Thank you very much, and it's great to be back where it all started with the great patriots of CPAC. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Standing before you today, I'm thrilled to report that our incredible movement, a movement that nobody's ever seen anything quite like it—there has never been anything like it before—is strong and growing stronger every single day.

The radical left is exposed; they're weak. And their pathetic policies have been out there long enough now that we don't want them; we'll never take them. We are bringing back our country and we are bringing back our freedom.

The socialists, globalists, Marxists and communists who are attacking our civilization have no idea of the sleeping giant they have awoken. We are a sleeping giant.

They cannot even begin to imagine the brave and righteous spirit they've unleashed in men and women like all of you here today, and this is some crowd; we broke the record again. We broke the record again.

But they're going to find out the hard way starting on November 8, and then again even more so on November 2024. They will find out like never before.

We did it twice. And we'll do it again. We're going to be doing it again. A third time.

2022 will be the year that millions of everyday citizens stand up to the left-wing fascists, and they'll continue, and we will all continue together to make America great again.

We had it done. The election was rigged.

They've undone some of it—not all of it they'll; never be able to do all of it because we'll be acting long before they can do all of it. If it was up to them, they'd do everything they could to destroy our country. But we can build it back again quickly and even better than before because they have lost all credibility. They've proven during this period of time that their policies are a disaster and that their policies don't work.

We'll get voter ID. We'll never defund the police. Ridiculous cancel culture will be wiped out entirely. The wall will be quickly completed.

Build the wall, complete the wall in three weeks. Took two and a half years on the wall, two and a half years to win all of the litigation—over 11 lawsuits that they threw at us. And we have it just about finished and then, I said they can't be serious, they don't want to close up the little loops. But nobody's ever had a border so secure as the border that we had. We'll be sealed good and tight, except for people coming into our country legally.

The drugs pouring in, the human trafficking will stop, and we will again save our country from destruction.

I want to thank the American Conservative Union for putting on this incredible show, this great program of patriots and in particular thank you to Matt and Mercedes Schlapp. Thank you.

We have some great Republican leaders tonight also and we have so many that I'm going to leave some out. It's always a disaster when we do this because they'll say sir—and it takes me a year to make up. Takes me a year because it's a year before they sit before you again. But we'll give it the best we can.


I want to thank—and these are great people, these are patriots— Senator Rick Scott. Thank you, Rick. Thank you, Rick.

Thank you, Senator Bill Hagerty, Bill, Tennessee. Great State of Tennessee. Thank you, Bill.

And John Kennedy. He's running. It's not going to be much of an election; he's gonna win so easliy. John. Wow, he's popular. Where's John? Look at John. Where is John? Great. You're popular John. Wow.

Great student. You know he's a great student, comes from an incredible state. The other senator's not so good in that state. I must be honest, but John Kennedy is fantastic. Went to Oxford, do you know that? He went to Oxford. He was an incredible student, brilliant guy. And he's with us all the way.

Also representatives, Madison Cawthorn. Where's Madison? Madison. They're doing everything they can to stop him. They're doing everything but that will not be successful. Will it?

Mark Green. Mark. Thank you, Mark. Thank you, Mark. Thank you.

A person who's very shy. Doesn't like speaking her mind, but she does it anyway. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A man that knows me almost better than any human being. He knows every inch of me, and he thinks it's actually a very beautiful sight. That's why I like him. That's why I like him. He was the White House doctor.

And also, for Obama and for Bush. And I'd love to ask him who's in the best shape?

He was also an incredible Admiral, highly respected by everybody. He was a great Admiral. He had every—so he was a great doctor, a great Admiral, and you know what he is now? He's an incredible, loving, wonderful but very tough politician from Texas. Congressman Ronny Jackson, thank you. We love Ronny.

He said President Trump is the healthiest president in history. If he didn't eat junk food, he'd live for 200 years. That got us into a lot of trouble, right, Ronny. That statement got us into trouble but that's okay. We all love you, Ronny. Thank you. Great job. Great job.

A man who's terrific, who really loves our country and who's loved in the state of Florida. Matt Gaetz. Where's Matt? Thank you, Matt. Good guy.

Former congressman and now happens to be working on a little project called Truth Social. Which has been trending at the top all over the place, and it's going to give our voice back. And he's tough as hell. Former congressman, Devin Nunez. Where is Devin? Devin. He's tough.

And you know, I don't have all these names, but I happen to see a star—128 and one in wrestling. He was serious. Don't wrestle him.

A man who I mean every time he goes on television it's like a fight. He gets on; he's got one point, the other point, the other point. And there's nobody like him and if you ever saw him work out he just, the machine starts to burn; the treadmill starts to go up on fire. He's still in great shape, but he's a tough cookie. All American wrestler, and nobody like him really. There's nobody like him. Congressman Jim Jordan.
Congressman Jim Jordan. And Polly. And Polly.

And Polly produced one all American or two? Is it two, one? Two. She said two. Two all American wrestlers. And I said are you better than your father was? He said, No, sir; nobody's better than my father was. That's a pretty, that's—only a son could say that. Right? Right, Polly? Jim, thank you for being here. Great people.

And Governor Kevin Stitt. We know Governor Stitt. He's here someplace. Governor Stitt.

And by the way, I notice a patriot in our midst, Mike Lindelll. Will you stand up?

He's a patriot. He's a patriot.

He's a great guy too. He spent his life, over two years he spent a whole life. I won't tell you what he does and what he goes through and what he believes. He's a great patriot. Thank you, Mike. Very much.

Another great patriot. She is doing incredibly well in Arizona. She was the anchor,
she was the anchor for 22 years. I hate to say that long. Was that about right? 22 years and people loved her. And she's beautiful inside and out. You know, you're not allowed to say that anymore. It's politically incorrect, but it's true. She's beautiful inside and out. She's an incredible woman. Kari Lake.

Kari Lake, everybody. And she is leading big. Wow, I just looked at a poll, Kari, and well you never know. Right? So just keep working. Just keep working. But you're leading very big and you're doing a fantastic job. Thank you very much.

And there's so many other people here. If I see them, if you don't mind during the course of a, the speech I'll just bring them out. This way it saves me a lot of problems for the rest of the year or when they vote against me at some point. They'll vote against me because I didn't mention their name. You know, they're politicians and they're vicious people.

Somebody said, Sir, you've been in business; you've been in entertainment "The Apprentice;" and you've been in politics. Who were the toughest; who were the worst?

I said the worst are the politicians, the toughest are the politicians, the meanest are the politicians, and the biggest lying scum are the politicians.

Like Adams "Shifty" Schiff. Where do you meet people like this?

He actually made up a story about my phone call with the President of Ukraine—who by the way is a brave man, he's hanging in. He's hanging in.

And I like him because you know during that ridiculous impeachment waste of time, —and the Republicans stood by us. We were 196  and O. When did you ever hear Republicans do that? But this was truly a scam. But the President of Ukraine said, he did nothing wrong. He could have said he did something or he thought, Well, I wasn't appropriate. You know, all the crap you have to listen to. He said he did absolutely—. I call them up to congratulate him on his victory. He said, he did nothing wrong. Absolutely nothing wrong. I'm glad the tape, I'm glad that tape was going, those transcribers were writing during that call, because otherwise it could have been—. But this is what we're dealing with; we're dealing with some people that are truly evil, truly bad people.

Let me also express my enormous gratitude to every single one of you here today in the audience. We appreciate you being here. It's a great crowd. That's a lot of people.

And that's a lot of fake news. Look at all those cameras up there, wow. [Audience Boos]

That's a lot of people. And my friends from North Carolina. They've come to 92—our beautiful friends, They've come to, I think it's 92 rallies and CPACs and other things. Thank you all very much. Thank you. I don't know if their husbands are happy about it, but, but they are beautiful people. They're great people. Thank you very much. Thank you for your dedication. You know what, the bottom line, they love our country. They love our country. Thank you. Appreciate it.

So we've been together from the very beginning of this journey and we are a long way from being done. Because we had something very bad happen, and we have to keep it going or we're not going to have a country left.

For an amazing 48 years CPAC has helped to conserve, protect and defend our magnificent American heritage. And this year we're being vividly reminded how fragile and precious that heritage really is.

I never knew how important being president was. I was president for four years. I think I did a great job. We did things that nobody ever thought we could do, but.

[Audience Chants: Four more years...]

The importance of the president—when I look at what's happening to our country today, the President is such an important representative. Now we obviously know that, but just a wrong word or a wrong, like a yawn or going to sleep very early, like at four o'clock.

You just can't, it's just such an important. It's so important psychologically, so important for our country. I never really realized to that extent. I knew it was important, but you assume you're going to be doing certain things that are right.

We rebuilt our economy and energy independence and all of those things, but you also have to portray a strength to the outside world, otherwise, they're gonna walk all over you, and that's what they're doing right now.

You can take the five worst presidents in American history and put them together and they would not have done the damage that Joe Biden and his administration has done in just a very short 13 months.

And no matter how you look at it, our country has totally lost its self confidence, lost its self confidence. We as a country have no confidence anymore. But we will get it back, and we'll get it back stronger than ever before.

Whoever heard of that? Whoever heard of that? Our country has lost its self confidence. Whoever heard of that? Whoever thought you'd be hearing—. But it's true. We've lost our self confidence. When you see the way we withdrew. When you see the things that, the stupidity, the open border concept. Who wants this? Prisons from other countries being emptied out into our country.

Just over one year ago, we had the most secure border in U.S. history, record low gas prices, American energy independence, the fastest economic recovery in the history of our country, fastest economic recovery in history. An unrivaled military. We rebuilt the military and we added Space Force on top of it. And peace and quiet was all around the world.

Now inflation is the highest in 40 years. Economists are talking about 5, 6, 7 and even $8 a gallon gasoline. Supply chains are crumbling. Store shelves are empty. Millions of illegal aliens are rushing our borders. Murders are setting records in our cities. The streets of our Democrat-run cities are drenched in blood. A radical left zealot has been nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States. China is threatening Taiwan. Russia is decimating Ukraine. Iran is on the cusp of a nuclear bomb.

We ended the worst and most dangerous deal I've ever seen. And now they want to go back to it—the Iran nuclear deal.

America and our great military has been humiliated in its surrender from Afghanistan. And that's what it was. It was a surrender for no reason whatsoever. We wanted to get out, but we had to get out with strength and with dignity.

And a major war in Europe may very well erupt. That's how they start, exactly what's happening today. This is how they start.

Joe Biden has turned calm into chaos, competence into incompetence, stability into anarchy, and security into catastrophe.

The Russian attack on Ukraine is appalling. It's an outrage and an atrocity that should never have been allowed to occur. It never would have occurred. We are praying for the proud people of Ukraine. God bless them all. God bless them all.

Thank you. They are indeed brave. As everyone understands this horrific disaster would never have happened if our election was not rigged, and if I was the president.

Very simple, it wouldn't have happened.

Under Bush, Russia invaded Georgia.

Under Obama, Russia took Crimea.

Under Biden, Russia invaded Ukraine.

I stand as the only president of the 21st century on whose watch Russia did not invade another country.

[Audience Chants: U.S.A.]

I gave Ukraine the Javelins that everyone is now talking about, and millions of dollars of other military equipment. The Obama Administration gave them blankets. You remember, they gave them blankets? They said we need more than blankets. No, no, we gave you blankets. They sent them blankets. Thank you very much.

Under our leadership, the world was a peaceful place because America was strong. And the perception of our country was perhaps like it had never been before. Powerful, cunning and smart. We were a smart country. Now we're a stupid country.

We always very simply put America first. It was the answer.

With the Abraham accords, we had peace in the Middle East. We had peace in Europe. China knew that it could no longer take advantage of the United States. And I was proud to be the first president in decades who did not get our country into any wars. I got you out of wars. Thank you.

Under our administration, Russia respected America, just like every other country respected America. And they really respected us a lot.

But now Joe Biden is seen as a weak—and I hate to say it because I want him to do a great job; I really want him to do, politically I don't care. I would much rather have him do a great job than a poor job. But nobody could ever believe how bad and weak and grossly incompetent it has been. And when you have a weak president who is not respected by other nations, you have a very chaotic world, and the world hasn't been this chaotic since World War Two. I think we can say that; we can say that very strongly.

I have no doubt that President Putin made his decision to ruthlessly attack Ukraine only after watching the pathetic withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the military was taken out first, our soldiers were killed, and American hostages plus $85 billion worth of the finest equipment anywhere in the world were left behind.

Yesterday reporters asked me if I thought President Putin was smart?

I said, Of course he's smart.

To which I was greeted with, Oh, that's such a terrible thing to say.

I'd like to tell the—Yes, he's smart.

The NATO nations and indeed the world, as he looks over what's happening strategically, with no repercussions or threats whatsoever. They're not so smart.

They're looking the opposite of smart. If you take over Ukraine, we're going to sanction you, they say. Sanction? Well, that's a pretty weak statement. Putin is saying, Oh, they're going to sanction me. They sanctioned me for the last 25 years. You mean I can take over a whole country and they're going to sanction me? You mean they're not going to blow us to pieces, at least psychologically.

The problem is not that Putin is smart, which of course he's smart. But the real problem is that our leaders are dumb, dumb. So dumb.

They so far allowed him to get away with this travesty and assault on humanity. That's what it is. This is an assault on humanity. So sad.

Putin is playing Biden like a drum. And it's not a pretty thing, as somebody that loves our country, to watch. Just not a pretty thing to watch.

I was with Putin a lot; I spent a lot of time with him. I got along with him. I got along with President Xi. I got along with Kim Jong Un. Kim Jong Un has massive nuclear power.

It's a good thing to get along with people, not a bad thing. You can be very tough and get along.

You know I'm the one that ended his pipeline. He said, You're killing me with the pipeline. Nobody else ended his pipeline. Biden came in. He approved it. But I did a lot of things that were very tough on Russia. Nobody, no president was ever as tough on Russia as I was. And I'd come in, the fake news would say Trump loves Russia. He loves Russia. Then we had the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which is now with Durham and Muller and all the rest, just a total hoax. It was a made up fictional story.

But with respect to what's going on now, it would have been so easy for me to stop this travesty from happening. He understood me. And he understood that I didn't play games. This would not have happened.

Someday I'll tell you exactly what we talked about.

But we talked about it. And he did have an affinity— there's no question about it—for Ukraine. I said never let it happen. You better not let it happen.

This is the only attack in history where the further he goes and the bigger it gets, then the worse it gets and the more deaths that's caused, the more money he makes because oil prices keep climbing higher and higher and higher. There's never been anything like that, where a warring nation, the more he makes it difficult to get oil, the more expensive it gets and the more money he makes. And all those tanks roaming around are very expensive, but they're peanuts compared to the kind of money that he's making because of the tremendous increase in oil.

You know when I left and during my term oil was at $36 a barrel. Think of it.  36. Now it hit 100 and they think it's going to 150. So the Middle East and Saudi Arabia, a lot of countries but Russia right now in particular is making more money than they ever dreamt possible. The cost of the war is very, very small compared to the kind of money they're taking in. There's never been a situation like that. It's horrible to watch. It's horrible, because it's a disincentive for him to disengage.

 Remember, Joe and Hunter Biden got $3.5 million from the mayor of Moscow's wife and were never allowed to explain in the debate. Remember, we had the debate and I said, Hey, what did you do with the 3.5 million that you got from the mayor of Moscow's wife—and Chris Wallace, who I assume was now fired from Fox, which is good—he said that's not an appropriate question. That turned out to be another one, Trump was right. That turned out to be another very appropriate question. He got three and a half million dollars from the mayor of Moscow's wife, very rich family. I will tell you that. This is a conflict of interest.

But at the same time, Joe Biden bragged unknowingly on tape, and this was on tape—can you imagine if I said it—about getting rid of a Ukrainian prosecutor or he wouldn't allow $1 billion of American taxpayers' money to be given to Ukraine? They kept saying where's the money, where's the money, where's the money? No, you got to get rid of that prosecutor; he's getting too close. Can you imagine if I did that? And he was on tape, and the fake news media—those people right there—refused to report it. [Audience Boos]

And that's without mentioning the fact that China gave them $1.5 billion to manage. And he never managed money before, other than the money they got probably. There's plenty of conflicts there. You don't have to even think about it. And the fake news didn't want to mention anything; they didn't want to talk about it. It was bad for the election. It was bad for our country in their mind, but they probably knew talking about it would have been good. We can never really bring our country back unless we get an honest media because they're like the policing agent. And they refused to air scandal; they refused to air it.

And it'll be interesting to see what's going to happen over the next three weeks or four weeks as one of the worst scandals ever—I call it the crime of the century, ballot harvesting—as it gets released. And it's all on tape; it's all on tape. And True the Vote. I want to thank those incredible women for the job, Catherine and all of them, for the job they've done. It's incredible. But that'll be released very soon. Everything is on tape. Even the pictures are taken of the people stuffing the ballot boxes. Because without the pictures they don't get paid. And we're talking about hundreds of thousands of votes in each swing state. They focused, they say, on the swing states and you know what? They probably did others too. But the swing states was the focus.

Over the past year we've seen weakness, self loathing and self destruction on a scale previously unthinkable. A military obsessed with equity to all and only being politically correct. I said, so let me ask you is a general, good strong general— General Patton. How do you think he'd like this military? General Douglas MacArthur. Would General Patton be allowed to shout at a private who is doing a horrible thing? "Sir, we don't think that would be appropriate." "Oh, really?"  I don't think, Jim Jordan, that would work out too well would it, huh? Wouldn't work out too well.
See also:
American Bridge 21st Century Press Release.  "American Bridge 21st Century Statement on Donald Trump’s 2024 Presidential Campaign Announcement."  Feb. 26, 2022.

Save America Press Release.  "ICYMI: President Donald Trump CPAC Recap."  Mar. 1, 2022.

Eugene Kiely, Robert Farley, Lori Robertson and D'Angelo Gore.  "FactChecking Trump's CPAC Speech."  FactCheck.org, Feb. 28, 2022.