[Music: "Money, money, money]

Wow.  Thank you very much.  And he did very well on The Apprentice, I have to tell you.  Very talented guy.

Our country is in very, very serious trouble.  We owe $17 trillion and we have more than a $1 trillion yearly deficit.  That means we're losing numbers that nobody's every heard of before.  Anywhere.  Any country.  Nobody's ever heard of numbers like this.

Likewise, the Republican party is in serious trouble.

The good news is that the country has tremendous untapped potential.  Absolutely tremendous.

The Republican party I could almost say is going to be a little bit tougher, and especially as you get more and more conservative.  They get nasty.  They don't like to hear what we have to say.  And it's not easy.  We have to get the momentum back.  And, we have to get it back quickly, before it's too late, before we waste that incredible potential that we still have.  We have to get it back.

Now, the president is given sadly unprecedented media protection.  It's incredible when you see what's going on, it's absolutely incredible.

With the Republicans, especially as you get more and more conservative in your thinking and your thought, it's really just the opposite.  As Republicans, if you think you're going to change very substantially for the worse Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in any substantial way, and at the same time you think you're going to win elections, it just really is not going to happen.

The way we solve our problem--  Because polls have come out, even the Tea Party, which I love so dearly, 78-percent of the people said leave my Medicare, my Medicaid, my Social Social alone.  That's the Tea Party.

So what we have to do, and the way we solve our problems is to build a great economy.  We don't have a great economy right now.  China has.  Other people have, other countries have.  We don't have a great--  We don't make things any more.  We were great, great manufacturers.  We don't make anything any more.  We buy from other countries.  Not only China.  All over the world.  We buy.  We have to rebuild our economy and we have to do it again.  We have to make America strong again and make America great again.

Now this is a hard one, because when it comes to immigration, you know that the 11 million illegals, even if given the right to vote.  You know you're going to have to do what's right.  But the fact is 11 million people will be voting Democratic.  You can be out front, you can be the spearhead, you can do whatever you want to do, but every one of those 11 million people will be voting Democratic.  It's just the way it works, and you have to be very, very careful, because you could say, that to a certain extent, the odds aren't looking so great right now for Republicans, that you're on a suicide mission.  You're just not going to get those votes.

Now, I say to myself, why aren't we letting people in from Europe?  I have many friends, many, many friends--and nobody wants to talk this, nobody wants to say it--but I have many friends from Europe.  They want to come in.  People I know.  Tremendous people.  Hard-working people.  They can't come in.  I know people whose sons went to Harvard; top in their class, went to the Wharton School of Finance, great, great students.  They happen to be a citizen of a foreign country.  They learn, they take all of our knowledge, and they can't work in this country.  We throw them out.  We educate them, we make them really good, they go home; they can't stay here so they work from their country, and they work very effectively against us.  Now how stupid is that?  Top in your class at Harvard and you get thrown out of the country.  So something has to happen.

You've been reading about the White House tour.  Now I suggested that--  Actually Newt Gingrich suggested it for me.  I thought it was very nice of him to do.  I didn't know anything about it, but he volunteered for me that I would pay for it for the entire year.  I said that's okay.  Somebody told me--  Well it was very nice of Newt.  He's a friend of mine, and he's a member of a great club right down the road that I happen to own so I love Newt.  Anybody who's a member of my club, I love.  Maybe President Obama should join one of my clubs.  I would love him.  But that's a sad thing.  Now I understand it's going to be reinstituted, but I would certainly be willing to do it. 

And I'll give you something it's small, but it's emblematic.  A couple of years ago I saw a major, major state dinner, and it was in a tent on the White House lawn.  A bad tent.  Probably a tent that the guy who owns the tent made a fortune; probably rented it for one night for more than it cost him.  And I said to myself, you know here's China in a tent.  And I offered.  I called up the White House, somebody I know very well, very high position, and I said look, I will offer free of charge to build the most beautiful ballroom there is in the country anywhere.  I will do it.  It will cost anywhere from $50 to $100 million.  I will do it.  You can get the greatest architects, you'll make it perfectly sympathetic with the White House and the architecture.  It'll be fabulous.  They said thank you very much.  Wow, what an offer.  We never heard from them.  That's the problem with the country.  That's a small thing, but that's the problem with the country.  And that's what happens.  You don't hear from people.

Now, when you get right down to it from the standpoint of conservatives and Republicans, you've got to win elections.  When you have people that are well meaning, but governors saying "it's the stupid party."  And I heard that statement, I said what a horrible statement to make.  What a horrible statement.  Because that's a statement that's going to come back and haunt you when the Democrats start using it.  And you have to change that; you have to change that thinking.

Or when I have somebody and I watch somebody who spends $400 million on campaigns with perhaps the worst ads I've ever seen.  I mean they did ads on Obama that I thought it was being paid for by the Obama campaign.  They were so incredible.  You remember the famous superhero ad?  Well people want a superhero.  They made Obama--  It was great. I said what a great ad Obama did, and then I said, oh, wow, that was done by the Republicans.  So when you spend $400 million and it's a failure, and you don't have one victory, you know there's something seriously, seriously wrong.  [ed. Trump is alluding to Karl Rove]

Now, I've made over $8 billion.  In fact when I was thinking of running, I actually filed my financial statement.  A lot of people were actually surprised.  But more than that, I've employed tens of thousands of people, and yet I'm continually criticized by total lightweights all over the place.  It's unbelievable.  No, it really is unbelievable.  I mean you see these guys, you see these guys on television, they can't buy a clean shirt, and they're saying Donald Trump, he's nothing.  And I'm saying thousands and thousands of people.  So I'm very proud of what I've done. 

And I think if Mitt made one mistake--and I like Mitt Romney a lot--but if he made one mistake it's that he didn't talk enough about his success.  Because honestly, people really want success.  They want a leader who's successful.  And Mitt has done a great job.  And I just feel that the Republicans and Mitt, and I told him this, didn't speak enough about the things he did, the great things.  They were on the defensive instead of taking that offensive.

Just recently I bought Doral Country Club, 800 acres in the middle of Miami, an amazing place.  But it was improperly run for years and years.  Tiger Woods just won the tournement this weekend.  Got record television ratings; it did fantastic.  It's an amazing place.  I'm going to fix it.  I'm going to make it incredible.  I'm going to make that place incredible.  That's what we have to do with this country.  We've got to fix it.  We've got to make it incredible. 

Right now we're a laughingstock. 

You see what's going on in Afghanistan with Kharzai.  I mean he has no respect for us.  You know in all fairness we're leaving.  He probably said, wow, I'm going to be stuck here alone.  But still, this guy, when I watch his moves, I just say how can leadership allow that to happen. 

With Iraq, we spend $1.5 trillion.  $1.5 trillion.  We lose lives; great, great, young, wonderful people.  We lose so much.  Why do we have nothing?  We have nothing.  When I heard that we were first going into Iraq, some very smart people told me, well we're actually going for the oil.  I said, alright, I get that.  I get that.  There's nothing else.  I get it.  We didn't take the oil.  And then when I said we spent $1.5 trillion, we should take 1.5 --  You know I don't know if you know, they have the second largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia.  So 1.5 trillion is nothing.  1.5 trillion.  We should take it and pay ourselves back.  What are we doing?  What are we doing?  What are we thinking?  And this is whether it's Obama or Bush or whoever.  What the hell are we thinking?  And for those soldiers, and the families; for the soldiers that were killed, I said we should pay those families money.  We should give them money.  They lost their sons and their daughters, and a million dollars to a family is nothing compared to the kind of wealth that you're talking about over there.  So right now you have somebody running Iraq that we don't even know who the hell it is, and I guarantee you he's building his palaces and everything else and we have nothing out of it.  So it's just a very sad thing.

You look at what happens with Syria, you look at what's currently happening with South Korea.  Now I buy all my televisions from South Korea.  I'm sorry to say.  I just ordered 3,000 units, 3,000 televisions.  South Korea.  LGs, etcetera.  We don't make them in our country any more.  I get criticized.  "Oh, why didn't you buy them here?"  You can't buy them here.  We don't make televisions in this country.  Alright.  So North Korea as it always does gets frisky and then we pay them off and they get less frisky, right?  North Korea gets frisky.  What do we get out of it?  We send our beautiful aircraft carriers, we send our destroyers--  You know every time you turn on the engine it's $5 million, right.  And we send them down and we stop whatever's going to happen to South Korea.  What do we get out of it?  We get nothing.

The fact is we're run by either very foolish or very stupid people.  What's going on in this country is unbelievable.  Our country is a total mess, a total and complete mess, and what we need is leadership.

Now, by fixing the economy, we're able to solve the problems that we really do need to solve, and immediately, as a nation.  Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.  They all become affordable when we become a wealthy country again.  You know part of the reason that the Republican and even the Democrats, they're all talking, we've got to cut, we've got to cut.  Because our country isn't doing it.  We're not cutting the mustard.  We're not doing it. 

New technology has shown that we have tremendous wealth right under our feet in the form of energy.  Right under our feet.  North Dakota is a great example.  We're not allowed to go and get it, so we go to the OPEC nations that think we happen to be--because I hate to tell you, they're all friends of mine; I know them all--they think we're the stupidest people on Earth.  They can't believe what they're getting away with.  And we could become so easily the energy capital of the world. 

So what I say is this.  We have to start building things.  We have to start manufacturing, not just taking care of people, not just taking care in terms of health care.  That's not manufacturing.  That's money going out.  We have to bring money in.  This country has to start building things again.  We have to take back our jobs from China.  We have to take back our jobs from other places.   When Apple talks about Apple building all of this stuff, and we're all so proud of Apple, they build virtually 100-percent of their product in China.  So China should be more proud of Apple than we are to be totally honest with you.  We have to start manufacturing and building again and we have to make America great again.  Our problems will be solved.

Thank you very much.  It's a great honor.