Thank you. Thank you. Please, please, please. Thank you all. Take your seats, please. It is -- I've got to say, it feels like a great homecoming to be here in Lima today. I am so thrilled to be with you all. Now I've got to say, 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 engaged actually. So, I'm very proud of him. He's doing things the right way. But he told me on Monday, which I guess is yesterday. He said, sir, I think we might have to cancel this trip to Lima. And I said I'm not canceling this trip to Lima for anything. I've been looking forward to this for months.
We're not canceling this trip to Lima. And I don't know if you guys saw, but there's nothing going on in the news at all that would justify me canceling this trip to Lima. [Laughter] 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 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 GOP. Thank you, Alex for everything that you do. I've got to thank -- and this is -- guys, you should be glad I asked about this.
I thought, because it says here Senator Tony Schrader, but I know Tony and he's not a lowly politician. He is actually the guy who operates behind the scenes. So, our great GOP Central Committee man and also the chair of the Putnam County GOP, Tony Schrader. Tony, where are you man? I love you. Hey, Tony's been so good to me from the very beginning and I'm going to tell a little a little story here.
That's what I'm going to do. You guys are going to be stuck here for 45 minutes, me telling stories, I'm just in such a good mood. Unfortunately, we've got these cameras back there, so I've got to 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 I decided to run for office the very first time it was the Senate race back in Ohio in 2022. And so, this is sort of early 2021 when I'm going around and giving speeches. I haven't even declared my candidacy yet, and Tony Schrader was actually backing somebody else in the primary.
Now, Tony was backing a person who was a very dear friend of mine, Jane Timken, who's -- I don't know if Jane is here, 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 than I thought humanly possible. And it was all because Putnam County GOP 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 Lima, Ohio without thanking our great Allen County GOP Chairman, Keith Cheney, 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 nobody is endowed with perfect gifts here. And of course GOP volunteer, Kurt Kaufman. Kurt, thanks for everything that you do. We said hello backstage. Thank you, Kurt. All right, so I got my thank you's, at least by name.
At least until I notice 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 if you walk back in time, you remember what happened. So, the 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 going to do, but it's probably going to be you.
So, go have fun the next couple of days. [Laughter] How do you 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 would have been one of the great tragedies in American history, not just a tragedy for him personally.
And I really do believe -- I'm a person of faith, I imagine most of you are too. I believe the hand of God prevented America from experiencing a great national tragedy in that moment. But so, I call the president that night -- it's probably 2 in the morning at this point. I called the president that night.
Remember, I had just met with him that morning talking about becoming his running mate. And I'm like sir, how you doing? And he's like, I'm fine. [Laughter] He'd just been shot in the ear -- oh, I'm fine. Nearly lost his life, but totally fine. He goes, how's it playing out there? And I'm like, Mr. President, I think it's playing pretty damn well.
Because remember, he had that 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. 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 11:45 and, I'm not kidding you, I don't answer the phone.
And I don't know what had happened. We had just landed in Milwaukee, we've got three little kids, it was a hot day. We were trying to get through all the security to get to our hotel room. I don't know what happened. So, I call him back 15 minutes later and he answers the phone and he says, JD, you just missed a very important phone call. [Laughter] And I said, yes, Mr. President.
And he said I'm going to have to select somebody else now. [Laughter] And of course, my heart 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 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 10 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 are some tough 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 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. [Laughter] And my eyes get really big.
And I'm like, Mr. President, what just happened? And he looks at me and he goes, nuclear -- nuclear. [Laughter] 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. [Laughter] So that's the kind of guy, my fellow Republicans, that we have as 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 130 days, 140 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 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 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 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 Fordow and elsewhere. Thank you. But we know the Iranians are going to counterattack and 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 face saving?
He's dealing with Congressional leaders about the One Big, Beautiful Bill that cuts taxes on overtime, cuts taxes for tips. Thank you. Really is the most important generational tax reform that we've had in this country in 30 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 just one Monday at the White House, and there's no person that could possibly read all the briefing materials, the 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 knows when they're negotiating against the interests of the American people.
And I'll tell you; you do not want to be a person in Donald Trump's Oval Office who's 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 him an effective president. It's what makes him an effective leader for the American people.
And I will say, I'm obviously extremely biased, but 130 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 run through a few of the ways in which the Trump administration has been wildly successful. Let me start with the thing that is, of course, in the news.
And what the president said going back 10 years -- if you look at the campaign in 2015 and 2016, and 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 destabilizes 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, Mr. Vice President, you don't have to call him the Supreme leader, but 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 interests, 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 60 days, he negotiated aggressively to encourage that Iranian 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-2 bombers and dropped twelve 30,000-pound bombs on the worst facility and destroyed that program.
And I think there are a lot of Republicans -- by the way, I count myself among them -- who after the past 25 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 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. 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 talk to you 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 that -- this happened now about five times, where every -- it 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 going to lead to lower jobs. They're going to lead to lower wages. And for now, five months in a row, every single time we come to 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 has not in a very, very long time.
That is thanks to good presidential leadership. And I'll bring it back to instincts because when the president came into office, he said frankly what he's been saying for 30 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, undercutting the wages and jobs of American workers. And the reason we allowed that to happen is for 30 years, we had a bipartisan 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 those jobs.
You know what President Trump said? On April 2nd, he said if you try to undercut the wages of American workers, if you try 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, 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 going to have to pay a tariff.
If you want to undercut American auto workers, you're going to have to pay a tariff. And all the economists said, well, what this is going to do is going to produce inflation. No, 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 130 days than you've seen in any 130-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 American made automobiles do you see on the streets of these 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 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 over the past four years, and that is the issue of illegal immigration. Now if I had stood here in October of 2024 and you had told me that after 45 days of the Trump administration, we would have illegal border crossings down between 95 to 99 percent, I would have said, 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 illegal border crossings down 99 percent.
It was a 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 with those 20 to 25 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 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 for the first time in 50 years -- the first time in 50 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 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 border. And as the president said at the state of the 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 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 DC 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 Jon Husted and Bernie Moreno, hopefully they're in Washington DC 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 Moreno's candidacy. And the president really -- I mean look, Sherrod was a tough candidate. Sherrod 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 Sherrod Brown. But I think what we showed him in the Ohio GOP is that while we had a reputation 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 red and it's 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. And I want to talk just a little bit 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 75, and I've got my Middie purple tie, Middletown Middies, our color is purple here.
I wore it in honor of the Middletown Middies. The first time that I've driven on I-75, I'm pretty sure, as 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 75 as a kid, when I was working at a tile warehouse delivering tiles to Findlay, Ohio, or as a -- there we go -- or as a Senate candidate who was trying -- showing up and speaking to groups of 12 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 statewide office, but we've got a lot -- I see a lot of young people here, many of whom are getting involved in politics for the very first time. And I've 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. [Laughter] That's what 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. [Laughter] Because he was the first -- he came from no politics to president of the United States. So -- but the thing is you don't get people who run 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 DC, 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 political leaders of the future are going to learn from the political leaders of today at the Ohio State House or at the federal Capitol in Washington DC. The first exposure I ever had to politics was actually as a page 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 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 Schuler, 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 to research an issue was Bob Schuler. And my point here is that what you guys are doing is cultivating 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 -- 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 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 -- [Audience member calls out "Go ahead."] That was another crazy thing that happened on January the 20th, man. So, I called the president on January the 18th, and I said, sir, I know the inauguration is very important, but let's be honest, the vice president is not the most important at the presidential inauguration, the president is. So, would you be OK 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, but I don't know honestly how much Usha really wants to wear high heels for nine hours on that day anyway. So, just let us go the national championship game. The president was like, no, JD, I can't do that, you've 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 event to the next. And 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. [Laughter] 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 sitting outside the bathroom on his phone, or has got his iPad out. Every single one of us has been to a wedding like this. You all know what I'm talking about, OK. 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-in-Chief's Ball. And we actually -- 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 20 minutes. It was the only 20 minutes that I kind of got to myself and I 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. So, I kind of started to relax a little, but I was 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. [Laughter] It's not going to get much better than this. And then we went to a couple balls and then I think it was after the second ball, before the third ball, I was watching on the TV and Notre Dame started to catch up a little bit. If you all watched this game, you'll remember Notre Dame started to catch up a 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 the damn trophy when they came to the White House. [Laughter] That was one of the most embarrassing moments of my life. But I was hoping -- oh 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 an amazing way to connect the great Buckeye state of Ohio and what was happening because, without this state, without this state's GOP 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 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 -- is Bob out there?
Is Bob Paduchik out there? There's Bob Paduchik. Give it up for Bob Paduchik. But you know, back in the day there was this idea that, you know, all the polls even -- right, Bob? At least all the public polls were saying that the president was going to lose Ohio. And then he won Ohio by 8 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 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 and no one else's interests.
That's what this party is ultimately all about. Because when I see that wage growth is the highest that it's been for working people in 60 years, working and middle-class people, the highest wage growth we've seen in this country for 60 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 campaign trail, and you're all going to hate me, but she was actually from Michigan, don't hold it against her. She's 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 grandkids' lives in a big way.
She was one of these grandparents whose daughter had lost her life to a fentanyl overdose. That fentanyl 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 going to want to cut back on ground beef and just go without this week.
Or you know, normally I like to make them eggs in the morning, but we're just going to 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 tied together this woman's suffering to the political leadership in Washington DC. 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 way our leadership failed her.
The second way our leadership failed her is with economic policies that made it 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 her grandkids 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 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. Now I haven't talked to that woman since we were elected. I haven't talked to that woman since the campaign stopped 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 fentanyl overdoses are down, when I see the president, under his leadership we're arresting Mexican drug cartel members at 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, 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 DC they have this thing where -- I think it means we're number one in Washington DC, but all the pink haired people throw up this sign and I think that means we're number one, right? I choose to take that as that symbol in Washington. But all kidding aside -- [Laughter] All kidding aside, you know sometimes this job of politics is inspiring and sometimes it's hard work.
And you take the good work, the inspiring work with 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.
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 are 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.