State Dining Room

7:34 P.M. EST

THE PRESIDENT: Please. Thank you. Well, I want to start by congratulating our great First Lady on such a beautiful room. I’ve never seen it look so beautiful. Worked very hard. (Applause.)

I also want to say that it’s an honor to have so many of our tremendously talented governors with us. This is a yearly tradition, and our crowd gets a little bit larger every year.

The governors — we’re going to have a lot of meetings tomorrow. We’re going to have some very important meetings. We’ll be talking about Parkland and the horrible event that took place last week.

I want to thank Governor Rick Scott of Florida. Rick, please stand up. You’re doing a great job. Really great job. (Applause.)

And that will be one of the subjects. And I think we’ll make that first on our list, because we have to end our country of what’s happening with respect to that subject. So we’ll be talking about that and many other things.

The economy is doing phenomenally well. I think you’ll see numbers that get better and better. The cutting of regulation has been an incredible event. People are being able now to build. They’re building and they’re farming and doing lots of things that they were having a very hard time doing.

Governor, I see you shaking your head, “Yes, yes. It’s true.” We’re getting so many compliments. And, you know, really, the regulations have kicked in because I began that right at the beginning of 13 months. I mean, I started right from day one.

The massive tax cuts that we’ve just gotten are now starting to kick in. So congratulations, everybody. (Applause.)

And I think that you’re going to see some numbers coming up over the next year, the likes of which we haven’t seen in our country for many, many years. Your GDP numbers, as you know, the first quarter — or the last quarter for the previous administration — was not good. And if you look at them now, we’re hitting 3’s [percent] routinely, and we had a 3.2. And now, I think, we’re going to exceed that by quite a bit. We’ll find out very shortly. But I can tell you, definitely over the course of the next couple of years we’re going to really be exceeding it.

So I just want to congratulate you. You’re very, very special people. The job you do is really incredible, and it’s not easy. But we’re very proud of you, and we’re very proud to have you here.

And with that, I’d like to ask Brian of Nevada — the Governor who has done an excellent job. But you’re not going to be there that much longer. I’m not so happy about that. (Laughter.) He said he’s had enough for a while. I don’t know what his next thing will be, but whatever it is, we’re with you. You know that.

So come on up and say a couple of words, Brian. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. (Applause.)

END

7:37 P.M. EST