Chris Christie Town Hall 8/09/23

Thank you. Did you need me?

(02:34)
Mic check, one, two, three. Okay.

Sounds good.

Good.

Good evening. Quick safety notification here. Please note the locations of all the exits that can be used to exit Wheeler Hall in the event of an emergency. Senator Chris Christie.

Thank you for coming.

Good. How are you?

Good seeing you.

Welcome to New Hampshire. [inaudible 00:23:04].

Happy to be back. Good evening. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Hey there. Guys, how are you?

Hi there.

All right. So I’m already apologizing because I’ll have my back to you for a good part of the time. So we’ll start off shaking all your hands and forgive me. Well, good evening, everybody. Thank you so much for coming up. I’m glad to be here, glad to be back, first, in the United States. Some of you may have seen that, a few days ago, I was in Ukraine. And I’m going to talk a bit about that tonight off the top and then we’re going to get, for the most part, to [inaudible 00:23:43] your questions. But let me tell you first what it’s like to get to Ukraine.

(23:49)
So you start off, at least I did, at JFK Airport in New York, and took an 8.5-hour flight to Warsaw, Poland. Then when you get to the airport in Warsaw, Poland, you get in the car and it drives you four hours. Let’s maybe turn this down a little bit so I don’t hear so much feedback because we’ll drive everybody nuts with that. That’s better. Thank you. To Ciszewo, Poland. Why? Because it is the easternmost train station in Poland, right near the Ukraine border. And then you get on a train and you go 11 hours on the train to get to Kyiv, to the capital of Ukraine. So it took me about 28 hours from JFK to get to Kyiv, we were on the ground in Kyiv for 11 hours, and then it took us 32 hours to get back because we had a couple of delays on the way back.

(24:46)
So it was about 60 hours, traveling for 11 hours on the ground, but let me tell you, as somebody who intends to be the next President of the United States, I’m really glad I went, and I’ll tell you a few reasons why. First, when I got to Kyiv, the first place they took me was to a city named Moshchun, which is about 40 miles or so outside the capital. And when you get there, the first thing you notice is that there are trees everywhere. It would look like a wooded suburb here in New Hampshire.

(25:26)
And that’s the first thing that strikes you, is it’s not vast farmland where nobody lives and it’s not some big city where there’s buildings on top of each other, it looks like just about any American suburb, some apartments, some homes, some woods, but the first thing I noticed about the woods were all of the trees in the woods were cut in half and none of the leaves were left on them. And when I started to talk to the deputy mayor about why that was, that was the destruction from Russian helicopters, Russian artillery, and Russian missiles that, in the first few weeks of the war, were being shot into this town.

(26:15)
What he said happened was extraordinary. The Ukrainian army had some soldiers up there, but they didn’t expect the Russians to come to this city. And so it was going to take some time to move some of the Ukrainian Army up there to fight them. What happened while they were waiting? Well, every apartment in the city was destroyed by Russian artillery and missiles. 2,800 apartments were destroyed, hundreds of civilians killed, and the civilians that remained started to dig trenches so they could get below ground level, miss the shrapnel that was flying from these missiles and artillery so it wouldn’t kill them, and they got guns and they started to fight back.

(27:09)
And they built these trenches between their city and their capital because they knew that’s where the Russians wanted to go, regular citizens like you and I, not trained soldiers, but regular men and women who lived in this suburb of Kyiv, who stood their ground until their army came. And when their army came, the Ukrainian Army drove the Russians out of this city.

(27:43)
I got to go to the memorial, to the civilians who were killed in that fight. And it’s incredibly moving because there were pictures of many of them that their families had come and brought and put on this memorial, and they built it right by one of those trenches. And you could see it was a manmade, hand-dug trench that only went about three feet down, and they had some makeshift stairs cut out of the dirt for people to climb down into them and to get under there and wait for the Russians to come and for them to try to defend their town. From there, I went to a place that was even worse, a city called Bucha. And I was met there by the Mayor of Bucha at St. Michael’s Cathedral, which is a beautiful cathedral built up on a bit of a hill, but you could see from the beginning that the cathedral had been damaged significantly by gunfire and missiles. And the mayor greeted me and walked me … I thought he was going to take me to the cathedral, but he didn’t first. He took me behind the cathedral. And I asked him, we had a translator, and I asked him, “Why aren’t we going into the cathedral?” He said, “That’s for later. First, you need to see this.”

(29:13)
And behind the cathedral, there is a shallow grave where 160 civilians who lived right around the cathedral were thrown into a shallow grave by the Russian soldiers. And what did they do? Russian soldiers went from, on one particular street, from home to home, they went in, they dragged the men out. With some of the men, they gouged their eyes while they were still alive, gouged their eyes out. With some of the men, they cut their ears off while they were still alive, and then they tied their hands behind their back and they shot them in the back of the head and killed them.

(30:02)
And when they were done with that, they then went inside the homes and raped the women who were there. If there were children in the home, they took them. They took them and they put them in vehicles, go back to Russia, rip these children out of the arms of their mothers and their sisters to bring them back to Russia to reprogram them to hate Ukraine and to pledge allegiance to mother Russia.

(30:46)
If you think Bucha was just an example, I went later to the Ukrainian Center for Children’s Civil Rights, which has been built by the order of President Zelenskyy to help the families whose children have been taken to be counseled. And if they get some of those children back, which they’ve gotten a few hundred, those children can then be counseled at this place. I met some of the mothers there whose children were gone. There are over 19,000 children, 19,000 verified, and the woman at the Civil Rights Center told me there’s more, but they don’t count them until they’re absolutely verified by the families. Over 19,000 children taken from their families and sent back to Russia. These mothers who I met don’t know if their children are alive or dead, don’t know if they’re being cared for or abused, don’t know if they’ll ever see them again. All of them have been taken to Russia.

(31:58)
I then went to the Ukrainian War Museum, and they have built facsimiles of the basements where Ukrainian families hid for two to four weeks during the initial siege. In these basements, they locked themselves in, there were no lights and no windows, and each basement held, because they would take neighbors if the neighbors didn’t have a basement, usually held anywhere between 40 to 60 people in a space that was about as large as from maybe this part of here to that curtain. There’s no lights, so what they did was take the car batteries from their cars and attach a string of LED lights to the car battery and a string of LED lights this

… this long would be the only light they would have for weeks as they heard the Russian bombs and artillery exploding above them in the gunfire. But they locked themselves in there because they knew what was being done to the men and to the children and to the women, and they hid there to try to preserve their lives and their dignity.

(33:24)
We walked through those recreations of those basements, and it was chilling, absolutely chilling. And then in the midst of all this, I went to the presidential offices to meet with President Zelenskyy. When you walk in to the presidential building, the first thing you note is it’s dark. There was burlap covering every window, and no lights were permitted to be on in any of the exterior walls of the building. They walked me through the building with flashlights so as not to trip over something. And at each area where there were windows, there were sandbags two-thirds of the way up, piled up to the windows. This is where the president of Ukraine spends every day for the last year and a half, running the war effort from there.

(34:33)
So I eventually made my way through a maze, and they do that on purpose to make it hard for anybody who might breach the security to find where the president actually is. And little did I know when I was going in there on Friday that they had already, just two days earlier, had captured a spy who was spying for the Russians to reveal to them where President Zelenskyy was going so they could make a rocket attack to assassinate him.

(35:08)
Finally got to the room where I was going to meet with President Zelenskyy. And when I walked in, he shook my hand. And we don’t time it, but we sense it over time. You shake hands for a certain period of time, and then it’s time to let go. He wouldn’t let go. And he welcomed me, and then he said to me, “Governor, promise me one thing before we sit down.” I said, “Of course, Mr. President.” And he kept holding onto my hand, and he said, “Please tell the American people how greatly appreciative we are of their support.” He said, “Without the support of the American people, all of this would be part of Russia by now.” We then sat down. We had a conversation together for an hour, and I asked him about how things were going, what the plan was. I asked him about what we had already given him and what he needed still, and what could we do to make sure that they not just survive, but they won this war. And one of the things he told me was extraordinary, that on the average day right now, the Russian Army shoots 56,000 artillery shells into Ukraine every day. You know how many of the Ukrainians are able to shoot back at the Russian army? On average, 6,000. And not because they don’t want to shoot back, but because that’s what they’ve got. And they’ve got to be very, very careful about how they use their artillery. These people in this country have fought back against every likely odd. They’re outgunned. They’re out-manned in terms of the number of soldiers on each side. They’ve laid waste to much of their infrastructure in big areas of the country, and yet every day they get up and fight.

(37:33)
And when I was at the memorial at St. Michael’s Cathedral, when I went in there, the Russian soldiers had gutted the entire cathedral. Anything of value, anything gold, they stole out of the church. And all around then, there was nothing left. The wood, the seating was gone. Everything was gone. But what they did was around the entire outside of the inside of the church, they have easels with pictures that were taken by Reuters, not by the Ukrainian government, but by international media who took pictures after the siege there so that everyone could see what was done by the Russian soldiers.

(38:28)
The worst photo was one of a young girl who didn’t look more than eight, nine, 10 years old. She was on the ground dead, having been shot. In her hand still was a leash. She was walking her dog. The dog was still on the leash, and they killed the dog also. And she laid on the ground dead with her hands still clutching that leash. She was out walking her dog, and the Russian army murdered her.

(39:13)
Look. We should have lots of debates and discussions in this country about the appropriate use of American military might, of the appropriate use of American ingenuity in supporting allies, the appropriate use of American diplomatic force around the world. But I’ll tell you this. The country that I’ve grown up in would never, ever let this happen to an ally without helping them.

(39:52)
And we have people right now in this race for president who have called what I just described to you a territorial dispute, the slaughter of civilians, the raping of women, the kidnapping and murder of children as a territorial dispute. We have the front-runner for president who says that this is not our problem. And if he’s reelected, he will end America’s support for these people. Actually, what he really says is when he becomes president, he’ll end the dispute in 24 hours. Right?

(40:42)
Now, let me remind you something. This is the same guy who said if he became president, he would build a big, beautiful wall on the entire border between the US and Mexico and Mexico would pay for it. Well, in four years, he built 52 miles, 52 miles of wall in four years. So let’s stop there. If he goes at the same pace, if he’s reelected, he only needs 110 more years as president to finish the entire wall.

(41:17)
And we haven’t gotten the first peso from Mexico, even for the 52 miles we built. And don’t expect one. You paid for it, which is fine if that’s what we want. If we want a wall on our side of the border, it’s no problem for us to pay for it. But that’s what he promised you four years ago, eight years ago, rather.

(41:40)
And if now he tells you he’s going to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours, let me tell you how he’s going to do it. He’s going to turn Ukraine over to Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin, the person who is executing this war, instructing his army to do the things that I just told you about that I saw with my own eyes, this isn’t fake news media. This isn’t some globalist organization. No, no, no. This is Chris Christie from New Jersey. Saw it with my own eyes.

(42:26)
Vladimir Putin, who is executing these atrocities against people who were just in their country, living their lives, raising their families, working and building their country, this is the guy that Donald Trump calls a great leader and brilliant.

(42:46)
Look, everybody. This has nothing to do with indictments. This has got to do with the character of who we want behind the desk in the Oval Office. And if he believes that Vladimir Putin is brilliant and a great leader, is that really the character and the judgment that you want sitting behind that desk, making decisions on behalf of our children and our grandchildren?

(43:17)
Now, of course, while I was over in Ukraine seeing this, learning this, and doing it, he was being indicted for the third time. Literally at the same time as I’m walking around Ukraine, he’s waltzing into a courtroom in Washington D.C. to tell us that he’s being indicted for us. For us. How lucky are we that we have such a selfless, magnanimous leader, because you know that the government was coming to get you. And on their way to get you, lo and behold, they came across Donald Trump. And they said, “Okay, we won’t get you. We’ll take him for you.”

(44:09)
Except I don’t think anybody in this room tonight, I suspect, invited people to come to Washington on January 6th, 2021 and told them it was going to be wild. I don’t suspect anybody in this room stood in front of that audience that day and told them that the 2020 election had been stolen when he knew that it hadn’t. I don’t suspect any of you in this room told the people gathered there that day to march to Capitol Hill and that he was going to go with them.

(44:52)
Now, let me tell you, everybody, I’ve known him for 22 years. If there is the slightest danger that he would break a fingernail, he ain’t going. Not going. So he went back to the safety of the White House and said to everybody up there, said, “Tell Mike Pence he can reverse the election.”

(45:14)
And then when he was sitting in that dining room off the Oval Office where he eats his lunch every day, he’s got his well done hamburger and he’s watching the TV and watching people lay waste to the United States Capitol. He sat there and did nothing, nothing for hours and watched it.

(45:40)
And when Kevin McCarthy called him from Capitol Hill and said, “Please, Mr. President, go on TV and tell these people to leave,” he said, “Well, Kevin, I guess they’re just more upset about the stolen election than you are.” Character. I don’t know, everybody, whether that makes him criminally liable. I don’t. And let me tell you, I don’t care. It doesn’t matter whether he’s criminally responsible for what happened on January 6th. Under those set of facts, which he does not dispute, he is morally responsible for what happened on January 6th. And so I ask you again, is that the character of the person you want sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office?

(46:33)
Look. I believe that the Justice Department has gone wrong. I believe that Hillary Clinton should have been indicted in 2016 for what she did with classified documents in her server. And I’ve been saying for weeks before the judge said it that they would never accept that Hunter Biden plea deal because it was obviously a sweetheart fixed deal.

(46:57)
But the system worked, everybody. The judge looked at it and said, “No shot. Sorry. Try again. Go back.”

(47:07)
The way to fix the Broken Department of Justice is not by giving other people who commit crimes, because they’re from our party, a pass, too. It is to say, “This stops now. And people in this country, whether it’s me and you or the President of the United States, will be held responsible for their conduct.” Remember, on all of these cases, he did it. He doesn’t dispute the conduct. He just says, “It’s unfair. Poor me. They’re picking on me. No one’s been picked on more than me.” Our poor New York City billionaire, so picked on, but he doesn’t deny that a porn star was paid off weeks before the 2016 election to keep quiet about her sexual relationship with the Republican nominee for president. Now, look. I was a prosecutor for seven years. I ran the fifth largest US attorney’s office in the country. I wouldn’t have indicted that case. It’s stupid. What he did is immoral, not criminal. That was bad.

(48:27)
He’s the one who kept the classified documents. And for 18 months, the government asked him privately, quietly, nicely to give them back. First, he denied he had them. Then, when they served him with a grand jury subpoena, he actually got his people to move boxes of these documents so that his own lawyers couldn’t find them, and then told his lawyers to tell them, “You’ve seen everything,” when he knew they hadn’t.

(48:55)
And I’ve had a number of people ask me, “Why would he do this?” It makes no sense, right? You’re not president anymore. Why do you need the documents? Why do you need the Iran war plan when you’re spending every day playing golf at Mar-a-Lago? Let me tell you why. Because his ego would not permit him to believe he was no longer the president, and he wanted to show people on the patio at Mar-a-Lago, “Look at what I have. I still have this.” And bad news for him, they have audio tape of him doing it. You’re not responsible for any of that. He is. He is.

(49:42)
So I don’t understand, frankly, why none of my other competitors are talking about this. Let’s put aside personality differences and all the rest. He is the front-runner. I read the polls the same way all of you do when you see them in the paper or hear them on TV. He’s ahead. If you’re serious about winning, you got to beat him. And how do you beat him unless you talk about the facts of what his presidency was and, based on his conduct then and since he left, what his presidency would be if he came back again and why you would be better. Yet all of them are silent, silent about this. They treat Trump like Voldemort in the Harry Potter books, he who shall not be named. And I saw the press go into a tizzy yesterday of joy when two and a half years after the election, Governor DeSantis said, ” Yeah. Joe Biden won.” Let me give a big round of applause to Governor DeSantis for catching up on two and a half year old news.

(51:13)
But the reporter slipped. She didn’t ask the right question. Of course, he lost. Biden’s there. He’s sleeping in the White House. The question is, “Do you think the election was stolen?” They didn’t ask him that question. And I suspect when Ron DeSantis comes back up here, if you’re in an audience with him, one of you should, and you’ll watch one of the greatest dodges of all time.

(51:39)
So let me be clear and not just be critical. The election was not stolen. And in fact, I said that on election night 2020 when I was getting paid to say things like that by ABC, paying me to tell the audience what my honest view was. The election wasn’t stolen. An out-of-control egomaniac lost to someone who had never beaten anybody outside the state of Delaware. I understand why that’s really upsetting. Joe Biden could never beat anybody outside the state of Delaware. He ran for president three times before that, lost all three times. I understand why that would wound your ego.

(52:20)
But believe me, I’ve lost to some people over time I didn’t want to lose to. It’d be inappropriate for me to name any names, but his initials are Donald Trump back in 2016. So we need to have an honest conversation about this.

(52:42)
He sent out a Truth Social post just this past week where he said some really terrible things about Nancy Pelosi. Now, look. I don’t agree with Nancy Pelosi on almost anything I can think of, and I think she has been a terribly destructive force in this country for things that I believe in. So let me start off by being very clear about that. I am no fan. In fact, I’m an anti-fan. But he sent out a Truth Social post that said, “Her husband’s descent into the four rings of hell started when he married her.”

Ouch.

And then said, “She will live the rest of eternity in hell. All right. I’m from New Jersey. We’re not delicate people, as you probably know. We’re not ones who have a hard time speaking our mind. We’ve been called a little edgy and chip on our shoulder, difficult people at times.

(53:49)
But when are we as a party going to stop acting like that is normal? I just said I don’t like her. I oppose her. I’m not a fan. I’m an anti-fan. That’s all fair political commentary. That’s the way our country was set up, to have that kind of commentary and disagreement. Not that stuff.

(54:21)
And then today, he was right here in New Hampshire giving his speech. And there’s a lot of different things he said, but one of the things he said was if he’s president again, he’s going to throw the globalists, the Marxists, the communists, and the fascists out of the country, and he’s going to once and for all drain the swamp in Washington D.C.

(54:48)
Okay. How about we just take that piece? It went on for an hour and a half, as it normally does, with a lot of discussion about how picked on he is and how difficult his billionaire life is and how all of you should feel not only badly for him, but you should feel so lucky that he’s willing to leave his compound in Mar-a-Lago or Bedminster, New Jersey or New York City to come and take these indictments for you, remember, because, otherwise, you’re going to the can, not him. He’s standing right in between you and the man to stop that.

(55:24)
The communist, the fascists, and the Marxists, he’s going to throw them out. How about he starts by fighting the real communists, Marxists, fascists like Vladimir Putin in Russia instead of getting down on one knee and calling him a brilliant person and great leader? But he starts with that.

(55:50)
Then he says he’s going to drain the swamp in Washington. Well, he told us that in 2016 also. Remember? I was on the stage. I heard him say that. Let me tell you, not only didn’t he drain the swamp in four years, what he did was he reorganized it. And he reorganized it to do one thing: to make room for his family.

(56:16)
His son Donny’s mistress, who got paid with campaign money to give a speech on January 6th, 50 grand of money that was donated from people like you to fight the stolen election, I’m sure they didn’t think he was going to pay his son’s mistress with that money. How about the $108,000 in campaign money that he paid for Melania’s stylist, 108 grand for her stylist? And what did he call it in the FEC report? Political strategy consulting.

(57:12)
I wish for all of you a political strategy consulting fund that allows you to hire a stylist. Look at me. I could use one. I just don’t have the 108 grand to pay for it. But he has it, but he didn’t spend his own money, the billionaire. No, no, no. He spent the money from his campaign fund that people like you donated so that he could get reelected president.

(57:46)
Or the two billion dollars that was given to his daughter Ivanka and his son-in-law Jared, by the Saudis six months after he left the White House. Now, is it because Jared is a brilliant investor? Let me tell you, I know a little bit about the Kushner family. And when I put his father in jail in 2004, Jared took over the business and he sold all of the moneymaking apartments that they had in the state of New Jersey and took all that money and bought 666 Fifth Avenue, one of the worst real estate deals in recent memory. Based upon that, he also bought a newspaper, the New York Observer, which is a money loser.

(58:46)
Based upon those examples of extraordinary investment acumen, the Saudis who don’t know what to do with money, right, the Saudis, some reason, they looked at that record and said, “That’s the guy we want to give two billion to.” Or is it more likely that when we had two competent secretaries of state in Rex Tillerson and Mike Pompeo, both good, decent men who sacrificed much to serve this country, instead Donald Trump sent Jared Kushner to the Middle East? Why? Because the folks in the Middle East, when trying to negotiate peace, were concerned to have a real estate developer come over and chat with them. No. He sent them over there to set up the grift, to do what needed to be done, so that when they left, the money would be paid. And it was, two billion dollars.

(59:54)
We have two front-running candidates for President of the United States who believe that service as president is two enrich the worst of their offspring. It’s just the facts, everybody. You look at this Hunter Biden stuff that’s going on, and it’s outrageous. It’s outrageous. And it seems to me that President Biden has lied to us, too. Never any involvement with his son’s business. Now, all kinds of reports I’m getting on phone calls on a regular basis, they said, “Oh, he was selling the illusion of access.” When you get the Vice President of the United States on the phone, that’s not the illusion of access. That is access. He’s on the phone with you.

(01:00:40)
When are we going to say enough is enough, everybody? These two have got to go. Joe Biden can’t function in the presidency anymore. He’s passed his sell by date. When you sit in the Oval Office and you fall asleep when the president of Israel is sitting across from you and there are five times the number of cameras that are back there shooting it, and you still can’t stay awake, it’s time. It’s time to go back to Wilmington, go to Rehoboth Beach, ride your bike around town. You’ve served the country as an elected official since, get ready for it, 1972. Time to go home. And Donald Trump, in my view, it’s time to stay home.

(01:01:36)
Look. We need to go back to doing the big things in this country again, the big things that made this country great. And you don’t hear any of these candidates talking about big things that you’re really worried about. They want to distract you with small little fights where we argue with each other over things that aren’t unimportant, but shouldn’t be the things in my view of a presidential campaign.

(01:02:05)
When one-third of the students between K and 12 in this country do not read at grade level, we should be talking about that. When social security and Medicare are going to go broke in 11 short years, leading to an automatic 25% cut in benefits for everyone, we should be talking about that. When we have a border that is so porous that enough fentanyl is coming over the border to kill 110,000 Americans last year from drug overdose, we should be talking about how we fix the border and the immigration system.

(01:02:51)
When we have crime rampant in every major city in this country where people are just walking, and you’ve all seen these videos, walking into a CVS or a Walgreens or some other type of store and just pulling stuff off the shelves and putting them in a basket and walking out with them, and prosecutors in these cities will not prosecute these people, and these cities have now become places like New York where folks are being pushed into subway tracks, knifed on trains and on the street, the federal government has to step in and say, “No.” Because if we don’t have great cities, everybody, we won’t have a great country.

(01:03:40)
Yet we have people talking about Bud Light and Disney. Now, look. My wife and I are not fans of Disney World. Okay? We’ve gone there with our kids. For us, it is a nightmare. A nightmare. But here’s the thing. Is that really going to change your life markedly if Disney is now going to be punished because they opposed the bill that Governor DeSantis was for?

(01:04:13)
Man, if I took vengeance against every group that opposed the bill I was for in eight years as governor of blue New Jersey, I still wouldn’t be caught up five years after I left office.

(01:04:27)
And on Bud Light, I don’t agree with their marketing campaign. But guess what the good news is? Neither did almost all of America. And you’re watching Bud Light stay on the shelves. That’s our power, the power of our purchasing power. If someone does something we don’t like, we don’t buy their stuff anymore. They get the message. Do we need the government to do that? I’d warn you, you don’t want to, because the Target that you like today may be the Target you hate tomorrow. Maybe it might be even your business that the government goes after.

(01:05:07)
I’m a conservative. I don’t think the government belongs in messing around with business. Let the consumers make those judgements, yet these are the things we’re talking about, people running around, arguing about transgender therapy. Serious issue. And so you know what my position is on that? Parents should be the ones making those decisions. Parents. How is a governor sitting in a state house know better about what should happen inside your home than you do? How is it that Ron DeSantis or Sarah Huckabee Sanders or any of the number of other governors who have signed these bills into law, they know better than you how your children should be treated and cared for?

(01:05:54)
I used to think that’s what liberals did, that liberals thought that the government supposed to do all that stuff. I’m in Alice in

… wonderland here. Now, all of a sudden, we got big government conservatives like Ron DeSantis doing this stuff. Let you decide.

(01:06:11)
I want you to be empowered, but by the way, you’re also responsible for what happens to your children. And that’s the way the country, I think, should work. I don’t want anybody telling me how to raise my kids, even if they offer to pay for it. I don’t want to get them to try to raise our children. Let’s start talking about the big things again and solving the big problems.

(01:06:36)
So I’m going to go to questions now, but I’ll end with this. If you wonder what I mean, I want to give you concrete examples. Okay? This country’s at a crossroads right now. It is. We can feel it. We feel the tension, the anger. Decisions need to be made by adults about where we’re going to go.

(01:06:59)
We had the same thing in 1776. If you took a poll in 1776 here in New Hampshire, guess what? Revolution wouldn’t have won. Wouldn’t have. Most people looked at the British Army and said, “No thanks. A lot more of them than us. We can’t win.” But folks like Washington and Jefferson and Adams and Franklin and Hamilton, they said, “The only way we’re going to truly be free and great and have liberty is to have our own country,” and they inspired us to sacrifice to establish what we established here. We went big rather than small, and we built the greatest country the world’s ever known.

(01:07:42)
In 1860, Abraham Lincoln could have said, “Let the South go. We’ll do fine up here in the North. We don’t need to have this fight to keep the country united.” He said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” and he inspired us to sacrifice, and at the end of it, America became bigger, stronger, richer and freer because of it.

(01:08:11)
In 1941, Franklin Roosevelt did not say, “This is Europe’s problem. This is Asia’s problem. No one’s going to be able to reach us here in the United States.” No. When the Japanese did reach us in Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt inspired this country to sacrifice greatly with lives and fortune, and he led this world to defeat Hitler and defeat Mussolini and defeat Hirohito. And when we got done with that sacrifice, as great as it was, America was bigger, richer, freer and stronger than we had ever been.

(01:08:52)
And in 1981, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, and there were those on the other side who said, “We just have to deal with the Soviet Union. We have to put up with it. We should freeze nuclear weapons. We should just walk away from this fight and let them exist,” Reagan said, “No, they are the evil empire and they belong in the dustbin of history,” and he inspired this country to sacrifice what we needed to sacrifice. And in eight years the Berlin Wall was down, and in ten years the Soviet Union ceased to exist. He went big and we were richer and freer and stronger and bigger than we had been before. We were the last remaining superpower.

(01:09:44)
Today, that fight is with China. They’re the ones supplying all the money to Russia to fight this war. They’re the ones stealing our intellectual property every day. They’re the ones threatening their neighbors. They’re the number two economy in the world that want to be number one. What are we going to do? Are we going to fill the moat and pull up the drawbridge and say, “Yeah, not our problem. Let the rest of the world deal with this”? Are we going to take it on directly and win like we always have? We’re 250 years as a country in three years, 250 years of having leaders who were willing to try to inspire us to sacrifice. We need that again. We’re at that moment again.

(01:10:37)
Don’t go for what the polls tell you. Leaders don’t follow polls. They change them by the arguments that you make. That’s why I’m in this race. That’s why I’m here. I love this country and I want us to be the country that does big things again. And if we do, then our children and grandchildren are going to have the great American life that we’ve already been given, and I don’t want to be the first generation that lets that go.

(01:11:13)
So let’s do some questions. It’s getting a little warm in here, so I’m going to take my jacket off, and before I do, the woman who I’m going to give the jacket to, I want to stand up and say hello. My wife Mary Pat is here with me tonight and I want her to say hello.

Hello. [inaudible 01:11:31].

Thanks. Well, I got to take this thing. I got to take the microphone, or else… Let’s be honest, you’d still hear me anyway, but all right. So we have people around who are going to give you microphones. You raise your hand, I will call on you and let’s have a discussion. All questions are on the table. Anything you want to ask is on the table and I will answer you directly. We’ll see if you like it or not, but you’re going to get a direct answer. So who wants to start? Yes, sir. Right up here in front. Catherine’s going to come bring you the microphone.

So my name is Eric Boyer. I teach political science here at Colby-Sawyer.

Great. Thanks for having me.

I swore when I saw the debate with Rubio that if I never got to meet you, I would say thanks. Every time I show my students that when we talk about debates, I enjoy it anew every time.

So do I, by the way.

Yeah, I can imagine. It’s every night, right? So I just want to give you a chance then to dream big, right? So if you were the president, what’s your moonshot? What is the thing we should be called to do and what should we be called to sacrifice to do? What is that thing?

I think the biggest thing and the most important thing we can do is fix the education system we have in this country from K-12, and I think the way we need to fix it is to put parents back in charge of making the decisions about their children’s education.

(01:12:56)
Look, I’m a product of the public-school system in New Jersey. I got a wonderful education in the public schools in New Jersey, and I don’t have any misgivings or regret about having gone to the public schools. My wife went to 12 years of parochial school: totally different experience. That’s what her parents wanted for her. My parents wanted me to go to the public schools. Her parents wanted to go to the parochial schools. We both ended up okay. We now have four children. All of our children went to parochial schools. So you can now be completely aware of who runs the show in my house.

(01:13:33)
But sometimes, the public schools aren’t the right place. Sometimes they’re failing us. And we spend $800 billion a year on K-12 education across this country. We do not have a spending problem. We don’t. And in our urban centers, which are performing the worst, generally we spend even more. In the city of Newark, New Jersey, in my home state, we spent $36,000 a pupil for public education that is failing them. They could go to just about any private school in this country for that amount of money.

(01:14:20)
So I’m not saying that everyone should go to private schools or parochial schools. You should go to the school that you and your wife or husband believe is the right school for your child to get the very best education. We need to empower parents to do that and change this system, because it is failing us when one third of the kids in this country, as I said off the top, can’t read a grade level. Who in this country is going to come up with the great next set of inventions, the next great story, the next great film, the next great business, the next great idea, if you can’t read?

(01:15:02)
And so to me, the most important thing a president can do going forward is to say, “The future of our country is dependent upon a great educational system.” We have gotten here 247 years later because we have had some of the greatest educated people in the world who have helped to come up with the great ideas that have fueled the engine of this great American experiment.

(01:15:27)
And so I fought this fight in New Jersey, fought it hard against the entrenched interest there. They spent a lot of money trying to get me out after four years and they lost. And you have to use the bully pulpit as president to inspire and empower families to demand from their states and from the Federal Government the opportunity to make their own decisions about their children, their children’s education, because you all know this: beside your children’s physical health, the next largest determiner of what kind of future they’re going to have is their mind, is their education. And if we can do that like we used to, then we’ll beat the Chinese, and not with guns and bombs and missiles, but with our minds. And that’ll be one that we can sustain for a long time, for generations to come.

(01:16:29)
So to me, that’s the thing that inspires me the most because look, I come from a background where my mom never went to college. She worked as a receptionist in an office. My dad was in the Army during the Korean War, came home, his father had passed away when he was 17 years old. They were poor, had no money. He went to work at the Breyers ice-cream plant in Newark, New Jersey.

(01:16:59)
And he’s a smart guy, and there was a guy on that line with him older who said to him, “What are you doing here? You’re smart. Go to school.” And he said, “Well, I don’t have the money to go to school.” And he said, “Bill, you served in the military. You have the GI Bill. Go to school at night.” My father went to Rutgers in Newark, New Jersey for six years at night, got his degree in accounting, became a CPA and changed my future. It made me believe, as the oldest child in that family, that I could go to college too.

(01:17:36)
And I can guarantee this: when he was standing in the Breyers ice-cream plant plant, he did not think, one, that he would get married at some point. He was having too much fun, I think. Two, that he would have children. And certainly, three, that his oldest child would run for President of the United States. But that’s the miracle of this country, and that miracle absolutely has its foundational piece in education. So that’s what I would do. Yes, sir. Right in front. Carl’s going to come up and give you one, and I will turn around and see if you have questions. Sir?

Hi. My name’s Gary. I’m from [inaudible 01:18:14], New Hampshire. How are you doing? Thanks for coming up.

I’m doing great.

Yeah. I believe in you. I like your rhetoric. I like your style. I don’t know why you’re where you’re at in the polls. I don’t understand why the front-runner is the front-runner, but I got to ask you this question. What is your standing on abortion, number one? Number two, do you believe that should be a political football for as long as it’s been? And I believe that should be between a woman, her husband and a doctor, not politics that people gravitate towards to say a certain group or to appease a certain group just to get a vote.

Yeah. Okay. I’m pro-life, and I’m pro-life because that’s the way I was raised, and I believe that every life is a precious gift from God. Now, legally, what I believe is that the Constitution says nothing about the issue of abortion, and for 50 years we’ve had a case that pretended that it said something about abortion when it didn’t. What a Constitution says is that if we don’t talk about it in here, those decisions revert to the states. I believe every state and its people should be able to make their own judgment about abortion.

So you don’t believe it should be a federal thing?

No. I do not believe it should be a federal thing. I think every state should be able to make that decision.

Why is it a political football?

It is a decision that governments make on every issue regarding the treatment of life, and the reason for that is because it’s right in the beginning of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that everyone has a right to life. And so it becomes a governmental issue because of that, because our foundational documents gave to each of us, both born and yet to be born in this country, a right to life. So now governments have to figure out, okay, how do we deal with that?

(01:20:18)
When you look at what’s happened since Dobbs was decided a year ago, it’s all over the place in this country. Right? So in Oklahoma, abortion is banned completely unless the life of the mother is at risk. In my home state of New Jersey, you can get an abortion up to nine months. Now, look, I think that it is absolutely true.

But in Nashville, it’s an unusual situation.

I’m not saying when-

The way you present it, you’re acting like a person is going in at nine months pregnant with a normal fetus and saying, “I would like that [inaudible 01:20:52].”

I’m not-

That’s [inaudible 01:20:53].

No, no. Excuse me.

Don’t be [inaudible 01:20:55].

No, no. Excuse me. I’m not acting in any way.

[inaudible 01:20:58].

No, no, no. I’m telling you what the law is. We’re having a discussion about the law, and the law in my state says that if you choose to come in at nine months and want an abortion for any reason, you cannot be denied that.

How did that happen?

We’re talking about how we decide how these things get done, and I will tell you this: there was a majority in the state legislature and a governor who said that should be okay. So that’s what the law is. You can’t say that a law is bad on one side if you disagree with it, and then, if you agree with the underlying philosophy, say, “Yeah, okay, that’s true, but it would never happen.” In New Jersey, it’s permitted to happen and not just in New Jersey. In New York as well, it’s up to nine months. In California, it’s up to nine months.

(01:21:54)
My point is not to advocate for one thing or the other. My point in answering your question is I think the way this should be handled is that every state and its citizens should make the judgment of what they think is best for their state. In New Hampshire here, it’s significantly different.

Thank you.

And then the Federal Government should stay out of it. It becomes a bigger political football when you get the Federal Government in the middle of it, because in each individual state, you have a much better chance of affecting what’s going to happen than you do affecting what’s going to happen in Washington. And so here in New Hampshire, the rules are significantly different than either New Jersey or Oklahoma. And there are some states that are at 6 weeks now. There’s some states that are at 12. There are some states that are at 20. There are some states that are at nine months.

(01:22:44)
But it’s the people of those states who decide, and we also can’t ever figure out necessarily what people are going to do. You have a state like Kansas, which is a deep red state, elects Republicans for President, most of the time for governor, both the United States Senators, majority of their Congressional delegation. Banning abortion was put on the ballot. It was defeated by over 62% of the people in the state. If you had gone to political pundits beforehand, they all would have told you it was going to pass in a state like Kansas.

(01:23:13)
This is a deeply personal judgment and decision, and I think those decisions should be made as close to the people as they can be, and I think that’s why the Constitution says if it’s not in here, the state should decide. I think each and every state should make that decision. The Federal Government should not get in the middle of this, unless and until you looked at all the states and let’s say you came up with a consensus. Okay, well then, if you want to put that consensus in place, the Federal Government should consider that. But remember this: you’re going to need 60 votes in the United States Senate for anything to get it passed.

(01:23:48)
I can’t think of a time whether it was life of the mother, someplace in between, or nine months that you get 60 people in the United States Senate to agree to. And you know what? That’s good. It’s good, because you should decide here in New Hampshire what you want the laws to be here. We should decide in New Jersey. And look, in New Jersey, I disagree with that law, but too bad. I had my chance to make my argument. The other argument won out. And whether I agree with it or not, if it so offends me, I can move and go someplace. If that is the single most important thing to me or to my wife, well then, we can move if we don’t like it.

(01:24:27)
But the states should decide it, and once we have those decisions in the states… I don’t want to give you an illusion. It won’t be resolved. It’s too emotional an issue. And the reason it’s become a political football is because it’s such an emotional issue. So you will regularly have arguments and disputes about this in our country, but at least now, the states and the people in those states are getting to make the decision, not some court in Washington DC or a group of people in suits and ties in Washington. It’s the people on the ground here.

So for the record, you wouldn’t push it federal.

No.

You’d leave it up to the states.

I’d leave it up to the states. That’s what I’ve been fighting for. For my entire life as a lawyer, I thought the decision in Roe was wrong, and I’m certainly not going to change my mind now.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Yes, sir. Right there. He’ll get you a microphone so everybody can hear you. He’s coming up right behind you.

[inaudible 01:25:18].

I know. Me neither, but you know what? You see all those cameras? If they can’t hear us, then we won’t… We don’t exist if we’re not on TV.

My name’s Gary, and I’m also a New Hampshire resident from Lebanon, and like you, I was a parochial kid. My wife was a public kid. Our kids went to public school, so I understand your situation.

You know what I mean? You feel it? Absolutely.

And they turned out okay.

Yeah.

My question is this: what do you have to do to convince people that character matters? Because there’s a lot of them.

That’s why I’m here in New Hampshire, because you all are the most interested voters in America. I believe that all of you are trained for this, starting in grade school. In fact, when I came up here eight years ago and was running the first time, I would get almost universally the same reaction when you would come up to somebody after a meeting like this and they would come up and say, “Hello, I really liked what you had to say,” and you would say to them, “So do I have your support?” And they would say, ” You’re in my top three.” And it kept going. Every time I go at this, “You’re in the top three. You’re in the top three.” And I finally said, “They teach these people this in school.” Just put them off. Say you’re in your top three.

(01:26:44)
Look, the truth matters, and I believe we’ve gotten to a place in this country in both parties where the truth is now-negotiable. If you don’t like the truth that you’re hearing on one cable station, you go to another one and you find the truth that you like. So if you’re conservative, you go to Fox News and you listen to the truth that you like. If you’re a liberal, you go to MSNBC and you listen to the truth that they tell you. If you’re just confused, you go to CNN and they say something to you.

(01:27:16)
I mean, we’re at a point where people are convincing us that the truth is not the truth. It is. And the worst part in our party now is that the reason I think people are not responding to this immediately is because they’re disoriented by it. We’ve had a leader of our party for the last eight years who is a stranger to the truth. He just is. I’ve known him for 22 years. He’s a stranger to the truth. He doesn’t know. And what he does know, if it isn’t something he likes, he makes it up. So I absolutely believe that if you come here enough and you answer questions directly and you’re honest with people and you tell the truth, that ultimately they’ll respond to it. Now, this is an experiment in democracy, like every election is. We’re going to see if I’m right or I’m wrong. But let me tell you who’s going to decide if I’m right or I’m wrong. You are. You are.

(01:28:27)
And I will tell you that if Donald Trump loses in New Hampshire in late January or early February of 2024, he’s finished. You in this state will be able to make that determination for the Republican Party, because I absolutely believe that what he is is an okay-looking facade that is rotted on the inside, and when you break through that facade, that entire building will collapse. The moment to decide whether that facade is going to be broken or not is here in New Hampshire, because you’ve done it before.

(01:29:18)
And let me urge you to forget about the polls. You’ve seen that enough times in this state as well. Remember, Barack Obama had that big win in Iowa. He came in here, he was 15 points ahead of Hillary Clinton in New Hampshire, and all of a sudden they came here and Hillary Clinton beat him in New Hampshire.

(01:29:39)
John McCain was dead. It was over. His campaign was finished in 2007, 2008. He came here and did meetings like this all around New Hampshire. He gave straight talk to the people of the state. And they didn’t vote for Mitt Romney. They didn’t vote for Rudy Giuliani. They didn’t vote for the people who were the favorites back then. They voted for John McCain after his campaign was already written off, and he became the nominee of the Republican Party.

(01:30:11)
And in 2016, I can tell you that none of us standing on that stage in the first debate back in July of 2015 ever thought in a million years… Me, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, none of us thought Donald Trump was going to be the nominee. You know who else didn’t think Donald Trump was going to be the nominee? Donald Trump. And I’ll tell you why I know that, because on the stage for the second debate in 2015, everybody on that stage except for me hated Donald Trump, wouldn’t talk to him.

(01:30:50)
And if you really want to make money, if you’re the RNC, what you should do is sell pay-per-view for what goes on on the stage during the commercials. You really get to see what really is going on. And what was going on back then was nobody wanted to talk to him. I was the only one who would talk to him. And he came up to me and he said to me, “Chris, look, I’m not staying in this race. Eventually I’m going to go down, and when I do, I’m going to get out, and you’re the only one here who’s nice to me. It’s all going to be with you.” He didn’t even think he was going to win.

(01:31:25)
Right? So I want you all to remember that you get to decide. And someone asked me, “Why is he ahead in the polls now?” Because he was the nominee the last two times. He’s the default dancer for folks, because we haven’t really started this campaign. It starts in two weeks. August 23rd, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the first Republican debate. And let’s see. Let’s see if he respects you enough to show up. Because it’s not about me. It’s not about DeSantis or Nikki Haley or any of the other candidates. Tim Scott. It’s about you.

(01:32:06)
It’s a privilege to be on that stage. It’s a privilege to run for President of the United States. There are people who are running who want to get on the stage who won’t be there because they won’t qualify for it. So for those of us who qualify for it, it’s a privilege to be on that stage and have the opportunity to run for President of the United States, to make our case to you directly why we deserve your vote. Let’s see if he respects you enough to show up on the 23rd. I’ll guarantee you one thing. If he’s there, he’ll know I’m there too.

(01:32:42)
Right. I’ll put you next.

Welcome. Thanks for coming up here.

Thank you, sir.

So I’m a second-generation Italian immigrant. Harrison, New Jersey.

There you go. All right.

And I’m also a lifelong independent, leaning Republican, who voted for Biden, and it was really against the other fellow and not for him as much. So now you’re in the race, and the last time around, he had his percentages that were rock solid and everybody else split everything else. Two-part question. One, why is it going to be different this time? Because you have the same mathematic working against you and everyone else not named Trump. And secondly, you threw in with him. You were all-in with him for a period of time.

I was.

What changed?

Election night 2020.

Okay.

Okay. Look, I had David Cameron, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, ask me one time to explain what he called this crazy system you all have of electing presidents. And I said, “The thing you need to understand, David, more than anything else, is we don’t get to vote for most of the time what we want to vote for. We get to vote for who’s left.”

(01:33:41)
So in 2016, it was Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton, the most unpopular major presidential candidate in the history of polling on election day 2016. Who was the second most unpopular presidential candidate in the history of polling? Donald Trump. I made the choice, and I would not change that choice from 2016 because I think Hillary Clinton would have been an awful president too.

(01:34:12)
When 2020 came around, I also thought that Joe Biden was simply too old for the job. I didn’t think he was up for it. Mary Pat and I have known Joe Biden for 40 years. We both went to the University of Delaware. We’ve known him since we were college students. And I think in his heart, he’s a good man. Everything I’ve ever known about him is that he’s a good guy, but he’s too old. It’s over.

(01:34:38)
But on election night 2020, when Donald Trump came out at 2:30 in the morning and said, “The election’s been stolen,” when I know that he couldn’t have even known whether it was or it wasn’t, votes were still being counted, that was it for me. When you’re the President of the United States and you stand behind that seal of the president in the East Room of the White House and you tell the American people the election’s been stolen, most of the American people are going to think, “Well, he’s president. He must know something.” And they’re going to believe him, and that’s what’s happened.

(01:35:07)
To this day, the majority of our party believes the 2020 election was stolen. And they believe that because Donald Trump lied to them and they bought the lie. That night, I said on television at 2:30 in the morning, “I’m done. I can’t support this guy any longer in any way from now till the end. And I spoke out against him in ’17, ’18, ’19 to ’20 when I thought he was wrong, and that’s why I didn’t take a position in his Administration. He offered me Secretary of Homeland Security. He offered me Secretary of Labor. In 2018, he offered me White House Chief of Staff, and I turned them all down. I knew I couldn’t work for him. Couldn’t work for somebody like that.

(01:35:48)
Now, why will it be different this time? Let’s look at the newest poll that just came out in New Hampshire. Forget the national polls. Let’s look at what’s happening here. Because the election for President is not a national election in the primary. It’s a state-by-state election. It doesn’t matter what the national polls say. He’s still in first, but he’s got 34% in the latest poll that just came out on Friday. Ron DeSantis is at 13. I’m at 11. Everyone else is in single digits. Think about what that means. 66% of New Hampshire Republicans and independents who will participate don’t want him.

(01:36:26)
This race will get smaller over time. The people who don’t qualify for the stage, I don’t know how they can stay in the race. I think we’re going to have eight people on the stage. We have 14 people running, so that means I think six will be gone, either right around that time or pretty soon thereafter, because they won’t be able to raise money and sustain a campaign if you can’t be on the stage for the debate.

(01:36:46)
Then once these debates happened, we saw this happen eight years ago, people fell off then too. Remember Scott Walker was in the first two debates. Remember Scott Walker? He’s going to be President of the United States. He was the front-runner in Iowa. He was gone by September of 2015. I think this race, when you get to New Hampshire and get to voting here, I think it’s going to be five or six people. And I believe if it’s down to that kind of number that he could be beaten, because I think his number is somewhere in the thirties.

(01:37:15)
And part of the reason why we have to be this direct about it, is because people need to know this is in their hands. It’s not a foregone conclusion. The polls today tell us it’s not a foregone conclusion. It’s up to you to decide. And I would say to you that if you think the party and the country needs a new direction, don’t vote for somebody, either like Donald Trump or some of my other competitors, who say they’re pretty much like him.

(01:37:45)
This is like if you like Coca-Cola. If you like Coca-Cola, and Coke comes out with new Coke and Coke is still available, you’re going to buy Coke because you’re like, “What do we need new Coke for?” Ron DeSantis is new Coke. That’s what he is. Now, if Coca-Cola was no longer available, maybe new Coke would get a little traction, but you still got the people who like Coca-Cola. He’s there. He was here in New Hampshire today. You can go vote for him.

(01:38:26)
I don’t think we need a slight change from the character and approach of Donald Trump. I think we need a significant change from the character and approach of Donald Trump. I just do, and if we’re going to try to bring this country back together, this doesn’t mean we won’t fight. Of course we’ll fight. You’re Italian-American. So am I. Our families, they fought all the

… all the time about big things and small things, but if somebody from the outside came in and tried to take one of us on, then it became a whole nother matter. That’s what this country has to get back to. We can fight amongst ourselves all we like about the issues that are important to us, and we should, the founders set it up that way, but when we have threats to the very core of who we are, either from outside forces or from malignant forces within like a failed education system, well, then we better ban together, and we need a president who’s willing to do that and not put themselves first. I’m going to get to your question now. But that’s why this whole America first thing from Donald Trump is the biggest joke I’ve ever heard in my life. He never puts America first. It’s Donald Trump first. Donald Trump first. Everything else behind that. And we need a president who is now going to say America first.

(01:40:02)
I’ll tell you one quick story. When I was governor of New Jersey, I got elected in a three-way race the first time with 48% of the vote. And a lot of people wondered whether I was going to be able to do this or not and how it’s going to bring things together. And I had a reporter ask me one day, “Governor, you’re saying things that are politically unpopular. The polls say that. How do you think you’re going to get reelected?” This is my first year.

(01:40:25)
I said, “Look, I don’t care if I’m reelected, and I’ll tell you why, because I already get the portrait.” You get elected once you get the portrait. The artist comes in, they paint you, it gets hanged on the wall in the state house. All you’re arguing about now is what the little brass plaque says. Is it four years or eight years? Hell man, I’m not selling my soul for a brass plaque. The honor is getting elected the first time. The duty is doing the right thing when you get elected. And by the way, I said all those politically incorrect, difficult things in those four years. I got 48% of the vote in 2009. In 2013, I got 61% of the vote. The truth matters and people want the truth. You’re next. [inaudible 01:41:11] Catherine. Yes, sir.

Hi, it’s Roosevelt, a graduate student here at the college. You talked about the importance of American dream and also the importance of education, but what concerns me, and I’m sure other college students in the room, is the high interest rates on students’ loans. And if elected, what would you do to try to decrease these student loans and what do you think would be the drawback or the mediation for you to do so?

Well, first off, the high interest rates are because of high inflation and high inflation is because we spend too much money in the government. And it’s Republicans and Democrats have both agreed on that. Larry Summers, who was Clinton’s treasury secretary said, “Biden, if you spend the money you’re talking about spending, inflation’s going to go through the roof.” And it did. And today everything costs 17% more than it did when he became in office. So the first thing to do is to reduce government spending, bring interest rates down for everything and interest rates will come down for student loans. Second, I had student loans, a lot of them, for both college and for law school because my family did not have the money to be able to send me. It took me 10 years to repay my college loans, or for us to repay my college loans. I almost blew it. It was a quick recovery, guys. It would’ve been a tough night for me tonight, a really tough night.

(01:42:35)
And so I’m not someone who believes student loans should be forgiven. I don’t. I think it’s unfair for two reasons. One, I think it’s unfair to people like me and her who repaid our loans. Secondly, I think it’s unfair to the people who never took them. And I’m not talking about the wealthy people who could go because the parents could afford it. I’m talking about the folks who didn’t go to college who decided to pursue a trade or do other things with their life and now their tax money has to be used to pay back student loans that they chose, affirmatively chose not to take. Here’s where I think the problem is with college, we’re looking at the wrong side. It’s the colleges that are the problem. All right, so this year I have my last child, our fourth going into her junior year at the University of Notre Dame. Go Irish, right? Oh yeah. Either you love them or you hate them. But here we are. We now have our second child at Notre Dame.

(01:43:32)
I just paid the bill for the first semester. The first semester at Notre Dame this year is $40,200. The first semester. College costs have far outstripped the pace of inflation. So here’s what I’d do if I were president. I would say to every college in this country, if you raise tuition above the rate of inflation, you will be ineligible for any federal funding. That means research grants. That means other support that colleges get and that means student loans. If a student needs a student loan, he can’t come to your college because you’re raising the prices too high. I used to make a joke back in 2016 when I was here that I went to a college and took a tour. I won’t name it, here in New Hampshire, but I went to this college and one of the things they had that they were very proud to show me was a rock climbing wall. So I’m like, “You’re in New Hampshire. This isn’t like Kansas or Oklahoma or the Panhandle of Texas. You’re in New Hampshire. Is it downstairs?” This wasn’t the school, but I’m gone there asked too now, okay.

(01:44:56)
Go outside, there are rocks everywhere. There are big hills and big mountains and for you to climb on. Go outside and climb them. How come I’m paying with my tuition for a rock climbing wall? It’s a stupid example, but it’s a stupid example. Someone here and in a number of other colleges, not only here but all across the country sat down and decided, okay, let’s build a rock climbing wall. Well, I’ll have to raise tuition a little bit more. They get loans, they’ll pay for it. You shouldn’t have to pay for things above the rate of inflation so that every college administrator can have their dream come true about what they want in their particular department or area.

(01:45:46)
And so I think we have to work on the cost side of it before we start looking at forgiving loans for people. I also will tell you this from a emotional perspective. I really believe that my degree means a lot more to me because I paid for it. I really do. And I think that if you get that situation where you work for it, you earn it, and then you pay for it, you treasure it. You treasure it, and you use it to the full extent that you can use it. And I think that’s a really important thing for us to continue to focus on. Other questions? Yes sir. Right there. Catherine’s coming around. Catherine, you’re doing great tonight.

[inaudible 01:46:32]

Thanks. So you might’ve already addressed this, but our government spending’s out of control. I believe our debt payment is now more than our military budget. Obviously entitlements, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security are the majority. How are you going to address this if you were to be president?

Well, first off, on government spending you’re right, and it’s gotten out of control on things much more than just entitlements. You’re right that the entitlements are a huge part of the budget. But what I will say to you is, I think they’re a huge part of the budget because they’re some of the most important things we can spend on. So to make sure that seniors have a safety net beneath them so they can buy food, buy shelter, buy heat and cooling, do the basic things in their retirement years that they need. The Social Security is set up for them. And by the way people paid into that system their entire working lives. And so we need to make sure that that promise is kept. Now, the problem with that is that it’s going to be broke in 11 years. So what do we do to fix it?

(01:47:51)
The most disgusting moment in Joe Biden’s last State of the Union Address, when he stood up and looked at Congress and said, “Can’t we all agree we will not touch Social Security?” And both parties stood up and cheered. Okay. But when it goes broke in 11 years, what are you going to do? What are they going to say to you when they cut your benefits 25% automatically by law? What effect will it have on your life, or your life, or your life to have 25% less of Social Security? It’s impossible. You can’t fix that for you once it’s done. So I think we have to look at a couple of things. We have to look at retirement age, but not retirement age for people in their fifties or sixties or older. For people in their thirties and forties so they have time to prepare, that they’re going to have to retire later.

(01:48:43)
Look, we have a son who’s getting ready to turn 30 in three weeks. If he can’t figure out with 35, 40 years notice about how to plan for his retirement with an older retirement age than the one that exists right now, he’s got bigger problems than that. He got plenty of time to do it, plan for it. You can’t do it to people who are in their fifties, sixties and seventies. They don’t have enough time left, working years left to be able to make that happen. But we need to look at that. We need to look at means tested. This is a great country and a great capitalist society. And for many of us, we’ve been much more successful than we ever could have hoped to have been. And if we’ve been smart about it, we saved some money. And if we’ve got enough savings, that would be considered very well off.

(01:49:38)
We need to look at whether you really need to collect Social Security or not. I know you paid into it, you want your money back. I get it. But you know what? We pay for lots of things for our taxes in this country that we don’t get anything directly back for. We do, because we think… Like I’ve never been on food stamps in my life, thank God. Part of my taxes go to food stamps. Should I say, “Look, I’ve never gotten it, so charge me a little bit less because I’ve never been on food stamps.”? No, because we believe that for people who are so poor in our country, that they can’t afford to eat, that we should provide them with some help to make sure that they do. And that’s one of the sacrifices we make. So for folks like, does Mark Zuckerberg really need to collect Social Security?

(01:50:25)
Warren Buffet needs to collect Social Security. Elon Musk, so he needs to collect. Let’s start there. We can all agree on that and let’s start working our way down from there to a place where we feel like it’s fair. But those are the things we need to do because otherwise what we’re going to do is raise taxes on everybody and that hurts our 30-year-old son who then can’t plan for his retirement in the way he wants to, or buy a home, or buy a car, or save for his children’s education, because we’re taking more money out because we won’t ask anybody else to make any sacrifices. So that’s the way I would deal with it. And lastly, on the overall spending issue, because I think you put your finger on it, that’s really the biggest issue that we have to deal with, but there’s lots of other spending that needs to be curtailed back.

(01:51:11)
I’m tired of having people who talk about this stuff and don’t do it. Remember, Donald Trump eight years ago stood on the stage and said, “I will balance the federal budget in four years and I will do it because I’m a businessman and I’ve always had to balance my budget.” This is coming from the guy who went bankrupt three times in Atlantic City, New Jersey. I want you to think about that for a second. This is back when Atlantic City had a monopoly on gambling except for Nevada, right? It was just Atlantic City and Nevada. He went bankrupt three times in a monopoly. I mean, how stupid do you have to be to go? I mean, look at casinos, who can’t make money running a casino. Everybody makes money. No, not everybody. Donald Trump, this is a guy who said he was going to balance the budget in four years.

(01:52:01)
He added $6 trillion to the national debt in four years. 6 trillion. More than any president in four years in this country’s history. When I became governor of New Jersey, we had an $11 billion deficit on a $29 billion budget. And everybody said I was going to have to raise taxes. And instead what I did was sit down and I cut 836 individual programs into budget and brought the budget into balance. And believe me, those were not popular decisions. But four years later when our unemployment was cut in half, and jobs were growing, and New Jersey was in a more competitive place because I didn’t raise taxes again to fix that problem, people gave me 61% of the vote.

(01:52:48)
So you also got to decide, are you going to do the right thing? Are you going to do the popular thing? I think if you do the right thing, you’ll ultimately be popular, but in the short-term, there will be a lot of people yelling and screaming at you. But we need to get there, because saying yes to everybody for everything is the road to ruin. And it’s that way in your own home or in the national government. So we got to start saying no to some things. All right, I’ll take two more before we all melt in here. Yes, ma’am. Right there.

Hi, Governor Christie. My name is Adriana Mensor. I have a question for you. You were talking earlier about how the minors in Ukraine have been taken by the Russian government. As a president, what is your plan to reunify the million minors that have come through the borders, through our borders in the last three years? Minors that basically had promised like, “Come here. If you are alone, unaccompanied, you are going to be allowed to come into this country.” Now, many of these minors are victims of human trafficking and child labor exploitation. I’m pretty sure you have seen the press releases from the US Department of Labor, how the child labor violations have increased in our country. What is your plan with this crisis?

Sure. First thing is, you’re absolutely right both on the labor violations and on human trafficking. When I was US attorney for seven years, I did more prosecutions of people who were trafficking children into our country and exploiting them in the sex trade and in other trades than any US attorney’s office in the country because I really believed that this was a group of people who had no one to advocate for them. And that if our legal system didn’t stand up for them, regardless of where they came from and how they got here, then we were not the country that we believe we are. And I would take the same approach as president. I’d do three things. First is to instruct every US attorney across the country to aggressively prosecute labor violations and human trafficking violations. To make sure that people who are human trafficking folks, kids, go to jail. And the folks who have the labor violations pay enough that it don’t make any sense to exploit child labor any longer because it will cost you money, not make you money.

(01:55:23)
Secondly, our border needs to be secured in a way that makes sense. So in the first day, I would sign an executive order to send National Guard to the border with this goal, inter tick fentanyl. Then we need to get everybody together in Washington to say, this immigration system is broken, families are being broken apart. There are 8 million unfilled jobs in this country that Americans either won’t do or can’t do, and our economy will not grow unless we get people to fill those jobs. Ronald Reagan, who’s my role model, he addressed immigration when he was president by getting together both sides and forcing both sides to compromise. I don’t know what that compromise is going to look like. I really don’t. But what I know is that when I was governor, I had a democratic legislature every day of my eight years. So I had to learn how to compromise because if I didn’t, I just would’ve been sitting there by myself all the time.

(01:56:26)
As president I’m going to try to do exactly the same thing, which is to say to everybody, we need to get together. We know this is a problem. There’s some thing that Democrats want that I might necessarily agree with. There’s some things that we as Republicans want that Democrats won’t agree with. We’re all going to have to give a little bit. None of us are dictators here and we have to compromise. So I’m not going to sit here today and tell you exactly what I think the compromise will look like. I don’t know. But what I do know is the only person who can make that compromise happen is the President of the United States. And he or she has to be willing to put their political capital on the line like I was talking to in response to his question and be unpopular with some quarters of folks to get something done. We are supposed to have… The country’s an argument, but it’s an argument towards an end, not just a constant argument, an argument to get something done, then move on to the next argument.

(01:57:21)
And that’s the way I would address it. And you’re not going to do it with just one party. You’re going to have to do it with both. That’s the way our system works. And it needs to get fixed. We need to secure it so that we don’t have these drugs coming over our border and killing our young people and our adults. We’ve got to make sure that we fill these 8 million empty jobs in this country to grow our economy. We’ve got to make sure that people don’t come here and are sexually exploited and their labor is exploited, because that’s not the kind of country we are. It’s not the kind of people we are. And we’ve got to make sure that our prosecutors do their jobs and put those people in jail and fine them to an extent that makes it no longer profitable to hire a child and exploit them in a factory or in the fields or any place else.

(01:58:06)
And that if you’re going to bring someone into this country and force them into the sex trade that you are going to go to jail for a long time for doing that to a young man or a young woman who comes into this country seeking freedom. Those are the things we have to do. If we do that, the problem will never be completely fixed, but it will be a hell of a lot better than it is right now. Thanks for your question. It’s great. Yes, ma’am. You’ll be our final question. Hold on. Let me get you a microphone so that… Because if you ask some really great question, they’re going to put you on TV, you’re going to be famous. So I want to make sure they can hear you.

I came from the Lakes region. I love the nature and the wildlife that we have. And I’m worried about the Endangered Species Act. Are you going to protect that and keep us clean? And generally what are you doing for the environment?

Well, let’s start with endangered species. Look, that’s the law of this country that needs to be enforced by the President of the United States and by the other executives who are in charge of it. And I think that it’s part of who we are as a country. Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican was the first one who cared about conservation enough to set up our national park system, to set up protections for the habitat that we have been so lucky to inherit in this country. On the environment as a whole, look, in our state, when I was governor, one of the things that I made sure that we did was to take an all of the above approach on energy and not just talk about it, but actually do it. So imagine in New Jersey when I was governor, we were the second largest solar energy producing state in the country behind Arizona, New Jersey.

(01:59:45)
In New Jersey, the most densely populated state in America. You know how we got 53% of our electricity? Nuclear, nuclear energy. It doesn’t send carbon into the environment. It is one of the cleanest energies that we can have. And it works. If you turn the switch, the light’s going to go on. If you put your air conditioning on, it’s going to work. We need to do that. We need to use oil and gas as well, and we need to develop the alternative energies like solar, like wind and the rest. But we got to do all of it to protect our environment. And we can’t unilaterally disarm our economy either. So I’ll give you an example. In the last 10 years, the United States has lowered our carbon output in this country by a billion tons a year. And that same 10 year period, you know what the Chinese have done? Increased their carbon output by 5 billion tons a year.

(02:00:42)
We’re not going to fix the climate issue by ourselves. Both of the biggest economies in the world have to contribute to it, not just one. And so one of my early agenda items with the Chinese would be to say to them, you want to have a great relationship with us? You got to care about the planet as much as we do. You’ve got to work on this problem as well. And I don’t want to hear anymore that they’re still in their industrial revolution. Please. They’re the second largest economy in the world. They’re not in an industrial revolution anymore. They just want to try to beat us. And I believe in climate change and I believe that human activity contributes to it. I think that’s undeniable. It’s not the only thing that contributes to it, but it does. And it would be illogical to think that it didn’t.

(02:01:28)
So we’re part of this planet. We’re doing things every day that contribute to what happens, both good and bad in the environment. And what we need to do is to make sure that we don’t disarm our economy. But let’s face it, I saw it this month in Georgia. They have opened the first new nuclear plant in 45 years in this country. We need to do that. We need to be able to do that so that we have a reliable grid while we’re developing things like solar and wind that are not yet reliable enough to be able to use as the foundation of our energy future. If we do those things, our environment will get better. And our environment in this country over the last 10 years has gotten better because a lot of the efforts that we made, but let’s not put aspirations ahead of innovation, right? So you can’t force… I love this. California says by 2030, no more gas powered cars. Yet, I saw just a couple of months ago, Governor Newsom in California put out an advisory to everybody saying, “Don’t charge your electric cars tonight. You’ll crash the grid.”

(02:02:41)
Well, how am I supposed to get to work, Governor Newsom, if you made me buy an electric car and I can’t charge it, because the grid is not stable enough because we don’t have enough stable sources to power it, right? So some of this has to be practical is my point. I have no problem with electric cars. I see these Teslas and the other ones all over the place and they seem pretty cool. I’m fine with that. But we can’t have everybody have an electric car until we have an infrastructure that will support you charging it so you can use it. And I remember one woman saying to me, “Why are you against electric cars?” She said, “It makes our environment clean.” And I said, “Well, let me ask you a question. Where do you think the electricity comes from?” And she said, “Well, it’s electricity.” I go, “It’s not like Ben Franklin with the kite and the key.” Right?

(02:03:32)
In most places it’s natural gas or oil, someplace is still even coal that’s generating electricity. If we want to turn every stove into an electric stove, and every house into electric heat, and every car into an electric vehicle, we better have a clean way to create that electricity or else we’re just screwing ourselves anyway. So that’s what I mean about let’s not put aspiration ahead of innovation. We’re going to get there. We always have, but let’s not disarm ourselves so that makes it slower to get there. Let’s arm ourselves so we can get there more quickly. And a billion tons of reduction in CO2 a year for the last 10 years, that’s a real improvement for this country. And we do care about the environment.

(02:04:13)
It was about two or three weeks ago, we were in Colorado and I was looking out where we were at the Rocky Mountains and thinking to myself, imagine what it must’ve been like for Lewis and Clark when they walked through there for the first time and saw what the incredible majesty of this country was. And we can’t have any generation not be able to have a similar experience. No one will have the same experience as Lewis and Clark when it was completely untouched. There were no skis to the ski lifts when Lewis and Clark went out to the Rockies.

(02:04:51)
But I care about the environment because I care about my children and I hope someday to have grandchildren. And if I do, I want them to have a place where they can live and breathe and enjoy this country. But I also want them to be able to have a job, support their families and not run behind the Chinese. Because if the Chinese Communist Party passes us, remember, these are the same people who are throwing people in concentration camps in their country because of the religion they practice. These are the same people who are telling everybody how many children they could have. That’s not the kind of country I want to live in. And I don’t think it’s the one you want to live in either. So I don’t know how the hell I got on the Uyghurs for an environment question, but there you go.

(02:05:38)
First off, let me thank all of you for coming tonight. When I ran the last time, I did a hundred of these in New Hampshire. I don’t know if I’m going to do a hundred this time, I’m older, but I’m going to try to do as many as I possibly can because I want to hear from you about what’s on your mind and what you think. And I want you to hear directly from me. And sometimes you’ll hear from me and you’ll agree with me and sometimes you won’t. That’s okay. The only person I’ve found that I agree with a hundred percent of the time is me. I agree with myself a hundred percent of the time, and I suspect you probably agree with yourself a hundred percent of the time. But everybody else, we disagree some amount. That’s not the test. The test is what’s in your heart.

(02:06:23)
Do you love this country and are you motivated by wanting to make it the greatest place in the world? Are you motivated by wanting to make your family safe, secure, and prosperous? Are you motivated by trying to make sure that you’re going to treat your neighbor like you’d want to be treated? We’ve gotten away from that in this country. We can’t even go to cocktail parties and talk to each other about politics anymore. You know it, you’ve seen it, you’ve felt it, you’ve experienced it. We need to lower the anger. Look, there’s a difference between being a fighter and being perpetually angry. I don’t think anybody would doubt that I’m a fighter, but do I look angry to you? I’m not. Hell man, I’m one of the luckiest people in the world. I’m getting to run for president of the United States in the greatest country the world’s ever known. What do I have to be angry about.

(02:07:21)
And I don’t want you to be angry either. Yes, we can be angry about the injustices both here and in the world and use that anger to try to fix them, not to try to hurt each other. We don’t need to have a leader who cares more, and he said it himself, he said, “If I’m reelected, I will be your retribution.” I don’t want him to be my retribution. And because you know what I know? He’ll only be his retribution, for him. He will go after the people who he thinks wronged him. Not anyone who hasn’t served you well.

(02:08:04)
The era of selfish anger in America needs to come to a close. We need to once again… We need to reject people in political life who want to exploit your anger, poke you a little bit just to make you a little more angry. And then tell them, and I’ll fix it for you. They make you angry. Then they say, “I’ll fix your anger.” That’s a shell game everybody. I don’t have the answer to every problem. And I am not the perfect candidate. But I would argue to you that you’re not going to find a perfect candidate. We’re all human. But what I know is I’ve experienced a lot in my life and I want to bring all of that experience and the passion that I have for this country to the job of President of the United States. And you’ll never have to wonder for a minute what I’m thinking. You’ll know. You will know.

(02:09:14)
And I remember a woman being interviewed after I was campaigning for reelection in 2013 in New Jersey, and she was in a diner in New Jersey. And I went up and talked to her for a little bit and the press was following behind me. And then the press came up after I walked away from her and said, “What do you think of the governor?” And she said, “Well, I never have to wonder what he’s thinking.” Now, I don’t know if that was a compliment or not. I took it as one. But what it was for sure, was a declaration of truth. This is who I am. And I’ll end by telling you this. I was raised by an Irish father and a Sicilian mother. Now, what that means is very early on as the oldest child in that family, I got very good at dispute resolution really early on. This was a family that kind of went at it. And what I learned though, was that passion that my parents taught me.

(02:10:16)
If it’s put to use for something that matters, for something big and important, and that passion could be put to wonderful use, not only for yourself but for other people. I will always bring that passion to this job every day if you give me the chance to do it. And I’ll always listen. And then in the end, you hire me to decide. And that’s the last point. I am not afraid to decide, to set a course for us and for our country and to try to do it the best way I can. And I think if we’re able to do all that together, then when we reach our 250th birthday three years from now, we’ll be able to still say that we’re the greatest country the world has ever known, and that we’re going to leave this great country better for our children and grandchildren that was left for us. That’s my goal as a candidate. That will be my goal as president. And I thank you all for coming tonight, very much. Thank you. Thanks for coming.