His scattershot speech ranged from his own successes on television and investment recently to politics and the economic outlook of the country. “People want to give me all sorts of money for Trump Tower and I don’t want it,” he wondered. “But no one will give you money for development.” He remarked that it seemed odd that there were low interest rates and, yet, no money to be lent, recalling a time when interest rates were high because of lack of capital. He pointed to the issue of trust again among lenders, not willing to take more risk on new buildings.

Trump knocked taxes as “too high” and declared, “I’m not leaving, but we will lose entrepreneurs to other countries. They have no loyalties.” His solution was to tax Chinese imports, lamenting “Do we make anything anymore? Everything is made in China.” It was a problem that would persist until the US figured out how to deal with the value of the yuan to dollar which was killing American competition with the one-billion-plus nation.

The issue with China, for Trump, boiled down to poor negotiations. He wanted someone like himself or Carl Icahn to take a crack at China’s trade agreements. His interpretation was simply that China sent “trained killers” to the trade table while the US sent diplomats.

Trump felt the US should get equally tough on OPEC regarding oil, who were essentially fixing the price of oil and killing the US and other oil intake countries. Trump also took the opportunity to weigh in on the two foreign wars, which he felt were in the wrong countries. Iraq particularly irked him, as he noted that in the first Iraq war, the US paid billions of dollars to free Kuwait and then handed it back to them for nothing. And Kuwait still does not invest in the US or help regarding oil prices. Trump pointed out that, “You pay the mafia for protection” or even private security companies, so it seemed like those organizations were getting better deals than the US.

The political scorecard, in very Trump fashion, was not party-biased, but person specific. He like Pataki, but the current governor was “incompetent,” Koch was good for four years, but “overrated” as a mayor, Bloomberg was great, Christie was doing a good job in New Jersey, but Corzine “didn’t have a clue.” His view of the former president Bush was less than flowery. “You looked in his eyes and you thought, ‘does he know what’s going on’?”

As importantly, he felt the “Obama administration is failing,” but that with smart leadership it wasn’t too late for them to turn it around. As with trade, he felt Obama needed to focus intensely on infrastructure, noting that as a construction advocate, he must look at things differently than the president.

Trump trashed the conditions of the Lincoln Tunnel, the West Side Highway, the Long Island Expressway, to name a few. Going back to the wars, he complained about the US’s inability to act smartly for its own best interests at home, saying that the US will spend billions of dollars and soliders’ lives to “take a hill” in Afghanistan, “build a school” and a “shopping center,” and then in a month it’s blown up and the US does it all over again, “but we can’t fix the West Side Highway?”

Rounding out his remarks, he did not feel it was the end of days for the US, despite some of his gripes. Large buildings in New York City were a little too over-priced in his opinion, and the value in places like Vegas or Miami was dubious, as he wasn’t completely sure some of those places would ever fully recover. Without leadership and focus, Trump was pessimistic, however he said, with the US you always “have a chance to see something great.”