6-24-25 FULL SPEECH VICE PRESIDENT VANCE IN LIMA

Vice President J.D. Vance was in Lima Tuesday night to address a gathering of the Ohio Republican Party. Audio courtesy of WLIO-TV. 

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Downtown.

Speaker 2 (00:25):
You please, please, please, thank you all. Take your seats please,
it is I gotta say, it feels like.

Speaker 1 (00:36):
A great homecoming to be here in Lima today. I
am so thrilled to be with you all. Now, I
gotta say my my chief of staff, who's a great guy.
He told me thank you. You probably don't know who
he is, but you're celebrating him anyway. He just got

(00:56):
engaged actually, so I'm very proud of him. He's doing
things the right way. But you know, he told me
on Monday, which I guess is yesterday, he said, you know, sir,
I think we might have to cancel this trip to Lima.
And I said, I'm not canceling this trip to Limah
for anything. I've been looking forward to this for months.
We're not canceling the trip to Lima. And I don't

(01:19):
know if you guys saw it, but there's nothing going
on the news at all that would justify me canceling
this trip to lin. Why the hell would we cancel
the trip to Lima. Ohio. It's a boring day in
the White House, as you guys have probably seen. So
let me offer a few words of appreciation. So I
could probably thank half the people in this room, and

(01:40):
I'm so thrilled to be with you this evening. And
there are a few by name that I want to
call out, so first of all, and I'm not even
going to try to pronounce your last name. I never do,
but Alex t the great chair of the Ohio g GP.
Thank you, Alex for everything that you do. I've got
to think and this is, guys, you should be glad.

(02:03):
I asked about this. I thought because it says here
Senator Tony Schrader. But I know Tony and he is
not a lowly politician. He is actually the guy who
operates behind the scenes, so our great GUP Central Committee
man and also the chair of the Putnam County GOP,
Tony Schrader, Tony, where are you? Man? I love you? Hey,

(02:29):
Tony's been so good to me from the very beginning.
And I'm gonna tell a little story here. That's what
I'm gonna do. You guys are gonna be stuck here
for forty five minutes of me telling stories. I'm just
in such a good mood. Unfortunately, we've got these cameras
back there, so I gotta be a little bit careful
if I say something really stupid. Somebody's got to stand
up here and stop me before I embarrass myself in
front of national TV. Here. But Tony Schrader was when

(02:53):
I decided to run for office the very first time.
It was the Senate race back in Ohio in twenty
twenty two. And this is sort of early twenty twenty one,
when I'm going around and given speeches. I haven't even
declared my candidacy yet, and Tony Schrader was actually backing
somebody else in the primary. Now Tony was back in
a person who is a very dear friend of mine,
Jane Timpkin, who's I don't know if Jane is here,

(03:15):
but Jane, Hey, Jane, how are you? But that was
a hard fought primary, a bunch of really good candidates,
and eventually, of course I won that primary and won
the race. But Tony worked harder for me, maybe than
anybody in all of northwestern Ohio. I mean, he knocked
on so many doors, you remember, Tony. We would have
events with volunteers where we would knock on more doors

(03:38):
than I thought humanly possible. And it was all because
Putnam County GP is an incredible organization led by an
incredible guy. So thank you Tony for everything that you do.
Of course, no thank you here is complete in linea
Ohio without thinking our great Allen County GP chairman Keith Cheney,

(03:59):
who has an incredible voice. He was the announcer. Keith.
I think if I had your voice, I would have
been Vice president earlier than I made it. Man, But
you know, nobody is endowed with perfect gifts here and
of course, up volunteer Kurt Kaufman, Kurt, thanks for everything
that you do. We said hello back to this age.

(04:19):
Thank you, Kurt. All right, So I got my thank
yous at least by name, at least until I noticed
somebody else's face in the crowd here. But 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. So, 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. And

(04:41):
if you walk back in time, you remember what happened.
So this Saturday before the GOP convention, the President, I
actually flew down to Florida to meet with the President
and we talked It was the first time I had
ever talked with him explicitly about becoming his running mate.
And he said, you know, I'm not sure what I'm
gonna do, but it's probably gonna be used. So go
have fun the next couple of days. How do you

(05:04):
have fun the next couple of days when that's what
the president tells you. And 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. I think what it would have been
one of the great tragedies in American history, not just
a tragedy for him personally. And I really do believe

(05:25):
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 and that moment. But so I called
the President that night. It's probably two in the morning
at this point. I called the President that night. I
remember I just met with him that morning talking about

(05:47):
becoming his running mate, and I'm like, sir, how you doing,
And 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. He goes, how's it playing out there, like,
mister President, I think it's playing pretty damn well. Because
remember he had that photo where he raises the fist iconically,
and I said, I think that photo is going to
go down in history as one of the great photos.

(06:09):
And of course I was right about that. So the
morning of the convention, the morning he announces me to
be his nominee, he calls me at around eleven forty
five and I'm not kidding you. I don't answer the
phone and I don't know what had happened. We had
just landed Milwaukee. We've got three little kids. You know,
it was a hot day. We were trying to get

(06:29):
through all the security to get to our hotel room.
I don't know what happened. So I call him back
fifteen minutes later and he answers the phone and he says, JD,
you just missed a very important phone call. I said, yes, yes,
mister President, and he said, I'm gonna have to select
somebody else now, and of course, you know, my heart

(06:53):
stops and I think he's actually going to do it.
But then he asked me to be his running mate.
He actually talks to my son, and you know, the
rest is history, right, the rest is history. So 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 and 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. There's some some tough

(07:14):
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. And 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,
and I think to myself, that's probably not a button

(07:36):
that you want to press. Right, So 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
and my eyes get really big and I'm like, mister President,
you know what just happened? And he looks at me

(07:58):
and he goes nuclear nuclear. And 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. And that's So. That's the
kind of guy, my fellow Republicans, that we have as

(08:18):
the President of the United States, a guy who can
do a good job but keep a sense of humor.
And I've learned a ton, even in one hundred and
thirty days, one hundred and forty days, however long we've
been in office, I think I've learned more. I've had
more on the job training than I think any person

(08:39):
in the history of having a job for all of
about five months. Because the thing that I've learned about
the President of United States, and I guess I kind
of knew this a little bit, but 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
is what makes the president so successful is he has
the best instincts about people of anybody that I've ever

(09:00):
seen in my life. He knows when somebody is selling
him a load of bs, he knows when he's making progress,
when he needs to cut something off. He 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.
And 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, the President of the

(09:24):
United States. Of course, we were trying to figure out
what we were doing with the Israel Iran situation. Of course,
we had just launched the wildly successful attack that destroyed
the Iranian nuclear facilities in Fourdeaux and elsewhere, thank you.
But we know the Iranians are going to counterattack, and

(09:46):
we're kind of trying to figure out is it going
to be a real counterattack or is it going to
be something more symbolic, more faith saving. He's dealing with
congressional leaders about the one big, beautiful bill that cuts
taxes on overtime, cuts taxes for ten thank you. Really
really is the most important generational tax reform that we've

(10:08):
had in this country in thirty years, and also provides
billions of dollars to replenish the southern border funding that
encourages us and empowers us to kick out the illegal
immigrants and to stop the flow of illegal immigration into
our country. So we're doing all these things and that's

(10:30):
just one Monday at the White House. And there's no
person that could possibly, you know, read all the briefing
materials that 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. You need
somebody who can tell when a person is negotiating on
behalf of the American people, and you need somebody who

(10:52):
knows when they're negotiating against the interests of the American people.
And I'll tell you do not want to be a
person in Donald Trump's Oval office who negotiating against the
interests of the American people, because they'll throw you the
hell out and tell you exactly what he's going to do.
And that and that is what I think makes them

(11:15):
an effective president. It's what makes them an effective leader
for the American people. And I will say I'm obviously
extremely biased, but one hundred and thirty days into this term,
we have got a lot to brag on from the
Trump administration. And what we're doing in Washington, DC. Let
me let me run just through a few of the

(11:37):
ways in which the Trump administration has been wildly successful.
And let me start with the thing that is of
course in the news, and what the President said going
back ten years, if you look at the campaign in
twenty fifteen, in twenty sixteen, he said it consistently through
his second term, is that he does not want Iran
to have a nuclear weapon. It's very simple. It destable

(12:00):
the entire region. It gives this terrible regime leverage over
the United States of America. As the President often jokes
with me, everybody in Iran calls the Iranian leader the
supreme Leader. That's a pretty amazing title, if you think
about it. But he looked at me in the situation
room a few days ago and he said, mister Vice President,
you don't have to call him the Supreme Leader, but

(12:22):
you would if the guy had a nuclear weapon, because
the leverage that nuclear weapons give you to destabilize the world,
to destroy our economic interest to destroy our national security interests.
You don't want the worst people in the world to
have a nuclear weapon. So what did the President do?
For sixty days? He negotiated aggressively to encourage that Iranian

(12:43):
regime to give up those weapons peacefully. And by the way,
he was more than willing to accept a peaceful settlement
to that problem. But again this comes back to instincts.
When the President realized that there was not going to
be a peaceful settlement to that problem, he sent B
two bombers and dropped twelve thirty thousand pound bombs on
the worst facility and destroy that program. And I think

(13:11):
there are a lot of Republicans, by the way, I
count myself among them, who after the past twenty five years,
they don't want to get involved in another long term,
protracted Middle Eastern conflict. We all saw what happened with
Iraq and Afghanistan. And so what I call the Trump
doctrine is quite simple. Number One, you articulate a clear
American interest, and that's in this case that Iran can't

(13:33):
have a nuclear weapon. Number Two, you try to aggressively
diplomatically solve that problem. And number three, when you can't
solve it diplomatically, you use overwhelming military power to solve it,
and then you get the hell out of there before
it ever becomes a protracted conflict. That is the Trump doctrine.

(13:55):
And to the Americans who are worried about this becoming
a protracted conflict, I think the President solved that very quickly.
Not only did we destroy the Iranian nuclear program, we
did it with zero American casualties. And that's what happens
when you've got strong American leadership. Now, let me talking

(14:17):
about something else. For every month that you've got inflation
numbers and jobs numbers and wage numbers coming out, you know,
I'll come into the White House and I'll say what
you know that this happened now about five times where
every seems like every economist and every financial journalist in
the world says that Donald Trump's policies are going to
lead to higher inflation, they're gonna lead to lower jobs,

(14:39):
they're gonna lead to lower wages. And for now five
months in a row, every single time we come into
the news, and it turns out the economists expectations missed
because wages are higher, inflation is lower, and our economy
is roaring in a way that it is not in
a very very long time. That is thanks to good
presidential leadership. And I'll bring it back to instincts, because

(15:03):
when the President came into office, he said, frankly what
he's been saying for thirty years, that we have got
to stop allowing foreign companies to take advantage and foreign
countries to take advantage of the United States of America.
Why in God's name would we allow cheap, slave labor
manufactured stuff from a foreign country to come into our country,

(15:26):
undercutting the wages and jobs of American workers. And the
reason we allow that to happen is, for thirty years,
we had a bipartisan failed consensus that we ought to
let cheap plastic garbage come into our country at the
expense of American jobs and the American families who depend
on all those jobs. You know what President Trump said
on April the second, He said, if you tried to

(15:48):
undercut the wages of American workers, if you tried to
bring in this crap, if you try to expose the
American worker to an economic unfairness that you don't force
your own countries to deal with, we are going to
slap a big fat tariff on what you bring into
this country. We're going to penalize you for once. Finally,

(16:08):
we had an American president who said, if you want
to destroy the wages and the jobs of American workers.
You're going to pay a big fat penalty because of it,
and that I believe has saved the American economy. If
you want to undercut American steel, you're gonna have to

(16:28):
pay a tariff. If you want to undercut American auto workers,
you're gonna have to pay a tariff. And all the
economists said, well, what this is going to do is
going to produce inflation. And know what the President said
is what it's going to do is one of two things.
Number One, it's going to force a lot of people
to move their factories back to the United States of America.
And we've seen more foreign investment in the past one
hundred and thirty days than you've seen in any one

(16:49):
hundred and thirty day period in the history of this country.
Or he said, what it's going to cause is these
foreign countries are going to open up their markets to
American manufactured goods. Because here's the crazy thing. You go
to Germany, you go to Japan, you go to South Korea.
Some of these countries, by the way, are very important
allies of ours. But how many foreign how many American
made automobiles do you see on the streets of these

(17:12):
foreign countries very often zero. But we allow all of
these countries to come in and do business on our shores. Well,
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, because
that's how we create prosperity for American workers. And the

(17:37):
final and most important thing, and I think this is
the most important issue confronting this country, and it was
certainly the most important issue that was destroying this country
for over the past four years, and that is the
issue of illegal immigration. Now, if I had stood here
in October of twenty twenty four and you had told
me that after forty five days of the Trump administration

(17:59):
we would have a legal order crossings down between ninety
five to ninety nine percent, I would have sayd whoa, whoa, WHOA.
I believe the President is very serious about this, and
I believe the President is very effective, But there is
no way that we're going to have illegal border crossings
down that much. And I'm happy to report that one
and a half months into the Trump administration, we had
ilegal border crossings down ninety nine percent. It was a

(18:22):
radical success, and it happened very quickly. And I believe,
ladies and gentlemen, that that saved the United States of
America because we know exactly what the Democrats, not because
we had to read their minds, but because Democrats would
go out and say that what they wanted to do

(18:43):
with those twenty twenty five million illegal aliens is give
every single one of them the right to vote and
turn them into permanent wards of the Democratic Party. And
if we allowed that to happen, if we allowed the
Democratic Party to import voters instead of persuade voters, that
would have been the end of American democracy. You hear
the American media say all the time that Donald Trump

(19:05):
is a threat to democracy. The threat to the democracy
is Democrats importing voters instead of persuading their fellow citizens.
And now we have largely solved that problem. If you look,

(19:27):
for the first time in fifty years, the first time
in fifty years, we now have net negative illegal immigration.
That means we're deporting more people than are coming in
through illegal immigration. That is the biggest testament to a
change in presidential leadership. And I was in the Senate

(19:47):
when the Democrats were trying to say that the thing
that we had to do was pass this ridiculous, massive
new set of laws and new set of amnesties to
get control of the American Southern bl And as the
President said at the State of Union just a couple
of months ago, it turns out you didn't need a
big new law to secure the border. You just needed

(20:07):
a new president of the United States. So we've done
all these things with effective presidential leadership. And of course
we've got a lot of good guys in Washington, d C.
Who are working very hard, and I want to give
a shout out. I don't believe that they're here. I
actually believe that John Houston and Bernie Marino hopefully they're

(20:30):
in Washington, d C. Working on the big beautiful bill.
They're doing a great job. And we are lucky in
the state of Ohio to have great political leadership across
the board. You know, Bernie, I remember talking to the
President about Bernie Marino's candidacy, and you know, the President really,

(20:54):
I mean, look, Shared was a tough candidate. Shared Brown
was a tough candidate. He always did better than national Democrats.
And the President himself was a little skeptical that anybody,
and we had a lot of great candidates running in
that race. The President was skeptical that anybody could beat
shared Brown. But I think what we showed him in
the Ohio GOP is that while we had a reputation

(21:15):
for a very long time as a purple state or
even a blue state, thanks to the hard work of people,
many of whom are in this room, I think Ohio
is now solidly read is going to stay red for
a very long time. But you and I know that's
not going to come without a lot of hard work.

(21:36):
And 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.
I would not be where I am without it. I believe.
In fact, the first time that I've driven on seventy
five and I've got my MIDI purple tie, Middletown Midies
our colors purple. Here, I warred in honor of the

(21:57):
Middletown Midies. The first time that I've on I seventy five.
I'm pretty sure his vice president was to come to
the Lima GOP event here today, and I think about
the number of times thank you Keith. The number of
times that I've driven up and down Interstate seventy five
is as a kid when I was working at a
tile warehouse to live in tiles to findlay Ohio, or

(22:20):
or as a there we Go, or as a Senate
candidate who was trying, you know, showing up and speaking
to groups of twelve people trying to earn votes. I
think that what is so great about the Ohio GOP
is that we really are strong top to bottom. We've
got great candidates running for state wide office, but we've
got a lot I see a lot of young people here,

(22:40):
many of whom are getting involved in politics for the
very first time. And I got to tell you, I've
lived a very blessed life in politics. The President, he
always gives me a little crap about this. He says, JD.
You came out of nowhere, you were a senator, and
then all of a sudden, you were the vice president
of the United States. I don't think anybody has had
that much success in politics except for me. That's what

(23:01):
the President always said. I was like, thank you, sir,
I guess I'm the second. He always calls me the
second most upwardly mobile politician. Because he was the first.
He came from no politics to president of the United States.
But the thing is, you don't get people who run

(23:22):
for political office without cultivating talent and cultivating the grassroots
and actually encouraging people to get involved at every level
of government. There's a lot of important stuff that we're
working on at Washington, d C. But there's a lot
of cool stuff happening right here in Allen County, Ohio.
There's a lot of important stuff that are happening at
the State House, and frankly, a lot of the great

(23:44):
political leaders of the future are going to learn from
the political leaders of today at the Ohio State House,
or at the or or at the federal capital of Washington,
d C. The first exposure I ever had to politics
was actually as a in the Ohio Senate when I
was a student at Ohio State University. That was the
first time I had ever been exposed to the American

(24:07):
political system, working for a great state senator by the
name of Bob Schuler from southwestern Ohio. And I'm sure
a lot of you remember Bob schul. He was a
good guy, the first person who taught me how to
respond to a constituent was Bob Schuler. The first person
who taught me how to write a good letter and
at research an issue was Bob Schuler. And my point
here is that what you guys are doing is cultivating

(24:29):
the people who are going to run this country and
lead this country for the generation to come. So this
party is what makes America great. This party is what
makes it possible for us to run good candidates and
to win elections in the future. And 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.

(24:51):
I wouldn't be the vice president of the United States
without many of the people in this room. And from
the bottom of my heart, I thank you, and I
love you well. Thank you, thank you. I should quit

(25:23):
while I'm ahead. Honestly, I should just walk out the
door now. I'm not going to do much better than that,
I think, but I owe that was another crazy thing
that happened on January the twentieth man. So I called
the president on January eighteenth, and I said, sir, I
know the inauguration is very important, but let's be honest,
the vice president is not the most important of the

(25:45):
presidential inauguration. The President is, so, would you be okay
if I put my hand on the Bible, took the
oath of office, and then headed south to attend the
National Championship Game as the vice President of the United
States because that's a very important you know, skip all
the inaugural balls. You know Usha who I think all
of you have come to love a second lady. She's
doing a great job, and I'm proud of her. I mean,

(26:10):
I don't know, honestly how much Usher really wants to
wear high heels for nine hours on that day anyway,
So just let us go to the National Championship Game.
The President was like, no, JD, I can't do that.
You got to be there but to walk you through
that day. So we do the inauguration, and it's crazy,
You're going from one of it to the next. And

(26:31):
I show up to the very first ball, which was
the Commander in Chief's ball, and 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. And 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, and you've got the guy you know who's

(26:52):
sitting outside the bathroom on his phone or he's got
his iPad out. We've every single one of us has
been to a wedding like this. You all know what
I'm talking about. Okay, Well, 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, but could
we get the hell out of here and watch this
Ohio State game. So what we did is that we
rented a conference room where they did the Commander and

(27:12):
Chiefs ball and we actually had you know, we had
an open bar. We turned it into a big party,
and we had the Ohio State game on. So I
go in there right for like twenty minutes. It was
the only twenty minutes that I kind of got to
myself and I you know, hung out with my buddies
and we watched Ohio State. And if you remember this game,
Ohio State got a massive early lead over Notre Dame.
Right the beginning of the game was very very good.

(27:34):
So I kind of started to relax a little bit, like,
oh my god, I just got inaugurated. Vice president and
the Buckeyes are going to the national championship, all on
the same day. This is the best day of my life, right,
It's not going to get much better than this. And then,
you know, we went to a couple of balls, and
then I think it was after the second ball, before
the third ball, I was watching on the TV and

(27:55):
Notre Dame started to catch up a little bit. If
you all watched this game, you remember Notre Dame started
to catch up little bit, and so I was like,
you know what, I'm going to be late to the
third ball, and I'm going to sit here and watch
this game because 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. Of course, it
all worked out. Ohio State won. They came to the
White House. I don't know if you saw, I broke

(28:17):
the damn trophy when they came to the White House.
That was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.
I was hoping that no, no, we didn't see that.
We didn't see that. JD. No, all of you are laughing.
Everybody saw it. But the point is that it was

(28:37):
an amazing way to connect the great Buckeye state of
Ohio and what was happening because without this state, without
this state's gup, in particular, Donald Trump would not have
been president the first time, and we certainly wouldn't have
the great Senate majority that we now have for the
second administration. And the President, as you all know, he

(28:59):
actually has a very deep affection for the state of
Ohio because he was the person who turned Ohio really
from a purple state to a red state. I mean,
all of you remember this. I mean, where is Bob
out There is Bob Paduchick out there. There's Bob Paducick.
You have it enough for Bob Paducick. But you know,

(29:19):
back in the day, there was this idea that you know,
all the polls, even right Bob or at least all
the public polls, were saying that the President was going
to lose Ohio. And then he won Ohio by eight points,
and of course he won it by a much bigger
margin the second and third time around. But he recognizes
that what this state represents is hard working, patriotic Americans

(29:40):
who feel abandoned by the Democratic Party and the Republican
Party is now the home for people who work hard,
who play by the rules, who want to live in
safe communities, and just want a government that looks out
for their interests in no one else's interests. That's what
this party is ultimately all about. Because when I see

(30:02):
that wage growth is the highest that it's been for
working people in sixty years, working in middle class people,
the highest wage growth we've seen in this country for
sixty years. When I see those inflation numbers keep on
coming in below expectation month after month, those are statistics,
and those are numbers that, of course we celebrate. But
what I remember is a woman I met on the

(30:22):
campaign trail, and you all gonna hate me, but she
was actually from Michigan. Don't hold it against her, as
a very sweet, very sweet woman who told me that
she was giving up some of the essentials because she
was raising her grandkids. And I know a lot of
you probably are involved in your grand grandkids' lives in
a big way. She was one of these grandparents whose

(30:43):
daughter had lost her life to a fentanyl overdose. That
fentonyl overdose brought in, of course, by the fentanyl poison
brought in by the Mexican drug cartels, And she was
talking about the ways in which, you know, normally we'd
like to have ground beef, but we're gon we're gonna
cut back on ground beef, and and just you know,
not go without this week. Or you know, normally I

(31:04):
like to make a eggs in the morning, but we're
just gonna do toast in the morning because eggs are
a little expensive. And she walked me through all the
ways in which because she was taking care of kids
she hadn't anticipated, and 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. And I thought about the common thread that

(31:26):
tied together this woman suffering to the political leadership in Washington,
d C. First of all, why was her daughter gone
in the first place, Because our leadership decided that we
were going to let illegal Mexican drug cartels bring this
poison into our country in the first place. That was
the first ware leadership failed her. The second way our
leadership failed her is with economic policies that made it

(31:47):
so unaffordable that she gave up eggs and decided that
she was just going to have her grandkids eat toast.
The third way that this country had failed her is
because the education system, where she just wanted to send
herr kids to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic, she was
terrified that they were falling behind, that they were learning,
if anything, propaganda from political activists instead of the basics

(32:12):
that would help them get ahead in life and eventually
have a good career to be able to provide for themselves.
At every step of the way, the previous administration had
failed this woman, and 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. She was losing faith in that American dream.

(32:34):
Now I haven't talked to that woman since we were elected.
I haven't talked to that woman since that campaign stop
where I met her, probably seven or eight months ago.
But when I see that energy prices are lower, when
I see that illegal immigration is down, when I see
that fitting all overdoses are down. When I see the president,
under his leadership, we're arresting Mexican drug cartel members at

(32:58):
record numbers, what I see is an Ohio Republican Party
and a national Republican Party that is fighting successfully for
the American dream. So what i'd ask all of you
when you're going out there and you're knocking on doors,

(33:19):
when you're going out there and you're making phone calls,
when 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. Trust me. In Washington,
d C. They have this thing where I think it's
it means we're number one in Washington, d C. But
all the pink haired people throw up this sign, and
I think you know that means we're number one. Right,

(33:41):
that's that I choose to take that as that symbol
in Washington. But all kidding aside, all kidding aside. You know,
sometimes this job of politics is inspiring and sometimes it's
hard work. Take the good work, the inspiring work with

(34:03):
the hard work. But I want you to remember that
what we're trying to do is create the kind of
country where that woman's grandchildren can grow up and go
to a safe school where they get a good education.
We're trying to create the kind of economy where those grandkids,
if they work hard and play by the rules, can
provide for their family with a dignified, high paying job.

(34:24):
We're trying to create the kind of country where that
woman knows that her leadership cares more about her and
her family than they do about Mexican drug cartels. We're
trying to create the kind of country where the American
dream is alive and well. We're off to a good start.
Thank you for all you've done to help us. God
bless you guys.