OXON HILL, Md. – President Donald Trump remarked on Saturday that his administration’s significant initiative to dismiss thousands of federal employees and reduce the government’s size is unprecedented. The president praised himself for his impact in Washington, claiming to have full control and making bureaucrats leave their positions.
Speaking to an enthusiastic crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference near Washington, Trump pledged to establish a new and enduring political majority that will shape American politics for years to come.
The president maintains that voters have given him a mandate to transform the government, secure the U.S.-Mexico border, and uphold the tax reductions that defined his initial term in office.
Trump clicked easily back into campaign mode during his hour-plus speech, predicting that the GOP will continue to win and defy history, which has shown that a president’s party typically struggles during midterm elections. He insisted of Republicans, “I don’t think we’ve been at this level, maybe ever.”
“Nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said, likening his new administration’s opening month to being on a roll through the first four holes of a round of golf — which he said gives him confidence for the fifth hole.
Trump has empowered Elon Musk to help carry out the firings, and the billionaire suggested Saturday that more might be coming.
“Consistent with President @realDonaldTrump’s instructions, all federal employees will shortly receive an email requesting to understand what they got done last week,” Musk posted on X, which he owns. “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”
A short time later, an “HR” email was sent to federal workers across numerous agencies titled “What did you do last week” and asking that recipients “reply with approx. 5 bullets of what you accomplished last week and cc your manager.” It cautioned against sending classified information, and gave a deadline of Monday at 11:59 p.m. ET.
Trump also said during the speech that he’d carry out harsher immigration policies. But those efforts have so far largely been overshadowed by his administration’s mass federal firings. He announced that one federal entity with a worforce that had been significantly reduced, the U.S. Agency for International Development, would have its Washington office taken over by Customs and Border Protection officials.
“The agency’s name has been removed from its former building,” he said.
The president also repeated his previous promises to scrutinize the country’s gold depository at Fort Knox.
“Would anybody like to join us,” he said to cheers from the crowd at the suggestion that administration forces might converge on the complex. “We want to see if the gold is still there.”
But Trump also devoted large chunks of his address reliving last year’s presidential race, jeering at former President Joe Biden and mispronouncing the first name of former Vice President Kamala Harris — his Election Day opponent — gleefully proclaiming, “I haven’t said that name in a while.”
He went on to use an expletive to describe Biden’s handling of border security, despite noting that evangelical conservatives have urged him not to use foul language.
Trump had kinder words for Chinese President Xi Jinping, saying “I happen to like” him, while noting, “we’ve been treated very unfairly by China and many other countries.”
On the sidelines of the conference, Trump met with conservative Polish President Andrzej Duda amid rising tensions in Europe over Russia’s war in Ukraine. After he took the stage, Trump saluted Duda and Argentine President Javier Milei, who himself separately addressed the conference.
Trump called Duda “a fantastic man and a great friend of mine” and said “you must be doing something right, hanging out with Trump.” He noted that Milei was “a MAGA guy, too, Make Argentina Great Again.”
Poland is a longtime ally of Ukraine. Trump upended recent U.S. policy by dispatching top foreign policy advisers to Saudi Arabia for direct talks with Russian officials that were aimed at ending fighting in Ukraine.
Those meetings did not include Ukrainian or European officials, which has alarmed U.S. allies. Trump is meeting on Monday at the White House with French President Emmanuel Macron and Thursday with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Trump also has begun a public back and forth with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, whom the U.S. president called a “dictator” while falsely suggesting that Ukraine started the war — though on Friday he acknowledged that Russia attacked its neighbor.
Trump told the CPAC crowd, “I’m dealing with President Zelenskyy. I’m dealing with President Putin” and added of fighting in Ukraine, “It affects Europe. It doesn’t really affect us.”
Zelenskyy has said Trump is living in a Russian-made “disinformation space.”
For much of the time since Russia invaded in February 2022, the United States, under Biden, pledged that Ukraine would play in any major effort to end the fighting, vowing “nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine.” Trump’s administration has dispensed with that notion, as the Republican president has accelerated his push to find an endgame to the war.
“I think we’re pretty close to a deal, and we better be close to a deal,” Trump said Saturday.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later told reporters that Trump and his team were focused on negotiations to end the war in Ukraine and “the President is very confident we can get it done this week,” though such a tight timeline seems difficult.
Later, the president and first lady Melania Trump were hosting dinner at the White House for governors from both parties who were in Washington for a meeting of the National Governors Association.
Leavitt is one of three administration officials who face a lawsuit from The Associated Press on First- and Fifth-Amendment grounds.
The AP says the three are punishing the news agency for editorial decisions they oppose. The White House says the AP is not following an executive order to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America.
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Weissert reported from Washington.
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