Donald Trump lashed out at Democrats moments before signing the bill to end the 43-day U.S. government shutdown, calling the entire episode an “attempt to extort our country.” The President accused Democrats of demanding $1.5 trillion for illegal immigrants and causing nationwide chaos “purely for political reasons.” He thanked Republican leaders and key unions for standing firm, while warning Americans not to forget the damage done when the next elections come. #trump #US #apt
00:00The United States, in an attempt to extort American taxpayers for hundreds of billions of dollars for illegal aliens and people that came into our country illegally, from gangs, from prisons, from mental institutions, they wanted to pay them $1.5 trillion, which would have really hurt our health care businesses and our recipients at levels never seen before.
00:25Today, we're sending a clear message that we will never give in to extortion, because that's what it was.
00:32They tried to extort, the Democrats tried to extort our country.
00:36In just a moment, I'll sign a bill exactly like we asked Democrats to send us all along, many days ago.
00:44This cost the country $1.5 trillion, this little excursion that they took us on.
00:49But Republicans never wanted a shutdown and voted 15 times for a clean continuation of funding.
00:57There's never been a time when one or the other party ever didn't sign a continuation.
01:05It's just a continuation, not a big deal.
01:07It's a continuation, and we'll talk later.
01:09Yet the extremists in the other party insisted on creating the longest government shutdown in American history, and they did it purely for political reasons.
01:19I want to thank Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, as well as House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Tom Emmer, and numerous other great Republican leaders and congressmen and senators who were here.
01:35And frankly, spent a long time in Washington getting this thing to go away.
01:39I also want to thank the broad coalition of Americans that stood with us in this fight to reopen government, including the Teamsters, the American Federation of Government Employees, the Fraternal Order of Police, AMVETS, the National Small Business Association, the American Farm Bureau, the American Trucking Association.
02:00These are all incredible patriots, Airlines for America, the Allied Pilots Association, the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, and many, many others, unions and non-unions.
02:13Over the past seven weeks, the Democrats shut down has inflicted massive harm.
02:18They caused 20,000 flights to be canceled or delayed.
02:22They departed so many times, so late.
02:26People were hurt so badly.
02:28Nobody's ever seen anything like this one.
02:30This was a no-brainer.
02:32This was an easy extension.
02:35But they didn't want to do it the easy way.
02:36They had to do it the hard way.
02:37And they look very bad, the Democrats do.
02:40They deprived more than one million government workers from their paychecks and cut off food stamp benefits for millions and millions more Americans in need.
02:48They caused tens of thousands of federal contractors and small businesses to go unpaid.
02:55And the total effect of the damage their antics cause will take weeks and probably months to really calculate accurately, including the serious harm that they did to our economy and to people and to families.
03:07So I just want to tell the American people you should not forget this.
03:13When we come up to midterms and other things, don't forget what they've done to our country.
03:17I also want to call for a termination to the filibuster so that this can never happen again.
03:24If we had the filibuster terminated, this would never happen again.
03:27And don't forget, we have another date coming up in the not-too-distant future.
03:31We can never let this happen again.
03:34And we should be able to pass great, really great legislation.
03:37So I say terminate the filibuster because, by the way, the Democrats will do it immediately if they ever assumed office, which hopefully they won't.
03:47Today we had the highest stock market price ever in all of the different markets.
03:53We set a record. It's the 48th time in the nine months that I've been in office that we had this record set.
04:01So think of that, 48 times we had a record set, but today is the highest of them all.
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