Here is the full transcript of Ohio Senator and Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance’s speech at a rally in St. Cloud for former President Donald Trump.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Wow! It is great to be in St. Cloud, Minnesota. God bless you guys.
Wow! First, let me start on a somber note, if I can. I want to open my remarks with a word about the horrific rocket attack in northern Israel that killed at least 11 people, teenagers and children as young as 10 years old. We heard about this just earlier today. Of course, it’s absolutely shocking and it’s a reminder of what happens when Donald J. Trump is not President of the United States.
World Events and Leadership
It makes the whole world weaker and more chaotic. Now no nation should or can tolerate this terrible stuff and I know this audience stands with Israel and stands with our friends. Let’s get President Trump back in office and get this war over with. And when Donald J. Trump is President again, the days of moral equivocation on this issue and so many others will be over.
We’ve got to finish the job and get this thing over with. Now, I want to talk about what’s going on in this country. And of course, all of us learned the hard way over the last week and a half, if you didn’t already know it, that Joe Biden cannot do the job as President of the United States.
In fact, exactly one month ago, President Trump wiped the floor with Joe Biden on the debate stage, exposing a massive cover-up of that President’s moral and mental incapacity and he saved this country from four more years of one of the worst Presidents in American history.
Media and Political Commentary
So let’s thank President Trump for getting rid of Joe Biden once and for all. And during that same time, President Trump accepted our party’s nomination with overwhelming support. We held one of the most successful conventions in history and he even took a bullet for the country that he loves and didn’t miss a single day of work. Just imagine what he’s going to do with four more years.
Now, we’ve got some of our friends in the media back there. They deserve it. After covering up Joe Biden’s mental incapacity and incompetence for three and a half years, now the media is at it again. For three and a half years, my friends, they told us that Joe Biden was Abraham Lincoln.
Criticism of Kamala Harris
And now the media tells us that Kamala Harris is Martin Luther King Jr. Can you believe it? But we all know she’s not MLK, just as Joe Biden was not Abraham Lincoln. We know that she is a card-carrying member of the San Francisco Lunatic Fringe. Ain’t that right?
And America is not going to be fooled by the media’s lies anymore. Now, everybody knows that Kamala Harris owns every failure of the ultra-liberal policies of the last four years. As America’s border czar, and she was the border czar, the media all said it, Kamala Harris is directly responsible for the worst border crisis in this nation’s history.
Immigration Policies
On her watch, more than 10 million illegal aliens have invaded our country, and it wasn’t by accident, it was by design. Creating this flood of illegal immigration is the purpose of the ultra-liberal immigration policies. They said they were going to do it, and then they did it on Kamala Harris’ first day in office.
They suspended deportations, they stopped building Donald Trump’s border wall, they reinstated catch-and-release, and they proposed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. On the first moment, from the moment go Kamala Harris and the Democrats sent engraved invitations to millions of illegal immigrants around the world. And now they’re here because they were invited.
They were invited by our own border czar. Can you believe it? Now, the chief of Border Patrol was appointed over a year ago, but border czar Kamala Harris hasn’t even spoken a single word to him. This administration handed 3 million work permits to illegal immigrants, destroying American jobs and crushing American wages.
And if the border czar wins, she will not only give jobs to illegal aliens, she’s talking about giving them free health care, free tuition, all paid for at your expense. I agree. Worst of all, Kamala Harris would happily erode every protection we have to prevent them from voting. She wants to hand over control of our country to people who shouldn’t be here in the first place, and we cannot let her.
Message to Illegal Immigrants
And I have a message, a very simple message to the millions of illegal aliens who are in this country and shouldn’t be. If you are here, start packing your bags right now because Donald J. Trump is coming back into office. Now, what bothers me most about Kamala Harris’s liberal policies is that she pretends that they’re compassionate, but they hurt the least fortunate members of the American family.
It is what the Bible calls “the least of these” that suffer the most under Kamala Harris’s policies. Now, I know this, my friends, because I myself grew up in a poor family. I was one of those kids who suffered under Democrat misrule, and I know that if we let these guys gain power, it’s going to be people who grew up like I did that suffer the most.
Personal Background
Now, a lot of you know my story. You know that things worked out for me. I was able to achieve the American dream because this is a great country that gives opportunities to people, and we’ve got to make sure it stays that way. And I benefited, of course, from the incredible bounty of this country.
I also benefited from a very tough grandmother who raised me because my own mom struggled with addiction.
And I’ll tell you, there are a lot of things that keep kids on the straight and narrow, but one, for me, was a grandmother who told me when she found out that I was hanging out with a local drug dealer, “JD, if I ever see you with that kid again, I’m going to run him over with my car.” And then she added, “And nobody will ever find out about it.” And I believed her.
Call to Action
And I came from that background, my friends, and I stand before you as your next Vice President of the United States. I love this country. But if we want to preserve that American dream for the next generation, if we want to build upon it, then we have got to win this election.
We have got to bring the people’s president back. That’s President Donald J. Trump, and we’re going to do everything we can to get him elected in November. And we’re going to do it together. We’re going to turn Minnesota red. We’re going to turn this whole country red with President Donald J. Trump’s leadership.
Future Plans
And we’re going to do it not just because we want to beat the Democrats, as fun as that will be, but because the American people depend on President Trump’s leadership. And the clock is ticking, my friends. In six months, we are going to launch the largest deportation program in the history of this country. We’re going to end catch-and-release and ban sanctuary cities, and then we’re going to finally finish building that beautiful border wall.
Now, we know Kamala Harris is not going to do this. She was ranked as the most extreme liberal in the United States Senate based on her voting record, and my friends, I serve with some pretty crazy liberals, and she was ranked ahead of all of them. She co-sponsored the Green New Deal scam, and she supports every insane environmental policy that’s going to drive American workers out of business, drive the price of gasoline through the roof, and drive Americans further into poverty.
She is 100% responsible for the inflation disaster that is destroying American families. And under President Trump, we had a booming economy with no inflation, wages were going up, and people were saving, and young people were buying homes. Let’s get back to that prosperity.
We’re going to fight for your ability to afford housing, education, health care, groceries. We want normal Americans to be able to afford a decent life in their own country. It sounds so simple, but it’s got to happen, and one of the ways we’re going to do it is drill, baby, drill. Get that stuff out of the ground, get it from our own people, get it from our own workers, and not from tin-pot dictators all over the world.
Criticism of Harris’s Policies
Now, some of this stuff, you read what Kamala Harris has said, and it’s hard to believe. She wants to abolish ICE, legalize squatting, and open the door for rapists, felons, terrorists, and murderers to vote. She also supports defunding the police. She opposes putting more cops in the street, because she believes that police are a greater threat than the bloodthirsty criminals they lock up, and maybe they are a greater threat to her, but to hard-working American citizens, they are our protectors, and we back the blue in this country.
Now, she wants to end cash bail, and what that means is that if you assault a police officer, you can be back on the street the very next day. In fact, when rioters and looters were burning American cities to the ground, including Minneapolis, Kamala Harris was raising money to bail them out of jail. Let’s throw them in jail and support the cops.
Bail and Crime Concerns
It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. She helped a group of anti-cop extremists raise more than $40 million to free scores of criminals right here in Minnesota. That’s not across the country, that’s just here in Minnesota. And I think in November, Minnesota is going to send her a message, they’ve had enough of Kamala Harris’s garbage, they’d like to have a real president.
You can’t make it up, some of the criminals freed by Kamala include a convicted rapist, a knife murderer, a domestic abuser, who later shot and killed a man while he was out on bail. It’s so sad. Thanks to Kamala Harris, Minnesota neighborhoods have filled and will fill with violent criminals. President Trump, you know what he did? He put them behind bars where they belong.
Gun Rights and Safety
And here’s the crazy thing, she also supports confiscating guns from law-abiding citizens. So, the criminals get to have all the guns they want, but hard-working Americans get nothing to protect themselves, that is a recipe for disaster and we’re not going to let it happen. She wants to make us sitting ducks in our own country, that’s the policy that Kamala Harris has pursued and we are not going to let that happen.
We are going to vote in big numbers in November and we’re going to take this country back, right? We’re going to save this country for Americans of every race, color, and creed. We’re going to do it the hard way. We’re going to do it because this country is worth saving.
We’re going to do it by fighting through the media lies and we’re going to do it by electing Donald J. Trump President of the United States. Now, maybe the worst and most dishonest thing that Kamala Harris has done, and it is a long list, my friends, is that she helped cover up Joe Biden’s declining mental capacity for years. It’s actually sad.
Putin, Xi, Kim Jong-un, all these dictators, they have been sitting in private rooms for three and a half years licking their chops because we have a president who can’t actually do the job. Now, anyone who is too blind to see Biden’s incompetence or too dishonest to admit it is not fit to serve as Commander-in-Chief. She lied to us. She lied to all of us and it’s unacceptable.
Criticism of Democratic Process
And, you know, they never give President Trump an easy path. Kamala Harris, the Democratic elites are trying to install her as their new nominee without her receiving a single vote for president. The media, our friends back there, they call it a coronation. I think there’s another word.
I call it a coup. In America, we do not crown our leaders. We vote for them. Democrat or Republican, you’ve got to give the voters a choice. But, if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Kamala Harris, it’s that she has a hard time winning votes because she’s too extreme even for the Democrat Party.
Harris’s Political History
Remember, in the 2020 primary, Harris dropped out months before they even cast the first vote. She was so unpopular, she polled in the low single digits among Democrats the entire campaign. She wasn’t even in the top three in her home state of California and that is pretty embarrassing, ladies and gentlemen.
And the reason is because Democrats know that the American people would never elect a San Francisco liberal who’s so far outside the mainstream. Now, we’ve got to give some credit to our Democrat friends because they were right in 2020. The American people are never going to elect a wacky, out of touch, San Francisco liberal like Kamala Harris.
Personal Defense and Loyalty
Now, I saw the other day, Kamala Harris questioned my loyalty to this country. That’s the word she used. Loyalty. And it’s an interesting word. Simplify. Loyalty. Because there is no greater sign of disloyalty to this country than what Kamala Harris has done at our southern border.
And I’d like to ask the Vice President, what has she done to question my loyalty to this country? I served in the United States Marine Corps. I went to Iraq for this country. I built a business for this country. And my running mate took a bullet for this country.
Conclusion and Call to Action
So my question to Kamala Harris is, what the hell have you done to question our loyalty to the United States of America? And the answer, my friends, is nothing. So let’s send a message to the media. Let’s send a message to Kamala Harris.
Let’s send a message to every hardworking patriot from Minnesota across the country. We are ready to have President Donald J. Trump back and we’re going to work our tails off to make sure it happens. God bless you all. Thank you. And thank you for having me, Minnesota. A great state.
