Donald Trump 2020 RNC Speech Transcript August 24

Donald Trump: (00:00)
Thank you very much. Thank you.

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Oklahoma loves you Mr. President.

Thank you very much.

Speaker 3: (00:29)
Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years.

Now if you want to really drive them crazy, you say 12 more years.

Speaker 3: (00:47)
12 more years. 12 more years.

Because we caught them doing some really bad things in 2016. Let’s see what happens. We caught them doing some really bad things. We have to be very careful because they’re trying it again with this whole 80 million mail-in ballots that they’re working on, sending them out to people that didn’t ask for them, they didn’t ask, they just get them and it’s not fair and it’s not right and it’s not going to be possible to tabulate in my opinion. It’s just my opinion. We have to be very, very careful, and you have to watch. Every one of you, you have to watch. Because bad things happened last time with the spying on our campaign and that goes to Biden and that goes to Obama and we have to be very, very careful. Have to be very, very careful, and this time they’re trying to do it with the whole Post Office scam. They’ll blame it on the Post Office. You can see them setting it up. Be very careful and watch it very carefully. Because we have to win. This is the most important election in the history of our country. This is the most … For a long period of time, I would say, “Well 2016, how special was that evening? Was that one of the great …” That was one of the great evenings but we have to be very, very careful and we have to win.

Our country is counting on it. This is the biggest, this is it. Our country can go in a horrible, horrible direction or in an even greater direction and before the plague came in from China, that’s where we were going. We were going in a direction like we had never seen. The most successful economy in the history of our country, the best unemployment numbers in history for African-American, Asian-American, Hispanic-American, women, college students, bad students, good students, everybody. If you had a diploma, if you didn’t have a diploma, didn’t matter, you were doing well. Everybody was doing well and we were actually coming together.

You know success brings people together, maybe better than anything else. Success brings people, so many times they say we’re divided. Well we were very divided under President Obama, very divided. People have no idea how divided. They didn’t talk about it as much, they didn’t say it as much, but we were really coming together and I was speaking with Democrats all of a sudden because the success, the markets were at an all-time high and by the way, take a look at what’s happening with the markets. Take a look at your 401(k)s which you probably do every hour. Take a look at your stocks. We’re very close to breaking the record and NASDAQ has already done it. You know NASDAQ has broken the record I think 16 times already during a pandemic. Hopefully we’ll call it the final phase of the pandemic.

Biden the other day said no he’d shut it down. He’d listen to some guy say and he’d shut it down. We just broke a record on jobs, an all-time record. There’s never been three months where we’ve put more people to work, over nine million people, and again, we’re just about ready to break the all-time stock market record. I mean you look at it, we’re just about ready to do it again and what that means is everything else is going to follow. Very small on Wall Street. Everything else is going to be there, the economy is coming up very rapidly, our farmers are doing well. Our farmers are doing well because I got China to give them $28 billion because they were targeted by China. I got the farmers $28 billion, 16 and 12. That’s why. So in spite of the pandemic and our farmers did a great job in supplying food and all the difficulties during this period of time, but we’re getting ready to do things like nobody has ever seen before, but the best way to bring unity is success. Success brings unity and we were there, and then we got hit with the plague but we won’t forget that.

I just want to thank the people of North Carolina because to be honest with you, I felt an obligation to be here. You have a governor is in a total shutdown mood. I guarantee you on November 4 it will all open up, it will be fine like most Southern states. On November 4, you know these Democrat governors, they love shutdown until after the election’s over because they want to make our numbers look as bad as possible for the economy but our numbers are looking so good and frankly I used to say a V and people would say, “Well maybe not. I don’t think so.” Some would say no way. We have a super V, you’re right. It’s now looking like it’s a super V. Our automobile numbers are incredible, both used cars and brand new cars, our manufacturing number is incredible. We’re putting a lot of manufacturing jobs to work that the previous administration said you’d need a magic wand. You’d need a magic wand for manufacturing jobs, I don’t think so. I guess we had the magic wand, that’s all, but again, we’re putting them back, we’re bringing them back. But think of your life just prior to the plague coming in. It was the best it’s ever been. Your state had the best numbers they’ve ever had, ever had, by far, and we had the best employment numbers also.

We were up to 160 million jobs. We were never anywhere near that, and then we had to shut it down. We saved millions and millions of lives. We learned the enemy, we learned all about the invisible enemy, how it affects really people that are older, especially older people, the elderly, but older people with problems with heart and diabetes, with other problems, and we learned and most of the country is right now doing very, very well. They’ve done an incredible job and to have a man sitting on television the other day say, “Oh I’d shut it down. Oh I’d shut it.” Like it’s easy, shut it down. By the way, when you shut it down and we did the exact right thing, we shut it down, then we reopened and that’s what we’re doing now. We’re well into it, but … If we didn’t shut it down at that point, we would have had millions of people dead. Millions of people.

You see the numbers, the job that Mike Pence and the taskforce and all of us together have done has been incredible, what we’ve done, what we’ve achieved, whether it’s ventilators, whether it’s supplying equipment to governors that were totally ill-prepared. Many of the governors were totally ill-prepared. Nobody wants to say that but it’s supposed to work that way, federalist, it’s supposed to work that way. The governors are supposed to do it, and many of them did a fine job and many of them came back well. But most of them didn’t have the equipment that they should have had. Few of them had the ventilators which are very, very complex machines and hard to make and hard to manufacture and expensive and we’re right now making thousands of ventilators a month and we’re sending them, we have all we can use, our whole country, every state. We’re stocked, we’re stocked and I always say and I’ll say it again, there’s never been a person that needed a ventilator that didn’t get a ventilator.

Every single person that’s ever needed a ventilator, with all that you’ve heard with how much they said we didn’t have again, I took over a country whose military was depleted and whose cupboard on this front were bare. The cupboards were bare. We didn’t have anything. We didn’t have a thing. We had very, very little and we did a great job. We haven’t been given … And it’s not for me, it’s for the incredible people, the generals, the admirals, the doctors, the nurses and yet you saw yesterday convalescent plasma, you saw remdesivir. You’ll soon see vaccines pouring out years ahead of what they would have been under a more traditional, let’s use that term because it’s nicer, a more traditional administration where they would have taken years to come up with this stuff. We’re coming up with it like nobody’s ever seen before. The FDA, Dr. Hahn I want to thank him, Alex Azar, I want to thank him. They’ve come with things and done things that have never been done in terms of speed and frankly in terms of quality. If you look at it what we’re doing and what we’re coming up with, drug companies are coming up with vaccines that are … I’ve seen some results already, it’s going to be very, very soon. They’re in Stage III trials. It’s unheard of. We wouldn’t be there for two years if this were a more normal situation.

So I just want to thank everybody for being here and again I felt an obligation to come to North Carolina. It’s been a place that’s been very good to me. You know we won a lot of victories here. I haven’t been doing this that long but I won every chance I had in North Carolina. I even stole a great chief of staff, Mark Meadows, right? I stole him from North Carolina, and he left Congress as a very popular guy. Could have been there for a long time if he wanted and he came in and by the way, you have a fantastic young gentleman going to take his place, he’s a fantastic young guy and he’s going to be a real star in the party. He’s going to be a real star in the party.

So I just want to thank everybody from North Carolina and I do want to show a little bit of a difference because another state that’s been very good to me is Wisconsin and Joe Biden was going to have their convention in Milwaukee and they didn’t go there at all, they didn’t do this. We did this out of respect for your state. We didn’t do this for any other reason other than respect for the state of North Carolina. Because we said we wanted to hold our convention in North Carolina and I think you’re going to remember that frankly on November 3. We wanted to hold our convention in North Carolina. So I did that out of respect, and if you had a governor that would have let us have some people. He actually told me this, we had an arena that holds 19,000 people, it was totally jammed, sold out, every hotel was full, everything, and I called him, he said, “But we have a shutdown going on and according to the rules and regulations …” Now this is 19,000, he did say it. I don’t think he’ll deny it, but he said, “According to the rules and regulations, the most people you’re allowed to have in that room,” meaning that arena, he viewed it as a room, “Is 10 people.”

I say, “So Governor, so I’m at 19,000, you’re at 10. Can we work something in the middle.” It didn’t sound too good, so we really had no choice. It was a terrible thing but I felt so badly because you could have … I mean economic development money, all of the things that happen, but we decided, I was with Ronna, the vice president, everybody, Mark, and we said let’s have our big deal, the roll call, let’s have it right here and let’s do it and I’m going to show up and I’m not going to tell anybody. Until a few minutes ago nobody knew I was coming. Nobody knew I was coming. But what’s more important than the roll call? You’re the ones calling it so what’s more important –

Speaker 4: (12:52)
We love you Mr. President. We love you.

I have to tell you, we’re going to do a lot of things. I’m just going to go over very briefly because we’re going to make a speech on Thursday night, I hope you’re all going to be listening. Because I came in, I’m on Air Force One and Air Force One has more televisions that any plane in history. They’ve got them in closets, they’ve got them on ceilings, floors. They’ve got more … You can’t escape a television, and I turned to CNN and they didn’t have this. They weren’t having it, can you believe it? They didn’t have it. No no, CNN didn’t have our roll call. Then I turned to MSDNC as I call it. MSDNC which is truly, it is a branch of the Democrats. It’s a I wouldn’t say fully owned corporation but it’s certainly a fully controlled or they control them, nobody really knows who’s controlling who but they had it on television. I remember watching it, it was interesting. You see the difference states and we say this and we say that, the great state of Alaska, the great state of Alabama, the great state of North Carolina, the great state of all of them, and it’s very interesting –

… Carolina. The great state of all of them. And it’s very interesting to me. They had theirs on, but they didn’t show it. Instead, they’re showing the scam because they’re trying to show the post office so that when their whole mail-in thing fizzles, they’ll try blaming it on the post office. Okay. So they show in these hearings that are very boring actually and they’re not showing you this either. They weren’t showing this. And Fox had it on, but unfortunately, Fox wasn’t showing it too much because they had the announcers talking, talking, talking. I said, ” I want to hear what they’re saying, the delegates. I want to hear what they’re saying.” So I think we had to switch over to CSPAN or to OAN or somebody. But I wanted to hear them.

But I can promise you a few things. Number one, we will not be taking the word, God, out of The Pledge of Allegiance. Okay. Like they did a number of times at their caucuses, so they took the word God out. I heard it. I was listening and I said, “That’s strange.” It’s sort of weird. You’ve heard it all your life, right? Under God, under God. All of a sudden, those two words are missing. I said, “Oh, he must’ve made a mistake.” Maybe the teleprompter wasn’t working or his book wasn’t working that I have right here. Something wasn’t working. I must admit. But the problem was then the next day I heard it again. And I said, “That’s not a mistake.” And then they immediately went into a mode, “Oh, no, no, no, no. We didn’t mean that. No, no. We didn’t say if for the convention. We didn’t say it.” No, that’s where they’re coming from. That’s where they’re coming from. You can say it or not say it. That is where they’re coming from.

Just like with energy, they don’t want energy. Not working well in Texas, by the way. I just looked at a poll. And by the way, it just came out that we have received 51% in the big and very important Rasmussen poll, and my numbers actually went up during the Democratic National Convention, 51%. So, think of it.

Audience: (16:10)
Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years.

Thank you.

Audience: (16:14)
Four more years.

I love this state.

Audience: (16:14)
Four more years.

Think of it-

Audience: (16:14)
Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years. Four more years.

Thank you.

Audience: (16:14)
Four more years.

I love this state. I like this place and you’re from all over the place. But this has been a good one for me. No, but think of it, so we’re at 51% in Rasmussen. Do you read about it? Do you hear about it?. You don’t hear about it. They give you these suppression polls, where they do registered voters instead of most likely. It’s supposed to be likely, likely. In other words, how about you, you’re likely to vote. But how about you, you’re registered, but I’m not voting. But see, under their plan where they send these ballots, you don’t have to want to vote. You get the ballot and then they have harvesting. They get guys to go, “Do you want to vote?” “No, not really, but I have a ballot.” “All right, good. Who’s it for?” “Sleepy Joe Biden.” “Now put it here, sign. Okay. Could I have it?” And they’ll take it.

In fact, harvesting is illegal in your state. They wanted to put a Republican, a fine man, a pastor, they wanted to put them in jail because he harvested. Now they want to make harvesting legal all of a sudden. They’ll put him in jail as a Republican, right? If he was a Democrat, they wouldn’t even be thinking about it. In California, they do the same thing. No repercussion. In North Carolina, you had a fine pastor, a fine man, and they got him on harvesting and they wanted to put them in jail. And now they want to make it all so that everybody can harvest because they know it’s not a good thing.

So people that don’t want to vote are going to be sitting there, there’ll be making them … If you talk about 80 million ballots, it’s 80 million, it could even be higher than that. I used to say 51 million, now it’s 80 million. They said, “Sir, you’re a little obsolete with the 50.” I said, “All right, what is it?” “80.” I said, “80.” How is it possible? Think of it, they’ll be sending them, they’ll be dumping them in neighborhoods. People are going to be picking them up. They’ll be bribing. They’ll be paying off people to grab some. This is going to be one of the greatest scams. And it’s common sense. This has nothing to do with politics. It’s common sense. Anybody, you don’t have to know politics, they’re going to mail out 80 million ballots. It’s impossible. They have no idea.

Who’s mailing them? Mostly Democrat states and Democrat governors. Well, supposing they don’t mail them to Republican neighborhoods. That means they’re not going to get them. So they’re going to complain and the election’s going to be over. And then they’re going to complain. And then they’ll say, “Oh, well, we didn’t get it. Big deal.” In the meantime, you might lose the election. This is the greatest scam in the history of politics, I think, and I’m talking about beyond our nation. And they act like they’re aggrieved. Like by saying this, we’re saying such a horrible thing. We’re not patriotic by saying this. No, we voted during World War I. We voted at the voting booth during World War II. The pandemic, we’re doing very well and people know how to handle it. Look at the crowds. They’re doing very well. It’s very safe. It’s going to be very safe. If you have an absentee ballot where you request it, we’re all in favor of that. Absentee, like in Florida, they have absentee is good.

But other than that, they’re very, very bad. There’ll be millions of ballots. Take a look at New York, take a look at Virginia, take a look at New Jersey, all different cases. They just had one last night. Now they’re thinking about recalling certain elections that took place with mail-in, and these are small elections that are locally based that are easy to run, not millions, but thousands of ballots, thousands, hundreds of ballots. But these are small, and they can’t control it. They said 23% of the ballots were defective. What does defective mean? It means fraud. It means a lot of things that we won’t get into because I don’t want to be accused. You see all the cameras back there. It’s the fake news. I don’t want to be accused of anything. But what it means is they’re trying to steal the election from the Republicans, that’s what it means. In a very, very nice way, I will tell you they are trying to steal the election just like they did it last time with spying and we caught them, and that included President Obama and that included-

Audience: (20:46)
Spygate.

Let’s be nice. Biden. This could only happen in North Carolina. But that included them and they got caught. And then somebody said, “Well, what are you going to do?” ” Well, we can attack a president.” Oh, I see. If it was me … They say we can’t attack a president. We caught him. We caught him cold and they say, we can’t attack. He was at meetings talking about it. And by the way, this was spying before and after. And I think it’s a disgrace to our country. I think we can never let that happen again. But now they’re doing something that in a certain way is more dangerous because it’s more effective. They spied on my campaign, you know what they found, nothing. But this is big stuff. This is stealing millions of votes. And it’s going to be very hard.

Now we’re in courts all over the country. And hopefully, we have judges that are going to give it a fair call because if they give it a fair call, we’re going to win this election. The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election. We’re going to win this election.

Audience: (21:57)
That’s right.

We’re going to win this election.

Audience: (21:57)
Four more years. Four more years. Four more years.

I’m just saying we cannot have these live, we call them live, some people call them universal, I like the word live, these live mail-in ballots sent to everybody, including mostly people that never asked for them. Think of it. You’re sitting there, you get a ballot. Here’s the bottom line. It was just given that in the polls believe it or not because the polls try and treat us right. That’s why I respect Rasmussen because they did well. A few of the others feel the same way, and they did well last time. Those are the ones that I look at. The ones that did well last time and Rasmussen was very good.

But if you look at it, every single vote that they have, every single vote it’s going to be looked at. A man is sitting, or a woman is sitting, waiting for nothing, watching television, has no enthusiasm. Because on enthusiasm, the polls are saying that I’m up by massive numbers, not just a little. I’m also way up on the economy, by the way, put at the top. Way, way up. But I’m up by massive, and when I say I’m up, I’m talking about we’re up. Okay. So if you could [inaudible 00:23:10].

Audience: (23:10)
We love you.

But I’m up by massive numbers on enthusiasm. So our voters are saying, “I’m very angry about this. I’ll go to the poll directly and vote.” But that vote is the saying, “I don’t care if Biden gets in.” He doesn’t have any enthusiasm. When you go to Ohio, when you go to Wisconsin, when you go to North Carolina, when you go to a lot of states, they have the Trump-Pence sign on every lawn. It’s all over the place, right? It’s all over.

Audience: (23:37)
Indiana wants you.

Indiana too. Indiana is great. Bobby Knight. We love Bobby Knight too. I’ll tell you, we love Bobby Knight and Coach Oates and all of them. They love us. And we love them. Indiana is great. Thank you. But here’s the thing. So if they don’t have any enthusiasm, so you’d say, “Are you going to vote?” “I’m not getting up to vote.” Okay. “I want to watch television instead of vote.” All right. But here’s a ballot. It just got to you. And he opens it. Oh, here’s a ballet. What the hell am I going to do with this thing? And then they have somebody knocking on your door and they’re harvesting. “Hey, have you gotten your ballot?” “Yeah, I have my ballot.” “You going to sign it?” “Well, if you want, I’ll sign it. Here it is. Get out of here.” That’s the most honest way of doing it, and that’s unfair.

That’s unfair because now they’re taking all of that enthusiasm that our party has, and we have tremendous enthusiasm. I think we have record enthusiasm. We have a base the likes of which nobody’s seen, including these people. Wall Street Journal did a fantastic story this weekend, a fantastic cover story this weekend on the base. It’s an incredible base. Everybody here is going to vote everybody in our base. I mean, we have a tremendous base. They don’t. They have no enthusiasm for their candidate. Because frankly, Bernie Sanders, they have much more enthusiasm for him. But Bernie Sanders, excuse me, again, he’s the greatest loser I’ve ever seen. This guy can lose and be so happy. Hillary Clinton, I want to use nice language so I don’t want to a use certain word. It starts with the word S-C. I don’t want to use it because they’ll say he used foul language while in North Carolina. So I won’t do that.

But Bernie Sanders got taken advantage of, is that okay, by Hillary Clinton, but worse by the Democrats this time because of Pocahontas, Elizabeth Warren got out of the campaign one day prior to the Super Tuesday vote, Bernie Sanders would have won every single state because Biden won by a little bit. She didn’t do well, but she took thousands and thousands of votes away and he stayed. If you add just a percentage of those votes back, that means that Bernie would have won easily the nomination. And I’m glad he didn’t because he had much more enthusiasm. And he would have had a base, a much smaller base than ours, but equally, I have to say this, equally as enthusiastic. This base doesn’t like Joe Biden. They don’t like Joe Biden. I think we’re going to get a lot of votes. We did last time. People were surprised. Primarily because of trade because I know how other countries take advantage of us, and I understand that, and that’s something that Bernie Sanders people really feel because I understand trade. I’ve done USMCA now. I got rid of NAFTA, the world’s worst [inaudible 00:26:33].

Audience: (26:31)
Thank you, Mr. President.

China tariffs. I mean, China had the worst year they’ve had in 67 years prior to the plague. The worst year they’ve had in decades and decades and we had the best year we’ve ever had. But we took in billions from China. We never took in 10 cents from China, never took in 10 cents. China for 25 years, and not only Obama, for 25 years China was taken in anywhere between 200 billion with a B and $550 billion from the United States.

I give them all the credit, number one for being smart and outfoxing all of the people that stood here and their representatives, but China, we built China. We helped build. We gave them three, four, $500 billion a year because before that, and before the World Trade Organization and they getting into it, China was flat line. China was … It was after that happened. And then they took advantage of us because we didn’t have people that were smart enough to see. And by the way, Biden would be the worst of all of them because his son took out one and a half billion dollars and he gets fees on one and a half billion, which is millions of dollars a year. Give me a break. China will own our country if this guy gets elected. We can’t let it happen. We can’t let it happen.

Audience: (27:56)
That’s right. Stop that. Drain the swamp.

So, we have a big one coming.

… So we have a big one coming. And just to finish, enthusiasm. So they take the enthusiasm now out of the equation, because they’re going to go knock on everybody’s door. Here, would you sign this? Yeah, I’ll sign it. Nobody knows who the hell is signing it. And they now want to have it where the signature doesn’t have to be verified. That’s right. The signature doesn’t have to be verified. And then they’re going to play the game that we’re not patriotic. What they’re doing is using COVID to steal an election. They’re using COVID to defraud the American people, all of our people, of a fair and free election. And we can’t do that. And don’t let them give you the Post Office stuff. The Postal Service, they do a great job. Lose a lot of money. I’ve said if they charged Amazon and these companies doing that, a couple of dollars more a package, that Amazon has to pay, not the customer.

You know what happened? Post Office would start doing very well, thank you. Amazon dumps all the packages. Why should we deliver it? We’ll let the Post Office do it and lose a fortune. So if they charged Amazon, now of course, he owns the Washington Post. So when I get bad stories in the Washington Post, I wonder why, right? I wonder why. But I just tell it like it is, right? I tell it like it is. We’ve accomplished more. We’ve accomplished more during the first three and a half years of this administration than any president in the history of our country. And I’m not even getting push back. I’ve been saying this for two years, for three years, I used to say for two years, for three years. But we’ve done more, let’s say just about. This way they can’t say, “Well, somebody won a war, or something.” Right? No, no. We’ve accomplished more than just about any administration in the history of our country. We’ve secured our borders.

We’ve built our wall, which will be finished very shortly. We brought back manufacturing jobs. We’ve defeated the entire… Defeated the ISIS caliphate and killed al-Baghdadi. We also killed the greatest, biggest terrorist maybe of them all, Soleimani. We killed Soleimani, right? And al-Baghdadi. We appointed 300 new judges. By the end of the first term, we will have appointed 300. It’s an unheard of number. That’s because president Obama was very nice and he gave me 142 openings. And historically, you get no open. When you become president. First question, you say, “How many judges?” They’ll say, “None, sir.” Because the other previous president, they want to… It’s a very important thing, federal judges.

We will have appointed 300, could be even more than that by the end of the first term. And I sat down, I said, first day, I said, “How many judges do I get to appoint?” They said, “Sir, 142.” I said, “100…” Because you know what? He thought that Hillary was going to win. Right? And the Republicans did not make it easy, let’s say. But if you have enough time, there’s not much anybody can do about it. We ended up with 142 judges. And now we’ve added many, many, and we’re going to end up with 300 and two great Supreme Court justices.

Audience: (31:37)
Yeah. Nice work, Mr. President.

And remember this, I’m saying that I’m… I’m demanding actually, a list. Let Biden put up a list of the judges he’s going to appoint. That he’ll take them out, like I did. I had 25 and we’re going to take it out of that list. And we’re going to be announcing a list over the next couple of weeks with the judges that we had, plus we might add a few more. So you know exactly where we stand. He can’t do it, because he would appoint… It’s not him. He has no choice. The radical left will demand that he appoints super radical, left, wild, crazy justices. Going into the Supreme Court, your American dream will be dead if that happens. It’ll be dead. And by the way, the next president… So I’ve had two. Some presidents have had none. I have had to in a relatively short period of time. But I will tell you that the next one could have two, three, four, and even five.

The next president. This is so important. This is so… Whether you’re talking about life, whether you’re talking about second amendment, whether you’re talking about military, this is so important. We have to do this. We have to win this election. But we brought back manufacturing. We rebuilt our military. We wiped out ISIS. I mean, think of it. When I came, ISIS was all over Iraq. The Prime Minister of Iraq was in last week and he said, “I want to thank you for defeating ISIS.” I said, “Now, are you talking about me or the United States?” “You, because when you came into office, it was a mess. They were all over Iraq and Syria, and you defeated them, sir.” I said, “Good. Tell that to the media, please. Would you do that?” And he said, “I will.” So let’s say he does. But we passed the biggest tax cuts and regulations cuts in the history of our country.

We replaced the worst trade deal ever made, NAFTA, with a great USMCA deal, that’s going to keep our companies here and it’s going to be treating us very nicely. And I wouldn’t say the other two countries were thrilled with it, but they were happy enough. And we did that. And that’s another thing, they said, “You’ll never be able to replace NAFTA. You’ll never be able to get it.” And I got it. We got it through Congress. We fixed a lot of our broken and bad trade deals. We’re getting 40 billion now from Japan. We fixed a horrible deal that was made with South Korea. Remember, that was a Hillary Clinton special. She said, “This will produce 250,000 jobs.” And she was right. Except unfortunately, the jobs went to South Korea, not to us. She said it would produce 250,000 jobs. And it did, to South Korea. And we stood up to China like nobody’s ever stood up. Between the tariffs and the trade deal, which now… Don’t forget, when I made that the ink wasn’t dry before the China virus poured into our country, right?

The ink wasn’t dry. So I view that differently than I would have, because it’s done very well. In the last week they had the largest order of corn, the largest order of soybeans. They are doing things… They’re very smart. A lot of people, because they see my attitude. A lot of people would say, “We’re not going to order.” They do just the opposite. I got a call last week, “Sir…” In fact, Sonny Purdue is here. The great Sonny Purdue, Secretary of Agriculture. There he is. Is that right, Sonny? I got a call. They ordered the largest, it was the largest order of corn in the history of our country. Twice. Twice. The largest order of corn. The largest order of soybeans.

Here’s how smart, somebody else would say, running some country. They’d say, “Well, we’re not going to do business with him. He’s not saying nice things about…” China’s very smart. Instead, they order more corn than we’ve ever thought possible. Right, Sonny? Order more soybeans than we ever thought possible. And now I have farmers calling me up, “Sir, we love China very much. Please don’t be too tough on them.” It makes it very difficult, Sonny, right? We do too good a job sometimes. We’ve achieved American energy independence. And we’re now number one in the world, by far.

And I saw where these phonies, you know they want to end everything we’ve done. They want to end it. They want to go to wind. They don’t even know if they want to go to wind. I think they want to just basically close up our country, because they’ve taken away our strength, but they want to do something. But, there is no such thing. Solar can’t do it. I love solar. It’s all fine. Very, very heavily expensive. Very expensive. But they want to go to other forms of alternative energy. And I think that’s okay, except we don’t have them. And it’s not going to power these massive factories.

Audience: (36:33)
We need hydro!

And hydro, I love. It’s one of my all time favorites. Hydro, I love. I have to tell you. That’s the Great Dams. You don’t see that too much. You know why? The environmentalist say, “You can’t build a dam there.” But now we can, because we’ve done-

Audience: (36:47)
… Yes we can!

We’ve done things that nobody thought were possible. Like example, the Keystone pipeline. We got that approved. The Dakota Access pipeline. They were all bogged down, right? Right? We’ve got things that they said you couldn’t get done. We’re energy independence. And they said, “We want to ban fracking.” No fracking. How do you think they’ll do in Texas, Oklahoma, North Dakota? Louisiana is going to love it. There’s no fracking. There’s basically… They want no fossil fuel whatsoever. Okay? No gas, no oil, no coal. No nothing. Okay.

So they don’t want anything. Now, they’re getting killed. Because a poll just came out in Texas. Texas wasn’t happy. They want no guns. They want no oil and gas. And they want no God. No God. It’s no religion, no guns, no oil and gas. I don’t think you’re going to do too good in Texas. George Washington could come back from the dead and he could choose as his VP candidate, the late great Abraham Lincoln. And you’re not going to win the state of Texas if you have no oil, no guns and no religion. I don’t think so.

Audience: (38:07)
Nice work!

I don’t think so. You’re not going to win too many places. We eliminated Obamacare’s horrible and very unfair individual mandate, which basically knocked out Obamacare. We knocked out Obamacare. We’ve protected your second amendment. So important. We’re protected the second amendment. We’ve cut drug prices, first time in 51 years, we got drug prices down. Now, I’m really doing it. I did a favored nations clause. Meaning, we pay the same price as the lowest country that has the best deal. The companies are going crazy. The drug companies. They’re taking ads on me. I said… I went to Mark Meadows. I said, “Mark, they’re killing me.” They have nothing but cash. Okay? Big pharma, they call it for a reason. There’s nobody that gives the politicians more money than big pharma. Nobody. Not even close. So I said, “Well look, if you’re not going to negotiate a fair deal, we’re going to do a favored nations clause.” To the top people, the biggest guys.

They said, “No, don’t do that, favored nations.” Favored nations, because you know, we have countries out there that are paying a tiny fraction of what our people are expected to pay. So if you have a country, Germany or others, they make… By the way, UK, all of Europe, Canada pays 50%, 5-0. 50% less. In fact, people leave our country, go to Canada, and pick up their drugs and they come back home. Can you believe that? This is the kind of difference. So I said, “No, I want a favored nations clause. I also want a rebate clause.” A rebate, where instead of the money going to the middleman, who have to be the richest people in the world. They get so much. They get more money, frankly, than the drug companies. At least the drug companies make a product. So I wiped out the rebate, where now it goes to people. And I instituted what’s called a favored nations clause.

And it’s very simple. You have that in deals. It’s whatever the lowest price in the world, we’re the biggest purchaser of prescription drugs by far in the world. So whatever the lowest price is that other countries pay. So if you have a country paying 10 cents for a pill and we’re paying $2.50 cents, and it’s not such an exaggeration, believe me, then we get it for 10. So what happens is that doesn’t work. So they’ll go up a little bit. We’ll come way, way down. So I said, “Favored nations. I want to pay what the lowest price is anywhere in the world. We’re the biggest purchaser, we want a favored nations.”

They had a heart attack. And then I signed it. They didn’t believe it. And now what they’re doing is they have ads, millions and millions of dollars worth of ads, that I’ve been horrible to the people because of drugs. And I believe in socialism. Socialism. You know why? Because some of the socialistic countries get the lowest price. So the only thing I have with socialism is I wanted to get their price. Okay. That’s the only thing. Other than that is our country will never be a socialist country.

Audience: (41:15)
Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

So we cut drug crisis. And you could get cuts. You could get cuts.

Audience: (41:25)
USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA! USA!

You could get cuts as much as 50, 60 or 70%, maybe even more than that, on prescription drug prices. And wouldn’t it be a kick… I’ll use this, wouldn’t it be a kick in the ass if I lost and sleepy Joe is president, and this thing kicks in right about soon, right? In 30, 40 days. And people wake up after the election. Boy, Biden’s done a great job. My drug prices just went down by 70%. What a great-

My drug prices just went down by 70%. What a great president he’s been. He’s great. And sleepy Joe would say, I thought about that, but everybody knew about favorite nations, but nobody had the guts to do it. And I’ll tell you, I was called by many politicians, please don’t do it, sir. Please. I said, “why?” They don’t want to tell me why. I know why. Because they’re politicians and they’ve been helped out and I guess we have to understand that too. But the fact is that we signed a favorite nations clause and a rebate clause, and your numbers are going to come down 60, 70%. And I hope you remember that on November 3rd, because nobody but me would ever do it.

The other thing I’ve done aside from very strongly protecting your Second Amendment, which was not easy. That was not easy. And by the way, they will take your guns away as sure as you’re standing or sitting there. They will take your guns away, either that or obliterate the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. You have the right to bear arms, especially when you look at a Portland and you see how weak those Democrats are. The governor, the mayor, how pathetic they let them riot every night. We’re saying, let us come in and solve your problem. We will solve it for you in one hour just like we did in Minneapolis, Minnesota, right? Five nights, six nights, they have to ask us in. Let us come in. We’ll solve your problem.

They’re almost used to it. This is the way our whole country would be if you ever let a thing like this happen, our whole country would be. So we protected your preexisting conditions, very strongly protected… and you don’t hear that. But we very strongly protected your preexisting condition. So we got rid of the horrible individual mandate, which cost everybody a fortune and we strongly protected. Every Republican is sworn to protecting your pre existing conditions. It’s very important. You won’t hear that. You won’t hear that from the fake news. We passed Right to Try. We passed VA Accountability and VA Choice. We mobilized the largest response since the Second World War. We are doing an incredible job on the China virus, but I’m going to talk to you about that Thursday night. Will anybody be listening on Thursday night?

And just very quickly, in the second term among many other things, we’ll continue with our military. We built the strongest military by far. It was depleted. A nice Marine back there. It was depleted like you wouldn’t believe. We have the best jets and rockets and equipment of any kind, tanks. Tanks made in Ohio. Lima. Tanks made in Ohio. So we’re going to create 10 million jobs, I think very easily, in the first 10 months. They want to raise your taxes. All my life I’ve heard as a politician, you like to lower taxes, right? This is the only election where somebody said we’re going to raise your taxes. They’re going to raise your taxes, quadruple your taxes. They’re going to add on to the regulations. There all of these projects that we got started that are great projects, they won’t be able to get built.

So they’re going to raise your taxes. They’re going to raise your regulations, make it impossible to build a highway. It used to take 17 years, 18 years, 20 years, 21 years, long time in some cases, to get approval to build a highway, right? We have it down to two years now, we’re going to have it down to one. And it may get rejected for environmental or safety reasons, but we’re going to know it very quickly. We’re not going to take 17 years. We could name highways. They took forever. End up costing a hundred times more and they’re not as good. Some of them go in circles, I mean, to get to a point. They want to [inaudible 00:03:44]. Let’s spend 37 million to… look, we’ve got to be smart. Got to be smart. We’ve got to win an election. Also, we’re going to create tax credits for companies that bring our jobs back from China and other countries and impose tariffs on countries that take advantage of the United States.

They’ve been taking advantage of us for years and years, and I’ve already done it in certain cases. We have countries that tariff us and we don’t tariff them. So they tariff us. It’s very simple. It’s called reciprocal. They tariff us, we tariff them. We are going to fully fund law enforcement and hire more police. We’re going to go with school choice and we’ve made a lot of progress on school choice for every student in America. We’re going to continue to expand opportunities zones. There has been nothing better. Don’t forget. It was us, us together that got criminal justice reform done. The greatest thing for the black community, African American community. They came and they said, “We can’t believe it. Obama didn’t even try.” And not only that, I got funded, the historically black colleges and universities. I got them funded. They weren’t funded. They were year to year. They didn’t know if they were going to be around for another year and they’d come in to the White House.

And after three years, I said, “Why do you guys keep coming back?” Well, it’s a year to your deal. I said, “That’s not fair. So you have to come back every year.” And we got them longterm financing and longterm funding. Nobody’s done more for the historically black colleges and universities than Donald Trump. Nobody. Nobody’s done more for the African American community. No president has done as much as anybody since, I mean, since, and I say it, since Abraham Lincoln. It’s true. It’s true. Criminal justice reform, opportunity zones with Tim Scott of South Carolina. He’s a great senator, he’s a great gentleman. Tim Scott is fantastic. Opportunities zones. But think of it, criminal justice reform, opportunity zones, the colleges and universities. What we’ve done has been amazing. But the most important thing is prior to the virus, the greatest job numbers in the history of the African American community, the Hispanic community and the Asian, as I said. So I just want to thank everybody. We’re going to get rid of our sanctuary cities as soon as we can so that they don’t protect.

We put NASA back in action. NASA had grass growing through its runway. It had grass growing through the cracks of its runways. It was closed, essentially, just a disaster. Now it’s the number one space center anywhere in the world by far. You saw the ships going up. And for some reason, a lot of rich people like rockets going up. And so we say, let’s lease them our beautiful launching areas and let them send all the rockets, let them pay for it. But we’ll be landing on Mars. We’re going to the moon. We’re go into Mars. We’ll be the first on Mars. Let’s see if that happens. We have to do it. If we hear it’s going to happen. If somebody else is here, you’re probably not. But I just want to, again, thank… I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. You’re incredible warriors. You have incredible strength. You have unbelievable intelligence and patience. It’s a combination of both. I don’t know which is greater, the intelligence or the patience, but let’s assume it’s the intelligence. But I have to tell you, I think we have the greatest base of support anywhere at any time, any election and people are starting to find that out. They found it out in 2016. And I will be honest, this election, I believe we have far greater enthusiasm in this election. And we had a level that was a record because they still don’t believe what happened. They said, “Where are all these people coming from?” Right? People that were great Americans that never voted, because they didn’t like who they were watching or looking. People were great, they didn’t vote. I’ll never forget, a Congressman from Tennessee came up. They do very early voting. Tennessee, a great state. And they had just started voting. And I was in Pennsylvania making a speech.

And he said, “Sir, I don’t know. I can’t speak for anybody, but I’m from Tennessee and I’ve been doing this for a long time.” He said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. People are coming from the valleys and the hilltops. And they’re coming from the cities. They’re coming from all over. I never say, they’re coming out of the rivers. They’re coming along those beautiful war fields that we have. They’re coming from everywhere, sir. I’ve never seen anything like it.” But if other States are like Tennessee, you’re going to win this election. He was the first one to say it. He was the first one. They came from the mountains. They came from everywhere. He said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.” And people they’d be having Trump pins and the hats. These are people that never were political people. They never wore a pin in their life having to do with politics. It’s been an incredible experience for me. It’s been an incredible experience, I think, for everyone. And I’ll tell you what, next year is going to be an incredible… it’s going to be a great, great year.

It’s going to be a year of tremendous success. We’re fighting off this horrible thing that was delivered by China. And it was by China and we’re never going to forget it and I let them know. We’re never going to forget what they did because you know what? We’re going to do great economics [inaudible 00:51:42] best year in the history of your state, but we’re going to do better economically than we did last year. But we can never forget the 175,000 people, which will go up. Remember this though, we saved millions because if we didn’t move and if I didn’t put the ban on highly heavily infected people coming to our nation from China, that everybody told me not to do. Months later, they were saying we shouldn’t… and then they all either apologized or admitted it was right. And Europe. I did Europe too, very early. If we didn’t do that, our numbers would be at a level like you wouldn’t believe.

So, I just want to thank everybody for this incredible support. Be very, very careful. This is going to be, and I really believe this. This is the most important election in the history of our country. Don’t let them take it away from you. Don’t let them take it away. North Carolina, we love you. That’s why I’m here. Thank you very much. Very special people. Thank you. God bless you all. Thank you.

Donald Trump 2020 RNC Speech Transcript August 24

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