DeSantis Slams Trump For Failing To Keep Promise About Wall At SC Campaign Rally
Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) holds a 2024 campaign rally in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
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00:00 doing? Thanks Josh for the introduction. It's great to be back in South Carolina. I was
00:07 supposed to be here probably about a month ago. I had a bunch of events scheduled but
00:13 we had a little thing called a hurricane that hit the state of Florida so duty calls on
00:18 that. My better half came up and handled that. Honestly she's better than me anyway so I
00:22 think people were happy with it. We were in California last week for this debate at the
00:27 Reagan Library and it brought back some memories for me. When I was in the Navy I got at one
00:34 point orders to report to Naval Amphibious Base Coronado, Naval Special Warfare, SEAL
00:45 Team 1 in anticipation of deploying to Iraq back in 2007. I had not spent a lot of time
00:52 in Southern California so we were there and did training and all this other stuff. The
00:58 weather was fantastic and all this stuff. I'll never forget flying back from Iraq after
01:03 being over in Fallujah and all these places, not the best places in the world, flying back
01:09 landing in Coronado Naval Air Station North Island, getting off that C5 and just the freshness
01:15 of the Pacific Ocean. It was just such a nice feeling. I thought to myself, "Man I know
01:21 why people have always wanted to live in California. For so many decades people have tried to do
01:26 that." I always had positive views about it. Now fast forward to me becoming Governor of
01:33 Florida and I was born and raised in Florida. I don't ever remember seeing a California
01:38 license plate my entire life. All of a sudden I see my state flooded with California license
01:44 plates. A lot of our voters in Florida, now people look at Florida now because of all
01:50 that we've done and are like, "Oh it's a Republican state and all this stuff." Honestly
01:55 the way we did this last election we may be redder than South Carolina if you can believe
01:59 that. That just shows you what leadership can do. Back then it was like a one point
02:06 state. They were like, "If you've got a bunch of people moving from Berkeley or San Francisco
02:12 that could potentially tip the state to go Democrat." In reality it was people who were
02:18 so frustrated with how California was being governed that they'd pick up their lives and
02:23 move all the way across the continental United States to live in a free state, the free state
02:29 of Florida. What it shows you is, and look as much as I love Florida I can't say that
02:35 our weather is better year round than it is in Southern California. I just can't say that.
02:39 I mean it's great weather there, they've got a lot of good stuff. Leftist policies have
02:45 destroyed that state. Leftist ideology has destroyed a lot of those cities. You have
02:52 people, I met six or seven people just last week out there who had reported being mugged
02:57 in the last year in Southern California. Forget about San Francisco and some of the places
03:02 in Northern California. So this stuff matters. We're actually, we do these debates. I know
03:09 that Donald Trump hasn't shown up. I think he should show up. I think he owes it to you
03:13 to show up and debate like everybody else. We're going to do another one on November
03:20 8th in Miami. I don't think he's going to show up for that, but I am doing an event
03:28 on November 30th on Sean Hannity with Gavin Newsom from California. And I think it's important
03:38 for a couple reasons. One, you know, Biden may not be their candidate. They may put in
03:45 a Newsom or some of these other people. We just got to be prepared for that and we got
03:50 to make sure we can win no matter who they put up. I will beat any of these Democrats
03:55 whoever they put up. Don't worry about that. But it's important debate for the country
04:03 because everything California does, that's the Petri dish of American leftism. Whatever
04:08 Biden's doing, California's three or four years ahead in terms of their aggressive leftism.
04:15 So our country's in decline. The California model, if that's taken national, that will
04:22 accelerate the country's decline. Whereas in Florida, the model that we have, that's
04:28 a model to reverse the country's decline. That's a model for American revival that can
04:33 actually get us out of the mess that we're in. So that's a debate we need to have in
04:37 this country. And I'll be excited to be able to do that debate with Sean Hannity and with
04:43 the governor of California. And you know, it's like, I don't have to prove Florida's
04:47 doing better than California because all I have to do is see all the people moving from
04:52 there to Florida. And I know we're doing better because they wouldn't be doing that if that
04:56 wasn't the case. But here's, I think, so we see that, we see what leftist policies can
05:02 do, we see what it's doing to our country. But you know, we have a lot of people in Republican
05:08 that talk and talk and talk and don't do anything. And I'm just sick of all the nonsense. I'm
05:15 sick of people worrying about social media, worried about this and virtue signaling. What
05:20 results are you producing? That is all that matters when it comes to fixing our country.
05:28 Because if you don't produce the results, we're not going to turn the country around.
05:33 And I can say, stand here before you and say that there's not a Republican in this country
05:42 that has everything he said he would do. We did in Florida. I did 100% of my promises.
05:50 We were able to deliver real results. It's not something that people even have to worry
05:55 about. There's not all kind of drama. There's not all that. It's just we go, we see an issue,
06:01 we take care of it and we deliver results. I mean, just look at the how Washington does
06:05 the budget versus like Florida. So since I've been governor, we've cut taxes by billions
06:11 of dollars. We've run big budget surpluses. We've actually paid down 25% of our state's
06:17 total debt that it had been accumulated from the, from the inception of the state of Florida
06:22 in the 1800s. We paid down a quarter of it just since I've been governor. You want to
06:29 talk about education? We have universal school choice. We enacted a parent's bill of rights.
06:38 We eliminated indoctrination in our schools like critical race theory and transgender
06:44 ideology. And sometimes, you know, these are fights where you've got to dig in and you
06:55 got to, you get a lot of incoming. So we had, when we did our bill for parents' rights in
06:59 education, it was about not having sexualized curriculum, particularly for elementary school
07:06 kids. Why would we even, we wouldn't even need to have this discussion 10, 15 years
07:10 ago. But that, so the left got very mad that we were trying to stop that. The media got
07:15 very mad at us. And then we had a company in central Florida that some of you may have
07:20 heard of, Disney, that was not too happy and they were trying to tank our parental rights
07:26 bill. And if you know anything about Florida, they're the 800 pound gorilla. What they say
07:31 usually would go with the legislature and all this other stuff. It's like, oh, you can't
07:35 ever take them on. It's too big. And people were saying at the time, well, the governor,
07:40 he's going to have to, he's going to have to cave on this one because they're just too
07:44 powerful. I don't cave. Okay. We stand up for what's right. And we made sure to do that.
07:51 But it is wrong to have kids in school, particularly these young kids, telling them that they can
08:03 change their gender or that they were born in the wrong body. That is happening in this
08:08 country. And my wife and I, we have a six, a five and a three year old. So we're very
08:13 sensitive to what's going on in our schools. And we think parents should be able to send
08:18 their kids to school. Parents should be able to have their kids watch cartoons. Parents
08:22 should just have their kids be kids without having an agenda shut down their throats.
08:32 So we did that. Illegal immigration. We enacted a ban on sanctuary cities in Florida. We did
08:39 E-Verify so that we have a legal workforce. We've cracked down on people being smuggled
08:48 in to our state from the border. And it's been very successful. We even transported
08:55 illegal aliens to beautiful Martha's Vineyard. And I can tell you this, we've been very successful
09:03 in that. You now have the governor of New York saying the border's a disaster. The governor
09:10 of Massachusetts, governor of Illinois, mayor of New York City, they're all saying it's
09:17 a disaster because, you know, they're getting a fraction of what the border communities
09:22 get and they don't want anything to do with it. Of course not. So we, I've done more on
09:26 the illegal immigration to secure the border than Biden has done. And he's the doggone
09:31 president of the United States. Come on. So we've done the border. Crime. Our crime rate
09:38 in Florida is at a 50 year low. That's not true in most parts of this country. We have
09:49 stood by the men and women in law enforcement. We don't defund police. We gave bonuses to
09:55 police officers. And anybody that moves into Florida from another state as a recruitment
10:00 bonus, we give them $5,000 right off the top because we appreciate what they're doing and
10:07 we know it's important. We ban local governments from defunding the police and we enacted anti-riot
10:14 legislation that says if you riot, if you loot, if you engage in mob violence in the
10:21 state of Florida, don't expect to be treated like they treat them in Portland where they
10:25 slap them on the wrist and put them back on the street. No, in Florida, if you do those
10:29 things, you're not getting a slap on the wrist. You're getting the inside of a jail cell.
10:36 And when you have prosecutors like Los Angeles, like San Francisco, Philadelphia, who get
10:43 elected, oftentimes with support, financial support from people like George Soros, they
10:54 get into office and they have a political agenda to not enforce laws they don't like.
11:01 So the inmates end up running the asylum, public safety gets destroyed, and people end
11:08 up fleeing these jurisdictions. So in Florida, we had two different prosecutors in different
11:13 jurisdictions who said they weren't going to enforce the laws they didn't like and they
11:19 were endangering their citizens. I removed both of them from their posts. They are gone.
11:26 We're the only one in the country that has taken action against these out of control
11:33 prosecutors. So we've delivered on crime, we've delivered on that. We've delivered on
11:37 fighting ESG, which is something that is being used by the left, environment social governance.
11:45 It's basically something that gives license to companies to not do traditional business,
11:52 but to pursue a political agenda. It is something that will destroy this country's economy if
11:58 we allow it to get a stranglehold. In Florida, we kneecapped it in our state. We don't allow
12:04 any ESG in our pension fund. We ban the use of social credit scores by financial institutions
12:11 and we don't allow rating agencies to use ESG criteria in its credit scores for municipal
12:18 and state bonds. That's how you lead on this stuff. We also look forward about, okay, what
12:25 are the threats to freedom in the future? One of the threats is the imposition of something
12:34 called the central bank digital currency. This is something that they're talking about
12:38 in Washington. The Federal Reserve has basically said, "Look, we don't have one now, but ideally
12:45 we would consult with Congress and the president, the executive before we did it." I'm like,
12:53 "Wait a minute. Ideally, you have no authority to be doing this, so we're not going to allow."
12:58 What we said was, "I don't know what the Fed's going to do, but I know this. If they get
13:03 rid of cash, if they get rid of cryptocurrency and force you into this one central bank digital
13:10 currency, what are they going to do with that power? They're going to use it to impose social
13:16 credit scores. If you buy too much gasoline, they'll stop it. If you buy too much ammunition,
13:21 they'll stop it." They're honest about this. They say it at places like the World Economic
13:26 Forum that this is a way to be able to control people. What we did in Florida was we went
13:33 on offense and we said, "In the state of Florida, we do not recognize central bank digital currency
13:39 as legal tender in our state. If they try to do it in Florida, we're not going to abide
13:46 by it." That's just to get us to January 20th, 2025, because when I get in my first day in
13:53 office, CBDC is going in the trash can for good, so you don't got to worry about it.
14:02 Here's the thing. This central bank digital currency, sometimes it's like government will
14:09 do things. They'll say it's for noble cause, and then there's really a danger lurking beneath
14:16 it. This is just a danger in plain sight. Anyone that looks at it knows what they're
14:21 going to do with this. They know they're going to abuse their power, so we don't let them
14:24 do that. We've also delivered on reforming universities. We complain as researchers that
14:31 even as Republicans that universities are indoctrinating, they're liberal, all this
14:35 other stuff, but we never actually do anything to right the ship. In the state of Florida,
14:42 we have gone on offense. We now have all tenured professors must undergo review every five
14:48 years and can be let go for poor performance. We're the only state in the country that's
14:55 done that. I had this liberal arts college in Sarasota called New College, and it was
15:02 like a Marxist commune. Left of the left, the applications were low, test scores were
15:12 low. It was supposed to be Florida's top honors college in our statutes. It wasn't doing that.
15:18 I was like, "All right, well, we've got to do this then so that the people of Florida
15:22 are getting a benefit." I appointed seven conservatives to the board of trustees. They
15:27 fired the president, hired a conservative president. They eliminated CRT and DEI, eliminated
15:34 the gender studies department, and recast the university as the top classical liberal arts
15:41 publicly funded college similar to Hillsdale College in Michigan. Now you have people all
15:52 over the country that are asking, "How do I get my kid down to New College because of
15:56 all the stuff that's going on?" They're recruiting new faculty. Some of the faculty have left,
16:03 and the media, some of the media have been, "Oh, these ten faculty left. There's a brain
16:07 drain going out of Florida with people leaving New College." I'm like, "Wait a minute. If
16:12 we're losing a professor of intersectional Marxism, that is not a loss for the state
16:18 of Florida. That's addition by subtraction." We want these universities to be the classical
16:25 mission of a university, not about political indoctrination. We're the only state in the
16:31 country that has made headway on that, and we'll continue to do that. There's actually
16:35 a lot we can do as president. We delivered, and we're the only state or the first state,
16:41 I think Texas followed maybe a couple other this past year, we're the first state in the
16:45 country to fully eliminate DEI from our public university system. They say it's diversity,
16:52 equity, and inclusion, but if you look how it's practiced, it's discrimination, exclusion,
16:59 and indoctrination. That is wrong, and that's got no place in our public university.
17:06 Then of course, we had to stand up when the world went mad during COVID, when common sense
17:15 suddenly became an uncommon virtue. We in Florida stood as a refuge of sanity, as a
17:21 citadel of freedom, and we had people come, not just from all over the country, but from
17:27 all over the world to be able to live in a free society. Because we did that, the state
17:32 of Florida has never done better. We have the number one economy in all 50 states, according
17:37 to CNBC, which is not a fan of mine by the way. You have number one in education now
17:43 by US News, top for net in migration, on and on down the line. An issue like that shows
17:50 when you elect somebody to executive office, the president, governor, what have you, the
17:56 quality that you need more than anything else is leadership. Because you don't know what's
18:01 going to come down the pike. You don't know what issues, I mean we know some things will
18:05 come down the pike, but there's other issues we can't even think about that will show up.
18:10 The question is how do you tackle those tough issues? Because it's easy to lead when the
18:14 winds hit your back. It's easy to take positions when they're popular and you're going to get
18:19 adulation from them. But are you going to be willing to dig in, stand your ground, and
18:24 fight back on behalf of people when you're getting arrows slung at you, when you're getting
18:29 smeared by the media, when the left's coming at you. Are you going to be willing to stand
18:33 your ground or are you going to fold? And no governor faced more incoming in the United
18:39 States, probably in the modern history, than I did during that period of time. But you
18:44 know, as a leader, I had to care more about saving the jobs of the people that elected
18:50 me than I did about saving my own political hide. And so I was willing to let the chips
18:57 fall where they may. And we stood strong. And we did, even, you know, I was out in California,
19:04 I did the show with Bill Maher on HBO, and he even acknowledged, and he's a liberal,
19:11 but he was honest, he was like, "Look, you were right on what you did there. You took
19:15 a lot of unfair grief and you were right and you should get more credit." But you know,
19:21 it's not about credit for me, to be honest with you. I think the issue going forward
19:26 is we need to hold accountable the people who delivered us into the COVID mess to begin
19:32 with, because nobody has been held accountable from Fauci to the CDC to the NIH to the FDA,
19:39 and they need to be held accountable. This country's in a mess because of what they did.
19:46 Our economy is bad because of what they did. Our freedoms were curtailed because of what
19:51 they did. And I'm the only candidate running for office that is going to hold these people
19:57 accountable once and for all. So we stood up, and you know what we did in Florida, people
20:01 said, "Oh, you're the free state," all this stuff. We said, "Well, we're not leaving that
20:05 to chance." We've enacted the most comprehensive medical freedom legislation in the country.
20:10 CDC is saying they're going to add this new mRNA COVID jab to the childhood immunization
20:17 schedule. What that will do is provide a pretext for school districts to potentially mandate
20:23 it on school children. Not in Florida, we have banned any mRNA COVID mandates in school,
20:32 at your job. You make those decisions. And you know, the thing is, these are not government
20:42 policies, because it's a big problem. And we did even more stuff than that. But I think
20:53 the point is, anything I tell you I'm going to do, you can take it to the bank. When I
20:59 get into office, I'm going to follow through. I don't make hollow promises. And I'm even
21:08 going to follow through on other people's promises. So I don't know if you saw, on Sunday,
21:14 Donald Trump was given a speech in Iowa. And he said, he started talking about his promise
21:20 in 2016. And we all remember it. I loved it. He was going to build the wall and have Mexico
21:27 pay for the wall. Probably the most famous political promise in modern history. Certainly
21:34 one of the top promises. And he would get lampooned by the media at the time. Like,
21:39 oh, you don't really mean it. He'd go out and say, no, I mean it. All this stuff. And
21:42 you have all the clips and everything. And obviously that didn't happen. We know that
21:47 didn't happen. But he was there and he said, look, he's like, these people are getting
21:52 on me about that. But there was never any legal mechanism where I could make Mexico
21:57 pay for the wall. It wasn't possible to make Mexico pay for the wall. And he started saying
22:02 this. I'm like, wait a minute. You've said that for years and now you're saying that
22:07 you never intended to do it, that it was there. But here's the even worse part. If you know
22:12 how to use power and you know how to lead, you actually can get Mexico to pay for the
22:17 wall. No. They're not just going to give you money if you put out your hand. And so I will
22:22 make Mexico pay for the wall by doing this. We are going to charge a fee on all remittances
22:28 that are sent from the United States to Mexico or any of these other countries. It'll be
22:33 billions of dollars and we will use it to build a wall. I will get it done. So, you
22:41 know, when you do 100 percent of your own promises, you can you can fulfill other people's
22:45 promises too. So we are going to do that. You can take it to the bank. The remittances
22:49 are going to pay for the wall and we'll get it done where he was not able to do it. But
22:54 I think that the issue is and then so all of that happened and you know, everything
22:59 I did in Florida, people were saying, oh, you can't do that. You can't do that. The
23:02 media is going to get mad at you. The left is going to get mad at you. And of course
23:04 they did. You know, you can't we got to as Republicans stop worrying about what the media
23:09 says about us. They're not going to like us no matter what. We got to stop worrying about
23:13 what the left is going to say about us. They're going to go after us no matter what. And so
23:18 if I did my my job based on trying to avoid them coming after me, I would be paralyzed.
23:24 I wouldn't be able to do anything. They have a spasm every time I get out of bed in the
23:28 morning. That's just the nature of it. So you got to lead. You got to understand that
23:33 doing what right doing what's right. If you're telling the truth that cuts through all the
23:38 BS out there and people want to see leadership and they want to see the truth. And the proof
23:43 of that is when I ran for re-election, Florida had been decided most of these races by 1%
23:51 for a long time. I ran and we didn't win by 30,000 votes. We didn't win by 1%. We won
23:59 by 20% and over 1.5 million vote margin. That's the largest margin of raw votes in Florida
24:06 history. And no Republicans ever done better in a governor's race than what we did in this
24:13 past re-election. But that should show you that you take a state that was always viewed
24:20 as a very competitive state and then you shift it now to where we're viewed as a solid Republican
24:26 state and maybe redder than South Carolina, maybe redder than some of these other states.
24:31 Nobody would have thought that was possible five or six years ago. So the leadership matters.
24:37 So what we need to do to get the country turned around, one, we got to win. Because if you
24:42 don't win, you don't even get a chance to do any of this stuff. And I can tell you what
24:46 we've had as Republicans the last three election cycles is loss after loss after loss. Lost
24:54 in '18, we lost the House. Lost the Senate in '20 and the White House. Lost the, almost
25:01 didn't win the House in '22, which was the most favorable environment we've ever had.
25:05 We delivered a red wave in Florida. We delivered four new Republican congressmen. They wouldn't
25:11 even have the majority if it wasn't for what we did in Florida. So you got to be able to
25:16 win and we've shown an ability to be able to do that. And you know, you do in Florida.
25:22 Florida's a microcosm of this country. If you can win big in Florida, you can win anywhere.
25:27 You can win the electoral college. You can get that done. So that's important. But even
25:31 more important than that, you got to actually deliver on all this stuff. We don't have time
25:37 for any more failed promises. We don't have time for sloganeering. We don't have time
25:42 for bluster. The only thing we need now is results. Because it's the results that are
25:47 going to turn this country around. So as I think about what we need to do, I was, when
25:52 I was doing the debate going into the Reagan Library, I started thinking about some of
25:56 the things that the President, President Reagan had done over the years. And I thought back
26:01 to his farewell address to the nation. And he talked about a lot of the things that they
26:06 did and reflected on different things. And I said, you know, as we're going out in the
26:11 hustle bustle of this campaign, I can sit there and say this or that. But you know,
26:15 maybe a good thing would be to think about January of 2033. So after two terms as President,
26:23 you're getting ready to hand off the baton to hopefully a worthy successor. And then
26:28 you've got to give, I've got to give this this farewell address. You know, what would
26:32 I say to you? What am I going to be able to say to you? I think we're going to be able
26:36 to say a number of things. One, we'll be able to say that we restored the American dream
26:41 in this country, that you can get ahead again. You can get ahead again because we will have
26:50 gotten rid of Bidenomics. We will have stopped Congress from spending us into oblivion. We
26:55 will have achieved energy independence and energy dominance and you will be paying less
27:00 for that. We'll have lower interest rates and families can get ahead again. And if we
27:05 can't do well for families, then this country is not going to succeed. So we'll restore
27:09 the dream and that will be done. The other thing we'll be able to say is our country's
27:13 sovereignty has been restored. Our border is enforceable. Mexican drug cartels have
27:20 been defeated and we don't have poison pouring into our country, killing tens of thousands
27:25 of our fellow citizens any longer. We'll also be able to say that our country remains the
27:32 world's leading superpower, that our military is strong, that recruiting is vibrant. And
27:43 we'll be able to say that we successfully fended off the challenge posed by the Chinese
27:49 Communist Party and that will mean this will be an American century again. We'll be able
27:58 to say that our school systems are educating our kids but no longer indoctrinating our
28:05 kids. We'll be able to say that parents' rights are respected in every corner of this
28:16 country, that parents have the fundamental right to direct the education and upbringing
28:20 of their country, and we will have school choice in all 50 states so that we can liberate
28:27 kids and parents from some of these failed school systems in these deep blue areas. We'll
28:32 also be able to say that from coast to coast, regardless if you're in a red state or a blue
28:38 city, criminals are going to be held accountable for their crimes and they are going to be
28:44 locked up where they belong. And you and your family will be able to live in safe communities
28:54 yet again. And we'll also be able to say that we have restored the proper understanding
29:01 of the U.S. Constitution. We will have a limited government that works alongside us, not an
29:09 unaccountable bureaucracy that's been weaponized against us. You are not going to have to worry
29:13 about FBI agents going after parents, going to school board meetings. You're not going
29:25 to worry about the federal government going after pro-life demonstrators. You're not going
29:30 to worry about the IRS targeting conservative groups. You're not going to worry about a
29:35 weaponized DOJ because we will end the abuses and we will hold people accountable. And there
29:47 will be more to say, but I think that we're at a point in our country's history where
29:53 we're in a state of decline across all those different metrics. And 2024 is make or break
29:58 for us. We're either going to reverse the decline or we are going to be in a hole that
30:02 we are not going to be able to dig out of. So my pledge to you is we will get in there
30:07 on day one. We will get to work. We are going to reverse this country's decline. We're going
30:12 to usher in a new birth of freedom that will lead to a great American revival. And we have
30:17 no other choice to do it. I've got to fight. I've got a six, a five, and a three-year-old
30:22 that my wife and I are thinking about. And we are running the risk of being the first
30:26 generation of Americans who are going to leave to our kids and grandkids in America less
30:31 prosperous and less free than the one we inherited. And that would not do them justice.
30:37 And it would not do justice to the people that have sacrificed through all the generations
30:42 proceeding to be able to preserve freedom in this country. I would fly up to Washington,
30:47 D.C. back in the day, and I would never forget going into Reagan Airport when they would
30:51 take a route that took you right parallel to the National Mall. If you looked out the
30:56 left side of the plane, you saw the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, all these
31:01 great testaments to the principles and values that our country stands for. And you feel
31:06 good. You feel patriotic to see that. But what I figured out after doing that trip is
31:11 the best monuments were not out the left side of the plane. Because if you looked out the
31:15 other side of the plane, you looked over the Potomac River, you saw a series of small,
31:20 nondescript monuments orderly arranged over the rolling hills of a place called Arlington
31:25 National Cemetery. And it occurred to me then, and I believe now, you can have the best constitution
31:30 in the world, you can have the best Declaration of Independence in the world, these things
31:34 do not run on autopilot. They require each generation of Americans to step up when freedom
31:40 is threatened and defender. And that may mean putting on a uniform, risking your life, and
31:45 indeed giving the last full measure of devotion and service to this country. It may just mean
31:51 that we have to do our part to make sure that we elect the right people to office to be
31:57 able to turn this country around. I am in this fight because we have no choice but to
32:02 win. I want to thank you all for coming out. I want all of your support in the South Carolina
32:07 primary in February. And we are going to get this done. And as president, I won't let you
32:13 down. Anyone have any questions? Yes. I'm going to protect gun rights, Second Amendment
32:26 rights. We will do that. I signed constitutional carry in the state of Florida within the last
32:33 year. And that was another promise that I said I would do. We were able to do it. I
32:38 oppose what both the Trump and Biden administrations have tried to do by doing gun control through
32:44 executive order and through the bureaucracy. What they're doing with the pistol brace rule
32:49 I think is unconstitutional. But that is definitely a threat to people's Second Amendment rights.
32:54 And I will revoke that as president. Yes. Sure. Oh, great. That's another promise I
33:03 delivered on. Okay. Election integrity. So in Florida, when they used to talk about Florida
33:09 and elections, people used to snicker. They used to laugh about that. So I came in and
33:14 I said, you know, in my inaugural address five years ago, I said one generation of botched
33:18 elections is enough. And so in Florida, we have a ban on ballot harvesting, a ban on
33:25 Zucker Bucks, universal voter ID, no mass mailing of ballots. And we created an election
33:33 crimes task force in state government that prosecutes election crimes. And I was actually
33:39 I was doing this Bill Maher. He was hitting me because we've prosecuted people. And I'm
33:44 like, wait a minute. If you're an illegal alien, you should not be voting in this country.
33:48 We should be prosecuting those people. So Florida now has the most transparent, efficient
33:58 elections in the country. And we put a lot of work in it. Now, going forward, I hope
34:04 every state adopts reforms like Florida. Georgia has done good stuff. Some others have done
34:09 good stuff lately, but not every state has. As your nominee, I am not going to let the
34:15 Democrats run circles around us. If there are states that allow ballot harvesting, we
34:20 are going to have organization to do our own ballot harvesting. If you have states that
34:25 allow Zucker Bucks, I am going to do that. I am not going to sit back with one hand tied
34:30 behind my back and let them get away with it. So we are going to be fighting on all
34:36 fronts. We're not going to leave any votes on the table. And that's why we're going to
34:42 win all those swing states that we didn't win in 2020.
34:46 Thank you.
34:47 Governor, this will be our last question.
34:49 So the question is, what's happening with the budget and deficit? So the two biggest
34:59 problems in recent years, as much as people in Congress say others, is they borrowed and
35:06 printed trillions and trillions of dollars. Starting in March of 2020, they did $2.2 trillion
35:13 in March of 2020. Huge mistake. December, late December of 2020, they did another $2.2
35:21 trillion. Basically, Trump signed that and Biden got to spend it all when he came in.
35:26 Then Biden did another $2 trillion with the American Rescue Plan. We've never seen spending
35:32 like this outside of a war, World War II. So that drove inflation. That drove the Federal
35:39 Reserve to then raise interest rates. So now what's happening is they used to borrow and
35:45 spend about $250 billion a year to service the federal debt. That is now ballooning to
35:52 where that's going to end up being a trillion dollars a year just to service the interest
35:58 on the debt. So the number one problem with the budget was they borrowed, printed, and
36:04 spent. Interest rates have now gone up and they're stuck having to pay the debt at much
36:09 higher rates. So the first thing you've got to do is you've got to get interest rates
36:13 down. You've got to get inflation down. You do that by stopping spending at these levels,
36:19 which are ridiculous. I mean, like they're patting themselves on the back because they
36:23 did a continuing resolution. That money that they're spending is way higher than it was
36:28 three or four years ago. Do you feel that much better off because they're spending?
36:32 Of course not. So you've got to get that take care of. You also need to take all the
36:37 biodynamics and the bureaucracy, rip that out. That's going to help small business.
36:41 It's going to help the economy grow better. And you need to use our energy resources and
36:46 have energy independence and dominance, lower gas prices, lower fuel costs, utility bills.
36:53 That's going to help everything throughout the economy. You'll then get that interest
36:57 down. And yes, we got a battle to fight more to reduce spending, but you cannot possibly
37:04 do it when you have interest on the debt. That's going to be a trillion dollars each
37:09 fiscal year. It is insane. And this is only something that's happened within the last
37:13 three or four years. And here's the thing. As much as I want to blame the Democrats for
37:19 everything, Republicans were part of the problem too. It's both parties that are part of the
37:24 problem. All right. Thanks guys. God bless.