Trump Says High-Speed Rail Isn’t Needed Because ‘You Take an Airplane – It Costs You $2’

Reporter: “On Elon Musk, how often are you talking to him? And have there been ideas that he has brought to you that you said, oh, no, wait a minute, this is going a little too far?”

Trump: “Well, many ideas. But look, he’s done a great job. Look at all the fraud that he’s found in this USAID, it’s a disaster what the people, radical left lunatics. They have things that nobody would have even believed, the whole thing with $100 million spent on you-know-what, with money going to all sorts of groups that shouldn’t deserve to get any money, with the money — I’d like to see what the kickbacks are. How much money has been kicked back? Who would spend that kind of money to some of the things that you read about and I read about and I see every night on the news and every morning when I read the papers, who would spend money for that? I would say this, the people that got all that money, are they kicking it back to the people that gave it from government? No, that’s — to me, very, very corrupt. The real question is how much of a kickback has there been? And one of the things I want to investigate rapidly, because I’ve never seen anything to this extent, the train that’s being built between Los Angeles and San Francisco is the worst managed project I think I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some of the worst. Billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars over budget. In fact, I read where you could take every single person that was going to go on the train and get the finest limousine service in the world and take them back and forth with limousines and you’d have hundreds of billions of dollars left over. It is the worst thing, and we’re going to start an investigation of that because it’s not possible. I built for a living and I built on time, on budget. It’s impossible that something could cost that much. And now it’s not even going to San Francisco and it’s not going to Los Angeles. It’s — they made it much shorter. So now it’s at little places way away from San Francisco and way away from Los Angeles. No, we’re going to start a big investigation on that because it’s — I’ve never seen anything like it. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. The worst overruns that there have ever been in the history of our country and it wasn’t even necessary. I would have said, you don’t buy it. You take an airplane, it costs you $2. It costs you nothing. You take an airplane. But this got started. And if you have to, you drive, you can drive.”