24 posts from Thursday, August 21, 2025

And you people are winners, and I just think it's really -- it's such an honor to be with you. And we're going to make Washington, D.C., great again. We're making our country great again. The country is very close to being great. When they say it's the hottest country in the world, they mean it. And this Capitol is right now, after four days, five days, it's at a level that you haven't seen in a long time. And it's all because of you. So I want to thank you all very much. It's an honor to be with you. And we'll always be with you. We're going to be with you for as long as I'm around. You're going to be treated as nobody more important. And thank you all very much for being here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Doug, would you like to say something? Thank you. Thank you, everybody.

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The crime numbers are way down. I'm looking at, you saw some of the stats. They just read them out to me inside. The numbers that we haven't seen here ever, actually ever. And I think it's probably, right now it's, to me, I feel very safe now and I'm hearing people are very safe, but I know within two weeks it's gonna be, Pam, it's gonna be at a level that's even far superior. So I just came, I just wanted to thank you all. You're doing incredible, you're incredible people. You make the country run, frankly. You make the whole place run. We're gonna have the best capital ever. We're gonna have the, it's gonna look better than it ever did.

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Well, I just want to thank everybody very much for being here. I wanted to do this. We've had some incredible results and results have come out and it's like a different place. It's like a different city. It's the capital. It's going to be the best in the world. We're going to do what you're doing with law enforcement. And very importantly, also, we're going to physically do it. We're going back to Congress for some money and we're going to redo a lot of the pavement, a lot of the medians, a lot of the the graffiti is all coming off real fast. It's going to come down real fast. We're working with Clark Construction there. One of the big ones. They're the biggest here by far, actually. And we're going to be not so much building. It's cleaning and fixing and redoing and putting brand new surfaces down on your roads and streets. And when people come in from the airport all the way to the Capitol or the White House or any place else, they're going to say, boy, this place is spotless.

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But I've never received so many phone calls thanking me for what we've done in Washington, D.C., from people that haven't gone to a restaurant literally in four years. And they said, you know what you've done is it's unprecedented because what they -- they said it was just unsafe. We couldn't do it. We'd go out and you'd see the stories. You'd read the stories. You'd see all of the things that are happening. And they said we couldn't stand it, sir. Now I take my wife and my kids to dinner. One of them said he's gone out four nights in a row and he hadn't gone out for four years. So it's a great tribute to you. And when I look at you people, I understand why, because there's no games, right? We're not playing games. We're going to make it safe.

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He has been back and forth and back and forth to Europe and the Middle East. He's the U.S. Special Envoy, Steve Whitkoff. He's spent more time with these leaders in the Middle East, Europe, and Putin himself than any other American. Steve, thank you for being with us. Thank you for the good work you're doing. I would argue that we are on the precipice of a really good peace deal in the Middle East. You have spent a lot of time with Putin. If you had to add up the hours, what would it be? Probably close to 24 or 25 hours, Sean, of personal time with him and with some of his other people, Yuri Ushikov, Sergei Lavrov, approximately 24 or 25 hours. I don't want to get into... I have my own thoughts on Vladimir Putin. They're not very complimentary. It's neither here nor there. Joe Biden called him every name of the book, but he never picked up a phone and called him. Here's the main question. Putting aside what your personal thoughts on him will be, do you believe this piece is attainable and is it because of what Donald Trump did by convincing the EU to buy our oil, by putting tariffs on India, by arming Ukraine and upping the anti-wood NATO? Is that the reason why Putin finally came to the table or did he really want peace? Those are all the reasons, Sean. The president, and me and you have discussed it, has this uncanny ability to bend people to his sensible way of thinking. He does it each and every time. I've never seen anything quite like it, and I've been around some master deal makers. He is the legend, as far as I'm concerned. His policy prescriptions are so pragmatic, so sensible, and in a distorted world, he's recalibrating it all. It's simply remarkable. Every single leader that I've met in my travels, Sean, they say the same thing as I do. Every single one of them. You were in the room in Alaska, the very room that I ended up interviewing President Trump in. You were there with him and Vladimir Putin. You were in the room with NATO leaders and European leaders and Zelensky. If you can, to the extent that you can, bring us in that room in Alaska and bring us in the room in the White House yesterday. Well, I don't want to delve into the specifics of what was discussed, because we're in a negotiation mediating, and I think we're going to be very successful because of the leadership of President Trump, but there were concessions almost immediately made on the part of the Russians in the first meeting in Alaska, and part of getting those concessions was learning whether we were going to be able to see the Russians prepared to be more accommodating, and it was clear. That's a bit of intelligence that's really important for us to see, and the president fleshed that out almost immediately, and that's what led to the length of the meeting. We stayed there for quite some time because we actually made progress on how we might get to a peace deal. You know, a ceasefire deal is very, very easy to break because it doesn't have all the ingredients attached to it. A peace deal is much more different. It's sturdy, and the president began to sense in this meeting in Alaska that we had a lot of the precursors agree to for a peace deal, so why not pursue an entire peace deal? And of course, in this sort of nutty world, he got criticized for that. I sat and watched it and marveled at it, to tell you the truth. Well, I mean, if the dog bites at the beast things and you're feeling sad, Steve, there's a group of people in this country that will blame Donald Trump for all the above. Let's talk about the conventional wisdom is land swaps for security guarantees. I don't really see any other possible deal than that myself, looking at a potential outcome. Maybe not the deal I'd write down on paper, but a deal that's doable. Anything you can comment regarding that? Look, the president, Sean, has said that the Ukrainians actually can make a peace deal if they want to. But we're not suggesting that they they have to take it. The president has also said it's going to be for President Zelensky to make that judgment call. And I think that judgment call is all going to be it's going to begin with security guarantees. They want to make sure that this can never happen again to them. And that's exactly how they ought to be thinking. So but it's our job to bring the parties together, to narrow the issues. And that's what that's what President Trump does better than anybody. He he he's got a he's got a real sense. I mean, it is on. He's got a real sense of what it's going to take for Ukraine to meet in the middle and to move the Russians. And he accomplished that in two back to back meetings. And I I like I was I watched in what I watched in wonderment, to tell you the truth, because it was his show. It looks like that were closer to peace, a final piece in the Middle East. The president said that Hamas had to be wiped out. They were given every opportunity to turn the hostages over. Where does that stand? Well, look at what happened, by the way, three weeks ago, that proposal was on the table and they slow played us Hamas. And the president put out his truth statement saying that he wasn't going to tolerate it anymore. And guess what happened? There's been a major break. They've issued the announcement and they've said they want they want a peace deal. Now, the president has been has been very decisive and straightforward in his truth. He wants all the hostages back. And that is the position that we have. We want all the hostages back. That conflict should end immediately. Twenty hostages should be returned to their families, a commencement or commensurate amount of Palestinian prisoners to be released as well. And just let's end that thing and and bring peace and solitude to the Gaza people and rebuild Gaza as it should be rebuilt, as the president has set forth. I wish you and the president every success. Blessed are the peacemaker, Steve. We wish you success. Thank you for sharing that with us. We appreciate your time.

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