CLAY: Mr. President, you got criticized for many things, but one of the things you got most vociferously criticized for was saying that you thought covid had come from a Chinese lab.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah.

CLAY: Now, all of a sudden, everybody is circling back and saying, “Oh, maybe this did happen,” but all of these different tech platforms disallowed the conversation and debate to actually take place.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Right.

CLAY: Are you still as confident now as you were last year when you made those allegations that covid came from a Chinese lab? And what should the consequences be for China for the lies that they spread about where covid came from and allowing this to spread around the world as opposed to being transparent with everybody from the get-go?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Probably more confident. And, you know, I felt very confident last time, but I would say even more now in retrospect. Because a lot of the phony things that they were saying about, you know, it came from here, it came from a thousand miles away, from a bat colony a thousand miles away. Much of that has really been disproven. And I would say more confident. And it was amazing ’cause that was another one.

You know, I talk about when I said, “They’re spying on my campaign,” the place went nuts. When I said that it came from the lab in Wuhan, people went crazy. Now, it could be… It’s probably that I said it. In other words, if somebody else… I said hydroxychloroquine and people went crazy. If I would have said, “Do not under any circumstances take hydroxychloroquine,” probably they would have said, “Oh, that’s terrible. Let’s take it,” right?

CLAY: (laughing)

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You know, it’s one of those things. So they like to go had to explain, ’cause they think it’s good politically. I actually don’t. But now almost all of those things, maybe all of them I’ve been proven correct on. I think they have now a list of 18 different items. It was 10 two or three weeks ago, but they found other ones.

You know, they just go against — and no matter what you do, they want to go against. These people, I don’t believe they love our country. I’ll be honest with you. But with the lab and Wuhan — and, frankly, even if you didn’t or weren’t sure, why would they be so vociferous? You remember, they went crazy when I said that, and they tried to…

Now, they’re all saying that I was right. But they’ve said that about a lot of things. Almost all of the things that I said, I was right. When I said that terrorists caused such-and-such an attack — and I said it early, like about two seconds after the attack, right? They’d said, “This is terrible.” Well, I’m 18-0 on those attacks, you know.

It’s like, they would take a little bit longer. In many cases, they wouldn’t want to say it. And in many cases, they didn’t say it. But they do have a tendency. And I guess they think it’s good politics. You know, I don’t see why it’s good politics. As far as China is concerned, they should pay us reparations. They should pay us for the damage that they’ve caused. And, frankly, the damage they’ve caused to the world.

Now, they don’t have enough money to do that. They don’t have nearly enough money to pay for the damages. But they should pay us $10 trillion. They should pay the world a lot. But, you know, we took a tremendous hit. And because of what we did and because I came up with the vaccine in nine months instead of…

I did it in less than nine months. It was supposed to be… Buck, you knew this. It was supposed to be five years, three years, but it will never happen. By that time every would have been dead. This would have been… If I didn’t do that, this would have been another Spanish flu of 1917 where perhaps a hundred million people died.