Read the full transcript of Vivek Ramaswamy’s speech at Donald Trump’s Madison Square Garden campaign event in New York City, New York on October 27, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
I’ll tell you something, I don’t follow the polls, I don’t follow the pundits, but I follow the energy. And this does not feel like second place energy in here tonight. I had a friend of mine, smart guy, he’s a billionaire, texted me this morning. And he said, “Why the hell are you guys wasting your time in New York City instead of going to a swing state?”
You want to know what I told him? I said, “Welcome to 2024, New York is a swing state.” I got a message for Kamala Harris tonight. We’re feeling the joy in New York City tonight, aren’t we?
And the only celebration bigger than this one right now is going to be on the evening of November 5th, when we send Donald J. Trump back to the White House as your 47th president and commander in chief. And I’m looking around here, there’s only one man who is going to be more happy than everybody else in this room when that happens. And that is going to be a man by the name of Joe Biden, actually.
He is so pissed off about what they did to him. And you know, he’s thinking it, but I’m going to say it. Identity politics never works in America. When you select somebody on the basis of their race and their gender, it always ends up being a disaster.
And I’m actually talking about Tim Walz this time, by the way. It goes both ways. Listen up, guys. Last year, I became the youngest person ever to run for U.S.
president as a Republican. Thank you. I appreciate that.
The Lost Generation
And I’ll tell you something about my generation. We are lost. We are hungry to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Yet we can’t even answer what it means to be an American today.
We’re in the middle of a national identity crisis. Faith in God, patriotism, hard work, family. These things have disappeared, only to be replaced by woke-ism and transgenderism, climatism, COVID-ism, depression, anxiety, fentanyl, suicide. These are symptoms of a deeper void of purpose and meaning in our country.
And right now, we need to step up and fill that void with our own vision. Answer, what does it mean to be an American in the year 2024? It means we believe in the ideals of 1776. It means we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color, that you get ahead in this country not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.
Bringing Meritocracy to America
That’s why we’re done with the woke DEI agenda, bringing in meritocracy to America. It means we believe in the rule of law, and I say this as the kid of legal immigrants to this country. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. And that is why, if we’ve had the largest influx of illegals into this country in American history, we will have the largest mass deportation in American history.
That is not racist or xenophobic. That is what it means to stand for the rule of law in the United States of America. It means we believe in self-governance, that the people we elect to run the government, for God’s sake, ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not unelected bureaucrats in the deep state that are running the show today. So you want another mass deportation?
Let’s get three million federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bureaucracy. That’s the mass deportation that saves the country.
Reviving American Ideals
What does it mean to be American? It means we have elections we can trust and believe in, and that means single-day voting on Election Day as a national holiday with paper ballots and government-issued I.D. to match the voter file.
That’s how we save the country after we win it this time, by voting early. These are not black ideas or white ideas. They are American ideals that set this country into motion. We’re in a war to revive them, and right now we need the commander-in-chief who will lead us to victory.
That is your next president, Donald J. Trump. If you want to seal the border, vote Trump. If you want to restore law and order in this country, vote Trump.
If you want to grow the economy in this country, vote Trump. If you want to revive national pride in this country, vote Trump. If you want to stay out of World War III in this country, vote Trump. If you want to make America great again, vote Trump.
Uniting America
I’m going to give you one more reason to vote Trump, and it’s this. It’s the one with the media in the back. They won’t talk about this. But they know it to be true.
Donald Trump is actually the president who will unite this country, actually, and we don’t talk about that enough. America First includes all Americans, regardless of their race, their gender, or their sexual orientation. Our message to black Americans tonight is this. We want you, what we want for every American.
Safe neighborhoods, good jobs, clean streets. A country where you are judged based on the content of your character, not the color of your skin or your political beliefs. That’s the America we know. Our message to gay Americans tonight is this.
You’re free to marry who you want, if you want, without the government standing in your way. But that doesn’t mean that boys get to compete with girls in girls’ sports, or you do genital mutilation and chemical castration on our children. Our message to every legal immigrant in this country is this. You’re like my parents.
But our message to every illegal immigrant, if you came legally, you get the same American dream that everybody else does. Work hard, get ahead, make contributions to this country, love the nation, and that’s our message to legal immigrants. But our message to every illegal immigrant is also this. We will return you to your country of origin.
Not because you’re all bad people, but because you broke the law, and the United States of America is founded on the rule of law. Our message to my generation, the millennials, is this. You were sold a false bill of goods. You were told you’d become a gender studies major in California.
Somehow that gets you a head start on the American dream when it hasn’t worked out that way. Dead on your shoulders. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Yes, it’s true, you were lied to.
But we can’t just be cynical about our country because this is still the last best hope that we have in the free world. And our message to Gen Z is this. You’re going to be the generation that saves the country. You want to be a rebel, 18 years old?
Stand up on your college campus and call yourself a conservative. Be proud of it. Say you want to get married, have kids, raise a family, and have a good job. That’s how we win in America.
The American Dream
We don’t have to be this nation in decline. We are still on our way up. We’re still that country where we will look our children in the eye and mean it when we tell them, you get ahead in the United States with your own hard work, your own commitment, your own dedication, and that you know what, you are free to speak your mind at every step of the way. That is the American dream.
That is what we are running to. And that is what we get when we send Donald Trump back to the White House this November. Thank you. God bless you. And the great state of New York. And may God bless our United States of America. Thank you. God bless.
