President Trump meets with Airline/ Aviation Industry leaders 2/9

Remarks by President Trump in Meeting with the Aviation Industry State Dining Room 9:47 A.M. EST THE PRESIDENT: Thank you for being here. Nothing like having meetings in the White House. Good place. Good place for meetings. Good place for a lot of things. People don’t realize I inherited a mess. A big mess. I think they know. I think they understand. Well, thank you all. I know so many of you through reading and through business magazines, and you've done an amazing job. And I want to congratulate you. I know you're under pressure from a lot of foreign elements and foreign carriers. I've been hearing that a little bit. At the same time, we want to make life good for them also. They come with big investments -- in many cases, those investments are made by their governments. But they are still big investments. I'm thrilled to welcome the leaders of the airline industry to the White House. Your industry supports over 10 million well-paying U.S. jobs and creates almost $1 trillion in economic activity, which is really big stuff, really amazing. Last year, our airlines moved approximately 2 million people each day in our country, which is an incredible number of people. And they move them well -- despite the bad equipment that the airports give you in many cases, because they can't get approvals, and we had regulatory morass that's a disaster. And I can tell you that a lot of the new equipment that already is obsolete the day they order it -- and that's according to people that know, including my pilot. I have a pilot who's a real expert, and he said, sir, the equipment they're putting on is just the wrong stuff. And we'll talk about that. Because if we're going to modernize our systems, we should be using the right equipment. And I know Mr. Tilden is nodding. You know what I mean. It's one thing to order equipment, but let's order the right equipment. Probably the wrong equipment costs more. You can probably buy the right equipment for less money. So we want to talk about that. Because my pilot, he's a smart guy, and knows what's going on. He said the government is using the wrong equipment and instituting a massive, multibillion-dollar project, but they're using the wrong type of equipment. So let's find out about that. We want the traveling public to have the greatest customer service, with an absolute minimum of delays and with great convenience all at the lowest possible cost. We want to help you realize these goals, and we will indeed help you realize these goals. Airports are very important when you travel. Very important. As an example, some of you were saying yesterday to me that you go to China, you go to Japan, they have fast trains all over the place. We don’t have one. I don’t want to compete with your business -- (laughter) -- but we don’t have one fast train. And it's the same thing with our airports. Our airports used to be the best. Now they're at the bottom of the rung. We've spent $6 trillion -- think of it -- as of about two months ago, $6 trillion in the Middle East. We've got nothing. We've got nothing. We never even kept just even a little tiny oil well. Not one little one. I said, keep the oil. But we've spent right now $6 trillion in the Middle East. We have nothing. And we have an obsolete plane system, we have obsolete airports, we have obsolete trains. We have bad roads. We're going to change all of that, folks. You're going to be so happy with Trump. I think you already are. So we want to help you realize these goals by rolling back burdensome regulations. And you people are regulated probably as much as almost anybody, although I can think of a couple of industries that are even worse. Lowering the overall tax burden on American businesses big league. That's coming along very well. Way ahead of schedule, I believe. And we're going to be announcing something, I would say, over the next two or three weeks that will be phenomenal in terms of tax, and developing our aviation infrastructure. Again, I want to thank you all for being here. So I want this to be a meeting of substance. I want to be able to do things for you. The auto industry was in. They left, they said it was the best meeting they've ever had. I even took them into the Oval Office. The head of Ford, the head of General Motors, the head of Fiat, others -- they never saw the Oval Office. I said, you mean they never took you in? You see how far away it was from the room? Ten feet. It was 10 feet across the hallway, but they never got taken in. I took them in. The auto companies are going to be making massive investments in Michigan and Ohio, in Pennsylvania, a lot of the places where jobs have left. So we’re really happy about that. They’ve been great. Ford is going to build -- you know they cancelled a big plant in a certain place, I won’t say where -- a $2 billion