Gov. Newsom Heavily Edits CNBC Transcript of Trump for X/Tweet

California Governor Gavin Newsom just posted on X/Twitter a heavily edited clip of former President Donald Trump on CNBC with Joe Kernen, doing a “see, I told ya so” that Trump would cut Social Security and Medicare.

“Here is Donald Trump himself telling the American people he will slash Social Security and Medicare. Remember this in November,” Newsom wrote.

Here is Donald Trump himself telling the American people he will slash Social Security and Medicare.

Remember this in November. pic.twitter.com/U3HkNrOj7O

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) March 11, 2024

Not so fast Gavin. Actually, Trump said “We have to grow our way out of it more than anything else but we also have to cut spending and we can cut spending massive amounts of waste.”

The lengthy CNBC transcript tells us what Mr. Trump really said, rather than Newsom’s 22 second splice job. CNBC host Joe Kernen actually started off the conversation acknowledging that how the U.S. handles Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid is not sustainable.

JOE KERNEN asked, “There are stark policy differences obviously Mr. President, but one thing that I think that at least the perception is that there’s not a whole lot of difference between what you think we should do with entitlements or non-discretionary spending and what President Biden is proposing. It’s almost a third rail of politics. And we’ve got to what a $33, $34 trillion total debt built up and very little we can do in terms of cutting spending. Discretionary is not going to help. Have you changed your, your outlook on how to handle entitlements Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Mr. President? Seems like something has to be done, or else we’re going to be stuck at 120% of debt to GDP forever.”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “So first of all, there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements in terms of cutting and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements, tremendous bad management of entitlements. There’s tremendous amounts of things and numbers of things you can do. So I don’t necessarily agree with the statement. I know that they’re going to end up weakening social security because the country is weak. And let’s take a look at outside of the stock market, are, we’re going through hell. People are going through hell. If they have and I believe the number is 50%. They say 32 and 33%. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of over 50%, that means people are, you know, they have to make more than 50% more over a fairly short period of time to stay up. They’ve gotten routed. The middle class in our country has been routed and the middle class largely built our country and they have been treated very, very badly with policy. When I was president, I was doing a job, we’re going to start to pay off debt. We were drill baby drill. We were producing oil but we were going at a much higher level oil and gas. We were doing, you know, we were third when I started and when they ended we were one by a longshot and we were very close, we’re energy independence, we’re very close to becoming energy dominant Joe, we’re gonna be dominant so dominant, like double what Saudi Arabia and Russia were doing. And we were on that path. We were gonna be paying down debt. We were doing, we were doing a lot of things and then we got hit with Covid. We did a fantastic job with Covid. But nobody, nobody wins with Covid. I guess China found that out because they also really got hit very hard also, but nobody wins with Covid. And so we had to get to we had to do other things. We had to help. You know, if I didn’t do the expenditures that we didn’t do the kinds of things we did for the economy, we would add in 1929 type depression. And I had to say out in front of it, and we did we did a great job on that and we did with all of the things we’re coming up with Regeneron doing so much else, getting all because you know we had empty when I came in, we had empty, I call them empty cupboards. We had empty shelves, we didn’t have equipment, we didn’t have the gowns, we didn’t have the ventilators. We didn’t have anything. This country wasn’t prepared for a thing like that. And I’m not even blaming anybody in that. Because, you know, when when it came, nobody thought the pandemic would ever happen again. It sounds like an ancient’s problem, not a problem that you’d have you know at that time, you know, in modern, very modern age. It was like an ancient thing. We you know, who, who would ever show I’m not blaming anybody, but we had empty cupboards, and I got them stocked and I got them stocked fast. And we did a great job with it. Never got credit. I got credit for the greatest economy. I got credit for foreign policy. I got credit for knocking out ISIS and not going into wars. But we beat ISIS, but I never got the credit for having done a great job with that.”

CNBC host JAY CLAYTON jumped in: “Hey, Mr. President, thank you for that, that was nice. Before you came on, I was saying to Joe, look, your regulatory agenda in a second term would be one of pro-growth not anti-consumer, not anti-competition, but pro-growth. Mostly because, you know, we don’t have a lot of fiscal tools left. Do you want to talk about the pro-growth agenda that you had in the last term?”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: “Yeah. Number one, we don’t have a choice. It has to be that – we don’t have a choice. It’d be nice to say let’s get nice and nice and conservative and let’s not grow, if we don’t grow you know, we have $35 trillion out there. We have to grow our way out of it more than anything else but we also have to cut spending and we can cut spending massive amounts of waste. Look, we give foreign countries trillions and trillions of dollars a year and when you want to cut them you met with levels it’s crazy. When you want to cut some of these foreign countries, many of whom don’t like us, many of whom almost all of them take advantage of – everybody takes advantage of the United States and I had that very much stopped but they very much take advantage of the United States. I mean China until I came along, China was killing us, China was taken out 300 – just in terms of numbers you know, we’re just it’s $507 billion a year. Now under Biden it’s worse. It’s gotten much worse. No country can sustain when, we can’t sustain that. When a country just rips us off like China then what I did is that the tariffs and the tariffs were forcing companies back to the United States. We want those companies that go to China and many other countries, not only China, the European Union rips us almost as bad as China, but they do it with a smile. Nobody thinks that the European Union that way, you know, they say oh, they’re wonderful, but they really take advantage of us and until I came along, they took advantage of us militarily, as you know. NATO was a total disaster for us, we were paying almost – so think of it, European Union we were paying almost all for their military we were paying close to 100% until I came along. I said I’m not doing it. You’re gonna have to pay, we’re not doing it anymore. They said would you protect us if we don’t, I said if you’re delinquent, they said yes. I said if you’re delinquent, you’re not going to be protected. And $400 billion came in like clockwork, Obama, Bush, everybody else. They did absolutely nothing.”

This very positive conversation is a far cry from the mealy-mouth disingenuous comment from California’s Governor – a stark contrast between a responsible adult and a spoiled brat.

Read the entire conversation transcript of the CNBC interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” (M-F, 6AM-9AM ET) today, Monday, March 11, his first interview since President Biden’s State of the Union address.