President Donald Trump spoke about race relations at an economic roundtable in Dallas on Thursday.

"Americans are good and virtuous people," Trump said. "We have to work together to confront bigotry and prejudice wherever they appear, but we will make no progress and heal no wounds by falsely labeling tens of millions of decent Americans as racist or bigots. We have to get everybody together. We have to be in the same--same path I think Pastor. If we don't do that we have--we have problems, and we will do that. We will do it, I think we're going to do very easily. It will go quickly and it will go--it will go very easily."

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: In recent days there had been vigorous discussion about how to ensure fairness, equality, and justice for all of our people. Unfortunately, there are some trying to stoke division and to push an extreme agenda which we won't go for that will produce only more poverty more crime, more suffering. This includes radical efforts to defund, dismantle and disband the police. They want to get of the police forces, they actually want to get rid of it, and that is what they would do, and that is the way they would go, and you know that because at the top position there's not going to be much leadership there's not much leadership left.

Instead we have to go the opposite way we must invest more energy and resources in police training and recruiting, and community engagement. We have to respect our police, we have to take care of our police they are protecting us, and if they are allowed to do their job they will do a great job. And you always have a bad apple no matter where you go you have bad apples, and they are not too many of them I can tell you there are not too many of them in the police department; we all know a lot of members of the police.

I was listening today, and a friend of mine was on very important person said some of the best people he's ever met are policeman, law enforcement people and they are taking care of people that in many cases they never even met before and at great danger, great risk. They get shot for no reason whatsoever other than they are wearing blue. They get knifed; you saw that the other night. It was a horrible thing.

But there is no opportunity without safety. In Chicago 40 people were shot and 18 people were killed in one day Sunday, May 31. Think of that, 48 people shot, 18 people killed. You don't hear about it too much. Every child should be able to grow up in a safe community free from violence and fear. They have taken a lot of the police protection away in Chicago, and they have great, great police in Chicago I know Chicago very well that they are not allowed to do what they can do better than anybody. They could the job very easily.

Americans are good and virtuous people. We have to work together to confront bigotry and prejudice wherever they appear, but we will make no progress and heal no wounds by falsely labeling tens of millions of decent Americans as racist or bigots. We have to get everybody together. We have to be in the same--same path I think Pastor. If we don't do that we have--we have problems, and we will do that. We will do it, I think we're going to do very easily. It will go quickly and it will go--it will go very easily.

We have so many different elements of strength in this country. We have such potential in this country. We have the greatest potential, we have the greatest country in the world, but we get off subject, we start thinking about things that don't matter or don't matter much and the important things we don't even discuss, but we are here to discuss some very important things today.

Politicians make false charges, and they are trying to distract from their own failed records. They have some very bad records, and these are usually the ones that cause the problems or can't solve the problems. These are the same politicians who shipped our jobs away, took tremendous advantage of all Americans but African-American middle-class. So much of that wealth and that money and those jobs went to China and other countries, and they get trapped, they get trapped, they get trapped in a government morass, they get trapped in bad government schools.

So I'm going to be announcing four steps to build safety and opportunity and dignity. First, we are aggressively pursuing economic development in minority communities. We are doing it very powerfully. We have done it with opportunity zones, but we are going to go above that. At the heart of this effort is increasing access to capital for small businesses and that is with minority owners in black communities.