- 6/25/2025
Vice President JD Vance speaks at the Ohio Republican Party Dinner in Lima, Ohio.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Who's on my website?
00:02Thank you, thank you.
00:06Please, please, please, thank you all.
00:08Take your seats, please.
00:10It is, I gotta say,
00:12it feels like a great homecoming
00:14to be here in Lima today.
00:16I am so thrilled to be with you all.
00:23Now, I gotta say, my chief of staff,
00:26who's a great guy,
00:28he told me, thank you,
00:30you probably don't know who he is,
00:32but you're celebrating him anyway.
00:34He just got engaged, actually, so I'm very proud of him.
00:36He's doing things the right way, but, you know,
00:38he told me on Monday,
00:40which I guess is yesterday,
00:42he said, you know, sir, I think we might have to cancel
00:44this trip to Lima. And I said,
00:46I'm not canceling this trip to Lima for anything.
00:48I've been looking forward to this for months.
00:50We're not canceling this trip to Lima.
00:56And I don't know if you guys saw it,
00:58there's nothing going on in the news at all
01:00that would justify me canceling this trip to Lima.
01:02Why the hell would we cancel the trip to Lima, Ohio?
01:04It's a boring day in the White House,
01:06as you guys have probably seen.
01:08So, let me offer a few words of appreciation.
01:12So, I could probably thank half the people in this room.
01:16And I'm so thrilled to be with you this evening.
01:18And there are a few by name that I want to call out.
01:22So, first of all,
01:24and I'm not even going to try to pronounce your last name,
01:26I never do, but Alex T., the great chair of the Ohio GOP.
01:30Thank you, Alex, for everything that you do.
01:32I've got to thank, and this is, guys, you should be glad I asked about this.
01:42I thought, because it says here, Senator Tony Schrader.
01:46But I know Tony, and he's not a lowly politician.
01:50He is actually the guy who operates behind the scenes.
01:53So, our great GOP Central Committee man,
01:56and also the chair of the Putnam County GOP, Tony Schrader.
01:59Tony, where are you, man? I love you.
02:06Hey, Tony's been so good to me from the very beginning.
02:09And I'm going to tell a little story here.
02:10That's what I'm going to do.
02:11You guys are going to be stuck here for 45 minutes of me telling stories.
02:14I'm just in such a good mood.
02:15Unfortunately, we've got these cameras back there.
02:18So, I've got to be a little bit careful.
02:20If I say something really stupid, somebody's got to stand up here and stop me
02:24before I embarrass myself in front of national TV here.
02:27But Tony Schrader was, when I decided to run for office the very first time,
02:32it was the Senate race back in Ohio in 2022.
02:36And so, this is sort of early 2021 when I'm going around and giving speeches.
02:40I haven't even declared my candidacy yet.
02:43And Tony Schrader was actually backing somebody else in the primary.
02:46Now, Tony was backing a person who is a very dear friend of mine, Jane Timken.
02:51I don't know if Jane is here, but Jane, hey Jane, how are you?
02:57But that was a hard-fought primary, a bunch of really good candidates.
03:00And eventually, of course, I won that primary and won the race.
03:03But Tony worked harder for me maybe than anybody in all of Northwestern Ohio.
03:09I mean, he knocked on so many doors.
03:11And I remember, Tony, we would have events with volunteers where we would knock on more doors than I thought humanly possible.
03:17And it was all because Putnam County GOP is an incredible organization led by an incredible guy.
03:21So thank you, Tony, for everything that you do.
03:24Of course, no thank you here is complete in Lima, Ohio, without thanking our great Allen County GOP chairman, Keith Cheney, who has an incredible voice.
03:38He was the announcer.
03:40Keith, I think if I had your voice, I would have been vice president earlier than I made it, man.
03:47But, you know, nobody is endowed with perfect gifts here.
03:50And, of course, GOP volunteer Kurt Kaufman.
03:53Kurt, thanks for everything that you do.
03:54We said hello backstage.
03:55Thank you, Kurt.
03:57All right, so I got my thank yous at least by name, at least until I noticed somebody else's face in the crowd here.
04:04But people always ask me what it's like to be vice president of the United States, and I'll tell you a couple stories that illustrate that.
04:10So first of all, I didn't know that the president would make me his vice presidential running mate until literally the morning of the GOP convention.
04:18And if you walk back in time, you remember what happened.
04:21So the Saturday before the GOP convention, the president, I actually flew down to Florida to meet with the president, and we talked.
04:30It was the first time I had ever talked with them explicitly about becoming his running mate.
04:35And he said, you know, I'm not sure what I'm going to do, but it's probably going to be you, so go have fun the next couple of days.
04:41How do you have fun the next couple of days when that's what the president tells you?
04:45And, of course, so that evening he flew up to Pennsylvania to do a rally in Pennsylvania, and that was the famous moment where he turned his head and missed,
04:55I think what would have been one of the great tragedies in American history, not just a tragedy for him personally.
05:01And I really do believe, I'm a person of faith, I imagine most of you are too, I believe the hand of God prevented America from experiencing great national tragedy in that moment.
05:14But, so I called the president that night, it's probably 2 in the morning at this point, I called the president that night.
05:21Remember, I had just met with him that morning, talking about becoming his running mate, and I'm like, sir, how you doing?
05:27And he's like, I'm fine. He's just been shot in the ear, I'm fine. You know, nearly lost his life, but totally fine.
05:33He goes, how's it playing out there? And I'm like, Mr. President, I think it's playing pretty damn well, because remember, he had that photo where he raises the fist iconically,
05:42and I said, I think that photo is going to go down in history as one of the great photos, and of course, I was right about that.
05:48So, the morning of the convention, the morning he announces me to be his nominee, he calls me at around 11.45, and I'm not kidding you, I don't answer the phone.
05:58And I don't know what had happened. We had just landed in Milwaukee, we've got three little kids, you know, it was a hot day, we were trying to get through all the security to get to our hotel room, I don't know what happened.
06:10So, I call him back 15 minutes later, and he answers the phone and he says, J.D., you just missed a very important phone call.
06:21And I said, yes, yes, Mr. President, and he said, I'm going to have to select somebody else now.
06:28And of course, you know, my heart stops, and I think he's actually going to do it, but then he asked me to be his running mate.
06:33He actually talks to my son, and you know, the rest is history, right? The rest is history.
06:38So, that's the first story. The second story that I'll tell you is, we've probably been in the Oval Office for all of ten days.
06:44And I'm sitting there, and we have a phone call with a foreign leader, I won't mention who, and it's a tough phone call.
06:50There are some tough issues that we have to work through with this foreign leader, and he asked me to come sit behind him at the resolute desk so that if I need to say anything, I can just speak directly into the speakerphone.
07:00And it's early in the administration, so there's not a whole lot in the Oval Office yet, and there's this sort of wooden box with a red button sitting on the resolute desk.
07:10And I think to myself, that's probably not a button that you want to press, right?
07:15So we're talking to this foreign leader, and the president looks over at me, puts the foreign leader on mute, and says, this is not going very well, and he presses the red button.
07:27And my eyes get really big, and I'm like, Mr. President, you know, what just happened?
07:34And he looks at me, and he goes, nuclear. Nuclear.
07:41And two minutes later, a guy walks in with a Diet Coke, and he looks back at me, and he says, it wasn't nuclear, it's just the Diet Coke button.
07:47And that's...
07:52So that's the kind of guy, my fellow Republicans, that we have as the President of the United States, a guy who can do a good job, but keep a sense of humor.
08:05And I've learned a ton, even in 130 days, 140 days, however long we've been in office.
08:11I think I've learned more, I've had more on-the-job training than I think any person in the history of having a job for all of about five months.
08:18Because the thing that I've learned about the President of the United States, and I guess I kind of knew this a little bit,
08:24but I've really learned it seeing him interact with foreign leaders, with congressional leaders, and just doing the job of President of the United States,
08:31is what makes the President so successful is he has the best instincts about people of anybody that I've ever seen in my life.
08:38He knows when somebody is selling him a load of BS, he knows when he's making progress, when he needs to cut something off,
08:45he knows when he's dealing with somebody that he can trust, and he knows when he's dealing with somebody that he can't trust.
08:51And I think, if you think about everything that comes across the President's desk, I mean, just on, I guess this is yesterday, on Monday alone,
08:59the President of the United States, of course, we were trying to figure out what we were doing with the Israel-Iran situation.
09:07Of course, we had just launched the wildly successful attack that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facilities in Fordow and elsewhere. Thank you.
09:16But we know the Iranians are going to counterattack, and we're kind of trying to figure out is it going to be a real counterattack,
09:26or is it going to be something more symbolic, more face-saving.
09:30He's dealing with congressional leaders about the one big, beautiful bill that cuts taxes on overtime, cuts taxes for tips.
09:38Thank you. Really, really is the most important generational tax reform that we've had in this country in 30 years,
09:46and also provides billions of dollars to replenish the southern border funding that encourages us and empowers us to kick out the illegal immigrants
09:57and to stop the flow of illegal immigration into our country.
10:05So we're doing all these things, and that's just one Monday at the White House, and there's no person that could possibly, you know, read all the briefing materials,
10:14the tens of thousands of pages of background on all this stuff, but what you need in that Oval Office is you need somebody with good instincts.
10:22You need somebody who can tell when a person is negotiating on behalf of the American people,
10:28and you need somebody who knows when they're negotiating against the interests of the American people.
10:32And I'll tell you, you do not want to be a person in Donald Trump's Oval Office who's negotiating against the interests of the American people
10:39because they'll throw you the hell out and tell you exactly what he's going to do.
10:45And that is what I think makes him an effective president. It's what makes him an effective leader for the American people.
10:56And I will say, I'm obviously extremely biased, but 130 days into this term,
11:01we have got a lot to brag on from the Trump administration and what we're doing in Washington, D.C.
11:06Let me run just a few through a few of the ways in which the Trump administration has been wildly successful.
11:17And let me start with the thing that is, of course, in the news.
11:21And what the president said going back 10 years, if you look at the campaign in 2015 and 2016,
11:27and he said it consistently through his second term, is that he does not want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
11:34It's very simple. It destabilizes the entire region.
11:38It gives this terrible regime leverage over the United States of America.
11:42As the president often jokes with me, everybody in Iran calls the Iranian leader the supreme leader.
11:48That's a pretty amazing title if you think about it.
11:51But he looked at me in the situation room a few days ago and he said,
11:55Mr. Vice President, you don't have to call him the supreme leader, but you would if the guy had a nuclear weapon.
12:00Because the leverage that nuclear weapons give you to destabilize the world, to destroy our economic interests,
12:08to destroy our national security interests, you don't want the worst people in the world to have a nuclear weapon.
12:14So what did the president do? For 60 days, he negotiated aggressively to encourage that Iranian regime to give up those weapons peacefully.
12:22And by the way, he was more than willing to accept a peaceful settlement to that problem.
12:27But again, this comes back to instincts.
12:29When the president realized that there was not going to be a peaceful settlement to that problem,
12:33he sent B-2 bombers and dropped 12 30,000-pound bombs on the worst facility and destroyed that program.
12:48And I think there are a lot of Republicans, by the way, I count myself among them,
12:52who after the past 25 years, they don't want to get involved in another long-term protracted Middle Eastern conflict.
12:58We all saw what happened with Iraq and Afghanistan.
13:01And so what I call the Trump Doctrine is quite simple.
13:04Number one, you articulate a clear American interest, and that's, in this case, that Iran can't have a nuclear weapon.
13:11Number two, you try to aggressively, diplomatically solve that problem.
13:16And number three, when you can't solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it,
13:21and then you get the hell out of there before it ever becomes a protracted conflict.
13:26That is the Trump Doctrine.
13:33And to the Americans who are worried about this becoming a protracted conflict,
13:37I think the president solved that very quickly.
13:39Not only did we destroy the Iranian nuclear program, we did it with zero American casualties.
13:45And that's what happens when you've got strong American leadership.
13:53Now, let me talk to you about something else.
13:55For every month that you've got inflation numbers and jobs numbers and wage numbers coming out,
14:01you know, I'll come into the White House and I'll say that this happened now about five times,
14:06where every, it seems like every economist and every financial journalist in the world says that Donald Trump's policies
14:13are going to lead to higher inflation, they're going to lead to lower jobs, they're going to lead to lower wages.
14:18And for now, five months in a row, every single time we come to the news and it turns out the economists' expectations missed.
14:25Because wages are higher, inflation is lower, and our economy is roaring in a way that it has not in a very, very long time.
14:32That is thanks to good presidential leadership.
14:35And I'll bring it back to instincts because when the president came into office, he said, frankly, what he's been saying for 30 years,
14:44that we have got to stop allowing foreign companies to take advantage and foreign countries to take advantage of the United States of America.
14:52Why, why in God's name would we allow cheap slave labor manufactured stuff from a foreign country to come into our country undercutting the wages and jobs of American workers?
15:07And the reason we allowed that to happen is for 30 years, we had a bipartisan failed consensus that we ought to let cheap plastic garbage come into our country
15:16at the expense of American jobs and the American families who depend on those jobs.
15:21You know what President Trump said? On April the 2nd, he said, if you try to undercut the wages of American workers, if you try to bring in this crap,
15:30if you try to expose the American worker to an economic unfairness that you don't force your own countries to deal with,
15:37we are going to slap a big fat tariff on what you bring into this country.
15:41We're going to penalize you for once. Finally, we had an American president who said, if you want to destroy the wages and the jobs of American workers,
15:50you're going to pay a big fat penalty because of it. And that, I believe, has saved the American economy.
16:02If you want to undercut American steel, you're going to have to pay a tariff. If you want to undercut American autoworkers, you're going to have to pay a tariff.
16:09And all the economists said, well, what this is going to do is going to produce inflation.
16:13And no, what the president said is what it's going to do is one of two things.
16:16Number one, it's going to force a lot of people to move their factories back to the United States of America.
16:21And we've seen more foreign investment in the past 130 days than you've seen in any 130-day period in the history of this country.
16:29Or, he said, what it's going to cause is these foreign countries are going to open up their markets to American manufactured goods.
16:36Because here's the crazy thing. You go to Germany, you go to Japan, you go to South Korea.
16:41Some of these countries, by the way, are very important allies of ours.
16:44But how many American-made automobiles do you see on the streets of these foreign countries?
16:50Very often, zero. But we allow all of these countries to come in and do business on our shores.
16:57Well, the deal is fair trade. If we're going to let you do business in the United States of America, you damn well let us do business in your country.
17:04Because that's how we create prosperity for American workers.
17:09And the final and most important thing, and I think this is the most important issue confronting this country,
17:20and it was certainly the most important issue that was destroying this country over the past four years.
17:25And that is the issue of illegal immigration.
17:27Now, if I had stood here in October of 2024, and you had told me that after 45 days of the Trump administration,
17:36we would have illegal border crossings down between 95 to 99%, I would have said, whoa, whoa, whoa.
17:42I believe the President is very serious about this, and I believe the President is very effective.
17:47But there is no way that we're going to have illegal border crossings down that much.
17:50And I'm happy to report that one and a half months into the Trump administration, we had illegal border crossings down 99%.
17:58It was a radical success, and it happened very quickly.
18:08And I believe, ladies and gentlemen, that that saved the United States of America.
18:12Because we know exactly what the Democrats, not because we had to read their minds, but because Democrats would go out and say
18:19that what they wanted to do with those 20, 25 million illegal aliens is give every single one of them the right to vote.
18:25And turn them into permanent wards of the Democratic Party.
18:29And if we allowed that to happen, if we allowed the Democratic Party to import voters instead of persuade voters,
18:35that would have been the end of American democracy.
18:38You hear the American media say all the time that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.
18:44The threat to the democracy is Democrats importing voters instead of persuading their fellow citizens.
18:50And now we have largely solved that problem.
19:03If you look for the first time in 50 years, the first time in 50 years, we now have net negative illegal immigration.
19:12That means we're deporting more people that are coming in through illegal immigration.
19:16And that is the biggest testament to a change in presidential leadership.
19:22And I was in the Senate when the Democrats were trying to say that the thing that we had to do was pass this ridiculous,
19:31massive new set of laws and new set of amnesties to get control of the American southern border.
19:37And as the president said at the State of the Union just a couple of months ago, it turns out you didn't need a big new law to secure the border.
19:44You just needed a new president of the United States.
19:46So we've done all these things with effective presidential leadership.
19:56And of course, we've got a lot of good guys in Washington, D.C. who are working very hard.
20:01And I want to give a shout out. I don't believe that they're here.
20:04I actually believe that John Huston and Bernie Marino, hopefully they're in Washington, D.C., working on the big, beautiful bill.
20:10They're doing a great job.
20:12And we are lucky in the state of Ohio to have great political leadership across the board.
20:20You know, Bernie, I remember talking to the president about Bernie Marino's candidacy.
20:29And, you know, the president really, I mean, look, Sherrod was a tough candidate.
20:33Sherrod Brown was a tough candidate.
20:35He always did better than national Democrats.
20:38And the president himself was a little skeptical than anybody.
20:42And we had a lot of great candidates running in that race.
20:44The president was skeptical that anybody could beat Sherrod Brown.
20:47But I think what we showed him in the Ohio GOP is that while we had a reputation for a very long time as a purple state or even a blue state,
20:56thanks to the hard work of people, many of whom are in this room, I think Ohio is now solidly red.
21:02It's going to stay red for a very long time.
21:10But you and I know that's not going to come without a lot of hard work.
21:13And I want to talk just a little bit about about what that means, because, look, I am very much a product of this political party of this Ohio GOP.
21:23I would not be where I am without it.
21:25I believe, in fact, the first time that I've driven on 75 and I've got my midi purple tie, Middletown Middies, our colors purple here.
21:33I wore it in honor of the Middletown Middies.
21:36The first time that I've driven on I-75, I'm pretty sure as vice president, was to come to the Lima GOP event here today.
21:43And I think about the number of times.
21:45Thank you, Keith.
21:46The number of times that I've driven up and down Interstate 75 as as a kid when I was working at a tile warehouse to live in tiles to Findlay, Ohio, or or as a there we go.
21:59Or as a Senate candidate who was trying, you know, showing up and speaking to groups of 12 people trying to earn votes.
22:07I think that what is so great about the Ohio GOP is that we really are strong top to bottom.
22:13We've got great candidates running for statewide office.
22:15We've got a lot.
22:16I see a lot of young people here, many of whom are getting involved in politics for the very first time.
22:20And I've got to tell you, I've lived a very blessed life in politics.
22:25The president, he always gives me a little crap about this.
22:28He says, J.D., you came out of nowhere.
22:30You were a senator.
22:31And then all of a sudden you were the vice president of the United States.
22:34I don't think anybody has had that much success in politics except for me.
22:38That's what the president always said.
22:41I was like, thank you, sir.
22:43I guess I'm the second.
22:45He always calls me the second most upwardly mobile politician because he was the first.
22:51He came from no politics to president of the United States.
22:54But the thing is, you don't get people who run for political office without cultivating talent and cultivating the grassroots and actually encouraging people to get involved at every level of government.
23:08There's a lot of important stuff that we're working on at Washington, D.C.
23:12But there's a lot of cool stuff happening right here in Allen County, Ohio.
23:16There's a lot of important stuff that are happening at the statehouse.
23:19And frankly, a lot of the great political leaders of the future are going to learn from the political leaders of today at the Ohio Statehouse or at the federal capital of Washington, D.C.
23:33The first exposure I ever had to politics was actually as a page in the Ohio Senate when I was a student at Ohio State University.
23:41That was the first time I had ever been exposed to the American political system, working for a great state senator by the name of Bob Shuler from southwestern Ohio.
23:49And I'm sure a lot of you remember Bob Shuler.
23:51He was a good guy.
23:52The first person who taught me how to respond to a constituent was Bob Shuler.
23:57The first person who taught me how to write a good letter and research an issue was Bob Shuler.
24:01And my point here is that what you guys are doing is cultivating the people who are going to run this country and lead this country for the generation to come.
24:11So this party is what makes America great.
24:15This party is what makes it possible for us to run good candidates and to win elections in the future.
24:21And I just want to say from the bottom of my heart, this feels like a homecoming because it is, because I wouldn't be here.
24:27I wouldn't be the vice president of the United States without many of the people in this room.
24:31And from the bottom of my heart, I thank you and I love you.
24:34Thank you, thank you.
24:57I should quit while I'm ahead, honestly.
25:01I should just walk out the door now.
25:03I'm not going to do much better than that, I think, but I owe.
25:08That was another crazy thing that happened on January the 20th.
25:11Man.
25:12So I called the president on January the 18th and I said,
25:17Sir, I know the inauguration is very important, but let's be honest.
25:20The vice president is not the most important at the presidential inauguration.
25:23The president is.
25:24So would you be okay if I, you know, put my hand on the Bible, took the oath of office,
25:28and then headed south to attend the national championship game as the vice president of the United States?
25:33Because that's very important.
25:34You know, skip all the inaugural balls.
25:36You know, Usha, who I think all of you have come to love as second lady.
25:40She's doing a great job and I'm proud of her.
25:43You know, I don't know, honestly, how much Usha really wants to wear high heels for nine hours on that day anyway,
25:53so just let us go to the national championship game.
25:55The president was like, no, JD, I can't do that.
25:57You've got to be there.
25:58But to walk you through that day, so we do the inauguration and it's crazy.
26:05You're going from one of it to the next.
26:07And I show up to the very first ball, which was the commander in chief's ball.
26:11And because I've got, you know, you all, every single one of us here has been to a wedding on a Saturday during a very important Ohio State game.
26:19And we love the people who are getting married, but we're also like, why the hell did you have to have your wedding on an Ohio State game?
26:27And you've got the guy, you know, sitting outside the bathroom on his phone or he's got his iPad out.
26:32We've every single one of us has been to a wedding like this.
26:34You all know what I'm talking about.
26:36OK, well, I was that guy because every single one of my buddies was like, you know, we're proud of you for becoming vice president.
26:42But can we get the hell out of here and watch this Ohio State game?
26:45So what we did is that we rented a conference room where they did the commander in chief's ball.
26:50And we actually, you know, we had an open bar.
26:52We turned it into a big party and we had the Ohio State game on.
26:55So I go in there, right, for like 20 minutes.
26:58It was the only 20 minutes that I kind of got to myself.
27:01And I, you know, hung out with my buddies and we watched Ohio State.
27:04And if you remember this game, Ohio State got a massive early lead over Notre Dame, right?
27:09The beginning of the game was very, very good.
27:11So I kind of started to relax a little bit.
27:13It's like, oh, my God, I just got inaugurated vice president.
27:15And the Buckeyes are going to the national championship all in the same day.
27:18This is the best day of my life, right?
27:21It's not going to get much better than this.
27:23And then, you know, we went to a couple of balls.
27:26And then I think it was after the second ball, before the third ball, I was watching on the TV.
27:32And Notre Dame started to catch up a little bit.
27:34If you all watched this game, you remember Notre Dame started to catch up a little bit.
27:37And so I was like, you know what?
27:38I'm going to be late to the third ball.
27:40And I'm going to sit here and watch this game.
27:42Because if Ohio State loses, I'm going to hate myself forever for not having sat here and cheered on the team during these final moments.
27:49Of course, it all worked out.
27:51Ohio State won.
27:52They came to the White House.
27:53I don't know if you saw.
27:54I broke the damn trophy when they came to the White House.
27:56That was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.
28:00I was hoping that all you – no, no, we didn't see that.
28:07We didn't see that, J.D.
28:08No.
28:09All of you are laughing.
28:10Everybody saw it.
28:11But the point is that it was an amazing way to connect the great Buckeye State of Ohio and what was happening.
28:21Because without this state, without this state's GOP in particular, Donald Trump would not have been president the first time.
28:29And we certainly wouldn't have the great Senate majority that we now have for the second administration.
28:33And the President, as you all know, he actually has a very deep affection for the state of Ohio.
28:39Because he was the person who turned Ohio, really, from a purple state to a red state.
28:44I mean, all of you remember this.
28:45I mean, where – is Bob out there?
28:46Is Bob Paduchik out there?
28:47There's Bob Paduchik.
28:48Give it up for Bob Paduchik.
28:50But, you know, back in the day, there was this idea that, you know, the President,
28:58the idea that, you know, all the polls even, right, Bob?
29:02At least all the public polls were saying that the President was going to lose Ohio.
29:05And then he won Ohio by eight points.
29:07And, of course, he won it by a much bigger margin the second and third time around.
29:11But he recognizes that what this state represents is hardworking, patriotic Americans who feel abandoned by the Democratic Party.
29:19And the Republican Party is now the home for people who work hard, who play by the rules,
29:24who want to live in safe communities, and just want a government that looks out for their interests and no one else's interests.
29:30That's what this party is ultimately all about.
29:37Because when I see that wage growth is the highest that it's been for working people in 60 years,
29:44working and middle-class people, the highest wage growth we've seen in this country for 60 years.
29:48When I see those inflation numbers keep on coming in below expectation month after month, those are statistics.
29:55And those are numbers that, of course, we celebrate.
29:57But what I remember is a woman I met on the campaign trail.
30:00And you all are going to hate me, but she was actually from Michigan.
30:02Don't hold it against her.
30:03She's a very sweet, very sweet woman who told me that she was giving up some of the essentials because she was raising her grandkids.
30:14And I know a lot of you probably are involved in your grandkids' lives in a big way.
30:18She was one of these grandparents whose daughter had lost her life to a fentanyl overdose.
30:23That fentanyl overdose brought in, of course, by the fentanyl poison brought in by the Mexican drug cartels.
30:29And she was talking about the ways in which, you know, normally we'd like to have ground beef,
30:34but we're going to cut back on ground beef and just, you know, go without this week.
30:39Or, you know, normally I like to make them eggs in the morning, but we're just going to do toast in the morning because the eggs are a little expensive.
30:45And she walked me through all the ways in which, because she was taking care of kids, she hadn't anticipated.
30:51And because grocery prices were going up so much under the Biden administration that she was struggling financially in a way that she never had in her entire life.
31:01And I thought about the common thread that tied together this woman's suffering to the political leadership in Washington, D.C.
31:08First of all, why was her daughter gone in the first place?
31:11Because our leadership decided that we were going to let illegal Mexican drug cartels bring this poison into our country in the first place.
31:18That was the first way our leadership failed her.
31:20The second way our leadership failed her is with economic policies that made it so unaffordable that she gave up eggs and decided that she was just going to have her grandkids eat toast.
31:31The third way that this country had failed her is because the education system where she just wanted to send her grandkids to learn reading, writing and arithmetic.
31:40She was terrified that they were falling behind, that they were learning, if anything, propaganda from political activists instead of the basics that would help them get ahead in life and eventually have a good career to be able to provide for themselves.
31:55At every step of the way, the previous administration had failed this woman.
32:00And I could see it in her eyes, the American dream, this very idea that the next generation is going to be better than the generation that came before it.
32:08She was losing faith in that American dream.
32:11Now, I haven't talked to that woman since we were elected.
32:14I haven't talked to that woman since the campaign stop where I met her probably seven or eight months ago.
32:19But when I see that energy prices are lower, when I see that illegal immigration is down, when I see that fentanyl overdoses are down,
32:29when I see the president under his leadership were arresting Mexican drug cartel members at record numbers,
32:37what I see is an Ohio Republican Party and a national Republican Party that is fighting successfully for the American dream.
32:45So what I'd ask all of you, when you're going out there and you're knocking on doors, when you're going out there and you're making phone calls,
32:59when you're contributing hard-earned money to political candidates, when you yourself are running, because I know it's not always easy to be a political candidate.
33:06Trust me, in Washington, D.C., they have this thing where I think it means we're number one in Washington, D.C.,
33:12but all the pink-haired people throw up this sign, and I think that means we're number one, right?
33:17I choose to take that as that symbol in Washington.
33:21But all kidding aside, you know, sometimes this job of politics is inspiring, and sometimes it's hard work.
33:36And you take the good work, the inspiring work with the hard work, but I want you to remember that what we're trying to do is create the kind of country
33:45where that woman's grandchildren can grow up and go to a safe school where they get a good education.
33:51We're trying to create the kind of economy where those grandkids, if they work hard and play by the rules,
33:57can provide for their family with a dignified, high-paying job.
34:01We're trying to create the kind of country where that woman knows that her leadership cares more about her and her family
34:07than they do about Mexican drug cartels.
34:09We are trying to create the kind of country where the American dream is alive and well.
34:14We're off to a good start. Thank you for all you've done to help us. God bless you guys.
Recommended
2:42
0:28