilot?
00:04Thank you, Mr. President.
00:05The criticism that I've seen, and I'm sure you've seen, regarding Elon Musk and your big, beautiful bill,
00:10what's your reaction to that?
00:12Do you think it in any way hurts passage in the Senate, which, of course, what is your seeking?
00:17Well, look, you know, I've always liked Elon, and I was always very surprised.
00:20You saw the words he had for me, the words.
00:23And he hasn't said anything about me that's bad.
00:25I'd rather have him criticize me than the bill, because the bill is incredible.
00:31It's the biggest cut in the history of our country.
00:33We've never cut.
00:35It's about 1.6 trillion in cuts.
00:37It's the biggest tax cut.
00:40Tax, you would say, people's taxes will go way down.
00:45But it's the biggest tax cut in history.
00:47We are doing things in that bill that are unbelievable.
00:51And when you look at what we're doing for small businesses, for people, for middle-income people,
00:58all of the things that we're doing, nobody's ever seen anything like it.
01:03And, you know, Elon's upset because we took the EV mandate, which was a lot of money for electric vehicles.
01:10And, you know, they're having a hard time, the electric vehicles.
01:13And they want us to pay billions of dollars in subsidy.
01:18And, you know, Elon knew this from the beginning.
01:22He knew it for a long time ago.
01:23That's been in there.
01:24That's been, I would say, J.D., that hasn't changed.
01:27That's been right from the beginning.
01:29I think Mr. Secretary, that hasn't changed at all, right from the beginning.
01:33But I know that disturbed him.
01:35He wanted, and rightfully, you know, he recommended somebody from, that he, I guess, knew very well,
01:43I'm sure he respected him, but to run NASA.
01:46And I didn't think it was appropriate.
01:48And he happened to be a Democrat, like totally Democrat.
01:52And I say, you know, look, we won.
01:55We get certain privileges.
01:56And one of the privileges, we don't have to appoint a Democrat.
01:59NASA is very important.
02:00We have great people.
02:01General Cain is going to be picking somebody with our, we'll be checking him out and seeing.
02:09But he wanted that person, a certain person, and we said no.
02:14And, you know, I can understand why he's upset.
02:16Remember, he was here for a long time.
02:19You saw a man who was very happy when he stood behind the Oval Desk.
02:24And even with the black eye, I said, do you want a little makeup?
02:28We'll get you a little makeup.
02:29But he said, no, I don't think so.
02:31Which is interesting and very nice.
02:34He wants to be who he is.
02:36So you could make that statement, too, I guess.
02:38Look, Elon and I had a great relationship.
02:42I don't know if we're well anymore.
02:44I was surprised because you were here.
02:46Everybody in this room practically was here as we had a wonderful send-off.
02:50He said wonderful things about me.
02:51You couldn't have nicer.
02:52He said the best thing.
02:54He's worn the hat.
02:56Trump was right about everything.
02:57And I am right about the great, big, beautiful bill.
03:01We call it a great, big, beautiful bill because that's what it is.
03:04And, again, biggest tax cuts in history, biggest economic development moves anywhere.
03:10We've never done anything like it.
03:13Businesses spurred.
03:15And I don't know if you've seen the numbers, but the numbers came out.
03:17Even the CBO, which is run by Democrats, said that we're going to be doing it.
03:23You know, I'd like you to discuss it, the $2.8 trillion, that CBO.
03:28This is a group of people that are Democrats.
03:31They're very hostile to us.
03:33They just came out with phenomenal numbers what it does.
03:36Do you want to mention that, Scott?
03:37Yes, sir.
03:38So what we've seen is we keep hearing from the CBO that there's going to be a large deficit from the bill,
03:46which we disagree with.
03:47But using the CBO scoring, they came out and scored the tariff revenue.
03:52We think it will be the minimum of $2.8 trillion over the 10-year window,
03:57which actually puts the bill in surplus if you include the tariff revenue, which they won't do.
04:02It gives you a tremendous surplus, but we're not allowed to use that.
04:06For some reason, they say scoring.
04:09Nobody knows what scoring means.
04:10Maybe a couple of people, but nobody.
04:12Somebody sits in the background.
04:14They say, well, we're not going to allow that.
04:16They're not allowing other things that we have that are tremendously profitable for our country.
04:20But if you saw the other day CNBC, they came out with numbers.
04:25And the people on the show, very good people, I've watched them for a long time,
04:29they couldn't believe the numbers, how good they are.
04:31The numbers were incredible.
04:33And that was personal income and also very low inflation.
04:37We have very low inflation.
04:38We're down to 2% now and maybe even lower than that.
04:42And when I took it over, it was a mess.
04:43Remember, we had the worst inflation probably in the history of our country.
04:48They say 48 years, but let's say that's, I think it's worse than that.
04:53So we had the worst inflation in the history of our country under the Biden administration.
04:57Now we're down to a beautiful number, 2%.
05:01You'd actually like to keep it there.
05:04Better than zero is 2%.
05:05It's going down maybe to one.
05:07And 1% is like perfect.
05:09That's perfect.
05:10You don't want to have zero for certain reasons that nobody is very interested to listen to.
05:16But we have almost perfect inflation.
05:19Grocery prices are down.
05:21Everything.
05:21Remember eggs?
05:22Eggs.
05:23We weren't going to buy another egg for the next 20 years that was so expensive, right?
05:27Remember?
05:27You guys all hit me about eggs.
05:29Eggs have come down 400%.
05:31Everybody has eggs now.
05:33They're having eggs for breakfast again.
05:35But if you look at gasoline, very important.
05:38I think always the most important because it's the energy is a big, the biggest factor.
05:42That's what happened.
05:43He screwed up our energy policy and everything went up because energy went up.
05:47But now energy is way down.
05:49And they have states where you're at $1.98 a gallon for gasoline.
05:56So the costs have come way down.
05:59And one of the things I ran on was that.
06:02I ran on the border.
06:03We have the best border in the history of our country.
06:0599.99%.
06:07It was last week three people came in.
06:11Two of them for medical reasons.
06:13We let them in because one of them had a heart attack.
06:15I think it was a nice thing to do.
06:17And one of them had something else.
06:19So we've never had.
06:21I had very good numbers for four years.
06:23But we've really topped it.
06:26And I want to thank Christy and Tom Holman.
06:28They've done a fantastic job.
06:31But nobody mentions that anymore.
06:32Remember, a few months ago, the border was a total disaster.
06:37People were coming in by the hundreds of thousands of people a day, a week, a month.
06:43I mean, we had a month.
06:44Two million people came in in one month.
06:47The border was being overrun.
06:49And a lot of bad people, criminals, murderers, drug dealers.
06:53We had some of the worst people in the world coming in from all over the world.
06:57It's totally close.
06:58And you know what?
06:59People are coming into our country, but they're coming in legally.
07:02So we've done a great job.
07:04Elon knew that.
07:06Elon endorsed me very strongly.
07:08He actually went up and campaigned for me.
07:10I think I would have won.
07:11Susie would say I would have won Pennsylvania easily anyway, even if the governor ran.
07:16The real governor, not the governor from Minnesota, who's, I mean, he's a sick puppy, that guy.
07:20That poor guy feels sorry for him.
07:22But they made a bad choice with him.
07:25But if you pick Shapiro or anybody else, I spoke to him recently about his, you know, his house being set on fire, which was terrible.
07:34But if they picked him, I would have won Pennsylvania.
07:37I won it by a lot.
07:39But I'm very disappointed because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill better than almost anybody sitting here.
07:46Better than you people.
07:48He knew everything about it.
07:49He had no problem with it.
07:50All of a sudden, he had a problem.
07:51And he only developed the problem when he found out that we're going to have to cut the EV mandate because that's billions and billions of dollars.
07:58And it really is unfair.
07:59We want to have cars of all types.
08:02Electric.
08:02We want to have electric.
08:03But we want to have gasoline, combustion.
08:07We want to have different.
08:08We want to have hybrids.
08:09We want to have all.
08:10We want to be able to sell everything.
08:12And when that was cut, and Congress wanted to cut it, it became a little bit different.
08:18And I can understand that.
08:20But he knew every aspect of this bill.
08:23He knew it better than almost anybody.
08:25And he never had a problem until right after he left.
08:28And if you saw the statements he made about me, which I'm sure you can get very easily, it's very fresh on tape, he said the most beautiful things about me.
08:36And he hasn't said bad about me personally, but I'm sure that'll be next.
08:40But I'm very disappointed in Elon.
08:42I've helped Elon a lot.
08:44To that end, Mr. President, did he, I just want to clarify, did he raise any of these concerns with you privately before he raised them publicly?
08:50And this is the guy you put in charge of cutting spending.
08:53Should people not take him seriously about spending now?
08:56Are you saying this is all sour grapes?
08:57No, he worked hard and he did a good job.
09:00And I'll be honest, I think he misses the place.
09:03I think he got out there and all of a sudden he wasn't in this beautiful Oval Office.
09:06And he was, and he's got nice offices too, but there's something about this one.
09:10I was telling the chancellor, this is where it is.
09:13People come in here, even from Germany, they come in and they walk into the Oval Office and it's just a special place.
09:20It's, you know, World War I, it started and it ended here.
09:24And World War II and so many other things, everything big comes right from this beautiful space.
09:31It's now much more beautiful than it was six months ago.
09:35A lot of good things are happening in this room.
09:37And I'll, I'll tell you, it's not, he's not the first.
09:41People leave my administration and they love us.
09:47And then at some point they miss it so badly.
09:50And some of them embrace it and some of them actually become hostile.
09:55I don't know what it is.
09:56It's sort of Trump derangement syndrome, I guess they call it.
09:59But we have it with others too.
10:01They leave and they wake up in the morning and the glamour's gone.
10:06The whole world is different and they become hostile.
10:10I don't know what it is.
10:11Someday you'll write a book about it and you'll let us know.
