Donald Trump speaks at America First Agenda Summit in Washington, DC Transcript

Speaker 1: (00:00)
Very supportive of the America First Agenda.

Speaker 2: (00:02)
America First.

Speaker 3: (00:04)
Movement is alive and well.

Speaker 4: (00:05)
America first message.

Speaker 5: (00:07)
America can be first.

Speaker 6: (00:09)
The contract with America inspired Americans to get involved.

Speaker 7: (00:13)
There is a wave of change that swept across this country.

Speaker 6: (00:16)
Today, the America first agenda ensures that America’s future is America first.

Speaker 8: (00:26)
It is why A, FBI exists. It is vital.

Speaker 9: (00:27)
Stand up, stand up, stand up.

Speaker 10: (00:28)
We’re prepared to be very specific about what we’re doing.

Speaker 11: (00:32)
Economics, energy, school choice, Middle East peace, national security.

Speaker 12: (00:35)
Only America first.

Speaker 13: (00:38)
We are going to keep our promise.

Speaker 14: (00:58)
Introduce to you one of the greatest living Americans, one of the great Americans of both the 20th and 21st centuries, the president that changed the country, the president that saved America. Please help me welcome President Donald J. Trump.

Donald J. Trump: (01:13)
Thank you very much, wow. Thank you. Well, I want to thank everybody and it’s wonderful to see so many friends and very, very familiar faces. It’s a great honor to be with you. I want to begin by thanking the America First Policy Institute, my my have you come a long way for hosting me for today’s remarks and in particular to recognize America First Policy Institute president Brooke Rollins. Brooke, fantastic woman. Another fantastic woman is Linda McMahon, chairwoman, and my friend, Larry Kudlow. When I want to learn about the markets, I call Larry. Thank you, Larry. Thank you very much. We’re honored to be joined as well by House Republican leader and a friend of mine and a good man, Kevin McCarthy. Kevin, thank you. Thank you.

And I see your friend, Steve. You don’t leave without Kevin, right? Two great people. And thank you very much. And also to the many members, I’d introduce you, but you have so many, would be all day, many members of House and Senate, former members of my cabinet and administration, state, local leaders and countless other distinguished guests, thank you all for being here, a real pleasure to be with you.

Just two years ago with the help of many people in this room, we had a booming economic recovery like nobody’s seen before, the strongest and most secure border in US’s history, energy independence, and even energy dominance, historically low gas prices, as you know, no inflation, a fully rebuilt military and a country that was highly respected all over the world by other leaders, by other countries, highly respected.

Very simply, we had made America great again. We made it great again, and we did it by putting workers first, by putting families first and above all, by putting America first. But now our country has been brought to its knees, literally brought to its knees. And who would’ve thought this could happen. Inflation is the highest in 49 years, 9.1% and a lot of people think it’s much higher than that.

Gas prices have reached the highest in the history of our country. We have become a beggar nation groveling to other countries for energy. Millions of illegal aliens are stampeding across our wide open borders, pouring into our country. It’s an invasion. Democrat run cities are setting all time murder records. Our country is being dealt one historic humiliation after another on the world stage.

And at home, our most basic rights and liberties are totally under siege. The American dream is being torn to shreds and we will not have a country left if this economic, social and attack on civilization itself is not quickly reversed. Newt Gingrich, friend of mine who is in our audience told me this morning that our country has not been this week in terms of prestige and relative economics and respect since the civil war.

And yet there is time for us to bring America back from the brink. It’s at the brink, got to bring it back from the brink. We gather today on the verge of a historic midterm election. The American people are poised to reject the failed reign of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer and the radical left in a momentous landslide. This is an incredible opportunity.

This November, the people are going to vote to stop the destruction of our country and they’re going to vote to rescue America’s future. I’m here before you to begin to talk about what we must do to achieve that future. When we win a triumphant victory in 2022, and when a Republican president takes back the White House in 2024, which I strongly believe will happen, there’s a tremendous amount to be done from reviving our economy to liberating our energy, to restoring our standing in the world.

But for this afternoon, I want to speak about some of the core elements of our agenda and in particular, public safety which we have very little. There’s no higher priority than cleaning up our streets, controlling our border, stopping the drugs from pouring in and quickly restoring law and order in America. Under the Democrat rule in Democrat run cities, Democrat run states, and a Democrat run federal government, the criminals have been given free reign more than ever before.

There’s never been a time like this. Our streets are riddled with needles and soaked with the blood of innocent victims. Many of our once great cities from New York to Chicago to LA where the middle class used to flop to live the American dream are now war zones, literal war zones. Every day there are stabbings, rapes, murders and violent assaults of every kind, imaginable. Bloody turf wars rage without mercy.

Parents are worried sick that their kids will get shot on the way to school or on the way back home. Sadists who prey on children are released on bail, but there is no bail and there is no bond. Unique, never happened before. Drugged out lunatic attacked innocent victims at random, roving mobs of thieves walk into the stores and walk out with whatever merchandise they can carry. They’re left alone. Nobody tells them, “Don’t do this, put it back now.”

Homeless encampments are taken over. Every public park and every patch of green space in previously beautiful urban centers and the dangerously deranged roam our streets with impunity. We are living in such a different country for one primary reason. There is no longer respect for the law and there certainly is no order. Our country is now a cesspool of crime.

We have blood, death and suffering on a scale once unthinkable because of the Democrat Party’s effort to destroy and dismantle law enforcement all throughout America. It has to stop and it has to stop now. In Philadelphia, last month, a 73 year old man was walking along the street when he was approached by a band of seven teenagers who attacked him for sport and beat him to death with a traffic cone, beat him like you’ve never seen anyone beaten before, laughing as they bludgeoned a life from their helpless victim, cackling as they left his body on the side of the road dead.

In New York, a 35 year old woman was stalked back to her building by a homeless career criminal. He slipped into her apartment as she opened the door, stabbed her repeatedly as she screamed for help and left her bleeding to death in her own bathtub. Previously, that man had been arrested and released more than half a dozen times. Here in Washington, DC, just a few weeks ago, a hardworking landscaper made the horrible mistake, had the misfortune to blow a few blades of grass into a sitting car and he was bludgeoned, absolutely bludgeoned and shot cold blood at a point blank range, leaving behind a grieving wife and two children. He was a good man, everybody loved him. There’s so many stories I could fill a whole speech with them. I could go on with these stories for months and years.

A pregnant woman murdered outside her home as she unloaded the gifts from her baby shower. A young girl struck in the head with a bullet while driving her family on her 12th birthday. A 61 year old woman burglarized, raped, murdered, and set on fire in her home. A 70 year old woman and a 38 year old daughter viciously stabbed to death by a man who had been arrested for felony arson just eight days prior and was immediately released.

Just last Saturday a man was struck by a car while crossing the street in New York and the driver pulled over and robbed him as he lay unconscious struggling for his life. He probably saw that. So last night he was so badly hurt he was unconscious and he was robbed by the person that hit him with the car, all on tape. Some of these chilling stories are difficult to hear, but the American people need to hear them.

And you have to hear them, especially the politicians in the audience that are going to give us the power to bring our country back and to make our country safe. Murder in our country is up 51%. We must never allow ourselves to grow numb to the violence that is tearing apart the fabric of our nation. It’s time to have the courage to say what needs to be said and to do what needs to be done to keep America safe. We’ve never had a time like this.

We’ve never had anything close to what’s happening right now. We owe it to the victims, we owe it to our families and we owe it to our country to do the right thing. In the Make America Great Again Movement, we believe that every citizen of every background should be able to walk anywhere in this nation at any hour of the day without even a thought of being victimized by violent crime.

If we don’t have safety, we don’t have freedom, we don’t have a country. America first must mean safety first. We have to have safety. Starting with our new majorities in Congress next year and continuing onto the next Republican president, we need an all out effort to defeat violent crime in America and strongly defeat it and be tough and be nasty and be mean, if we have to. Here’s what we must feel to restore public safety.

First, we have to give our police back their authority, resources, power, and prestige. We have to leave our police alone. Every time they do something, they’re afraid they’re going to be destroyed, their pension’s going to be taken away, they’ll be fired, they’ll be put in jail. Let them do their job. Give them back the respect that they deserve.

Our great police know what to do. We have to allow them to do it. We need to return to stop and frisk policies in cities and not shy away from it. I watched as other politicians recently apologized for stop and frisk where cities were safe and they apologized and those cities are no longer safe. So stop and frisk, it works. Do it judiciously, but it works and it’s worked brilliantly.

Take the guns away from the criminals who shouldn’t be having guns. Let the people that have to have guns, that need to have guns, let them have them but take them away from the criminals. If you’re a convicted felon and you have a gun, you are off the streets and you know where you go, the mere concept of defunding the police should never again be stated or even heard. It is so ridiculous and so dangerous.

Likewise, the idea of stripping them of their liability shields, think of that, they’re in trouble. Go out and hire your own lawyer, we’re not going to protect you. We cannot strip them of their liability shield in any way, shape or form. We have to stay with our police officers or we’re never going to have the great officers that we’ve had over the years.

Our police officers are heroes performing a great public service at great personal risk. It’s an unbelievably dangerous job. And by the way, more dangerous today by far, by far than it has ever been. Rare mistakes are made, but we cannot allow every isolated policing mistake to be turned into a national crisis and all power taken away from our police so that people are killed all over the streets of our country.

The radical left’s anti- police narrative is a total lie. Let’s call it the big lie. Have you ever heard that expression before? The big lie. That’s why next year, our new majorities in Congress should vote to strengthen qualified immunity and other protections for our great police officers. They have to become our heroes. They are mine, but some people, they don’t feel that way. They’re going to have to feel that way if we’re going to have a great country and a safe country.

A law enforcement heroes of our time, they do their duty to protect US citizens and to protect everybody, whether it’s our country or other countries coming in to pay their respects to the United States, which they do less and less now because they’re afraid to come in. They see all the stories of safety and the lack of safety. But we must uphold our duty to protect our police officers.

Second, because of the radical Democrats and because of what they’ve done, driving record numbers of officers to resign, retire or quit the police work all together, the new Congress had immediately pass emergency funding to hire and retain tens of thousands more police officers all across our country, have to go in the opposite direction.

I haven’t seen in a long time any bills wanting to be passed where they give the police strength. It’s always where let’s take more away, let’s take more away, let’s take immunity, let’s take everything we can, take their pensions if they speak a little bit too tough, can’t do that anymore. Our country is going to hell and it’s going to hell very fast. It’s a very unsafe place.

We need the largest increase in the hiring of police officers in American history and that’s what this will be. And we’ll get that done. I have no doubt, Kevin, we’ll get that done, Steve, we’ll get that done. To get more police on the streets than ever before walking every beat and with great respect, there should be a squad car on every corner if that’s what it takes to stop the killing.

Again, I don’t want to make this partisan, but every city, every single city is run by Democrats, every single city where it’s in trouble like the kind of trouble we’re talking, it’s run by Democrats and the crazy policies that they put forth. And they can’t believe them. And certainly after all of this time with the bad results, you would say, “Gee, it’s time to make a change.”

But I really believe even a majority of the Democrats would say, because they don’t want to be brutalized, a majority of Democrat voters would say exactly what I’m saying is right. Third, we need a no holds barred national campaign to dismantle gangs and organized street crime in America. During my presidency, we sent tens of thousands of MS 13 gang members back out of our country. We’d either ideally send them out and in some cases they were so bad and so dangerous, we put them in jail because we didn’t trust the other countries to hold them.

Because as you know, other countries very happily send all of their criminals now through our open border into the United States. They’re emptying their jails into the United States, we’re like a dumping ground. We’re not going to allow that to happen. We know where these gangs operate, what streets they control. We even know their names. The police officers know their names. The problem is they’re not allowed to do anything about it and they want to.

We need to get in there immediately, go into every drug den, every stash house, every hideaway and round up the dealers and killers and the gang members and charge them with any and every crime that we find. And there are a lot of them, drug crimes, sex crimes, all sorts of crimes, vicious, vicious, horrible crimes like we’ve really never seen before, certainly not on a scale like this. We’re a war zone.

To lead this effort, a joint violent crime task force composed of the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security should be tasked with destroying these organizations. And the penalties should be very, very severe. If you look at countries throughout the world, the ones that don’t have a drug problem are those that institute a very quick trial, death penalty sentence for drug dealers.

It sounds horrible, doesn’t it? But you know what? That’s the ones that don’t have any problem. It doesn’t take 15 years in court. It goes quickly and you absolutely, you execute a drug dealer and you’ll save 500 lives because they kill on average 500 people. It’s terrible to say, but you take a look at every country in this world that doesn’t have a problem with drugs, they have a very strong death penalty for the people that sell drugs.

If we’re going to stop this scourge, it’s time to get brutally tough on the dealers and traffickers and narcoterrorist cartels who are stealing over 200,000 American lives a year. And that’s a very low number compared to what the real number is. It’s a very… Think of it, you don’t lose that in wars, you don’t lose that in wars. And yes, these drug traffickers should and must receive the death penalty.

And I’ll tell you just from dealing with the heads of other countries, I said to President Xi of China, “Do you have a drug problem? No, no, no. Why do we ask such a question? No.” He almost didn’t know what I was talking about, “No, no.” I said, “Why do you think?” Well, if somebody is selling drugs, they get the quick trial, quick trial. Never forget. What is quick trial? Meaning it goes fast and they get the death penalty.

But when I asked him, I said, “Do you have in any way, no drug problem.” They do have a drug problem. You know what they do? They make drugs and send them into our country. But I had it stopped. That was a drug problem they had. We had it stopped. Now it’s bigger, fentanyl, they make it, most of it and they send it through Mexico through the border and we had it just about stopped and now the border as you know is just a horrible situation.

But you look at Singapore, you look at other countries where they have the death penalty, they have no drug problem whatsoever. And if we did that, in one year, even if it was not strong, because it’s never going to be quite like China, I would say. What do you think Kevin? Do you think it will ever be like… I don’t think so.

No matter what we do, no matter how tough we get, it won’t be quite… You know what a quick trial is, right? Two hours. That’s what I… Not two years, not 20 years. No, we’re not going to have that. But just by the mere fact that you have that, immediately drug dealing would go down and deaths would go down by at least 50%, 5-0, 5-0. If the radical Democrat politicians at the state local levels refuse to protect public safety and instead turns criminals loose to prey upon the innocent, then the federal government will have no choice but to step in, not wait for the governors anymore. I was mandated, “Wait for the governors,” but sometimes I couldn’t do that. I was watching too many things happen in Minnesota, Minneapolis, what happened if we didn’t send in the national guard? They wouldn’t have a city left.

… happened if we didn’t send in the National Guard. They wouldn’t have a city left. But you have to wait for the governors in theory. We shouldn’t be doing that anymore. If a governor wants to have vast numbers of people killed and riots and all of the problems that we have, we’re not going to wait any longer. We’re going to pass legislation where we can immediately go in and help those people that are under siege and they have governors that don’t know what they’re doing.

Under these circumstances, the federal government has the right. Really, they have the right to do what they want to do but we can’t do that. We can’t give that. It’s a duty for us to use every tool, every authority and constitutional power at our disposal to defend the citizens of our country. If we have a weak, foolish and stupid governor that is allowing the kind of things that you saw to take place, we have to be able to go in and we have to be able to clean out the mess. And it has to be cleaned out quickly, strongly. It has to go very fast.

Just last week, a man tried to stab a sitting member of Congress running for governor of New York, Lee Zeldin, good man, good person. And under the New York State policies, the attacker was released within hours on cashless bail. And according to a study reported last week in the Wall Street Journal, a majority of murders in Baltimore are committed by suspects who should rightfully be in prison but are instead roaming free under democrat rule, almost all democrat rule. Amazing, isn’t it? The next Congress and the next president should crack down on this insanity and crack down very, very hard and very, very quickly. The civil liberties of people, the safety of law abiding Americans cannot be violated by weak mayors and cowardly governors or people that just don’t know what they’re doing. Because you’d actually say, “Look. These are smart people. They don’t get there without being intelligent people. They must know.” The only other thing you could say is they hate our country. And I don’t know. It’s hard to believe they hate our country but a lot of people say they hate our country. It’s the only reason they’d allow things like this to happen.

Because just from a common sense standpoint, how can you allow it to happen? And just look at these statistics, how bad it becomes. Where there are radical and racist prosecutors denying citizens the full protection of the laws, those offices need to be investigated by the federal government and their systematic violations of civil rights has to be taken care of.

And where there is a true and total breakdown of law and order where citizens’ most basic rights have been violated, then the federal government can and should send the National Guard to restore order and secure the peace without having to wait for the approval of some government that thinks it’s politically incorrect to call them in. When governors refuse to protect their people, we need to bring in what’s necessary anyway. We have to go beyond the governor.

Another 60 people were shot – Think of this. It’s not even possible – were shot in Chicago over the weekend. In Afghanistan for 18 months, not one of our soldiers was killed and they had that number of people shot in Chicago over the weekend. Think of it. And he died by the way, and he died. When that many are shot, a lot are going to die and this is constant in Chicago. And this cannot go on anymore. Every other approach has been considered and tried and they’ve tried the weak approach. They’ve been trying it for years and really trying it over the last couple of years and it’s not working. It’s time to go a different direction and only one option remains. The next president needs to send the National Guard to the most dangerous neighborhoods in Chicago until safety can be successfully restored, which can happen very, very quickly.

Fifth, we have to take back our streets and public spaces from the homeless, the drug addicted and the dangerously deranged. What’s happened to our cities? Look at San Francisco, such a beautiful city and today people don’t even look at the beauty. They just want to try and make it to their office or their home. Less than two weeks ago, a beloved NASCAR star, great, great star, Bobby East was stabbed to death out of nowhere. Out of nowhere, this man showed up out of nowhere by a homeless man as he filled up his car. Bobby was filling up his car at a gas station and this man viciously attacked him in California, killed him.

Days earlier, an Olympian in woman’s volleyball, great player, was attacked by a homeless man as she was walked down the street and brutally hit in the face with a metal club almost causing her death and very close to causing blindness. No civilized society turns over its public spaces to be dominated by the drug addicts or the homeless no matter what the reason may be. If liberals think it’s somehow compassionate, let them invite the homeless to camp in their backyards, soil their property, attack their families and use drugs where they’re children are trying to play. Let them try it. Let them try it.

Letting people live in the street of a major city, or anywhere for that matter, with needles, drugs, squalor is not good for anybody. For the good of everyone involved, the homeless need to go to shelters. The long-term mentally ill need to go to institutions and the un-housed drug addicts need to go to rehab or, if necessary, an appropriate jail. They’ve taken over our cities, so many of our cities. It’s at a level that nobody can even believe. But wherever they go, surrendering our parks and sidewalks to people that in many cases are crazed, very sick, it’s just not an option. Look, we have a problem. This is a big problem. How do you handle these hundreds of thousands of people getting worse all the time? Hundreds of thousands. It would take years to build hospitals and housing facilities to take care of them, okay? Let’s put that out. I did very well in the real estate business. It takes a long time to build houses and housing, years and years.

Right now they’re putting homeless in super luxury hotels, the best hotels in the world. Paying more money than they’re charging for wealthy people who would have usually stayed there. They pay more money. Thousands and thousands of dollars a night. And even at that, the owners of the hotels are unhappy because wealthy people aren’t staying there anymore. They don’t want to stay there. With all of that, they don’t want to stay there. I fought very hard and very successfully in stopping tents being built on DC public property, very hard.

Every time I drive through the streets of our beautiful DC with the most beautiful monuments, everything so beautiful and then I’d see a cluster of tents and others. And I’d see it happening and I’d send people out immediately. Secret Service, by the way, did a phenomenal job. I’d send people out immediately to get rid of those tents before… When you have five or six or eight, but when you have hundreds of them and even thousands of them, very hard to do it. It comes too late. But coming in today for the first time since I left Washington DC, it is not recognizable what’s happened. What’s happened? They have tents with homeless and others all over I think the most beautiful public spaces anywhere in the world. I don’t care. I look at canyons. I could look at oceans. I think the most beautiful public spaces in the world, they don’t look beautiful now. Who is going to want to come to Washington DC? And perhaps even more importantly when a foreign leader comes and they have meetings here, it leaves such a bad impression. They go home and say, “What kind of a country has the United States turned into?” And you don’t think that gets around?

You have to see what I saw today coming in. The streets were dirty. They were littered with papers, main highway, main roads coming in, the main roads that we all take. They had more bottles and cigarettes and everything you could imagine, paper of all kinds from all places lying along the roads. That’s without the tents. And then you look at the tents and the homeless and you say, “What’s happening to this great bastion.” Perhaps some people will not like hearing this. But the only way you’re going to remove the hundreds of thousands of people, and maybe throughout our nation millions of people we’re talking about, and help make our cities clean, safe and beautiful again is open up large parcels of inexpensive land in the outer reaches of the cities. Bring medical professionals including doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, drug rehab specialists, build permanent bathrooms and other facilities. Make them good. Make them hard but build them fast and create thousands and thousands of high quality tents which can be done in one day. One day. You have to move people out.

Now, some people say, “Oh, that’s so horrible.” No. What’s horrible is what’s happening now. Because now they’re in tents but most of them aren’t even tents that function. But we have to do it because you can put up a tent in one day. It would be two years, three years, long time if you’re going to build housing that would take care of the kind of numbers that we’re talking. We’re talking about hundreds of thousands and probably millions of people. It will be the ambition of these people and all of us to get their life back on track, leave the tent city and be back into the mainstream of society which is where they want to be. It’s a great thing.

Now, the media will go out and say, “Oh, Trump wants to build tents.” No, no. I want to take care of the people because nothing could be as bad as what’s happening to them right now. And at the same time, I want to save our cities because you’re going to have a time when nobody will be here anymore. Nobody will come here. Nobody will come to New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or any of our cities to build millions of units of housing or hold homeless people in luxury hotels, which of course take a fortune for the government, and have no medical or rehab professionals available. There are none available. It’s fruitless just like setting up a blue ribbon committee stuffed with publicity seeking socialites. I know them all, and dilettantes. I know them all. To handle the coyotes, the caravans, the very tough drug dealers and human traffickers, it’s fruitless. They set up blue ribbon committees. Everyone calls, “Oh, could I be on a blue ribbon committee headed up by Missus Vanderbilt.”

To empower local communities to deal with these challenges, the next Congress should pass a landmark package of public health, public safety and mental healthcare reforms. Cleaner streets are safer streets and I will be happy to help campaign for any of those bills. And I can you speaking for Kevin and Steve and all of the Congressmen and women in the room and the Senators in the room of which we have many, I think we’ll have no trouble getting votes for that, cleaning up our cities and cleaning up our countries and making it safer by a lot. We must restore the ago-old right to self-defense. We have to be able to defend ourselves.

We’ve all heard the story of the bodega worker on the nightshift in New York who was violently assaulted. Violent, it was on camera, on tape, three different directions by a man attempting to steal a bag of potato chips. When he stabbed the man in self-defense after being really roughed up and beat up, punched in the face and the bodega worker was charged with murder. But thankfully after a lot of pressure, those charges have been dropped. They’ve been dropped. Amazing. But the message sent by jailing this man was that if you’re attacked, you must lie down as an act of sacrifice and let yourself be pummeled and beaten to death to uphold the left’s vision of reimagining public safety. Their vision is sick. The federal government needs to aggressively protect the right to self-defense in every jurisdiction where it is now under threat. It has to. If necessary, Congress should pass legislation spurring the Biden administration to act. I don’t know how they can say no to it but they’ll find a way. And we should also have concealed carry reciprocity. Number seven, federal, state and local governments should aggressively enforce existing statutes to stop the perverted sexualization of minor children. You have the statutes. The society that refuses to protect its children is a society that soon will not be able to protect anybody. This is a hallmark of cultural and social decay against which we should fight back very hard and very soon. We don’t have time to wait years to do this. The sickos who are pushing sexual content in kindergartens or providing puberty blockers to young children who have no idea what a puberty blocker is – Neither do I by the way. Neither do most of the people in the audience as you smile. Let’s just say they’re not good – are not just engaged in acts of depravity. In many cases, they are breaking the law and they should be held fully accountable.

And by the way, we should not allow men to play in women’s sports. So crazy. So it just shows you what these political geniuses, I have all these consultants, all these great brain… “Sir, don’t say that. It’s very controversial.” That’s not written down anywhere. I just said, “This might be a good time.” So, they said, “Don’t do it,” and that gets the biggest hand I’ve every heard. No, it’s crazy. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. I tell the story of the great swimmer, great female swimmer, wonderful woman, beautiful woman. She’s been swimming for many years. She wants to break the world record and she’s at the pool and she wants to break it by an eighth of a second, that’s like fast. And she’s going to do it. She’s getting ready and she looks down. She sees all people she’s been competing with for years because they rise to the top. And she looks over here and she sees people. But then she looks and she – They call this. They say this – sees somebody with a man’s body. That’s what they do. They call it. I said, “You think it’s okay to say that.” That’s actually the expression they’re using. They’ll change that soon, so I have to do it quickly. I have to say it because they’re going to change it.

And you know the guy. He was named female athlete of the year. Did you know that? It’s true. He was just named female. We’re not dealing with things that are so easy here, Newt. This is a difficult, crazy world. You’d almost say, “Is the world going crazy,” because 99% of the things I’m saying are common sense. But she looks over and sees her friends down there and then she looks and this guy is massive. He’s got a wingspan. He’s got arms that are 30 feet long. And I always say, “And she was seriously injured during the meet because he swam so fast that he gave her major wind burn as he went by her.” And she didn’t break the record but he broke the record that day. You know what the number was? 38 seconds. So, she wanted to break it by an eighth of a second and he broke it by 38 seconds.

Or the weightlifter, I think it was 218 pounds. That’s a lot. I can’t lift it. I don’t know who can. Any of our ex-Trump people? They’re all Trump people. Kevin’s saying he can lift it. I don’t know about that, Kevin, but that’s a lot, 218 pounds. And she got over that weight and she was going to break it. They put a half an ounce here, half, a little tiny ring on top of these big barbells, dumbbells, and they go and she’d go in like this. She’s got to break it. Stood for 11 years. And her mother and father are screaming, “You got it. You got it, darling. I’m so proud of my girl.” She couldn’t do it.

And then this guy comes along. He’s named Alice and he looks at the weight, world record, world record. We could have put another couple of hundred pounds on, I think he would have lifted it. It’s so disrespectful to women and they say it’s politically incorrect. It’s so disrespectful to women, so horrible, so unfair. It’s so unfair and I’ll tell you what. If I were ever, I’d be the greatest woman’s basketball coach in history because I don’t like Lebron James. I like Michael Jordan much better but I’d go up to Lebron James. It doesn’t matter. I’d say, “Lebron, did you ever have any desire to be a woman? Because what I’d love you to do is star on my team that I’m building up.” I will have the greatest team in history. They will never lose. Nobody will come within 70 points of this team. No, we have to change that and we have to make it okay to talk about it. You know the young lady I was talking about is afraid to talk about it. She’s shunned and she’s canceled when she talks about it. This is crazy. Right, Kellyanne? I see my Kellyanne. I love Kellyanne. I love Kellyanne. Finally to secure our country, we have to secure our borders and there’s never been anything like what’s taking place at our border. Our open borders are a gaping wound allowing drugs, gangs, child traffickers, human smugglers and tens of thousands of dangerous criminals to pour into our country. That’s every week when you hear tens of. That’s every week. Because I really believe the number. You know you’ve heard three million, four million. You saw the head of homeland security the other day say that our border’s secure. I said, “You see? The democrats are all about disinformation.” Some people say misinformation. I like disinformation slightly better but they mean pretty much the same thing. They will say something and you’re supposed to believe it, like Russia, Russia, Russia. Trump is an agent of Russia. If they kept saying it, I might even start believing it some day. No. What they do is they say this stuff and it’s happening now with the January 6th, they say stuff and they think you’re going to believe it. It’s a serious, it is a horrible, horrible thing but he said our border is secure. And I actually, the wonders of Tivo, I turned it back to hear it again because I couldn’t believe.

And he did say that. He said, “Our borders are secure.” I believe we’ll take in 15 million people not four million people and we have no idea who’s coming in but I do know they’re emptying their jails. They’re getting rid… and last week, we had 141. Most people don’t know there are many more countries than that. But last week, we had 141 countries represented by people that came into our country illegally. We don’t know who they are, where they’re from. We know nothing about them but they say that I got a lot of things right. They say, “Trump called it all right.” Everything I’ve said has turned out to be true. Many of these people that are coming in will cause trouble for our country the likes of which you have no idea, terrorism and other things, like sending in people into our country that will cause problems for us for decades to come and problems like perhaps you’ve never even seen before, that kind of level.

When we regain the majority, we need to use the purse strings to prohibit even one dime from being spent to implement Joe Biden’s open borders agenda. We have to have it stopped and to force him to deport the illegal aliens that he is now refusing to deport. Now, you know he’s not going to do that, so we do have to wait to a certain extent. The guys can do a fantastic job and they can stop things from happening but it’s going to be very hard for them to change that. They’re not going to do it. I think it would be actually easier. I think we’d be doing them a favor politically. We’re actually helping them politically if they ever did but they’re not going to do it, so we do have to do a great job in 2024 and it think we will…

We do have to do a great job in 2024, and I think we will do it. It’s interesting. When I campaigned in ’16, the border was a big deal. I talked about it constantly and I won. Then in 2020, I couldn’t talk about the border. Do you know why? Because I did such a good job there was nothing to talk about. It’s true. I said, “I can’t talk about it.” I complained. I said, “I did too good a job.” I did too good a job. That’s like obsolescence.

You know a windshield wiper? For those of you, I used to drive cars. I haven’t been driving too many lately. But for those of you that complain, you buy a windshield wiper, right? It lasts for one year. Then it doesn’t work anymore. You can’t see. You got to get another one. They could make the wiper good for a hundred years, but they want planned obsolescence. The same thing is happening. The exact same thing is happening.

We have to be able to close up those borders and we have to be able to send many of the people back. Many of those people have to be sent back. There are a lot of bad ones. So we have to send them back. So I don’t know how Kevin is going to handle that. I don’t know how the Senate is going to handle that. Steve, you’re going to have to help. All of the people are going to have to help, but you still need somebody in the White House or it’s not going to get done. It can’t be done. You need help. I think that help will be forthcoming. I think it’s going to be a lot sooner than people think. Very important. Republicans should be laying the groundwork for this today. We need to stand and fight and demand that real border security, real border security, strong border security be included in the spending bill this September.

Now, I went to Mexico and I said, “You have to give us 28,000 soldiers to protect our border.” The president who I really like, he’s a socialist, but that’s okay. I like him a lot. He likes me. I like him. Can you believe this? I got along with him great. But he laughed at me when I suggested, I said, “No, no, you have to do it.”

So then he sent his representative to deal with us and everybody in the State Department laughed at me. They all said, “They’re not going to do this.” I said, “Here’s what you do. Give me a list of your 10 top things.” I said this to all of the people, ICE, Border Patrol, everybody, and the State Department. “Give me a list of the top 10 things you need from Mexico, and I’ll get them all.” They said, “No way, no way, sir.”

There was a woman in the State Department who was really a good woman. She was there 25 years. She dealt with Mexico pretty much exclusively, “Sir. They will never do this. We’ve been after this for many years, decades.” I say, “How much you want to bet? They’ll do it.” She said, “You can’t do it.” I asked for all of the things, Remain in Mexico. Little thing, Remain in Mexico. People think that’s easy. It wasn’t easy to get, but we had all of the different things we needed. I asked for 28,000 soldiers. Then we had eight other things which were just equally as obnoxious to ask for. I said, “So what do you think?” She said, “You’re wasting your time, sir, but that’s okay. I’d like to watch.” I said, “Fine.” So the head man came in, the top representative of the country came in and I asked him for these 10 things and he was laughing. “Of course, we wouldn’t do that. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to give you soldiers to protect your border?”

I said, “Yeah, you have to do that because they’re pouring through in Mexico. You have to do that. We want 28,000 soldiers. That’s the exact number we need.” “We will not do that under any circumstances.” I said, “All right, then I’m going to sign this piece of paper, and on Monday morning,” this was a Thursday evening. “On Monday morning, there will be tariffs imposed of 25% on every single item sold from Mexico into our country. It goes into effect on Monday morning at 8:00.”

That means all of the cars because as you know, over the years, not with me, but over the years they stole 32% of our automobile business. Think of it. They manufacture 32, they took 32% out of our country. I said, “All of those cars, everything that you sell into this country, 25%.” He said, “I’d like to come back in five minutes.” He came back in five minutes. “President, we would be honored to give you all 10 of those things.”

We got all 10, we got all 10, we got everything. We got 28,000 soldiers free of charge, no cost. They did a fantastic job. This was during the construction of the wall. It’s one of the ways we had the best numbers in recorded history, but Mexico was great. You have to be able to ask people for things. The woman at the State Department said, “I’ve never seen anything like it. I cannot believe it.” She was a good woman, but it’s just one of those things.

The next Republican president must immediately implement every aspect of the Trump agenda that achieved the most secure border in history, including Remain in Mexico, Safe Third Agreement. You know what that is? Asylum restrictions, enhanced, rapid deportation initiatives. I got all of these things and they gave them up. They gave them up. Newt, can you believe it? Yes, you can. He’s saying, “Yes, I can.” They gave them all up. Think of it, Remain in Mexico.

In other words, you cannot come into the country. You have to remain in Mexico until we check you out. If you’re not a murderer, a criminal, if there’s some reason why you can legally, then we take you in. Other than that, you remain in Mexico, back to where you came from, the country that you came from and that’s it. It was hard to get, but I got it pretty quickly, like in about 10 minutes. They couldn’t believe it and that’s it. We had a great border and people weren’t pouring in.

Now we have people remain in the United States, and come back for your trial in four years. Nobody ever comes back. Only the really stupid people come back. I think it’s about 1% come back. It’s the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. We should pass a law enacting these reforms permanently. They have to be permanent. Under our administration, we built hundreds of miles of border wall. Hundreds. In fact, we completely finished our original wall plan, completely done. We were so proud of it. Despite two and a half years of Democrat inspired lawsuits, I won them all. Then some people came to me, “We need more wall.” I said, “Where do you need it?” “We need it in other areas.” It wasn’t originally planned. “Well, let’s go and let’s see, we can get it done.” Then we had the catastrophe of the election. We had it almost finished. It was a catastrophe, that election, a disgrace to our country. But three weeks, would’ve been done. It would’ve been completed, all of the additional wall. But as you know, they didn’t want to build the wall. They didn’t want to build the wall.

That’s when I started to think that maybe they really do want to have these borders open so everybody can invade our country. The border was the best and safest in US recorded history. They have turned it into the worst in the history of our country, but probably the worst in the history of the world. That includes third world countries because no third world country would have millions and millions of people. I don’t care how desolate, how poor, they wouldn’t have millions and millions of people pouring into their country. There has never been a border like this in history.

What they’re doing to this country, they’re poisoning our country. They’re poisoning our country. Remember what I said, “We’re going to pay a big price over the years to come to repair the damage Joe Biden has done.” It’s also going to be necessary to fund the largest ever increase in the number of new ICE offices. You know how tough they are? These are tough Patriots. I know some of the people in these rows here, and I can tell you, none of you want that job, not even the governor. Hello, Governor. None of you want that job.

They walk into a nest of MS-13, MS-13, doesn’t like guns as much as knives. They like to hurt people and take a long time to do it. A gun is too quick. They took two 16-year-old girls walking home from school and they cut their skin off and they died. They both died. They did it with knives. The ICE officers will run into a nest of MS-13, the meanest of all gang members, the meanest. The Hell’s Angels are the nicest people in the world by comparison. They’re really nice. They’re high society. They cut and they cut. These people will go into a nest and they’ll run in and the fists start going, and they always win.

They’re tough. They love our country and they are totally disrespected by foolish Democrats that have no idea. We’ve taken thousands of them, thousands and thousands of these gang members, we’ve taken them out and we’ve brought them back to their countries. We were having a hard time because when I first came in, I think an important story. They said, “Sir, you can’t take them out because the other countries, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, and many others, they won’t allow us to land our planes in their airports.”

I said, “What do you mean?” The three countries in particular, and Mexico, but three countries. They wouldn’t allow them. So I said, “What do you mean they wouldn’t?” They said, “They don’t want them back, sir. They’re not going to allow.” So every time we’d fly with a plane full of essentially prisoners, gang members, and they’d have planes on the runway. They wouldn’t allow them to run. They wouldn’t accept our buses through the border. They wouldn’t do anything.

I said, “So in other words, they send them here,” because the countries send them here. Very smart. These are very street wise people, these leaders, whether they’re presidents, prime ministers, or dictators, many of them are dictators. Some of them are all three, actually the ones that really have [inaudible 00:57:58]. So what happens is I said, “You mean they wouldn’t take them back?” I said, “That’s not a good situation.”

Under President Obama, they were stymied. They couldn’t do anything. They wouldn’t do anything. They wouldn’t send them back because the country wouldn’t take them back. I said, “How much money do we pay those three countries?” “Sir, we pay them 750 million a year.” It’s a lot of money. I said, “We give them for what?” “Economic development, sir.” In other words, economic development to the head of the country for his homes, et cetera. “So we give $750 million. Inform them that we’re stopping payment immediately.”

We stopped payment to the three countries of $750 million. Then what happened is I got a phone call the next morning from all three, almost at the same time, separate calls, “Sir. They’ve stopped payment of the money that the United States very graciously sends us every month.” I said, “That’s right. You’ll never see that money again because you’re not letting us bring MS-13 and these people that you sent over here illegally, because you sent them, you sent them and I don’t blame you. You don’t want them, but you’re not letting us bring them back.”

They said, “Sir, we would be honored to have them back. Please, send them immediately.” I’ll never forget it. All these guys are sitting around that have been doing this stuff for a long time. Right, Kellyanne? You were in the room, Kellyanne, when they said, “We would be honored to have them back. There’s nothing we would rather have than MS-13 gang members coming back into our country. But please, when will the money start?” So we had a great success with that and we sent thousands, tens of thousands of these people back.

Since Biden has effectively suspended all immigration enforcement, including our horrible, vicious criminals that… He suspended everything. These vicious criminals, there’s no policing of visas and overstays whatsoever. Part of the reason we need to use this dramatic increase in ICE officers will be to ensure the prompt removal of anyone who overstays their visa permits. In particular, it’s very hard when you have 15 million people pour into our country. Many of these are very good people. It’s very hard to say we’re going to remove 15 million people.

Donald J. Trump: (01:00:19)
There’s a thing called humanity. There’s things that we have to think about, but we can get rid of all of the bad ones. The police know almost immediately who the bad ones are and that we could do and that we can do fast and easy. At the same time, we should implement a bond system and a financial penalty so that anyone who comes to our country on a temporary visa and fails to depart, suffers significant financial consequences. We take the money away from the country. We charge the country $25,000 each for each person that comes in illegally.

I had that going. Then we all of a sudden got hit with the China virus. I was all set to do that. I was looking forward to it. Then they said, “There’s a terrible thing happening in China. There are a lot of dead people laying all over the streets. There’s something going on.” Shortly thereafter, I closed it up long before Nancy Pelosi wanted it or any of these people, including Fauci. I used to listen to Fauci and whatever he said, I did the opposite. I came out very good, but we closed it up. Then we had to close it up to Europe, but we would’ve had a much, much worse situation. It’s pretty amazing. Some of the things we’ve done are pretty amazing.

The National Guard can be used to help find and remove criminal illegal aliens from our country. We have to use the National Guard, but we really do. We have to get ICE back. These people are incredible. The Border Patrol, Brandon Judd, the whole group, they’re phenomenal people, and they love the country. They could have an easy job. They don’t have to do anything. They want to do their job. It’s incredible. Sometimes I wonder. I see things where they just want to be allowed to do their job. They don’t want to be told to just stand away and leave us alone and let everybody pour in. They feel horrible. They see the country is being destroyed. These are great people, Border Patrol, ICE, and our police. Of course, our police, all of our law enforcement.

Furthermore, we should significantly increase jail time for repeat immigration violators to make clear that if you flout our immigration laws, you are looking at very hard time and substantial time. This used to be called Kate’s Law. Do you remember that? Named after Kate Steinle who was an incredible, beautiful young woman who was gunned down in San Francisco while standing with her father on a pier. Do you remember that? How can you forget it? In the prime of her life, by an illegal alien, with five prior deportations. He just kept coming back in, kept coming back in. He shot her standing with her father, “Daddy, daddy, something happened.” That was her last words. What a horrible story that was.

So we went to get Kate’s Law passed. I didn’t, but I know a lot of people were working very hard on it. I believe that the radical left Democrats just wouldn’t hear about it. They wouldn’t do anything about it. It’s hard to believe. We have to get a law, Kevin, that’s even tougher than Kate’s Law. I think everyone’s going to go for it now because the one good thing about what’s happened, they’ve performed so badly we’ll be able to get the job done in an even stronger and faster manner than had we not witnessed this carnage that’s going on in our country right now. That’s a good thing.

We’ve also seen too many instances of illegal aliens who cross our borders with a history of sex crimes and sexual offenses at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. Don’t forget, when we clogged up the border, these people weren’t coming. We had the lowest numbers in 42 years on sex traffickers, the human traffickers, mostly women, by the way. Second, children. Last, is men. Last, is men, but mostly women. We had the best numbers that we’ve had in many, many decades because we had the border stopped up. We had a lot of people, including, as I told you, 28,000 Mexican soldiers. They were allowed to be tougher. If our soldiers look at somebody and don’t say, “Good morning, ma’am. How are you?” They want to throw them out of the military. The Mexican soldiers are a little tougher than that.

They’re ultimately not tougher because we have the greatest military in the world. As you know, we got rid of ISIS, 100%. Great people, great soldiers. We have the greatest in the world, but they have to be also allowed to do their job. Just this month, we all heard the horrifying story of an illegal alien in Ohio charged with raping a 10-year-old child. To keep such predators out of our country, we need to pass a dramatic sentencing enhancement for those who are breaking our immigration laws so that anybody with a record of sex crimes will not set foot on our soil. If they do, they’ll be out of here quickly or they’ll be in one of our prisons, which is also very likely.

These are just some of the critical reforms we should race to implement. We have to get it done as soon as we possibly can. Our country and the lives of our people are at stake. We do not have a moment to waste. Our country is in a condition on crime that we’ve never seen before. Not even something that anybody in this audience would think is possible. When you look at the violence of the crimes, dumping a young man in a garbage can and setting him on fire. I dealt with the mother of that young man, and so many other things, you could go on for days and days, the damage that’s been caused.

While I have focused on public safety today, there’s much more to the America first agenda, as you all know very well looking into the future. I look forward to laying out many more details in the weeks and months to come. It’s just the beginning, but it’s also, and we can say this to Brooke, it’s also a policy. You can say conservative. You can say whatever you want. It’s really a policy of common sense. It’s a policy of law and order.

Hello, Alveda. How are you? Thank you. We have to do so much. We need to save our economy and stop the inflation crippling American families. We have to rescue our schools from the Marxist teachers unions. We need to completely demolish the corrupt education bureaucracy and liberate our children. This is the craziest thing to have to say this because who would ever think we have to say this, we need to protect parents’ rights. Can you imagine? You’re up here as… I’m a politician. I don’t like to consider myself, I’m a politician, I guess. I ran for president.

I won, and I won a second time. Did much better the second time. Did a lot better. Did a lot better. Very corrupt. I always say I ran the first time and I won. Then I ran a second time and I did much better. We got millions and millions more votes. You know what? That’s going to be a story for a long time. What a disgrace it was. We may just have to do it again. We have to straighten out our country. We have to straighten out our country. We had it there. We had it. We actually did it twice.

We did it pre COVID and then we did it again. We handed over a stock market that was higher than it was pre COVID. Nobody can even believe it. We actually did it twice. So it’s a very sad thing. All of the things I’m talking about, would’ve been done. We need to get political correctness and left wing race and gender theories out of our military so that America can once again, fight and win wars. We have to be thinking about winning.

We have to abolish all COVID mandates and lockdowns and rehire every patriot who is fired from the military with an apology to them and give them their back pay that they’ve been looking for. It is a great shame of the Pentagon brass that they have not spoken out in defense of their own service members. They have to speak out. To drain the swamp and root out the deep state, we need to make it much easier to fire rogue bureaucrats who are deliberately undermining democracy, or at a minimum just want to keep their jobs. They want to hold onto their jobs.

Congress should pass historic reforms, empowering the president to ensure that any bureaucrat who is corrupt, incompetent, or unnecessary for the job can be told, did you ever hear this? You’re fired? Get out. You’re fired. Have to do it. [inaudible 01:09:49]. Washington will be an entirely different place. Our current appeals process, as an example for these rogue bureaucrats has three stages which take on average five years per stage. In other words, to fire someone who’s doing a bad job, if the government wins will take 15 years under our current system. Think of that, 15 years. Almost all politicians will be long gone before that process even ends.

In addition, we need a great national effort to bring back our supply chains, bring back our factories, which we did a lot of, by the way. We made great trade deals. Great, great. Got rid of NAFTA, the worst trade deal ever made. USMCA is the best. In fact, if you know, Canada and Mexico want to renegotiate the deal and I say to Biden, “Don’t do it. Don’t give up the tariffs on China.” We want to bring back our jobs and secure manufacturing independence. We need to rapidly maximize domestic oil and gas production to restore energy independence and bring the price of gasoline back down to a number that nobody even believes anymore. We had it down to a $1.87. Can you imagine?

To build on my historically successful trade policies that brought back millions of jobs and billions of dollars, we need to strengthen our trade laws, give the president more tools to combat unfair trade, make Section 301 more usable and don’t take the tariff power away from the president. If you do, it’s the greatest gift to China and other countries that you could ever do. For the senators, don’t allow it to happen. It’s before you. If you do that, you’re not a great American. I’ll say it very strongly.

We need to establish a commission to hold China accountable for unleashing the virus upon the world and the damage they’ve caused. We need to restore my administration’s initiative to target and eliminate Chinese espionage, which Joe Biden outrageously abolished. We had it, Huawei couldn’t come in. You know that. They were prohibited from coming in. All of a sudden they were all over the place. It’s crazy what…

… prohibited from coming in. All of a sudden, they’re all over the place. It’s crazy what’s going on. We should once again require able bodied single adults to go to work or train for a job in order to receive welfare and other benefits. You got to work. And we should require proof of citizenship to receive the child. We have to do this to get the child tax credit, to stop subsidizing illegal immigration. We’re bringing illegal immigrants into our country, because they’re paying them a fortune. We’re paying them. In California, the governor wants to pay for their education, their medical. They want to give them more than our vets. They want to give them better benefits than our vets and citizens. We need a bold range of election integrity reforms from beginning, unsecure.

And remember this, the unsecured drop boxes are a disaster. If you give $5,600 plus $1, they put you in jail. $5,600, you can’t give any more than that, they put you in jail. Zuckerberg gave $417 million. So what’s happening? Just an amazing thing.

And we want to ensure universal voter ID, but our goal should be same day voting with only paper ballots. That’s just like France just had. Same day voting, we have plenty of capacity. Same day voting with only paper ballots. That’s it. The military, if it’s based far away only can vote, and people that are legitimately ill can vote by mail in, but that’s a very small category. Same day voting. France just had an election, 55 million people, they voted. At 11 o’clock, it was over. There was no dispute, no nothing. It was all paper. Everything was paper. Same day. They voted in one day. It started early in the morning. It went throughout the day. 55 million, it’s bigger than The States. 55 million, same day voting, all paper. You’re not going to have any more problems.

We need to break the choke hold of Silicon Valley censors and restore free speech in America. These are the choices that America must confront on the road ahead. Right now, these next few years, our country will decide whether we are going to allow a corrupt and radical ruling class to snuff out the torch of Liberty, or whether we will resist the forces of decay, and raise that torch higher and prouder than ever, to enlighten and inspire the entire world. We can do that. Together, we’re standing up against-

Audience: (01:14:53)
[inaudible 01:14:53].

Thank you, I think. Together, we’re standing up against some of the most menacing forces and entrenched interests and vicious opponents our people have ever seen or confronted.

A friend of mine recently said that I was the most persecuted person in the history of our country. And then, I started thinking about it, Kellyanne. And I said, “You know what? He may very well be right. He may be right.”

Think of it, we had a Russia, Russia, Russia scam that was covered religiously by the media. A lot of media back there today. It was covered religiously even though the media knew it was fake. They knew it was fake. It turned out to be a concocted fairy tale made up by crooked Hillary Clinton, the Democrats, a sleazeball writer named Christopher Steele, and a coordinated effort with, of all places, Russia. They dealt with Russia on the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax. Then, I had the impeachment hoax number one, impeachment hoax number two, and the Mueller investigation, resulting after two years in a verdict of there was no collusion. Who has been through anything like this, seriously? Certainly no politician and definitely no president.

All of this while I was doing so much as president, including creating the most secure border in American history, recording the largest tax and regulatory cuts in the history of our country. Biggest tax cut ever. Bigger than the Reagan cuts, bigger than anyone, and regulatory, just of equal importance. $1.87 a gallon gasoline. We’re at 5, 6, 7. You going way up. No inflation. Low interest rates. Record growth and real wages. Rebuilding our entire military. We rebuilt the military, gave 85 billion of it to the Taliban. Can you believe that? The historic Abraham Accords bringing peace to the Middle East, it was incredible, and much, much, much more.

Now, we have the January 6th unselect committee of political hacks and thugs. Think of this, these are hacks and thugs. These are the same people that we’ve been dealing with for four years, same people. And it’s the very people who perpetrated the lies that I was an agent of Russia, like Adam Shifty Schiff and others, who were standing before the same microphone, same thing they get out, and they say, “Oh, our country is suffering so badly because…” And he knows the whole thing is a hoax.

I said this the other day, he knew Russia Russia was a hoax. Him, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, the Democrats. And he stood pompously before microphones. His head, as you know, I feel is shaped like a watermelon. He’s a quite unattractive man. Now, see, they’ll get me in trouble for that, Kellyanne, because by saying he’s unattractive, they’ll say, “That’s a horrible thing to say.” But he said slightly worse about me.

But think of this, he knows it’s a hoax. Not a stupid person, an evil person, a sick person in my opinion. But he goes before these same microphones and he said, “President Donald Trump’s son, Don Junior will go to prison for what he’s done with Russia.” What kind of a man would say that my son… Or put yourself in my son’s position, that he’s going to prison when something that he doesn’t even know about, and that Adam Schiff knows is a hoax and a fairytale and was made up. And The New York Times, Bret Stephens did a piece on it the other day, they admit now that it was a totally made up hoax.

He’s saying my son should go to prison, and he knows it was a hoax. What kind of a human being can do that? Only a sick, evil, very bad human being. And now, I have the same people there, the same people, other than Janey, who’s the worst, and crying Adam Kinzinger. I watched him today. But the same basic people are now going on this.

And it’s so unfair when you see what happened to BLM, when you see what happened to Antifa, when you see what happened to all of the killings that took place all over the country, and then you see what they’re doing to people that in some cases didn’t even enter the building, and you see the way they’re being tortured and handled so horribly. When you see Kamala Harris getting people out on bail that burned down buildings and killed people, and getting them out on bail, and you can’t even get many of these people out on bail, what a sad thing. And something’s going to have to happen, because people are not going to take it much longer. There’s two sets of justice and we don’t have to go into it, but nobody’s ever seen what’s happening today in our country.

And they’re doing the exact same thing with January 6th as they did with all these previous assaults in our country. So where does it stop? Where does it end? It probably doesn’t stop, because despite great outside dangers, our biggest threat in this country remains the sick, sinister and evil people from within.

Crazy Nancy Pelosi. She impeached me twice, only because she had enough votes. And the Democrats do stick together, even though they don’t agree with it, because they’re afraid not to. She impeached me twice, but the Republicans stuck together also. So I’m honored that they did. But think of how sick that is. I got impeached over a phone call. “Congratulations on your win.” Trump gets impeached. This is just a crazy time.

Never forget, everything this corrupt establishment is doing to me is all about preserving their power and control over the American people. They want to damage you in any form, but they really want to damage me, so I can no longer go back to work for you. And I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Yeah. Four more years.

Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s very nice.

Now, it’s a very sad thing, who else could have taken this? Think of it. Nixon went through not even one impeachment. And I think he always regretted that he didn’t fight. But people, it’s been a very interesting period of time. And to me they say, a very successful man came up to me and said, “You’re one of the most successful, could I ask you a question?” “Yeah, what?” “How do you take it? How do you get up in the morning?” I say, “Do I have a choice?” And we take it. But I think the people respect it. I really do. I see that. And I see it maybe now more than ever.

And the problem we have is we have that the fake news media is corrupt and complicit. If they weren’t, we would have a much quicker heel. Because in its own way, they’re the police. They’re the police of honesty and all. And when people don’t trust them, their approval rating is now lower than Congress, which is saying something. Sorry for all you congressman, but that’s the truth. It’s been there for a long time.

But when I first ran, it was very high, and I’m very honored to say that I’ve revealed something that people just didn’t know. But it’s never been like it is now. If I renounced my beliefs, if I agreed to stay silent, if I stayed at home and just took it easy, the persecution of Donald Trump would stop immediately. It would stop. But that’s not what I will do. I can’t do that. The much simpler life.

I have to save our country. I can’t do that because I love our country. And I can’t do that because I love the people of our country. So I can’t do that. I wouldn’t do it. And people don’t want me to do it.

We love you.

Thank you very much.

And I’m not doing this for me, because I had a very luxurious life. I had a very simple life. I had everything. People say, “You sure you want to do this?” But there’s an expression, “The best day of your life is the day before you run for president.” Did you ever hear that expression? And I laughed at it. I said, “Hmm, that may be true, actually.” Right, Kelly? May be true, but I’m doing it for America. And it’s my honor to do it. It’s my great, great honor to do it.

Because if I don’t, our nation is doomed to become another Venezuela or become another Soviet Union. That’s where we’re headed. When you look at what’s happening with the media [inaudible 01:24:40], that’s where we’re headed. Or become a very large scale version of Cuba, where all is lost and there is no hope. But no matter how big or powerful the corrupt radicals that we’re fighting against may be, no matter how menacing they appear, we must never forget this nation does not belong to them. This nation belongs to you, the American people.

We inherit the legacy of generations of American patriots, who gave their sweat, blood, and tears, and even their very lives to build this country into a free and virtuous republic, unlike anything the world has ever known. Our American ancestors stood their ground on Bunker Hill. They starved and suffered at Valley Forge. And they seized victory at Yorktown. So many great, incredible, dangerous, brilliant events. They ventured out and conquered an untamed wilderness. They settled the Great Plains, crossed the Rockies, and kept pushing westward. They raised families. They built a bustling city. They founded thriving industries. They rescued freedom from the evils of fascism and communism. And they planted our flag on the face of the moon. Think of what we’ve done. These courageous men and women gave everything they had to make America into the greatest nation in all of history.

But now, we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation. We are a nation that has the highest inflation in 49 years, and where the stock market just finished the worst first half of the year since 1872. Likewise, we are a nation that has the highest energy cost in its history. We are no longer energy independent or energy dominant, as we were just two short years ago. Think of it. We are a nation that is begging Venezuela and Saudi Arabia and many others for oil. “Please, please, please help us,” Joe Biden says. Yet, we have more liquid gold under our feet than any other nation in the world.

We are a nation that is consumed by the radical left’s Green New Deal. Yet everyone knows that the Green New Deal will lead to the destruction of our country. We are a nation that surrendered in Afghanistan, leaving behind dead soldiers, American citizens, and $85 billion worth of the finest military equipment in the world.

And we are a nation that allowed Russia to devastate a country, Ukraine, killing hundreds of thousands of people. And it will only get worse, and it would never ever, ever have happened if I was your commander in chief, would’ve never happened. And it didn’t. For four years, it didn’t. And China with Taiwan is next.

We’re a nation that has weaponized its law enforcement like never before, against the opposing political party. Nothing’s ever happened like what’s happening now. We’re a nation that no longer has a free and fair press. Fake news is all you get. And they are the true enemy of the people. We are a nation where free speech is no longer allowed, where crime is rampant like never before, where the economy has been collapsing, where more people died of COVID in 2021 than died in 2020. We are a nation that is allowing Iran to build a massive nuclear weapon, which they are incredibly being allowed to do right now, as we speak. Would’ve never happened under President Trump. They were dying to make a deal. They would’ve made a deal with us right after the election, and it would’ve been a good deal. And China is being allowed to use the trillions and trillions of dollars that was taken from us to build a military the likes of which possibly the world has never seen. And this also would never have happened with us.

The level of speed with which they’re going is a very dangerous thing. And just two years ago, we had Iran, China, Russia, and North Korea in check. They weren’t going to do a thing against us, and everyone knows it, especially those leaders.

And perhaps most importantly, we are a nation that is no longer respected or listened to around the world. We are a nation that in many has become a joke. We are a nation that is hostile to liberty and freedom and faith. We are a nation whose economy is floundering, whose stores are not stocked, whose deliveries are not coming, and whose educational system is ranked at the bottom of every list. But we are not going to let this continue.

Two years ago, we had the greatest. There’s never been anything like it. Two years ago. It’s greatness like no one had ever seen. There’s never been anything. We were outlapping China at levels that they never thought possible. China always thought they were going to be the world’s biggest economy by 2018, 2019 at the latest. And they weren’t even close, because we were outdistancing, something that they never thought could happen.

But soon, we will have greatness again. With all my heart and all my soul, I firmly believe that the American people will reject a fate of decline, demoralization, and ultimately a fate of defeat. And I believe that we will come together and choose instead a future of renewal, revival, recovery, resurgence, and in the end, a nation that is more exceptional than it ever was before. I believe we can do that.

America’s story is far from over. And in fact, we are just getting ready for an incredible comeback. A comeback that we have no choice, but to make. We don’t have a choice. We won’t have a country if we don’t make it. Through strength, we will restore our safety. Through hard work, we will rebuild our prosperity. Through courage, we will reclaim our liberty. Through love, we will repair our unity. Through success, we will rediscover our pride. And through unyielding determination together, we will make America stronger, safer, freer, greater, and more glorious than ever before.

Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. It’s been a great honor. Thank you.

Donald Trump speaks at America First Agenda Summit in Washington, DC Transcript

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