Editor’s Note: In this energetic campaign speech delivered in Atlanta, Senator Jon Ossoff rallies supporters by characterizing the current political moment as a crucial opportunity to stand against unprecedented corruption and incompetence. He critiques the current administration’s policies, specifically focusing on rising costs, healthcare challenges, and the ongoing conflict in Iran, while calling for a grassroots movement to reshape the nation’s priorities. Throughout the address, Ossoff emphasizes the importance of protecting voting rights and building a broad coalition to ensure democratic accountability in the upcoming midterm elections.
Listen to the audio version:
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello, Atlanta!
Jon Ossoff: Hello, Atlanta! Atlanta, first of all, give it up again for my friend, Dr. Jamal Bryant. Thank you, Pastor. Thank you, Pastor, for that warm introduction. Thank you for all you do for the state of Georgia. And Atlanta, let’s hear it again for our next governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms.
Now I’d like to ask every veteran, every military service member, every military spouse, please raise your hand if you can and be honored by all of us here today for your service. Thank you so much for your service to the country. Thank you.
Something Is Happening in Georgia
Now Atlanta, these crowds, they keep growing. Something is happening in Georgia. Every backyard, every living room is full, and crowds like this leave no doubt that Georgia is ready to do our part again to save our republic. Are you ready to win, Atlanta?
Something is finally waking up. Do you feel it? Turn to your neighbor and say, “I’m awake.” Say, “I’m all in.”
Now many of you are here because you recognize the urgency of opposition to this unprecedented corruption and incompetence. And you recognize the stakes of these midterm elections when Georgia’s voice will be decisive once again.
Trump’s Crumbling Presidency
His presidency crumbling. Donald spent Saturday complaining on the internet. Listen to this. Six hours, 52 posts. The president attacked the pope. He posted his own face on Mount Rushmore and a made-up Trump Peace Prize. He announced three times “America’s back,” and he assured an increasingly concerned public he’s in excellent health.
And when not posting, he’s been trying to rob us. Have you seen it? He sued the U.S. government he commands for $10 billion. Then he settled the suit with himself to create a $1.8 billion slush fund so he can cut checks to cronies and January 6 foot soldiers. The same men who sacked the Capitol to seize the presidency for Donald Trump, who beat police officers with flagpoles, built a gallows on the Capitol lawn, and hunted the vice president to lynch him. Donald Trump’s brown shirts. He pardoned them, and now he wants you to pay them.
He’s trying to put his face on the money. Did you see that? He’s building a monument to himself. But Atlanta, he’s doing these things now because no one will honor him when he’s gone. Because he’s a failed president and a national disgrace.
Broken Promises on the Economy
He promised to bring down prices on day one. Instead, prices are soaring. Ground beef’s up 25% since Trump was sworn in. Coffee, 40%. The price of gas, 33%. Groceries, rent, health care, and the power bill hit their new all-time highs last month.
And while you pay more for everything, Donald Trump wants your tax dollars for what many are calling the Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Ballroom. By the way, he forced out that Republican congressman, the one who made him release the Epstein files. Did you see that? That is true commitment to the cover-up.
This president promised a golden age. Instead, the economy has lost tens of thousands of manufacturing jobs since he launched the big illegal tariffs, and more Americans are falling behind on their credit cards than any time since the Great Recession. Inflation’s higher than when Trump took office. Unemployment’s higher than when Trump took office. And consumer sentiment’s at its worst in 70 years.
The War in Iran
The president promised to fight for the working class and end foreign wars. Instead, he cut your health care to give the rich another tax break. And last week, yet more Americans were wounded in a war no one voted for and no one can explain. This war in Iran is the worst foreign policy blunder since Iraq. And just like the Iraq war, it’s a war built on lies.
Let’s just update the record. On day one of the war, day one, the president said it was “running ahead of schedule.” On day 10, he said it was “very complete.” Day 21, “getting very close.” Day 32, “leaving very soon.” On day 39, the president of the United States said “a whole civilization will die tonight.” And on the next day, day 40, he declared “total and complete victory.” Day 67, “great progress.”
Day 92: The Iran War’s Broken Promises
Day 79, the clock is ticking. Today is day 92. And on day 92, Iran’s ballistic missiles and drones have not been destroyed. The Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war, is still closed. The regime is intact, along with its stockpile of highly enriched uranium. A stockpile Iran only built after President Trump shredded President Obama’s Iran deal. Do you remember that?
Just weeks into this war, they said they’d need $200 billion to fund it. Let me put that in perspective for you. $200 billion would fund a decade, 10 full years, of nationwide universal pre-kindergarten. The America first president who said he would end foreign wars to put America first and focus on America’s working class. Instead, now he says, “It’s not possible for us to take care of daycare, Medicaid, or Medicare.” Now he says all we can afford is war. Now he demands we cut cancer and Alzheimer’s research to throw even more money at Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon.
While the Financial Times reports, “Pete Hegseth’s broker looked to buy defense fund before Iran attack.” Y’all remember they promised to drain the swamp?
Instead, this is the most corrupt administration of all time and everybody knows it. Everybody knows it.
The First Family’s Billions
While Americans pay more and get less, while our insurance premiums skyrocket and hospitals close down services, while American service members are wounded and killed in action, the first family is raking in billions of dollars.
Just listen to this. Last September, the president of Kazakhstan calls Donald Trump and says he wants to grant tungsten mining rights to an American company. And the very next month, Eric and Don Jr. get a stake in the American company pursuing the mining deal. Six days later, six days after Prince Eric and Prince Don get their stake, Kazakhstan announces this company will get, “the largest known undeveloped tungsten resource in the world.”
A few more weeks go by and then the U.S. government, run by their father, sets aside $1.6 billion of your tax dollars to fund and finance their mining project in Kazakhstan. All this while you pay more for gas, for groceries, for healthcare.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Billions from foreign princes and oligarchs. Sweetheart real estate deals all over the world, taxpayer funding to Trump-backed companies. And listen, here’s the bottom line. If you’re involved in any of this, next year you’ll be raising your right hand and swearing to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So help you God in front of the United States Congress.
Corruption Runs Deeper Than Donald Trump
The Mar-a-Lago mafia has taken American corruption to spectacular new heights. But corruption in America runs a lot deeper than Donald Trump. American politics is coin-operated. Money goes in, favors come out. And that’s why spectacular wealth buys an ever-greater share of power over our national affairs while the mere citizen is treated with contempt.
Citizens United was the most destructive court decision in modern American history. It unleashed a flood of secret money, corporate money, billionaire money on both sides. Members of Congress live in fear of these super PACs. And that corruption is why insurance companies get away with denying your claim for a procedure you needed to save your life. It’s why big tech is still allowed to spy on us and sell our lives to the highest bidder. It’s why the ultra-rich get another tax break while you pay more for everything.
Donald Trump’s rise is a symptom of this deeper disease. And I suspect many of you are here because you recognize that our task is not just to contain his wickedness, but to cure the rot that gave rise to it. That this broken moment is an opening not for restoration, but for reformation.
Because who really supports allowing unlimited secret political money to bend the national agenda in darkness? In East Point or Valdosta or Brunswick or Columbus, if I ask anyone, Democrat, Independent, Republican, Independent, none of the above, if I ask them whether this is how things should work, it doesn’t matter who they are, the answer is a resounding no.
Taking On Corruption
And if it takes a constitutional amendment to end Citizens United, we’ll deliver a United Georgia to ratify it.
Now, speaking of corruption, my two opponents. See, they tried to run Kemp, but he refused. So we’re left with the congressman who’s only a congressman because his daddy was a congressman, and the coach who’s only a coach because his daddy was a coach. And both already mired in scandal.
The congressman under investigation for paying your tax dollars to his criminal staffer’s girlfriend for apparently no work, while the coach’s family got tens of millions of your tax dollars courtesy of Governor Kemp and then poured cash into the governor’s pack to prop up the coach’s campaign. They should have to come out and answer questions about all of it right now. Right now.
But Atlanta, it doesn’t matter which one wins. They’re both corrupt political insiders, and they’re both pro-war, pro-tariff, and pro-cutting your health care. They’re both Trump puppets, and we’ll beat either one of them in November.
A Coalition Beyond Party Lines
And Atlanta, we will win with a coalition that extends far beyond party lines. Because this campaign’s not just for Democrats. It’s for everyone who sees things spiraling out of our control, who longs for sanity and competence, and sees the same old politics failing.
Everywhere across our state, people tell me they’re desperate for change and desperate for new ideas. The young couple expecting their first child who wonder how they’ll afford a crib and a stroller, let alone a first home. And their health insurance just went up a thousand bucks a month. The student working through college who still needs food stamps to make rent, whose conscience can’t stand their tax dollars being used to lock up immigrant children at home or to kill innocent children abroad. The South Georgia farmer whose costs rise and earnings fall each year, whose kids have left the family farm, who had to wait almost two years for federal aid after the hurricane.
See, Georgians are sick of being ripped off, taken for granted, disrespected. Because we’re told a story that if we work hard and play by the rules, we’ll thrive. That no matter who we are or where we start, the grind will pay off. But for too many across our state, this story just isn’t true.
Groceries, rent, insurance, taxes, the car note, the power bill, the math just does not work. And it feels like no matter how hard you hustle, you can’t get ahead. The culture wars are exploited to divide us. While our hospitals close. While hedge funds buy up all the houses in our neighborhood. While we have to pay $3,000 for an ambulance.
Georgia’s Health Care Emergency
And Georgia is in the midst of a health care emergency. It’s an emergency that some of our so-called leaders dress up as normal. They try to numb us to the suffering they’ve caused. They’ve continued to block Medicaid expansion while Georgia lost 21 hospitals in 20 years. And then last year they gutted Medicaid nationally.
Listen to this. 40% of all Georgia kids are covered by Medicaid. 50% of all Georgia births are covered by Medicaid. 70% of all Georgia seniors in nursing homes are covered by Medicaid. Already one labor and delivery unit in Georgia has closed, citing those Medicaid cuts, with more pain coming for hospitals and clinics and nursing homes.
And then the Affordable Care Act cuts, which have doubled premiums for more than a million Georgians and caused hundreds of thousands to lose their coverage just in the last few months. All this when here in Georgia we already have the second highest uninsured rate in the nation. The third fewest mental health providers. The fourth worst newborn weight at birth.
Just wrap your heads around this. When you’re born in the state of Georgia, your life expectancy is shorter than if you were born today in Lebanon, a country that’s been in a state of intermittent war for decades. And now consider this. Our state’s economy, just our state’s economy, is 40 times larger than Lebanon’s national economy. But they’re living longer than us.
A Values and Priorities Problem
The legendary civil rights leader, Marian Wright Edelman, said, “We don’t have a money problem, we have a profound values and priorities problem.”
Because see, this isn’t just the way it is. Or the way it has to be. All this needless death and suffering and misery is a choice. Georgia’s leaders have chosen to leave Georgians without insurance. And without hospitals. They’re down having a steak at the palm, handing out your tax dollars to their donors while women hemorrhage in Georgia labor wards because they didn’t get prenatal care.
But Atlanta, when you elect a Medicaid-expanding Governor Bottoms in November, together we can get Georgians covered with great health care, save our hospitals, and build and open new ones to serve every county in this state.
Take Action Right Now
So Atlanta, if you’re ready to win, if you’re ready to save our state and save our republic, I want you to take action with me, together, right now, right here. Are you ready to do something right now?
Okay, I want you to take out your phones. Hold them up in the air once you got them. Take your time. I want to see those phones in the air. You got them?
Okay, now you’re going to open a new text message. Okay? Put those phones back up when the new text message is open. Y’all still with me?
Okay, you’re going to send a message to the following number. Y’all ready for the number? Y’all ready for the number? The number is 5-1-0-1-5. 5-1-0-1-5. One more time. 5-1-0-1-5. Y’all got it?
All right, now what you’re texting to that number is the word join. You’re texting join to 5-1-0-1-5. Okay, when you’re done, put those phones back in the air. Let’s see it. There you go. You just took action. You just took action.
And we’re going to have to work for the next five months because the whole country is counting on us again.
The Stakes of Freedom
There is an awful lot at stake. If ever a moment called for checks and balances, this is it. And it’s not just the corruption and incompetence. It’s this unmistakable project not to lead us, but to rule us as subjects.
The president who once tried to overturn his own defeat now tries to jail elected leaders of the opposition. Tries to prosecute Americans who defy or criticize him. Tries to seize control of elections nationwide.
Freedom is rare. Stretching back beyond the horizon of recorded history, most humans who have ever lived have lived at the mercy of lords and masters and kings. But we’re a nation founded on the rejection of kingdom. We’re a nation founded on the radical idea that all human beings have a natural right to liberty.
Dr. King said of our declaration, “Never before in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent, and unequivocal language the dignity and worth of human personality.”
And from those founding ideals, despite our sins and through courageous struggle, the flame of American freedom has grown brighter and bolder and given hope to the whole world. But in the winds that blow today, that light is flickering.
Defending the Right to Vote
And of all the freedoms hanging in the balance, none is more precious than the right to vote. We see the Voting Rights Act eviscerated and then like clockwork, as if they’d been lying in wait 61 years since the moment the ink dried from President Johnson’s pen. The president’s allies set out to remove Black elected officials, not by defeating them at the polls, but by manipulating maps to dilute minority power.
Do you all see it? The Fulton County raid, the executive order attacking voting, the MAGA loyalists on our state election board — they’ve made their plans very clear.
But Georgia Democrats are prepared to answer with a mobilization so massive and a defense of voting rights so fierce that no plot against the franchise will foil the will of the people. There you go.
Because Atlanta, how foolish of them to come to the cradle of the civil rights movement to spread those lies and seize those ballots.
The Spirit of John Lewis
How foolish to launch an attack on voting rights here at the political and spiritual center of the very black history they seek to erase. Their attacks only strengthen our resolve. And if all of us here do what we must do, the sound of feet marching to the polls this fall will be heard in every corner of our state and all the way up on high where Congressman Lewis will look down and see a job well done.
We stand here together in Congressman Lewis’ district and I promise you his spirit is with us in this place right now. In his final years resisting the tide of deepening cynicism, he still elevated us. He reminded us that we all live in one American house and one world house. He called it the inevitable truth that we are all members of one human family. One human family.
One Human Family
And I suspect many of you are here today because you’re deeply troubled by the pain so many of our fellow Georgians and fellow Americans and fellow human beings are enduring right now. The terror of a child watching ICE take away his mother. The despair of a cancer patient losing coverage mid-treatment.
Maybe they don’t care in the White House or in the Governor’s Mansion, but that ache in your heart, that pit in your stomach, that’s what reminds us we’re all in this together. That we’re not just one United States, we’re one united people. E pluribus unum. Out of many, one.
That we’re bound together by the same great national spirit that passed civil rights laws, defeated fascism, and landed men on the moon. The United States is still destined for greatness. But only united will we meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of our time to guarantee great health care for every American. To unleash an affordable housing boom and save our family farms. To harness new technologies for the good of the many and not the few. To make America the world leader on human rights. And return nations to the path of peaceful coexistence.
Our National Greatness
And see, this is what small men like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller will never understand. That our national greatness flows not through our blood or our genes, but through our ideas. Americans are not a race, we’re a people. United not by ethnicity, but by our values, our shared convictions, and that is what makes us exceptional and a beacon to the world.
How amazing is it that the most powerful nation on earth proclaims as its core values that all are created equal, with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, no matter how humble our beginnings, no matter our ancestry, no matter when we arrived on these shores.
A Wave Is Building in Georgia
In Atlanta, a wave is building, the kind of wave that comes once a generation, when people have been pushed too far, and they decide all at once, all together, that enough is enough. So let’s give them a united Georgia. Let’s save the country again. Let’s make sure they hear it all the way down at Mar-a-Lago, that Georgia will bow to no king.
Thank you. God bless you. Let’s get to work. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.
