People say, hey, wait a minute, that was 40 years ago.
Tip O'Neill, Ronald Reagan, and Bob Dole got together.
Reagan wanted to get rid of Social Security.
He thought it should be privatized.
Bob Dole felt differently and said, no, this helps too many people out.
But what we can do is come together, and Tip, of course, was for saving Social Security, which they did, but they did so at the time in 83 by raising the age and then also putting in place programs like WEP and GPO, which of course limited and prevented teachers, firefighters, police officers, et cetera, from they or their spouses getting Social Security that they had paid in for.
So we're out to alleviate that as well.
Don in Pennsylvania, Republican.
Good morning, John.
I got two things.
Good morning.
I'm having a hard time hearing this.
The first thing is about the 11 million votes that the Democrats didn't get.
I don't think that they didn't vote.
I just don't think they were there.
And the second thing is how much money did the government and especially Nancy Pelosi take out of Social Security?
And how much did Nancy Pelosi take out for the impeachment on Donald Trump the first time?
Give the people what that number is.
Thank you.
Well, a common misunderstanding is, and people say this, I hear this all the time, that, you know, stop raiding the trust fund.
The trust fund has not been raided.
Money has not been taken out of there.
It remains intact.
In fact, it's so strong and solvent.
We are going to lead this program here, but you can continue watching it if you go to our website, cspan.org.
We take you live now to Mar-a-Lago for remarks from President-elect Donald Trump, speaking at a gala organized by the America First Policy Institute introducing him, Sylvester Stallone, live coverage here on C-STAN.
I'm proud to be here.
I didn't expect this, but I'll just keep it short and sweet because there's no such a thing as a speech too short.
When I did Rocky, if you remember the first image was a picture of Jesus that says Resurrection AC Club.
I found a church that had been converted to a boxing ring.
So the image pans down from Jesus onto Rocky being hit.
And at that moment, he was a chosen person.
And that's how I began the journey.
Something was going to happen.
This man was going to go through a metamorphosis and change lives, just like President Trump.
We are in the presence of a really mythical character.
I love mythology.
And this individual does not exist on this planet.
Nobody in the world could have pulled off what he pulled off.
So I'm in awe.
And I'll just say this, and I mean it.
When George Washington defended his country, he had no idea that he was going to change the world.
Because without him, you can imagine what the world would look like.
Guess what?
We got the second George Washington.
Congratulations. You good?
Yeah. Bye.
And I'm bound to be an American.
Wearing each nine over my free.
And I won't forget the men who died.
And I'm bound to be an American.
Please welcome the President of the United States.
Donald Trump.
Thank you.
The men who died who gave that right to me and I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today because there ain't no doubt I love this land.
God bless the USA, to the hills of Tennessee, across the plains of Texas, from sea to shining sea,
from Detroit down to Houston and New York to MLA, where there's pride in every American heart.
And it's time we stand and say that I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free, and I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me, and I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today, because there ain't no doubt I love this land.
God bless the USA and defend her still today,
because there ain't no doubt I love this land.
Thank you very much.
Wow well, thank you, Sly.
You know Sly does not do that, he doesn't do that stuff and he did a beautiful job and I want to thank you and John Voigt for being here.
John, the great fight movies I think Sly has a lot of them.
John has the champ.
What a movie.
That was right, but I want to thank everybody for being here.
You know, when mrs Post and Ef Hutton, her husband at the time when they built Mar-a-lago many years ago the roaring 20s it was the roaring 20s and we're hotter right now than they ever were in the roaring 20s I believe it was going to be a lot hotter, but we can keep it going.
We're not going to have 1929 happen, although if it would have continued the way it was it might not have been too good.
But when they built it, nobody knew what was going on.
Nobody knew opulence, nobody knew real luxury, nobody knew poverty.
They didn't know anything, and they learned a hard lesson in 1929 1929, they learned a very, very hard lesson, and we're going to turn our country around.
We're going to make it so great, so strong, so powerful.
We're going to bring it all back.
I want to thank some people that have been so instrumental in doing such a great job in terms of not only policy, but people, and people love them.
Brooke Rollins, who put this on with Linda McMahon.
Linda has been a great friend of mine for a long time, right, Linda?
I want to thank you very much.
And the America First Policy Institute, what a job they've done.
But I said, you know, the policy is much more important if we do it for eight years than it is if we do it for four years.
So I said, let's do this.
Don't worry about your policy.
Let's get out and let's win the election.
But nobody knew we were going to win it the way we wanted.
That was a big one.
So that was really great.
And Javier, I'd like to congratulate you on the job you've done for Argentina.
Your speech was beautiful, but the job you've done is incredible.
Make Argentina great again.
You know, MAGA.
He's a MAGA person.
And you know, he's doing that.
He's actually doing it.
It just happens to work with the AA.
That one we don't have to worry about.
It doesn't work so well with other countries.
But you know what?
I think your numbers are working also.
You've done a fantastic job in a very short period of time.
It's an honor to have you here.
That's really great.
Thank you.
Also, Speaker Mike Johnson, wherever you may be, Mike, in this very big and crowded room.
Thank you, Mike.
I went yesterday just in case.
I said, look, I want to tell you, I'm behind this man 100%, and he got 100% of the vote from Republicans.
Are you sure?
You sure, huh?
Yeah, he's doing a great job.
Nothing easy.
We actually had one little period about four weeks where we had a majority of one.
That wasn't that pretty, right?
And you handled it beautifully.
He just kept that stiff upper lip, but he's doing a really good job.
And that was a great vote you got yesterday.
Totally unanimous vote.
Congratulations, Mike.
That's beautiful.
Members of Congress, all of whom voted for Mike, and they've been my friends.
It's just a small group, but we have a lot of them outside.
We have a lot of them coming over the weekend.
Byron Donalds, the star.
Where's Byron?
Byron, you.
What a star.
What a star.
Thank you, Byron.
Ronnie Jackson, Doc Ronnie, he's been a lot of things.
He was my doctor.
He was a great admiral, you know, highly respected admiral, great doctor at the White House, and now he's a very popular congressman.
He won by 48 points.
That's pretty good.
Of course, it was a very, very Trumpy district, but he won by 48 points.
But when he was a doctor, they asked him the question, the fake news, which is here.
Look.
Wow, that's a lot.
That's a lot.
We invited him in.
They said, can we come in?
I said, we have nothing to hide as Republicans, right?
We have nothing to hide.
But they asked Ronnie, they asked the doctor, he was up in the podium, who's the healthiest?
Because he was the doctor for Barack Hussein, Obama, Donald Trump.
And he was the doctor for Bush also.
They said, who's the healthiest of them all?
He said, without question, it's Donald Trump.
And I said, I like that guy.
I said, I like that guy.
And he's doing great.
Jason Smith is here, a great, great congressman, Wesley Hunt.
Wow.
And Mike Waltz, who's going to be doing a little other work for us in the very near future.
We just nominated him, and he's going to be doing a great job in the administration.
And I promised Mike that I wouldn't be taking too many more before we start counting the votes, okay?
He said, please, could you slow down a little bit?
I just like the people in Congress, Mike.
I'm sorry.
But no, don't worry about it, Mike.
Just relax.
Just relax.
We have a man who has a seriously high IQ.
You know, I'm a person that believes in high IQs, and his is about as high as they get.
He launched a rocket three weeks ago, and then he went to Pennsylvania to campaign because he considered this more important than launching rockets that cost billions of dollars.
Elon Musk, Elon.
What a job.
What a job he does.
And he happens to be a really good guy.
You know, he likes this place.
I can't get him out of here.
He just likes this place.
And you know what?
I like having him here too.
He's good.
He's done a fantastic job.
Really an incredible mind and he's an unbelievable entrepreneur, sort of everything.
I'm asking him, what do you do best?
And we were not able to figure it out, but it's a lot of things.
Another one who's another great mind and a great guy and so popular and I think he's right.
He wants to make people healthy.
It's driven him pretty wild over the last number of years.
The Democrats didn't treat him well.
He was doing fantastically well.
And I think they came out with some rule that you had to do this.
Mike, you had to get 70 or 75 percent of the vote to qualify to be in the primary.
That was a pretty tough thing to get.
And he was doing incredibly well and he decided he can't do it, went independent.
Now he's with us all the way.
And today I nominated him for, I guess, if you like health and if you like people that live a long time, it's the most important position, RFK Jr.
Bobby?
Good.
And I just looked at the news reports.
People like you, Bobby.
Don't get too popular, Bobby.
You know, you've reached about the level now.
We want you to come up with things and ideas and what you've been talking about for a long time.
And I think you're going to do some unbelievable thing.
Nobody's going to be able to do it like you.
And boy, does he feel it in his heart.
So congratulations also to your family.
And a woman who was a Democrat and was an independent, she went independent, and last week she said, I want to be a Republican because this is what I stand for.
And I've always admired her, and I've admired her because she was loaded up with common sense.
And it's all about common sense.
I mean, we're conservative in this room, but we can understand the other side.
But what we really are is people with common sense.
And I think that's why we won with the numbers that we won by.
Tulsi Gabbard, thank you, Tulsi.
Great common sense.
And you have Vivek Rameshwami.
It's taken people a long time, and now that name is emblazoned into their brain.
But Vivek, wherever you may be, where are you, Vivek?
Thank you, Vivek.
Good.
He's working with Elon On efficiency.
They're working on efficiency, among other things, and they're going to be saving a lot of money and making our country stronger and better.
And they'll be coming out with individual reports, but a big one toward the end.
And you put those two together, it's going to be really great.
So we look forward to seeing it, working with Elon, and that'll be a great experience.
You're going to learn something from Elon, I think, right?
It's going to be great.
Thank you very much, Vivek.
And great job.
What you've done is fantastic.
And somebody that I've admired for a long time, but I've really gotten to know him in my political life, but especially I think over the last year, more than maybe ever before, maybe more than even the first four years, because we had a tremendous success through my first term.
And then bad things happened, and we had to wait.
I couldn't wait.
I was going, I was saying, we got to, they're not going to do it.
They're not going to help us.
They're not going to save this country.
And it really dawned on me about 10 days out.
I said, wait a minute, we're 10 days.
I waited four years, three years, two years.
All of a sudden, it's 10 days, and then every day seems so long, but I knew by the crowds we were getting, it was going to be really something.
And Newt Gingrich got up and he said, This is a very special thing that's happening because nobody has ever had crowds, and they just wanted hope.
They wanted something.
They just didn't want what they had.
And nobody expressed it more beautifully than Newt Gingrich.
And thank you, Newt, very much.
It was really beautiful.
And Callista, thank you very much.
Thank you, Callista.
But the American people have just delivered really something very, very amazing, the biggest political victory in 129 years.
Can you believe that, Newt?
120.
They said the most consequential election, I love that word, it's a beautiful word.
Most consequential election in the last 129 years.
Well, that's something.
So we swept all swing states.
We won the popular vote.
Oh, I love that.
You know, in the last one, in my first term, they said he won the election, but he did.
They always followed by he didn't win the popular vote.
That's what they say.
I don't even know if it's a true or not, who knows.
But they would say he didn't win the popular vote.
And we won the popular vote by records now.
Nobody can say that anymore about us.
Nobody can say that because we won the popular vote.
And I didn't win it.
The people won it.
The great people of our country won the popular vote, and that's what they wanted.
And this was something really special.
Won the White House, recaptured the Senate, and now, as of today, recaptured the House.
Thank you very much, Congressman.
And on track.
Looks like we have it.
The largest margin in the national vote in presidential year since 1928.
That's a long time ago.
Well, that's interesting.
That's when this House was built, 1928.
It took a lot of years, but that was what it was completed.
And something that I just read here, and I saw from one of our friends from the news, from the media, we won, I didn't know this, we won 49 out of 50 states, shifted toward the GOP significantly.
That's a big, that's a big number.
So we won the largest share of black and Hispanic votes of any Republican in the history of our country, recorded history of our country.
So we won, think of that.
We won the largest share of black and Hispanic voters.
That's so incredible.
They're unbelievable people.
We respect them.
We admire them.
They've been through a lot.
And they like us.
And it wasn't easy.
It wasn't easy.
But on the, if you take a look at the border of Texas, the governor called me, Greg Abbott, who's a great guy, called me up.
He said, you want every single town on the border.
And these towns were always blue.
They were a dark, strong blue.
And we won every single town up and down the border in Texas.
We won with married women.
What about unmarried women?
What happened to unmarried women?
We won with married women.
We won half of all ages.
Think of that.
More than 50% of the 18 to 29-year-olds, the highest in many decades, the highest number.
And again, it really has to do with common sense.
You know, people don't want men playing in women's sports.
They don't want it.
They don't want it.
You know, I said that during the last few weeks, I was very heavy on the common sense things, like they want a border.
They want people to come into our country.
They do.
They don't want to have exclusion, but they want to come in legally through a system.
They don't want them coming in through prisons and through where you dump a prison from countries all over the world, dumping prisons into our country.
The prisoners dumped into our country by the millions.
They don't want that.
They don't want all of the kind of things that you don't want drug deals.
They don't want gang members.
They don't want people that are causing trouble.
They don't want people that the country doesn't want.
And they had a, I would say a truth, Elon would say an X, but it came out and it had 12 different things and it went down a list of things.
And part of it was that the cartels were bringing in drugs.
They don't want them at stopping.
When you see the numbers that are going to be released, in two days, things happen to our country.
This is two days as of three days ago, but things are happening to our country that we didn't see happening for years.
The caravans on the way up, 35,000 people, they're breaking up.
They're breaking up.
They're not even not making the journey.
And we had three or four of the highest, I guess almost every single day we set new records in the stock market.
We set new records economically.
Now, the only thing is, Mr. Speaker, I think it's important.
Maybe you should pass a bill.
You have to start my term from November 5th, okay, or November 6th if you want.
November 5th, because the market's gone through the roof.
Enthusiasm's doubled.
It's doubled in the last short while.
And I watched a liberal commentator say, you know, whether you like them or not, there seems to be a beautiful light shining over our country and even over the world.
I said, this guy didn't say that.
But we have to defeat inflation.
And while inflation's down, the costs are way too high.
And when I went around, I heard something that was very interesting.
The word grocery.
It's sort of such a strange and simple and nice word.
You know, I'm going out for groceries today.
They talked about that more than any other item.
The groceries are too high.
And when you think about it, that's a very bad, bad thing.
And I talked about that a lot in the last couple of weeks, and it resonated.
I tell a story about a woman.
She got three apples, an old woman.
She had three apples, and she brought them up to the cash register.
And she looked at the woman and she said, Is that the right price?
And the woman said, Yes, ma'am.
I'm sorry.
Yes, it is.
And she said, Oh, that's okay.
Could you wait one minute?
And she took one of the three apples and she brought it back to the refrigeration and she came back gently up to the cash register and she paid for two apples instead of three.
That should not be happening in our country.
That should not be happening here.
It's not going to happen here.
We're going to make it a much different place.
We're going to slash energy costs.
We're going to get your energy bills in half and that's going to bring down the cost generally speaking.
And we're going to have a whole new, we have a big, we have a big announcement and I won't tell you it's, I won't tell you the name of his exact name.
I think he's an incredible person.
He's got an unbelievably wonderful wife named Catherine.
So I won't tell you his name.
Might be something like Bergham.
He's from North Dakota.
He's going to be announced tomorrow for a very big position.
So everybody's waiting.
There he is.
Hi, Doug.
He's going to be announced tomorrow.
And we have somebody else that's probably coming up with him to be announced who's a big one.
And we're going to do things with energy and with land, interior, that is going to be incredible.
And so I look forward to doing the formal announcement, although this is a pretty big announcement right now.
Actually, he's going to head the Department of Interior, and he's going to be fantastic.
Good, Doug.
Congratulations, Catherine.
But we'll make the formal announcement tomorrow.
We're going to reduce regulation, waste, fraud, and inefficiency.
And these two guys are going to find a lot of it.
We're going to clean out the corrupt, broken, and failing bureaucracies, and that's what we're going to be doing.
And we're going to stop child sexual mutilation.
We're going to stop it because it's time.
It's time.
It's time and it's not right what's going on.
People are, it is mutilation and it's not going to happen.
We have to stop it.
We have to get back to a great country with low taxes and strong military.
We're going to fix our military.
We did it once.
Now we're going to have to do it again.
We didn't know a big chunk of it was going to be given to Afghanistan.
We're going to work on the Middle East and we're going to work very hard on Russia and Ukraine.
It's got to stop.
Russia and Ukraine's got to stop.
Thousands and thousands.
I saw a report today.
Thousands of people over the last three days were killed.
Thousands and thousands of people were killed.
They happen to be soldiers, but whether they're soldiers or they're people sitting in towns, we're going to work it.
So I just want to thank everybody for being here tonight.
I really want to congratulate Linda, you, and Brooke for the job you've done.
And it's an honor to be here.
And thank you, Sly.
Thank you, everybody.
Great honor.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
I say, young man.
Cause you're in a new town.
There's no need to be unhappy.
Young man, there's a place you can go.
I'll say to young man, when you're short on your dough, you can stay there.
And I'm sure you will find many ways to have a good time.
It's fun to stay at the YMCA.
It's fun to stay at the YMCA.
C-SPAN is your unfiltered view of government.
We're funded by these television companies and more, including Mediacom.
Nearly 30 years ago, Mediacom was founded on a powerful idea.
Bring cutting-edge broadband to underserved communities.
From coast to coast, we connected 850,000 miles of fiber.
Our team broke Speed Barriers, delivered one gig speeds to every customer, has led the way in developing a 10G platform, and now with Mediacom Mobile, is offering the fastest, most reliable network on the go.
Mediacom, decades of dedication, decades of delivery, decades ahead.
Mediacom supports C-SPAN as a public service, along with these other television providers, giving you a front-row seat to democracy.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigeg visited his alma mater, Harvard University, to talk about his service in the Biden administration.