TRANSCRIPT: Charlie Kirk on President Trump’s Early Priorities

Read the full transcript of Charlie Kirk, Founder and CEO, Turning Point USA’s talk titled “Hitting the Ground Running: The Trump Transition and Early Priorities” at Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Phoenix, Arizona. on February 18, 2025,

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

Introduction and Praise for Hillsdale College

CHARLIE KIRK: Thank you everybody, and thank you Dr. Arnn. It’s very kind. I think I might be the first speaker at a National Leadership Seminar. Not to go to college, is that right? Maybe, maybe not. But I’m on pace to complete every single Hillsdale online course, so I think I’m making up for it. And I visit college campuses, so you don’t have to, and I could tell you that if every kid who’s currently in college took the Hillsdale online courses, instead of going to that four-year college, America would be a much better place. Much better place. We might have some ideas now for this new administration.

I just want to brag on Hillsdale. So I wrote a book called The College Scam, and I sent a copy to Dr. Arnn. And I speak extensively about how great Hillsdale is, and how it’s the exception of what I talk about in the book. And I can tell you from first-hand experience, having visited and spoken at, and intimately involved with organizing students on over, well we’re on over 1,000 campuses, I have visited well over 175 of them personally, that there is no place like Hillsdale College.

The students are different. They’re focused on the right things. They are looking up. They’re asking questions that are deeper in nature. They could tell you why they’re there. So I’m visiting, we have our campus tour that’s restarting on Thursday. I’m excited to kind of go back out there. And when I ask these students, I say, why are you here? They’ll immediately give you an answer that is industrial in nature. I’m here to be able to get prepared to get a job. I ask a Hillsdale College student, why are you here? They’ll say, well, I’m here to learn how to be a good citizen. I’m here to learn what it means to be a good person, to grow in character and faith and duty.

And I ask an average college student at Arizona State University, Harvard or the West, down the street here, and let’s just be honest, it pales in comparison to Hillsdale. For many reasons, let’s just be honest. And I asked them, I said, what are you reading? And they could maybe recite one or two books. At Hillsdale College, they know the texts intimately. And it’s not a mistake because it all starts from Dr. Larry Arnn.

Hillsdale was a good college when Dr. Arnn took over. Now it is the best college in America after what Dr. Arnn has done over the last couple of decades. And it has turned into a cultural powerhouse because, as you well know, Hillsdale, there’s a waiting line to get in. The standards keep on getting higher and harder to get in. But the millions of people like myself that are taking these online courses is dramatically improving our chances of restoring a free society.

The Constitution 101 course, that alone should be taught mandatorily to every police officer, firefighter, marine person in the military that has to take an oath for the Constitution. They should learn what they’re taking an oath towards. And no better course does that than the Hillsdale Constitution 101 course.

And the impact is beyond just what is happening in Michigan. It is digital. It is online. And I think it’s even deeper than some of you guys that are on the board even recognize or realize. Because it’s not just how many people are taking these courses. It’s the state legislature. It’s the senators. It’s the Congress people. I’m going to build out that argument in a second because the philosophical basis of this new administration is largely an outgrowth from the hard work that Hillsdale has been doing over the last couple of decades.

So it’s impacted my life. As Dr. Arnn said, I’ve completed over 30 of them. My goal is to take all of them. Yes, even the Euclidean geometry one. And I haven’t done the Jane Austen novels one. Sorry. Have done the Churchill one. It’s good. Okay, thanks. The new totalitarian novels is terrific.

By the way, I highly recommend for any of you that have kids or grandkids to tell them that if they want special privileges to go on a trip or they want phone time or video games, tell them, okay, you have to take a Hillsdale online course. I’m telling what we’re doing at Turning Point USA because they have all these ridiculous federal holidays off. We’re totally restructuring on Juneteenth. We’re not giving those days off. I’ll say, however, we will give you Constitution Day off if you take the Hillsdale online course on Constitution 101. So that is now practiced at Turning Point USA.

Finding Our Way Back to Foundational Roots

But I’ll tell you this, that as you take these courses, you realize how little our own elected leaders know about the country that they’re supposed to be protecting and they’re defending. How little the people that go on TV and start yammering about, you know, we’re all about freedom and liberty and they can’t tell you anything about the structure or the form of U.S. Constitution or what we’re fighting for. And I think we’re finding our way back as a country. I think that we are finding our way back to foundational roots.

And part of that, by the way, is being driven by one of the most unusual forces, which is that this is a bottom-up, youth-led political movement. That if you look at every single demographic in the 2024 election, the one that moved most dramatically and surprisingly were voters under the age of 30.

These are people that traditionally would be card-carrying members of the American left.

Now, Donald Trump did not win the youth vote in every single state. And I will tell you one state he won the youth vote in. I give Dr. Arnn all the credit. He did win the youth vote in Michigan. It’s true. It’s 100% real. Donald Trump won the youth vote in Michigan.

But, all kidding aside, this movement of young people is largely driven by them being raised in the excess of what we call woke-ism. The kind of political correctness, the totalitarian impulses of political correctness. And a resurgence, some of what the work we’ve done at Turning Point. But talking to the next generation about what kind of country do you actually want to live in? Do you want to be able to own a home, get married and have kids? Or do you want to just stare at a screen all day long and be an indentured Russian serf and never own anything for the rest of your life?

And President Trump, to his great credit, ran an asymmetrical political operation that defied every single norm and custom of the political consultant elite over the last 30 years. He did podcasting instead of 60-minute interviews. He went and did TikTok videos instead of New York Times editorial sit-down meetings. He said, no one reads the New York Times, but people do watch TikTok videos.

And in an amazing way, President Donald Trump performed the best that a Republican president has performed with younger voters in over 50 years. 50 years. And this is a bottom-up resurgence where now, of every demographic, they ask, do you approve or disapprove of Donald Trump? Baby boomers, no offense, they’re not really crazy about what’s happening in D.C. Do you know who is the most supportive of what’s happening right now in Washington, D.C.? Voters under 30.

And I’ll tell you, it makes perfect sense, by the way. It’s because they think the entire system, top to bottom, is wretched to the core and is a tumor that must be removed. And we must start from the beginning because it’s not working for them. Because they can’t afford homes and they’re seeing themselves involved in the most suicidal, depressed, anxious, and alcohol-addicted generation in history. And they want the same American dream that their parents and grandparents had.

And so we saw this in this last election. I personally was able to witness it. Our videos did billions of views. We registered tens of thousands of voters here in Arizona where we had over 1,000 full-time people on the ground. We chased well over 200,000 ballots for President Donald Trump. And I just have to brag, Arizona, best-performing swing state, won by 5.5 points. So thank you for all the Arizona faithful that worked so hard. Pretty awesome.

Trump’s Second Term: Bold and Ambitious

But all of that has now led to the ultimate question, which, of course, we all see what President Trump has done in just the last couple of weeks. President Trump is doing so much, the Democrats can’t remember why they’re mad at him. Wait, I’m mad. Why? I don’t know. He’s getting rid of this thing and signing this thing. Full-court offense. Shock and awe. It is time for us to overwhelm the left.

President Trump had a decision to make. He could do the kind of typical second-term thing and wait for his legislative priorities and sign a couple proclamations to rename some post offices. President Donald Trump is going after one of the most ambitious reclamations of a republic in the history of the species. We’ve never seen anything like it.

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Now, of course, we know the executive order is saying there will be no more DEI in federal agencies, no more DEI in our military. We know that he’s doing drill, baby, drill. We know that he’s closing the southern border. And by the way, did you see the recent numbers in just the last couple of days? So it’s worth repeating if you haven’t. In the last couple of days of Joe Biden being president, 11,000 people were crossing a day into our country. Like yesterday? 142 people. That’s too many. Stop applauding. It’s too many. We ought to go to zero. But yes, that’s a 98% decrease, which, by the way, goes to show that open borders is a choice.

You didn’t need a Senate bipartisan bill. You didn’t need some sort of committee. Joe Biden wanted the borders to be open, and he wanted us to have this flow of people from another country. President Donald Trump made a decision, no, actually, a nation is defined by its borders. We’re going to have sovereignty, and if you want to come to this country, come the right way. We’re not going to allow you to just waltz across the Rio Grande Valley and get the same benefits as someone who’s a U.S. passport holder. We’re not going to put up with that anymore. And that is a moral argument at its core.

Now, we know about Bobby Kennedy, who’s now HHS Secretary, Kash Patel, who’s about to be FBI Director, Tulsi Gabbard. My favorite executive order, by the way, is President Trump putting an end to the gender transitions called chemical castration for our kids, preventing the medical butchery that has been happening, all the incredible pardons of pro-life warriors, the recommission of the 1776 commission that Dr. Arnn chaired last time, we’re ending the wars.

And how amazing is this team from Marco Rubio today in Saudi Arabia, J.D. Vance in Munich, that was a 10 out of 10 speech. We got Scott Besson in Ukraine. We got Pete Hegsteth doing PT with the Marines at 5 a.m., where we had that slob Mark Milley who couldn’t even walk up a flight of stairs, or Lloyd Austin that would get out of breath just for standing out of his chair. We got Pete Hegsteth who’s literally running miles with Marines and Navy SEALs before the sun gets up in Poland.

The Core Fight: Challenging the Administrative State

A new administration is here, and all of this is worthy of celebration, but it does not get down to the core of the matter. It does not get down to what is the big and the looming fight. And I’m only able to articulate this because of Hillsdale College, because most people on TV are missing what’s really going on. They’re missing what is going to be the republic-determining element of this entire thing.

And it comes down to three major questions, big questions, that are being debated in the media, but they’re not getting down to the meat of the matter. The first of which is so simple, and you can ask my daughter, who’s two and a half years old, and she knows the answer to this question. How many branches of government are there? Pretty simple. We all know three. Yes, thank you, that’s right, good answer. Yes, there’s seven articles of the Constitution. Yes, we can go through all that. But yes, there’s three branches of government. Oh, easy answer. Is it really that easy? Are there three branches of the government?

What Dr. Arnn has been saying for as long, longer than I have been alive, and has been trying to get the American public to realize and recognize that there has been an invisible, unelected, unknown branch of government that has been operating unconstitutionally post-Woodrow Wilson, and no one has had the moral clarity, the mandate, or the gusto to even mention it, let alone challenge it, let alone deconstruct it.

And we can call that the administrative state. We can call that the shadow government, the deep state. All of those are correct answers, by the way. But understand the profundity of President Donald Trump saying, okay, JFK started USAID by an executive order. I can end USAID by an executive order. You serve at the pleasure of the President. And then they say, well, no, you can’t do that. Hold on, but which branch of the three does that fall under? It falls under Article II, which goes into one of the other more fundamental questions.

You see, what’s been grown like a cancer over the last hundred years is this fourth branch of government. And you can see this in some of the reporting on the Department of Justice and the FBI in particular. Anytime you hear this, you should press pause and tell your friend, nope, nope, and you should cancel this out of your thoughts when they say, oh, that’s an independent agency. No, it’s not, actually. There’s no such thing as an independent agency. Answers to the pleasure of the President, period, end of story. The FBI is not independent.

Now, the President could be as provocative, he’d get impeached if he does this, but it would be perfectly constitutional if he asked the FBI director to look at every pending case the FBI is looking into. Perfectly constitutional. If he looked at everything the DOJ is doing, it’s perfectly constitutional. The DOJ does not operate on a special island.

We have missed that in the Hillsdale Online course, Federalist Papers course, where Alexander Hamilton was going on talking about, well, the Attorney General is kind of its own president, and the FBI kind of does its own thing. And guess what? President Trump does not know this. He knows this philosophically, but he knows it personally. Because that fourth branch of government destroyed his first term, was the reason he did not get re-elected in 2020, and is the reason why he faced 700

This is known as the vesting clause of Article II of the US Constitution, which is all authority is invested in a president. That’s it. Pretty simple. One sentence, a lot there. And so yes, the president has the authority to say USAID, you don’t go anymore. He has the authority to send Elon Musk like a tomahawk missile into every single federal agency.

Elon Musk’s Role in the Trump Administration

By the way, how entertaining is this? It’s like one of the greatest things ever. I want you to understand what’s going on here, is that you have Elon, who I just have grown to just adore. He’s become a friend. I think that when the history books are written, he’s going to go down as one of the most interesting, consequential, business titan, political figures ever to exist. So here’s a guy that has more money than you could ever imagine. He could buy Spain. Literally, if you look it up, he could buy Spain. Not a joke. I think the GDP of Spain is like $150 billion. You could just buy it. And that’s like a portion of his wealth. And he’s literally sleeping on the floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office building.

And it’s not just him. Here’s the best part. He has this platoon of these super geniuses. And I mean like super geniuses. I mean, these guys make Mensa look like they don’t know what they’re talking about. And he’ll walk into these federal agencies, and he’ll be like, where are the passwords? How do you send an email? How do you do the accounting? Has anyone ever looked at the books here?

Just one example, he did the Social Security kind of peripheral audit. There’s like 140-year-olds still getting Social Security checks. I can just see the New York Times headline, Elon Musk’s so cruel, cuts off payments to 140-year-olds. You can just see the headline right now. How dare he? Now, if any of you guys are 140, I want to meet you, and you can come on my show, for the record. So by the way, if you think our Social Security roles are messed up, how bad do you think our voter roles are? It just makes you think.

But Elon Musk is getting down to the heart of the matter. Why? It’s so simple. Elon Musk sees the world very clearly, because Elon Musk has actually built things. And so for him, it does not compute. It’s like a failure to launch in his mind, where if at Tesla, if he wants to get rid of 10,000 people, he can get rid of 10,000 people. At SpaceX, if he wants to get rid of a bad employee, he can get rid of a bad employee.

In DC, you get rid of bad employees by putting them in charge of the CDC and running all of your public health guidelines. You fail upwards. That’s what you do. You actually ascend by failure. It’s a gravitational pull in the wrong direction.

A Cultural Sea Change

And so it is a cultural sea change, top to bottom, that we are experiencing. And they’re going to fight with everything they possibly can. If you think they fought hard to prevent President Trump from reobtaining office, this is way worse than they actually thought this was going to go. They thought it would be like mass deportations. Notice that no one’s talking about that anymore. Yeah, sure, take them. Go away.

But this Doge thing, it’s like all the controversial stuff that we thought was going to be big fights kind of gets to go on the extras. By the way, it’s a brilliant strategy by President Trump, might I add. Because everyone’s talking more about Elon than President Trump, and President Trump is able to kind of not be attacked for the first time in a decade. Pretty smart, right? And Elon, I think, feeds off of it. It’s like a life force thing to him. The whole thing is just phenomenal.

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And so, but the reason they’re fighting so hard on Doge and on what we are experiencing is we actually have a chance to do the thing that people thought that could never get done, which is we actually have a chance to reorient the ship back to the founder’s intent, to restore the three branches of government, to articulate what Article II actually is. And I think we have a shot at doing it.

Article I is the hardest because Congress is a disaster. But I think the Supreme Court is actually willing to hear this out for the first time in a generation. I think the Supreme Court is now willing to hear the arguments. What do you mean you’re an independent agency? No, no, you’re not an independent agency. You serve under Article II.

And we’ve seen with some decisions, the Chevron deference decision, the EPA decision, the courts are signaling that they’re ready for these monumental type cases. And what that means, everybody, is that the administrative state leviathan, this regime that has been swallowing our freedom and liberty post Woodrow Wilson, for the first time, we can reverse it. We can go back to where we came from.

But it’s not just going to happen because of one election. It will only happen with a free citizenry demanding it out of your leaders with vocal support on a daily basis, educating the mass of what’s really going on. And I believe we have a shot at doing it because we’re able to communicate to millions of people in a moment’s notice without having to go to the Washington Post.

I’m able to open my phone right now. I could tweet to millions of people or post something on Instagram or Facebook about any of the guardians of the censors. Elon Musk is able to do these X faces at midnight where he’s just rambling for a couple hours about all the things, like going through documents, talking about all the waste that he found. And literally, like 5 million people are listening to these things. That’s more than the CNN airport audiences for a decade. And he just goes through this stuff because now we can go direct to consumer. But let me clarify that. We can go direct to citizen.

And that’s the true revolution that’s occurring is that we are taking the bold and courageous move that is going to put a lot of people’s lives and fortunes and sacred honors at risk to say subject no more, citizen. Because we have lived as subjects for the last couple of years. Whether we realize it or not, we have not been citizens which is co-rulers or co-authorities of our own nation.

Trump’s Role in American History

And that’s where the Trump thing gets way bigger than Trump. And honestly, God bless this guy for being the man in the arena that Teddy Roosevelt has always talked about. Having the courage and the stamina. God bless him for not taking the deal where they said, you know, don’t run for president just being kingmaker and doubling down. Getting shot, his whole business empire nearly taken from him.

And now getting into what is the most high stakes fight constitutionally, morally, and civilizationally. And you guys know this. Europe is not going to save a free society. Europe is gone. It’s a husk of its former self. We’ve got the Chinese Communist Party rising up. If it’s not us, it’s nobody.

As Dr. Arnett said, it is the last best hope. And it’s only us if we can actually win the domestic war first. If we can restrain this beast that has been slowly taking over every one of our ways of life over the last couple decades and especially the last 100 years.

Providence and the Return to Power

And then I want to talk about one other thing about this. And then we can do, I think they said questions at some point, I don’t know the format. Is this, which is that I’m a big believer in God’s providence over our nation. I believe that God has his hand on Donald Trump. And I believe that God has his hand on this country. I really believe that. And I believe that as the founders did, that there is a providential element to all of this.

And I remember after Donald Trump was displaced from office in the 2020 election, we were all like, is the country over? And we believe through faith, as it says in Romans 8, 28, that God will use all things for good for those who love him. That maybe there is a plan here that we don’t understand.

And I know a lot of you know this and few people say it publicly, but I think it’s worthy of a teaching to our kids, especially because we thought it was the worst thing. But now we look back, we say, honestly, exile might’ve been really good for us. Those four years off might’ve actually been grace, not judgment.

Like those four years where we weren’t in control of everything actually made us stronger and tougher, made us have more resolve, made us find out what we’re really made out of, made us shrink our ranks away from the people that were summer soldiers, that were sunshine patriots. We told those people, go away, we’ll call you back when everything’s fixed.

I think President Trump in exile, when he faced the entire power of the federal government, became a stronger person. And not just him, but his senior staff that was around him, from Stephen Miller to Susie Wiles, this whole team, they were around the table in Bedminster, New Jersey. I was not there, but I know about it very intimately. When President Donald Trump was joking and playing Phantom of the Opera, drinking Diet Coke, when all of a sudden his phone rang and they said, you’re indicted.

And in that moment, I mean, it’s never happened before in American history. And then this avalanche of indictments came after that. And Jack Smith launched the lunatic thing. And his staff had a choice. Do you jump ship or do you lean in?

I think that’s a lesser appreciated element of all this, is the people that stood by him, his inner team. Because people say, Charlie, how are they so well prepared for all of this? Who is doing all this work? Who’s really in charge? Okay, Trump’s in charge, okay? But he’s empowered the people, his lieutenants, that were around him when he got that phone call in Bedminster, New Jersey.

He’s empowered the people that were around him when his arraignment was read to him. And he said, if we ever get power back, you know what to do. You’re gonna listen to the voters and we’re gonna go 10 out of 10 velocity right out of the gate.

A Transformed Conservative Movement

What you are seeing is the pent up of an entire community of people, about a couple dozen people, that saw their boss get shot. That saw the president and our entire country, in my personal opinion, literally come millimeters away from the country, disintegrating into chaos, oblivion, and discord, or what, I hate to say civil war, but I think we all know that it might’ve gone to that.

And it makes us really consider, as the history books are written, that, boy, the Democrats should’ve let us win in 2020. That them doing what they did in the 2020 election, Zucker boxes, mail-in ballots, might go down as one of the dumbest things the Democrat Party has ever done.

Because what they have to reap right now is a completely different conservative movement. It is completely different. It is 3.0. It is one that plays to win. It is one that is well-staffed. It is one that understands the odds and the stakes. And we saw what we were up against. We saw it intimately. And we looked over the abyss and we said, no thanks, we’re gonna go back to restore this beautiful country that we love.

And that’s where all of this comes together. And I believe you guys have an obligation to continue to support Hillsdale College, to fight for a free society, because that’s really where this is all gonna be connected.

My role these next couple of years, I’m not going in government. I have no role in the government. I’m an advisor. I’m a friend. I’m a fighter. I’m a warrior. I’m gonna keep on doing the grassroots movement with young people. Most importantly, I’m gonna keep on trying to keep people informed what’s happening here so this thrust, this moment does not get lost.

Because this is a once in many lifetimes opportunity. A moment to reclaim what has been given to us that we did not earn, that we do not deserve, to get us back on the path of the divine providence that the founders talked about in our birth certificate, the Declaration of Independence. And it’s only possible, in my opinion, thanks to Hillsdale College and all the work that you guys do here.

Thank you and let’s do questions if time allows. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Okay, is the questions okay? We have a format for that, great.

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Q&A Session

Thank you, Mr. Kirk. We now have time for Q&A. If you have a question, please raise your hand and wait for a microphone to be brought to you. There’s some over here.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, Charlie. My name’s Owen Anderson. I’m a professor at ASU, which you mentioned is the Harvard of the West. Yeah. I’d like to add the idea that these state universities are also part of that bureaucratic state. And I’d like to ask for your help with ASU. You are doing a great job. By coming out and talking to our students, I think you’ve changed the election. But there’s a lot more work to do.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yes, there is. And let’s just kind of go into some of the details of what President Trump’s gonna try to do from the top down. Number one, eliminate the Department of Education and get completely rid of it. And it never should have existed. It should not exist right now.

The second of which is you have to stop the flow of money. This is where enforcement’s going to come in. Right now, I bet ASU is already in violation of President Trump’s executive order. Would you agree with that?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: 100%.

CHARLIE KIRK: So now it’s going to come down to an enforcement question where President Trump signed an executive order saying no taxpayer money is going to go to any school that teaches critical race theory, DEI, transgender ideology, which

AUDIENCE QUESTION: sometimes, I get a little concerned. It’s only been six weeks. I know. I know. And so I just thought, when it comes to Canada being the 51st state. Oh, no, he’s deathly serious. OK, OK. And then I know you went to Greenland with Don Jr. Even more serious. OK. And my, yeah, I’ll say my Danish relatives are not real happy about that. And then this whole Gaza, like, take it. I’m just saying, I trust him, but I’m getting some imperialistic vibes.

CHARLIE KIRK: You’re super sweet. Thank you. No, no, I mean that. That’s great. I hear that. I’m not going to speak on behalf of the administration. Canada, we’ll let that one be. Gaza, I’m going to show my friend Josh Hammer. Josh, you’re speaking tomorrow about all this, right? Israel and all that. So I will yield to the expert. Josh will handle that extensively.

Greenland, I will defend, actually, because I think Greenland makes a lot of sense for a lot of different reasons. It has incredible rare earth natural mineral deposits. It’s geopolitically really situated. China wants it. Russia wants it. And also, we’ve been trying to get Greenland for well over 100 years, actually 150 years. And I can tell you, having visited Greenland with Don Jr., it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been in more ways than one.

I will just kind of caution any of you who are imperialistic. Let me say this, is that President Trump is a deal maker. He’s a negotiator. And you ask for the moon, and if you get Greenland in return, you’re screwed. Maybe the next National Leadership Seminar can be in Nook, but go in July. Don’t go in January.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi. I’m another supporter from the slave state of Washington. So what do you think the chances are that Trump will revoke the other earth-shaking executive order from JFK, the one that allowed government employees to unionize?

CHARLIE KIRK: That is, so I actually don’t have insight into that. But let me first give Trump credit for revoking a separate executive order that I did not mention, which was verboten and untouchable. My friend Jeremy Karl, who’s written the best book on anti-white racism, you’re talking tomorrow, right Jeremy? He’s amazing, which is that President Trump reversed the executive order requiring affirmative action for hiring practices in the federal government. That one deserves incredible credit. That took so much courage to do, and no one’s talking about it because he’s doing so much other stuff.

Understand that the affirmative action regime was never passed by Congress. It was done by executive order, saying that we’re only going to hire in federal hiring practices based on skin color, not merit, because of executive order. I can’t speak on the unionization one. I’d have to look more into that, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s being contemplated. But if a president does it, a president can undo it, as you can see by USAID. That was done by executive order by JFK. Why can’t you just fold it into the State Department?

Manufacturing and Economic Priorities

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Charlie, I’m ready to run through a brick wall after this speech here. So real quick, we’re in Arizona, home to Intel, Microchip, some of the big tech companies. What’s your thought, if any, on on-story manufacturing? What are some of the pain we’re going to have to go through to bring some of this back? Any thoughts or ideas on that?

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it’s a good question. I think that President Trump has alluded to this, and I think that the current economic nonsense that has been handed to us by the previous, let’s just say, easy, cheap money regime is that there might have to be a moment to take some cough syrup, metaphorically, economically, before we can get to some wellness. I mean, our economist friend doesn’t think a soft landing is possible. You guys debate that amongst yourselves.

However, I will say this, that President Trump using tariffs is getting a very, very bad rap in some financial circles or markets, but it’s a forcing function to redomicile labor and industry back to this country. And in order to actually have a country, you have to make things, not just be a series of hedge funds and tech companies and import all your plastic from China.

And I’ll give you just one example. We don’t make vitamin C in this country anymore. We don’t make our necessary pharmaceuticals in this country anymore. You cease to be an independent, autonomous, sovereign country if you’re dependent on a nation 5,000 miles away to be able to get basic goods and necessities.

So how much pain there will be, I don’t know. However, I will say there are a lot of major companies that are already talking about redomiciling the production of their assets or their goods into the interior of the United States, which is then how you circumvent the tariff if you make it in the United States.

The Next Generation of Conservative Leadership

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Hi, Mr. Kirk. Thank you for your speech tonight. So I’m excited to hear about the youth, the 30 and under. And I’m glad we’re playing offense. What do you, if you could speak about the old guard, the Mitch McConnells, the Paul Ryans. I feel like they’ve gone quiet, and I’m a little worried about it.

CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, you guys are a paranoid group. Come on, you’re always looking for something. I like it. Look, there’s a new generation that’s rising in DC. And if that concerns you, I want to give you some comfort. This next generation is the type of person that has the character of a Hillsdale College type student. I want you to look at the type of person I’m talking about.

You have a press secretary that’s 27 years old named Caroline Leavitt, who’s taken on the press every single day in an elegant and amazing way. You’ve got Stephen Miller, who’s in his young 30s, running all the domestic policy and running the entire immigration department of the entire federal government. You have a next generation of people. J.D. Vance is the youngest vice president since Eisenhower and one of the youngest vice presidents in American history. J.D. Vance is, I think, 40 or 41 years old. I think he just turned 40, right? He just turned 40. And so this next generation of conservatives is operating with urgency and is taking over DC for the better.

The old guard is going to do everything they possibly can. I mean, Mitch McConnell, I’ll let you guys fill in the blanks. I think it’s very disappointing for this reason. I have much stronger opinions on Mitch McConnell than what I’m about to say. But I’ll give you one that is very agreeable. It’s very disappointing that Mitch McConnell, for years, would go around and preach to all of his Senate Republican colleagues, we must stick together. We must stick together. I need your vote. We must stick together. But now, in circumstances where we need him to keep the conference to stick together, he’s the odd man out. And I think that tells us a lot about Mitch McConnell.

Closing Remarks

CHARLIE KIRK: OK, in closing, everybody, Hillsdale College is amazing. You know that. This is a fight for the most ultimate thing. It’s exciting. We won in November. We want to keep those victories going. Thank you guys for your belief in our work at Turning Point and what it is doing at Hillsdale College. Honored to be here. Thank you guys so much. God bless you. Thank you.

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