We now join the presidential press conference on — I mean in — progress.

Remarks by President Trump in Press Conference
New Delhi, India / 2/26/20

THE PRESIDENT: . . . one little simple question, and you’ll blow it out, and that will be the end of the trip.  They won’t even talk about the trip.  So I’ll be very, very conservative of my answers, if you don’t mind.

[On Coronavirus] And I think that whole situation will start working out.  A lot of talent, a lot of brainpower is being put behind it.  Two and a half billion dollars we’re putting in.

I see that Chuck Schumer criticized that.  He thought it should be more.  And if I gave more, he’d say it should be less.  It’s automatic, you know, with these characters.  They’re not — they’re just not good for our country.  If I gave more, he’d say, “It should be less.”  But that’s what they do.  In the meantime, that’s all they can do.  They’re not getting anything done.  We have so many things we could get done.

Bernie is probably winning, and it looks like he’s winning.  And he’s got a head of steam, and they maybe don’t want him, for obvious reasons.  So they don’t want him, so they put out a thing that Russia is backing him.  This is what they do.  I’ve gone through it for a long time.  I get it.  I get the game better than anybody.  And that’s the way it is.

[On the drawdown of troops from Afghanistan] And it’s very interesting, that one is.  Everybody is happy about it.  Even people that are normally against me, like 99.9 percent of the time, because we’ve been there for 19 years and everybody would like to see it happen.

I was actually surprised.  I thought the Schumers of the world would say whatever the opposite is, you know, because that’s all they can do.  Cryin’ Chuck.

But people are really — they’re really happy to see that we’re trying very hard.  You know, we’re bringing it down to 86- — 8,600.  And from there, we’ll make a decision as to what the final outcome would be.

But there’s been tremendous praise for the fact that we’re doing something.  You know, other administrations have tried to do something.  In particular, the previous administration, for a long time, they were never able to get anything done.  And we’re — we’re really serving not as a military force as we are a police force.  And we’re not a police force.  They have to police their own country.  We’re not a police force.  It’s like law enforcement.  And that’s the way it is.

So we’d like to, after 19 — I can tell you, after 19 years, we’d like to bring our young people back home.  Bring them — that’s where they want to be.  And we’ll always have intelligence; we’ll have other things there.  But we’d like to bring them — for the most part, we’d like to bring them back home.  We want to watch the area.  The area is a hotbed of problems.

And when we bring them home, we’ll let them know that if something happens, we will hit them so hard.  And we could win that easily if I wanted to kill millions of people.  I don’t want to kill millions of people — innocent people.  We could win that very easily.  We don’t have to act as a police force.  We could act as a military force to win, not a military force to just take care of things in that very, very difficult part of the world.  It’s a very difficult part.  It’s a very dangerous part of the world.

So let’s see what happens.  So far so good.  So far. 

We killed al-Baghdadi a few months ago.  And Soleimani was — is gone.  He’s no longer putting roadside bombs all over the place.  Somebody else may be, but he was the father — the king of the roadside bomb.

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But that’s what his thing was.  He thought that was a beautiful weapon: roadside bombs.  It’s a coward’s bomb.  And all of these young people that have been so badly hurt.  And we did a big favor.

In addition to that, as you know, Hamza bin Laden is now gone.  And he was looking to do damage.  And he’s gone.  And al Qaeda — last week, you saw what happened there.

So, nobody has done more than what I’ve done.  And — but at the same time, Russia should do it.  Iran should do it.  Iraq should do it.  Syria should do it.

You know, we’re in a different part of the world.  We’re doing it.  Everybody says, “You’re the only ones that can do it.”  Well, at some point, these other countries — I mean, Iran should do it.  Iran hates ISIS.  And they should do it.

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You know, the United States is 8,000 miles away.  And they’re all saying, “Could you do it?”  Yeah, we could do it.  We’ve been doing it for a long time.  But I’ve been doing it much better than anyone else has done it.  I mean what we’ve done in the last couple of years has been incredible.

We have 100 percent of the caliphate.  Remember, we had 99 percent.  I’d say, “Good, we’re leaving.”  And I was hit with — people couldn’t believe it.  They said, “Do 100.”  So we did 100.  I did 100 with some great generals that knew exactly what they were doing.  They were unbelievable.

We took 100 percent of the caliphate.  And we have thousands of prisoners right now locked up — and these are ISIS fighters — and killed thousands, not that I want to do that.  I don’t want to do that, but that’s what we had to do.

And when I came in, ISIS was all over the place.  It was totally out of control.

Q    Hi, sir, Emily Goodwin with the DailyMail.com.  I was wondering, do you think justice was served in the Harvey Weinstein case?

THE PRESIDENT:  So, I was never a fan of Harvey Weinstein, as you know.  In fact, he said he was going to work hard to defeat me in the election.  How did that work out, by the way?  I’m trying to figure that out.

He was a person I didn’t like — never liked.  I don’t know too much about the case because, as you know, I’ve been over here.  Between traveling and being at meetings almost every hour of the day, every minute of the day, I haven’t been able to really see too much of it.

But I was just not a fan of his.  I knew him a little bit, not very well.  I knew him because he was in New York.  Not — not a person that I like.

I will say, the people that liked him were the Democrats.  Michelle Obama loved him.  Loved him.  Hillary Clinton loved him.  And he gave tremendous money to the Democrats.

But in the meantime, we’re working with China very much on the virus.  We feel that’s something.

And I have to tell — I spoke to President Xi the other day.  He is so committed to solving that problem.  He is — he is working very hard.  He is very capable.  The country is very capable.  And it snuck up on him, but I think he’s going to do well.

Now you see it’s going to South Korea, it’s going to Italy, and it’s going to other places.  But I spoke to all of them.  They’re all working very, very hard on it.

The United States, because of an early decision I made — I made a decision.  I believe it was the first time it’s ever been done: We closed the country to certain areas, as you know.  And I was criticized for that decision.  Now they’re saying it was a good decision.  I think it was a good decision because we have very few people.  And you can add to it a few people that we took in because they’re Americans.  I mean, what are we going to do?  And they were almost in between countries, where people weren’t going to take them, and they’re Americans.  But they’re fully quarantined. 

… just like China.  Everybody said, “You’ll never make a deal with China.”  I made a deal with China.  It’s a great deal.  They’re going to buy 250 billion dollars’ worth of product.  And that’s only a piece of the deal.  It’s a large piece.  It’s probably 40 to 50 percent, but it’s a — it’s an incredible deal.

In addition to that, we’re taking in billions and billions of dollars’ worth of tariffs that we can now use for phase two, because they want to get rid of the 25 percent.  So we have the 25 percent; they want to get rid of it.

Well, with India — India is, I think, the highest — again, I said it before — but the highest tariff.  When you deal with India, Harley Davidson has to pay tremendous tariffs when they send motorcycles in here.  When India sends motorcycles into the U.S., there is virtually no tariff.  For the most part, there is absolutely no tariff.  So I just said that’s unfair.  And we’re working it out.  We’re working it out.
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THE PRESIDENT:  It’s just not a fair situation when one company is paying 100 percent, in the case of numerous companies, not just Harley.  But where they’re paying a tremendous — and actually, tariffs were raised not too long ago.

THE PRESIDENT:  What’s happening in Venezuela is so, so sad.  People are starving.  Here’s a case where a country was wealthy 15 years ago and very wealthy 20 years ago.  Very, very wealthy.  The wealthiest in all of Latin, South America.  The wealthiest and — by far.  Not even a contest.

And when you look today, they don’t have water, they don’t have basic food, they have no medicine.  It’s incredible what’s happened in Venezuela.

Q    Aleem Maqbool from BBC.  There were some back home that were hoping you would raise concerns about some of these policies that Prime Minister Modi has introduced that discriminates against Muslims, and also about a rise in hate crimes here in India.  But as someone who —

THE PRESIDENT:  Well, we did discuss that.  And we discussed that and specifically Muslims.  And we also discussed Christians.  And we —

Q    But someone who —

THE PRESIDENT:  I had a — I had a very powerful answer from the Prime Minister.  We talked about religious liberty for a long period of time, in front of a lot of people.  And I had a very, very powerful answer.

And, as far as Muslims are concerned, as he told me, I guess they have 200 Mus- — 200 million Muslims in India.  And a fairly short while ago, they had 14 million.  And he said that they’re working very closely with the Muslim community.

Q    But — so you, yourself, have been criticized for policies that have discriminated against Muslims, like the travel ban.  There’s also been a rise in hate crimes over the last couple of years in the U.S.  So are —

THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah.  Yeah.

Q    — you in a position to talk to him about those subjects?

THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah.  I won the travel ban, as you probably know.  A lot of people said I lost it.  No, I won the travel ban, and we use the travel ban where we think there’s — not based on religion, but where we think there’s going to be trouble, where we’re looking at certain countries.  As you know, we added a few countries onto it.

But we won the travel ban, and we won it in the Supreme Court.  So the travel ban is not a thing against Muslims, it’s a thing against areas where we don’t want people coming into our country that are going to cause problems, cause harm, cause death, hurt our people.  And I feel very strongly about that.