Donald Trump tells The Brody File that the Tea Party loves him because he tells the truth.
“I love the Tea Party, and the Tea Party I think loves me, because I tell it like it is,” he said.
The one-on-one interview was conducted with Donald Trump in the “boardroom” at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Sarasota, Fla., Sunday evening. Trump was in town to pick up the GOP "Statesman of the Year" Award from the Sarasota Republican Party.
Watch the interview below along with a full transcription.
More of the interview can be seen on The Brody File’s national TV show this Friday at 9:30 a.m. ET on the ABC Family Channel.
David Brody: Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about the Republican Party. What is the future here exactly of the Republican Party? You’ve got the Tea Party and the GOP and the divisiveness supposedly that’s out there. What do you think of the future as it relates to the Tea Party and the Republican Party?
Donald Trump: Well, as you know, I love the Tea Party, and the Tea Party I think loves me, because I tell it like it is. I talk about our country being in decline. They don’t want to hear that. But unless you know about it, you’re not going to be able to do anything about it.
I talk about China ripping us, I talk about all of the things that’s happening with energy, we could be self sufficient in energy, we don’t need OPEC, we don’t need anything, and yet we’re not allowed to take the coal out of the ground, we’re not allowed to go after natural gases, we’re not allowed to do what we can do.
We would be in a period of wealth like this country has never seen if we were allowed to just sort of let go. Let go of regulation. I look at the regulations in this country, as a builder. You build a building, environmental impact statement, sometimes it takes 10 years before you can build. And the,n by the way, at the end of the 10 years, they say no because there’s a piece of grass that is going to be disturbed, and I’m being totally serious about that. A piece of grass is going to be disturbed, and there’s not much of it, so you have keep thousands of people out of jobs, you have to stop building housing, etc. etc..
And other countries see this and they watch this and they laugh. China, as an example, it’s a good one. They talk, they spew all kinds of crap into the air, and we’re not allowed to. We have to clean our air, clean everything, everything. But China, they take our coal, which we’re no longer allowed to use effectively, and they fuel their plants with our coal. That gives them a tremendous advantage. A tremendous advantage, then we wonder why are they making products for less money?
So they take our coal, they use our coal, they don’t clean it, they do whatever they want to do, and our countries have a hard time competing with that, they close up our mills, they close up so many different businesses in this country.
Then you have ObamaCare. So, I talk about these things. ObamaCare is a disaster for our country. And I think the Tea Party, it really resonates, and I think a lot of good American people that love this country, it also resonates with them. Even beyond the Tea Party.