One of the two speeches so far that are of merit.
"I'm a father of five young children, from two-year-old Chloe to Kai
who just turned nine. I'm the husband to Vanessa, an amazing wife and
mother. And a son of a great man.
I'm an American. And tonight I want to talk to you about the country
we live in. The country our children will grow up in.
For my generation, this is the most important election of our lifetime
– one that will determine the future of our country and in turn the
future of the world.
For too long our country has ignored its problems, punting them down
the road for its future generations to deal with.
In business, I was trained by my father to make the tough investments
and decisions today to ensure a brighter future tomorrow.
We've actually started to believe that solving our great problems is
an impossible task. And that's why we need to elect a man who has a
track record of accomplishing the impossible.
For the first time, parents no longer think that their kids will be as
well off as we were. We've lost the confidence in our leaders and the
faith in our institutions.
We'll remember one thing. We're still Americans. We're still one
country, and we're going to get it all back. We're going to get it
back better than ever before.
I know we'll get it back because I know my father. I know that when
people tell him it can't be done, that guarantees that he gets it
done.
I know that when someone tells him that something is impossible,
that's what triggers him into action.
When people told him that it was impossible for a boy from Queens to
go to Manhattan and take on developers in the big city, rather than
give up, he changed the skyline of New York.
I've seen it time and time again. That look in his eyes when someone
says it can't be done.
I saw that look a little over a year ago when he was told he couldn't
possibly succeed in politics. Yes, he did.
For my father, impossible is just the starting point. That's how he
approaches business projects. That's how he approaches life.
Whether it's teaching his granddaughter how to swing a golf club or
tackling the toughest negotiations, he's always fully committed.
That's why the person who had never run for office before, stood on
the stage 11 months ago, in this very arena, with 16 professional
politicians, and this week that same man will stand before you as our
party's nominee for the president of the United States of America!
As a proud son and family member, it was one of the great honors of my
life to be able to put him over the top in the delegate count earlier
today.
His unrelenting determination is why he's going to become our next
president. And why I know that when my father says he can fix the
country, he means it.
You want to know what kind of president he'll be?
Let me tell you how he ran his businesses, and I know because I was
there with him, by his side on job sites, in conference rooms from the
time I could walk.
He didn't hide out behind some desk in an executive suite. He spent
his career with regular Americans. He hung out with the guys on
construction sites, pouring sheet rock and pouring concrete and
hanging sheet rock. He listened to them and he valued their opinions
as much and often more than the guys from Harvard and Wharton locked
away in offices, away from the real work.
He's recognized the talent and the drive that all Americans have.
He's promoted people based on their character, their street smarts,
and their work ethic, not simply paper credentials.
To this day, many of the top executives in our company are individuals
that started out in positions that were blue collar. But he saw
something in them and he pushed them to succeed.
The true gift as a leader is that he sees the potential in people that
they don't even see in themselves – the potential that other
executives would overlook because their resumes don't include the
names of fancy colleges and degrees.
I know he values those workers and those qualities in people, because
those are the individuals he had my sibling and me work under when we
started out.
That he would trust his own children's formative years to these men
and women says all you need to know about Donald Trump.
We didn't learn from MBAs. We learned from people who had doctorates
in common sense. Guys like Vinny Stellio [sp], who taught us how to
drive heavy equipment, operate tractors and chainsaws, who worked his
way through the ranks to become a trusted adviser of my father.
It's why we're the only children of billionaires as comfortable in a
D10 Caterpillar as we are in our own cars.
My father knew that those were the guys and gals that would teach us
the dignity of hard work from a very young age.
He knows that at the heart of the American dream is the idea that
whoever we are, wherever we're from, we can get ahead, where everyone
can prosper together.
The other party also tells us they believe in the American dream. They
say we should worry about economic inequality and immobility.
You know what? They're right. But they don't tell you that it was
their policies that caused the problem and it was their policies that
have no accountability.
They gave us the worst immigration system in the world, one that
imports immobility, one that drives down employment and wages for
Hispanic Americans, for African Americans, and for everyone. An
immigration system that favors illegals over those trying to go
through the process legally and, at times, even over law-abiding citizens.
It was Bernie Sanders himself who warned that a large tide of new
workers keeps wages low and poverty high.
The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our
students, especially those who have no options.
Growing up, my siblings and I, we were truly fortunate to have choices
and options that others don't have. We want all Americans to have
those same opportunities.
Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class, now they're
stalled on the ground floor. They're like Soviet-era department stores
that are run for the benefit of the clerks, and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students.
You know why other countries do better on K through 12? They let
parents choose where to send their own children to school.
That's called competition. It's called the free market.
And it's what the other party fears. They fear it because they're more
concerned about protecting the jobs of tenured teachers than serving
the students in desperate need of a good education.
They want to run everything top-down from Washington. They tell us
they're the experts and they know what's best.
The other party gave us a regulatory state on steroids.
Dodd-Frank was a thousand pages long and it's already spun off 22,000
pages in regulations.
Imagine trying to digest all that before you even open your doors for
business. That doesn't help consumers. What it does is destroy small
business in favor of big businesses who can afford the vast number of
lawyers and accountants needed to comply. Dodd-Frank is consumer
protection for billionaires.
We've produced the thickest network of patronage and influence of any
country at any time in world history. It's composed of a
self-satisfied people at the top – our new aristocrats. We can't live
that way any longer, it's too risky.
Let me talk a little bit about risks.
The other party is the party of risk.
I've spent many time with many great Americans who have served this
country in the military, and they know what's at stake. When we have
weak leaders in positions of power, Americans risking their lives for
our freedoms are less safe.
You know, almost daily I get a call or a text from a real American
hero. His name is Mark Geist and I'm proud to call him a friend.
Mark was part of the security team at the annex on our grounds at the
consulate in Benghazi.
Mark was one of the men who received frantic phone calls from his
buddies at the compound. Calls that pleaded for help. Calls that he
and his team tried to answer. But calls that didn't save all his
friends because Secretary Clinton's State Department had ignored their
request for help, both on the night in question and even in the weeks
and months leading up to the attack.
It was a tragedy and one that would be repeated were she to win the
election.
Ask Mark, who's fit to lead? Who has the judgment to lead? Who will
take that call at three o'clock in the morning? Or better yet, ask
yourselves if you were in Mark's shoes that night, who would you
rather call?
Let me tell you something about risk, if Hillary Clinton were elected,
she'd be the first president who couldn't pass a basic background
check. It's incredible.
Hillary Clinton is a risk Americans can't afford to take.
She says she'll issue executive orders to take away Americans' guns.
She wants to appoint judges who will abolish the Second Amendment.
Just look at how effective those laws have been in inner city Chicago.
A city with the toughest gun laws in our nation, where 70 people were
murdered last month alone and where over 3,400 American lives have
been lost since this administration took office in 2009.
You know why those laws fail? Because criminals by definition don't
follow laws.
Rather than prosecuting real criminals, she would strip hard working,
law abiding citizens of their rights to protect themselves and their
families.
She'll throw every possible obstacle in the path of safe, reliable,
affordable, energy, produced in America, by Americans for American
businesses and families.
Rather than being energy independent, our country will be forced to
remain beholden to her buddies in the Middle East.
Those are risks we can't afford to take. And when we win, we're not
going to have to.
There's so much work to do.
We will not accept the current state of our country because it's too
hard to change. That's not the America I know.
We're going to unleash the creative spirit and energy of all
Americans.
We're going to make our schools the best in the world for every single
American of every single ethnicity and background.
We're going to put Americans first. All Americans. Not a special class
of crony elites at the top of the heap.
We're going to elect a president who will work with everyone to pass
legislation that will make our country great again.
A president who will give us a tax code that will free the American
economy and end special loopholes for the wealthy.
A president who will give us an immigration law that protects American
citizens and gives them jobs.
A president who will repeal and replace Obamacare without leaving our
most vulnerable citizens without health care and who will do it
without destroying Medicare for seniors as Hillary Clinton has
proposed.
A president who knows we can't simply delete our problems but that we
have to tackle them head on.
A president who won't allow PC culture to put the safety and
well-being of our children and our loved ones at stake.
A president who won't bow and pander to nations that shudder at the
very thought of America's existence.
A president more concerned with the safety and comfort of his fellow
Americans than the feelings of those hostile nations abroad, who if
given the option would wipe America off the face of this Earth!
A president not beholden to special interests, foreign and domestic,
and one who funded his entire primary run out of his own pocket just
to prove it.
A president who will secure and defend the borders of the United
States and will appoint judges who believe that freedom requires a
limited government.
A president who won't use the highest office in the land as a path to
personal enrichment.
A president who's actually created real jobs, who has actually signed
the front of a paycheck and who doesn't just talk about it in theory.
A president who has real people's families and livelihoods depending
on his success and the success of his company for decades.
A president who speaks his mind and not just when it behooves him to
do so, who doesn't have to run a focus group or use data analytics to
be able to form a simple opinion, who says what needs to be said and
not just what you want to hear.
A president who will unleash the greatness in our nation and in all of
us, who will give the hard working men and women who built this great
country a voice once again.
That president can only be my mentor, my best friend, my father,
Donald Trump.
And when we elect him, we'll have done all that. We'll have made
America great again- greater than ever before.
Thank you and God bless!