J.D. Vance (129:47)
Wow, look at you. You mean we couldn't get you up in the front row? I'll tell you. Supposing I said, J.D. the governor of Texas, he's not doing his job. You heard what I said. See, I didn't know you were there. I said, he's doing, he's doing a great job. He's doing a phenomenal job. But now you're going to have a partner that's going to work with you because you didn't have. Not only didn't he have a partner, he had people selling the wall, right? We have a fence structure that we worked on. The governor worked on with me and I didn't love it, to be honest with you. I wanted a nice pre cast concrete, you know, 40, 50ft high. Like a beautiful. Could have been a T shape, Y shape. I love construction. I wanted that sucker to go up maybe 50, 60ft. It would have looked beautiful, a nice Y shape. And they said, the problem is, sir, they climbed that like a rabbit. I said, what do you Mean no way. And they brought some of these guys out, they climbed it like. And the other thing is you hit it with acid and the thing will disintegrate. You know they have things for car concrete. So they needed very hardened steel, very special steel. And then they did 7,000 pound concrete inside that steel unit, inside that steel. And then they have a rebar that's the toughest steel made very hard to cut. So this is why very little is cut. I mean it's right. And then they put a anti climb panel on top. I hated it. I said it's so unattractive. And I said why would that work? I don't believe it works. And I went to one, the border patrol gave a display. We had actually two sets of climbers. The guys that climb up walls with drugs on their back. I mean they got like 60, 70 pounds of drug and they go as fast as you can walk, they go bip bip bap. Or we have Mount Everest type climbers. And honestly the drug guys were much better. I couldn't believe the drug guys blew them away. Right. But it's true. The anti climb panel, they couldn't get around it. They just couldn't when you didn't have it. So sometimes you sacrifice beauty for efficiency. And we did. So we built this wall and we had, we built over 500 miles of wall. That's why we had such good numbers. The famous chart that came down very thankfully the chart that came down on my right governor, had I not looked over there. I'm not speaking right now, you might be speaking here. You want to know that true ujd, we got a lot of great people in this party. But it was, I got very lucky but we had the best numbers we've ever had. But I bought, you know what happens is when you fill it up, it's like water. You fill it up. Now we have 571 miles of wall. And they would always say, you know, when we renovated a wall so there'd be like a piece of plywood sitting there for 60 years or a two by four sitting for 60 years on the ground and rock rotting because you know, and they'll say you didn't build a new wall here. We're building 50ft up in the air, 30ft sections, 50 foot sections, all steel, all concrete, all everything. And all by the way, they don't even want me to say this but what the hell, doesn't take that long time. They're all wired for all of the equipment. We put wires and everything. So they can easily wire for all the different types of equipment. If there's a doubt we have a wire. Whenever we just look, you just find the wires all over the place up top. So we could just hook it up. We don't have to have wires on the outside which wouldn't do too well. Right. So anyway, so we built an extra 200 miles of wall and the governor wanted to buy it. He tried to buy it and they wouldn't sell it to him. He wanted to put it up himself. Could have been done in three to four weeks. 200 more miles. Because when you do it now they just keep going further out, further out, further out, getting around. So we did an extra 200 miles and it was all bought and they announced that they're not going to put it up. And that's when I realized they wanted open borders. And that's when I realized that people are going to come pouring through the wall like nobody's ever seen before. But you've seen it. A lot of you are here because of that. I made it my number one issue. They all said inflation was the number one issue. I said, I, I disagree. I think people coming into our country from prisons and from mental institutions is a bigger issue for the people that I know and I made it my number one. I talked about inflation too. But you know, how many times can you say that an apple has doubled in cost? I'd say it and I hit it hard. But then I go back to the fact that we don't want criminals coming into our country. We don't want the jails of every country in the world virtually being deposited deposit into the United States. And that man had to suffer with it. And he did an unbelievable job. I'll tell you. He was a very popular governor, but now he's like an unbeatable governor because of your border policies. He was fantastic and he really was. Governor Abbott is great. He's a great man, great leader and. But it did make him very more. Did you do it, you didn't that for politics. You did it because you want to do the right thing. But I'll tell you, it sure as hell worked for politics too. It's self preservation. That's right. But no, because the people are demanding it, the people of Texas are demanding it, the people are demanding it all over. So anyway, so we built it and they wouldn't let us use it. They wouldn't let the governor use it and other governors, they wouldn't let him use it. But he was the leader of the pac. And did a great job. And then, then we heard about a month ago that not only wouldn't they let it, excuse it, they were selling it. They were going to sell it for 5 cents on the dollar. Now, 5 cents on the dollar then, but today it would cost more than twice as much to build because we bought it like six years ago, and it was just sitting on the ground. And that does not do well for the whole thing. But it was just sitting on the ground. And I heard about it and I called the governor and I called a lot of people. Your attorney General, General. And here's the story. They were going to buy it, and these are great business people. They were going to buy it for 5 cents on the dollar or less. And they were calling us up, we'll sell it to you for 200 cents on the dollar. In other words, it will cost you twice as much. So it's 200 cents on the dollar. I said, can somebody explain that to a judge? I mean, how corrupt is that? You'd think they'd say, maybe we'll sell it to you for 20 cents, 30 cents, but not 200 cents. So they were going to buy something for 5 cents and they were going to sell it to us for a fortune. They were going to make. It would be. They'd have it down that in Fortune magazine, they'd put it of the deal of the year. Okay, you buy something like that. But it was so corrupt and so horrible. And when we told that to the administration, they didn't care. They just kept going forward. They couldn't care less, and they kept going forward. They knew that they were trying to sell it back to us. They would have sold it back to us. You would have ended up buying it. You would have paid probably 50, 60 cents, who knows? But they were going to use it for scrap metal. But then they made a much better deal. They could just buy it and sell it to us for 15, 20 times what they paid. 20 times. Think of it like 20 times what they paid. And we wouldn't let it happen. And the governor, with his attorney general, Ken Paxton, they made a fantastic, good lawyer. He's. He's pushed around pretty good by people, right? He said, you got the. You got a great attorney general. They should leave him alone. He was with me. And. But Ken and the governor went to court and a judge actually became incensed and actually called for an investigation. How could a thing like this happen? So he stopped it. So we're waiting to put that wall up. And now that you have a New president. That wall will go up so fast, the governor will complain. Sir, this is Greg Abbott. Sir, please. The wall is going up too fast. Please don't do that. You know the story about winning. No, no. We're going to win too much. We're winning too much. Please stop. People always love that one. We'll do this with the wall. Wall. Governor Abbott calls. Sir, the wall is going up too fast. We can't take it. We just can't take it. No, I think you'll be very happy if the wall goes up too fast. Right, but we'll get that dude. And we'll work with you on that. But it was a great decision by a great Texas judge. Right? And it was beautiful. Beautiful to watch. We see. Stopped them right in their track. I mean, they were literally loading the stuff under trucks. It was terrible. Honestly, it was terrible. And he wouldn't take it. So I'm so glad I mentioned that. They have a really good governor in Tex. Texas. Not. And I swear I didn't know he was here. I swear to you. Sounds like a setup. I didn't know you would end. Did I get lucky? I said the right thing because there would have been moments when I wasn't so happy with him, you know, but not too many, I can tell you that. So, anyway, it's good to see you, too, Governor. Great. But I just want to thank everybody. You've been incredible. I recognize so many of you. It's so crazy, but this has been a long journey. This was a journey that started in 2015, probably started 20 years before that. People used to say, you're going to run for president. You're going to run, run, run. And I always said, no, no, no, I don't want. And then one day I said, let's give it a shot. And what I talked about then was the border, too. I think it probably was the number one issue for me back in 2015, 2016. I talked about the border. And now I talked about the border. But this border is much worse. We fixed the border. It was totally fixed. There was nothing to talk about. 2020, by the way, that election was totally rigged. But these are the. That's okay. It was a rigged election. You know, the only thing good about it, it showed how bad they are, showed how incompetent. And frankly, historically, this is a much bigger event. If that would have gone like it should have. The only. The bad thing about it is some bad things happened. Like a lot of people in our country that wouldn't be in our country Right now. So, you know, know, that's the. That's the bad part. But I will say that it started in 2015, and right from the beginning, we went to the top. Day one, they announced Trump, and Trump went to number one and stayed there for the whole primary. And then we took on Hillary. She didn't look too happy today. We took on Hillary, a very nice person, but we took on Hillary and we defeated Hillary. And then we did much better the second time in 2020. You know, we got millions more votes. We got millions, like 10, 12 million more votes than we did the first time. No president has ever gotten that many more votes. I got like 9 million more than anybody else had ever gotten. And they said we lost.
