'Complete Disaster': Donald Trump Slams Pete Buttigieg, Says He Made Air Traffic Control 'Worse'

Forbes Breaking News

In a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, President Donald Trump spoke about Pete Buttigieg and the air traffic control system.

Transcript

00:00It was very important to us.

00:01And just to cover that, you know, there have been accidents,

00:06and my pilots, I would often hear them say,

00:10oh, good, and they would use a different system,

00:12a different country to land in New York.

00:14They'd use the radar and other things from a different country.

00:18I said, what's that?

00:19And he said, oh, our system is so bad.

00:22And I knew that.

00:22We were all set to start.

00:24And Bootett Edge came in, and what they did was so crazy

00:31because they hooked copper into fiber, into steel, into all.

00:36They had all different systems.

00:38They had hundreds and hundreds of contractors,

00:41different contractors for different airports.

00:43They spent billions of dollars,

00:45and they made the system worse

00:46because you can't hook copper into fiber.

00:49It doesn't work that way.

00:50You just can't do it.

00:51It's not doable, but they tried to do it.

00:53It didn't work out too well.

00:54And in the end, it was just a complete disaster.

00:58We want to have one great company.

01:01Now, Raytheon is going to bid.

01:03IBM is going to bid.

01:05We have five or six bidders that really are good and do this stuff.

01:09And we want one, I tell, because I know about overruns.

01:13I look at the railroad out in California,

01:15headed up by one of the worst governors in our country,

01:18who I used to get along with, actually.

01:20But he's just, you know, when you lose 25,000 houses,

01:24and you would have had your cities burned down.

01:26If we didn't step in, Los Angeles would have been burned to the ground.

01:29But you look at that, and I said, I really know how to build.

01:33And you've got to have one guy, one contractor, one great one,

01:36whether it's IBM or Raytheon is good.

01:39But you have four or five of them that are really, really great.

01:42And they're all bidding against each other.

01:44But you don't want to have one doing the wire,

01:46and one doing the digging, and one doing the demolition,

01:49and one, and then they're all saying they all blame each other

01:52because they're saying they were late,

01:54and therefore you have to pay me millions of dollars more money.

01:57I know this system so well.

01:59And we're going to have a great company do the whole thing.

02:03We're going to get a fantastic price.

02:05Maybe we'll get them very big and very strong,

02:07and maybe we'll get them to make a contribution toward it,

02:10toward, you know, getting it done at the right price.

02:13But we're going to have a great system.

02:14When we finish, we will have the best system on Earth

02:17done by one of the two or three best companies.

02:19There are only a few companies that can do this.

02:21This is not.

02:22But if you would have seen what this other group did,

02:24they were going, they were going crazy.

02:27They had, I think they, I heard 3,000 contractors.

02:32And then when it all came together, guess what?

02:34It didn't work. It's a disaster.

02:37So we are, we're going to have a pretty short period of time.

02:41It'll take us about two years to build it.

02:44And we'll have a contract given out

02:46probably over the next couple of months.

02:47We have some great bidders,

02:49some great companies that want to do the job.

02:51You're going to have great air traffic control.

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