DONALD TRUMP: I know Governor Walz is on the phone,
and we spoke.
And I fully agree with the way he handled
it the last couple of days.
I asked him to do that.
He had a lot of men.
We have all the men and women that you need.
But people aren't calling them up.
You have to dominate.
If you don't dominate, you're wasting your time.
They're going to run over you.
You're going to look like a bunch of jerks.
You have to dominate.
So the best example, I alluded to it a couple of seconds ago,
is Minneapolis.
It was incredible what happened in the state of Minnesota.
They were a laughing stock all over the world.
They took over the police department.
The police were running down the street, sirens blazing.
The rest of them were running.
It was on camera.
And then they wiped out.
You probably have to build a new one.
But I've never seen anything like it.
And the whole world was laughing.
Two days, three days later, I spoke to the governor.
The governor is, I think, on the call, and he's an excellent guy.
And all of a sudden--
and I said, you got to use the National Guard in big numbers.
They didn't at first, then they did.
And I'll tell you that--
I don't know what it was.
It was governor was the third night, fourth night.
Those guys walked through that stuff like it was butter.
They walked right through.
And you haven't had any problems since.
They know.
They're not going to go there.
Now they'll go to some other place.
But once you called out and you dominated,
you took the worst place, and you made it-- they didn't even
cover it last night because it was so little action
because you dominated.
You dominated.
Now, what happened to New York, I have to tell you,
I live in Manhattan.
What's going on in Manhattan?
I have no idea.
New York's finest, they've got to be
allowed maybe to do their job.
I don't know what's happening in Manhattan, but it's terrible.
And because it's New York, because it's Manhattan,
it gets a lot of press.
So they really spend a lot of time on it.
But New York is going to have to toughen up.
And we'll send you National Guard if you want.
You have the largest police force in the country,
40,000 people, I understand.
But what's going on in New York is terrible.
It's terrible, of all the places.
What went on last night in Los Angeles
with the stores and the storefronts is terrible.
If you're weak and don't dominate your streets,
they're going to stay with you until you finally do it.
And you don't want that.
Philadelphia, you better toughen up
because what's going on in Philadelphia, like New York,
is terrible.
It's terrible.
You better toughen-- they'll never leave.
I know you want to say, let's not call up the guard
or let's call up 200 people.
You've got a big National Guard out there that's ready to come
in and fight like hell.
I tell you, the best--
what they did in Minneapolis was incredible.
They went in and dominated.
And it happened immediately.
All of a sudden, my wife said to me, wow,
look at all those people.
They got out.
They were wearing dark black uniforms.
They got out, and they got out.
And they were there in the thousands.
And they just walked right down the street knocking them
out with tear gas, tear gas.
Those guys, they were running.
And the next night it was much less.
And then the next night, it's like, you know what happened?
They went to other cities.
They're all looking for weak spots.
Now, what they're going to do is they're
going to search out for perhaps smaller cities, smaller places.
You got to arrest these people.
Got to arrest these people.
And you got to charge them.
And you can't do the deal where they get one week in jail.
These are terrorists.
They're looking to do bad things to our country.
They're Antifa, and they're radical left.
And the reason you have other radicals
is because they've been watching this for years, many years.
And they don't like it.
And go back and study Occupy Wall
Street because you'll see the way that ended
was the thing of beauty.
Everybody said, I can't believe how easy it was.
It was an hour of bedlam.
And when it was all over, it was a beautiful thing.
MARK ESPER: Thank you, Mr. President.
If I build on your comments and Attorney General's
comments to give some quick stats.
So, of course, the Department of Defense
remains in full support of the state, the states,
the governors, the Department of Justice,
federal law enforcement.
Right now, we have 17,000 folks deployed in the National
Guard in 29 states.
But I will tell you, the bulk of the states
have fewer than 200 people to--
fewer than 200 people deployed in the bulk of the states
that called up their Guard.
So as the president and the AG have rightly pointed out,
Minneapolis, Minnesota has done a fantastic job.
By Saturday morning, after the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff and I spoke to the governor,
they increased their presence tenfold.
And I think the evidence was clear come Saturday night
and Sunday night.
And so, at my urging, I agree.
We need to dominate the battle states.
You have deep resources in the Guard.
I stand ready.
The chairman stands ready.
The head of the National Guard stands ready to fully support
you in terms of helping mobilize the Guard
in doing what they need to do.
Again, most of the Guard has not been called up.
There's only a few states, in fact,
I count two states, where more than 1,000
troops have been called up.
I think the sooner that you mass and dominate the battle space,
the quicker this dissipates.
And we can get back to the right normal.
DONALD TRUMP: I don't know what it is politically where you
don't want to call up people.
They're ready, willing, and able.
They want to fight for the country.
I don't know what it is.
Someday you'll have to explain it to me.
But it takes so long to call them up.
We're waiting for you.
We're shocked at certain areas, LA.
We're shocked that you're not using the greatest
resource you can use.
And they're trained for this stuff, and they're incredible.
Why you're not calling them up, I don't know.
But you're making a mistake because you're
making yourself look like--
look like fools.
And some have done a great job.
And a lot of you it's not good.
It's very bad for our country.
When other countries watch this, they're watching us,
and they say, boy, they're really a pushover.
And we can't be a pushover.
And you have all the resources.
It's not like you don't have the resources.
Is Tim there? because I'd like to maybe
have him explain the difference between the beginning
and the end.
And they've come back.
Tim, are you there?
TIM WALZ: I am.
Thank you, Mr. President.
I want to give a thank you to Secretary
Esper and General Milley for your strategic guidance.
Very helpful.
Yeah, our city is grieving and in pain.
And I would just say, as far as the potential of--
the peaceful protesters who are expressing
an outrage that is real.
They witnessed eight minutes of a man dying in front of them.
That part of it then, of course, sparked the civil unrest
where there were actors.
And I would like to believe they were from all out of state
here in Minnesota. But they're not.
They're homegrown.
This was an issue that this happened with the Minneapolis
Police Department.
But once that started to spin, the idea
that when you saw this happen in the first few days,
I don't believe anybody would have had
a big enough force to do this.
When we mobilized them into Thursday and Friday,
I had mobilized, as the president was saying,
or Secretary Esper was saying, about 750
to 1,000 is what we could get of National Guard on to the scene.
Was one of our biggest mobilizations in state history
for civil rights or civil disobedience.
And we were still overwhelmed.
At that point in time, I did something unprecedented.
I mobilized the entire Minnesota National Guard.
And that's what the President was alluding to with the size
of the force was capable.
But I think, again, Mr. President, you
asked on explaining this, I will just say,
it's going to be very difficult. There are bad actors in this.
But there is such a legitimate anger.
And here, our problem is going to be is we
cannot maintain this posture.
We do not have the resources to maintain the posture.
And we're going to have to transition back.
Our real dilemma here is the transition
back is to the catalyst that sparked this across the country.
And that was what happened with the Minneapolis
Police Department.
So what we did is a lot of this what
you saw yesterday was engaging civic leaders
and the peaceful protests.
And I would just close with I think the guidance is that you
got to get a handle on it with that force,
that that is absolutely correct.
And then the transition in the next phase
is trying to get those spaces for the peaceful protest.
And I'm happy to do things that we have to look
at of how do we get reforms.
And just as a feel-good story that was a tragedy that I'm
still sick over that we avoided was
the trucks beating down the highway towards thousands
of protesters.
At that point in time, you do not
know that was a fuel truck of what
it was going to be intentional.
As it turned out, it was a confused
and scared driver, who didn't want to leave the interstate.
Went into that.
As you saw, he was pulled out of the vehicle.
Some of you recall the horrific events during Rodney King,
but the truck driver last night when-- he's under arrest.
But he was interviewed.
He said that that crowd, the vast majority of them,
protected him and pulled him in, which
de-escalated the situation.
And, as the president said, last night was calm and quiet.
So thank you for that.
DONALD TRUMP: But Tim, it showed the incredible difference
between your great state yesterday
and the day before compared to the first few days,
which was just [INAUDIBLE].
TIM WALZ: Absolutely, absolutely.
DONALD TRUMP: [INAUDIBLE] a police force and taken over.
And I don't blame you.
I blame the mayor.
I've never seen anything like it where the police were told
to abandon the police house.
And it was ransacked and really destroyed.
Millions and millions of dollars are going
to have to go back to fix it.
I don't know.
You'll have--
TIM WALZ: Mr. President, if--
if I'm still on, the one thing I'd say,
I spent 24 years in the Guard.
The one thing I would say is that you could
do is a lot of people don't understand
who the National Guard is.
And you need to get out there from a PR perspective
and make sure that it's not seen as an occupying force.
But it's their neighbors; school teachers, business
owners, those types of things.
That's a really effective message.
DONALD TRUMP: OK, good.
I think that's a good idea.
I must tell you, it got so bad a few nights
ago that the people wouldn't have minded an occupying force.
I wish we had an occupying force in there.
But, for some reason, I don't know
what it is, governors don't like calling up a lot of the Guard.
We have thousands and thousands of people
waiting to be called up.
Is that a correct statement, general?
MAN: [INAUDIBLE]
DONALD TRUMP: 350,000.
We have 350,000 people.
And they call up 200.
Tim did that the first night, which wasn't successful.
What happened is after that he said, let's go.
And I'll tell you, it was like magic.
You saw thousands of people all of a sudden, one line,
just walking through this.
I say it.
It was like-- it was like a beautiful thing to see.
But we have 350,000 plus in the National Guard,
and nobody wants to use them.
And their cities are ransacked, and they're
a disgrace all over the world.
All over the world they're showing us.
What happened in Los Angeles with the store fronts,
Philadelphia, and New York was a disaster.
I don't understand what happened to New York's finest.
I don't understand it.
But there's nothing wrong with New York
calling up the National Guard.
There's nothing wrong with it.
All right, thank you very much, Tim.