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The Lead with Jake Tapper
Trump Speaks at Values Voter Summit. Aired 4-4:30p ET
Aired September 09, 2016 - 16:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[16:00:03]
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The African-American community has heard my message that I am going to make the inner city safe again, and I'm going to bring back jobs and I'm going to bring back the great education.
Don't be surprised -- remember this, November 8. Don't be surprised, because we have been given a lot of support over the last three or four weeks. If, on November 8, I get more African-American and Hispanic votes than anyone thought possible about a month ago, you see what's going on.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: They're starting -- people are starting to hear about this, and they're saying, wow. Wow. They are liking it. And, again, can't get any worse. It's going to get a lot better, but only if I do it. They can't do it.
The Democrats, they have -- what they have done is incredible. And Hillary Clinton will be absolutely more of the same, rigid. It will never change. Remember, 100 years, 70 years, 50. It's not going to change. Not going to happen.
Now, let's talk about another issue that will define the future of this country for generations to come, the United States Supreme Court.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Earlier this year, we lost the great Justice Antonin Scalia. The next president will not only have to fill this seat, but as many as four others.
It could even be, I mean, we could end up with a total of five judges by one president. It would be record-setting. Probably be three. Could be four. Could even be five.
And you pick the wrong people, you have a country that is no longer your country. It will be a disaster, one of the most important issues, frankly, other than maybe defense, because we are going to build up our military. It's so depleted.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: We're going to take care of our vets. We're going to protect your Second Amendment. So many things.
But one of the most important -- some people think it's actually the most important -- is the filling of the seats, the United States Supreme Court. You see what's happening right now. Essentially, it's 4 on 4. And you see what -- how bad it is. We're going to pick great judges.
I have already put a list of 11, Federalist Society, highly recommended. Got uniform great reviews on these 11 people. And we are going to put truly great people.
Maybe we use Judge Scalia as the ultimate example of what we're looking for, OK?
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: This will determine whether or not we remain a constitutional republic, frankly. That's what's going to happen.
I have pledged to appoint judges who will uphold the Constitution to protect your religious liberty and apply the law as written.
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: We reject judges who rewrite the Constitution to impose their own personal views on 300 million-plus Americans. We're going to have that.
I have made public a list of judges, as I said, that will guide my selection process. Hillary Clinton has refused to provide such a list. And we brought it up. Let's see your list. You ever saw the list, you would walk out of here not feeling very well, because she knows the extremist judges she would pick would be rejected by the overwhelming majority of the American public.
They'd be rejected. Clinton's judicial picks would allow her to completely take over American health care, the American economy, and Americans' religious liberty, not to mention your Second Amendment, which is on very thin ice right now, as you know, because of the fact that we're 4 on 4.
And if they even pick one judge who is wrong, you can probably, as you know it, you can kiss the Second Amendment goodbye. And we don't want to see that.
Another issue in this race of great importance to everyone in this room is the issue, of course, of national security. Just today, it was announced that North Korea performed its fifth nuclear test, its fourth since Hillary Clinton became secretary of state.
It's just one more massive failure from a failed secretary of state, failed at everything.
(APPLAUSE)
[16:05:04] TRUMP: Her policies have also put Iran onto a path of nuclear weapons
and, I have to say, made them overnight an absolute power.
They were dying three years ago. The sanctions were choking them. They would have fallen, but Obama didn't support people that would have taken over and I think, in this case, probably would have taken over the right way. Had no support.
But you look at what's happened to Iran in such a short period of time. But remember the ransom payment. Remember, it was $400 million two weeks ago. But then they made a mistake. This is cash.
Remember, they said they paid cash because they couldn't open a bank account? There was no way of sending it into a checking account? All lies, just like Obamacare was a big lie. Remember, you can use your plan, you can use your doctor -- 27 times, right, 27 times.
Use your doctors, use your plan. Turned out to be a lie. It's all a lie. It's all a big lie. It's a rigged system, and it's a lie. And I will tell you what. I will tell you what. The $400 million, for those that haven't been reading the paper over the last two days, turned out to be $1.7 billion in cash. Cash.
And I actually said -- they said, oh, that money is going to be used for terror. I said, no, they don't need it for terror. They have got $150 billion. That's in addition to the $150 billion that we gave them back. I said, they don't need it. This is going into their Swiss accounts and going into their accounts.
They are not going to use it for terror. They have plenty of money for terror. Think of it, $1.7 billion in cash, massive, big vats of cash. You saw them, cartons. Never saw anything like it. I have seen a lot of cash.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: Never saw anything like this, $1.7 billion.
Can you imagine these guys? Planes get -- they stop. Remember, they wouldn't give back the hostages? They waited there for hours and hours. And Obama kept saying, no, no, this has nothing to do. Even the hostages said, they kept us waiting for a certain plane to come in, not to take them back, because they were waiting for something.
It was just -- just another lie. But can you imagine these people sitting there, and they see $1.7 billion in cash? Ay yi yi, they think we're stupid. They think we're stupid.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: They won't be thinking it for long.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Very sad. At the same time, ISIS is hunting down and exterminating what it calls
the Nation of the Cross. ISIS is carrying out a genocide against Christians in the Middle East. We cannot let this evil continue. Can't let it.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: ISIS must be destroyed. Have to. Have no choice.
To defeat ISIS, we must use military warfare, but also cyber-warfare, financial warfare and ideological warfare. It's a whole different ball game today than it was 50 years ago and 200 years ago. Different world.
We must also establish a bipartisan goal in the United States and an international goal with our allies of defeating radical Islamic terrorism.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Words that our president won't use and words that Hillary Clinton won't use. Just like we won the Cold War by identifying our enemy and building a consensus to guide a long-term strategy, so, too, must we do the same with Islamic terrorism.
By the way, President Obama has allowed Syrian refugees to pour into our country at unbelievable rates. And Hillary Clinton wants to allow 550 percent more. But it's almost impossible to get a Christian in from Syria. They take others, but they don't take Christians. Very rare. Very rare.
So, I said that we need to make safe zones in the region. We want to take care of people. But we absolutely cannot allow this potential tremendous threat to continue.
[16:10:14]
And we have to stop this. This is going to be potentially a catastrophe for our country. It's from within. This could be the all-time great Trojan horse. This could be it.
You ever notice on the -- you look at the migration trail and you see people with cell phones, cell phones. And some of the cell phones have the ISIS flag printed on them. And some of them have things far worse than that, scenes far worse than that.
So, it was the failed policies, you have to remember, of Hillary Clinton and Obama that unleashed ISIS in the first place. If they did the right thing, you wouldn't be talking about ISIS right now.
Now she wants to get rid of -- oh, we're going to get rid of them. She tells them already there will be no boots on the ground. Now, even if you don't want boots on the ground, you don't want to say it. Don't say it.
Now they're saying, oh, I hope she wins. Oh, boy, would they dream of having her as president. Can you imagine? They dream about it every night having Hillary Clinton.
But even if you believe -- and I can understand that, no boots on the ground, I can understand -- you don't say it. Let them think they're going to go through hell. Don't say it.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Can you imagine the great General Douglas MacArthur, can you imagine the great General George Patton or one of our great generals that we have today, General Flynn, who is here someplace..
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: I love General Flynn.
Can you imagine these people saying, I mean, they're basically giving out the strategy. There will be no boots on the ground. If you don't want that, I fully understand. Don't say it. Don't say it.
Can you imagine MacArthur saying, we're going to fight the enemy, and we're going to move our troops in, in about a month, we're going to move from behind, we're going to hit them from the front? And everything they say turns out to be true.
You know, I hate to say this, because we have a lot of evangelicals in this room. But maybe we shouldn't be so honest when it comes to military strategy. Does that make sense?
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: Hope I didn't lose your vote for saying that.
(APPLAUSE)
TRUMP: Just look at what her policies have left us with in Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
The problem is, Hillary Clinton is trigger-happy. She really is. She's trigger-happy, and yet she says no boots, which is sort of interesting. There probably will be boots. Probably will turn out to be another disaster.
Her tenure has brought us only war and destruction and death. She's just too quick to intervene, invade or to push for regime change with people we don't even know who they are. They take over and they're far worse.
This creates the power vacuums that are filled by terrorists in groups like ISIS. My administration, on the other hand, will work with any country that is willing to partner with us to defeat ISIS and halt radical Islamic terrorism.
And, by the way, that includes Russia. If they want to join us on knocking out ISIS, that is just fine, as far as I'm concerned.
(CHEERING AND APPLAUSE) TRUMP: It's a very imperfect world, and you can't always choose your friends. Life. But you can never fail to recognize your enemies. We have some real enemies.
Unfortunately for our country, our enemies probably hacked into Hillary Clinton's e-mails. These are the same e-mails she destroyed after receiving a federal subpoena. What's that? Using software in order to bleach the e-mail, so you can never, ever see them.
She even mysteriously lost 13 different phones before the FBI got them. And many were destroyed with a hammer. Did anybody ever hit a hammer when -- you know, maybe two or three people. But they were just released from prison, those two people.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: No, can you believe this, destroyed them with a hammer? The old-fashioned way, I guess.
(LAUGHTER)
TRUMP: The other night, in the Commander-in-Chief Forum, did anybody see that? How did I do? Good. But we have a big debate coming up, who knows what's going to happen there, but I will say, every poll has been winning big league Commander-in-Chief. The polls came out and we won big league. Now we have a debate coming up. I don't imagine any of you will be watching the debate, right?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Don't say something -- don't say something --
TRUMP: I won't, I promise.
Hillary Clinton answered questions on her e-mails horribly. That's why she lost, that's why she did so poorly. She was terrible. Honestly, I shouldn't be saying this, she was terrible. She keeps talking about the e-mails and every time she talks about them, she talks about them differently. It seems, each week, true, she has a like a different answer.
But there can be no answer when she deletes 33,000 e-mails, bleaches them so they can be recovered, an unheard of practice, hammers them into total silence, you know what's happening. You know what's happening.
I always say getting away with that will be the single greatest accomplishment of her career. It's true. It's true.
So, her answers were bad. They were bad, and a lot of people said they swore totally dishonest, and you know, she was blaming Matt Lauer. I thought Matt Lauer did a very good job. I mean, his questions to me were very tough.
But the gentleman who stood up and said, honestly, you should be in prison for what you did, to me that was the tough one. That was a tough one. That was a tough question. Sort of a question in the form of a statement, right? Hillary Clinton is unfit to be our president for many reasons.
(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)
True.
(CROWD CHANTING)
She is unfit for many reasons, the biggest of which is her judgment, it's just so bad. It's time to restore honesty and integrity to our government. We have to do it.
And one more issue, final issue I want to discuss today is the economy and helping those in need. There is no more charitable group in this country than Christians. And all of us -- true -- and all of us here today are determined to lift suffering Americans out of poverty, and we're going to do with a lot of other people to help.
As your president, I will pursue a complete reform of our economy, to bring back millions of new jobs into our country, millions of new jobs. We've lost our jobs like a bunch of babies. They have gone to other countries. They've gone to Mexico. They've gone to other countries. China is taking massive advantage of us.
It's all so easy, believe me. It's all so easy.
That includes, we will be doing massive tax cuts for working families and for businesses.
(APPLAUSE)
It includes, very importantly, the elimination of all needless job killing regulations.
(APPLAUSE)
It includes lifting the restrictions on American energy, which is under siege.
(APPLAUSE)
I will also renegotiate NAFTA and if they don't want to renegotiable it so it becomes a two-way highway, not just a one-way highway out of the United States for our companies and our jobs, we will terminate NAFTA, believe me.
[16:20:06] We'll stand up to China and we're going to fight for every last job. It's going to be America first, and it's going to be the American worker first.
Crucially, I will also fight for the American family and American family values. The family must be at the center of any antipoverty policy agenda. Has to be.
(APPLAUSE)
Thank you.
Our country just lost one of the great champions for the American family, Phyllis Schlafly. A great woman, really great woman. We send our thoughts and prayers to her loved ones. I will be going to her funeral tomorrow in St. Louis.
(APPLAUSE)
Phyllis fought very hard till the very end for a free and prosperous America. The understood that to be truly united as a country, we can't simply just turn to government or to politicians. The bedrock of our unity is the realization that we're all brothers and sisters created by the same God. Phyllis understood that. And Phyllis stood.
And, by the way, Phyllis endorsed me a long time ago when it wasn't necessarily something that was so easy to do. And she was incredible, she was so brave. She endorsed me and that was not the thing to do at the time.
People said, Trump? She said, he is going to win, you don't understand. He knows how to win, he's going to win. They said, Phyllis, it's not going to be Trump, and we went boom, boom, boom.
But I will tell you, Phyllis endorsed me at a time when it wasn't necessarily the thing to do, even the popular thing to do, and I will never forget that. That had a huge impact. She was a great, great powerful woman with a tremendous heart and I look forward to being with her family tomorrow, because you really -- that is a celebration. She was 92 years old.
(APPLAUSE)
We are all equal, and we all come from the same creator. If we remember that simple fact, then our future is truly limitless. There is nothing we as Americans can't do.
There's a biblical verse that I've often read, and I want to repeat it again, because I think it is so important to what we have trying to achieve right now for our country. It is from 1 John Chapter 4.
"No one has ever seen God. But if we love another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us."
So true. So true.
(APPLAUSE)
Imagine what our country could accomplish if we started working together as one people, under one God, saluting one flag.
(CHEERS)
It's time to stop quibbling over the smallest words, and time to start dreaming about the great adventures that lie ahead for our country.
This is my promise to all of you, starting in 2017, we will be one American nation. It's time to break our ties with the bitter failures of the past, and to embrace a new American future. We have to do it.
Together, we will make America believe again. We will make America united again. And we will make America great again.
Thank you very much and God bless you. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you very much!
JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: Welcome to THE LEAD. I'm Jake Tapper.
That was Donald Trump addressing conservative voters and activists at the Values Voter Summit right here in Washington, D.C.
[16:25:02] You heard him there. He promised to defend Christian heritage. He said that faith and God and his teachings will bring together what he called the divided nation.
He also revived his foreign policy take downs of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, calling her trigger happy. Her record at the State Department, he said was a failure.
We're also waiting for Hillary Clinton to come out and speak any moment. She is in a meeting with national security experts right now.
Right now, we'll bring you her remarks live later this hour. But let's chew over what Mr. Trump just said. I want to bring in the CNN political director David Chalian and CNN chief political analyst, Gloria Borger.
And, David, what struck you most about this appearance before the conservative voters, the Values Voter Summit?
DAVID CHALIAN, CNN POLITICAL DIRECTOR: The first thing is that it was not entirely about social conservative issues. He didn't just play to the home crowd. He gave a large portion of his typical stump speech now as you noted, going after Hillary Clinton on military adventurism, being trigger happy, ISIS.
Not that these voters don't care about every issue, they do, but he didn't just play to the social issues. He did do the one thing we see him often highlight when he speaks before social conservative groups and that is point to the Johnson amendment and his opposition to it, and his commitment to Lyndon Johnson had put into the law for tax- exempt status, to be not available to religious organizations that play in politics and Donald Trump basically makes a First Amendment case for that.
And so, the Johnson Amendment should be eradicated and I think that is a very appealing message to this crowd.
GLORIA BORGER, CNN CHIEF POLITICAL ANALYST: He also reiterated his choice for school choice and home schooling, which also plays to this crowd. But I should also note, he does very well with white evangelicals. There was a poll I believe in July where he had 78 percent of white evangelical support.
So, this is talking to the home team here. You know, he is well- supported by them and I think that this speech was not only directed to them, but a national audience in so far as he broadened them out to everything you were saying to Obamacare and foreign policy.
And he has been remarkably on message, reading off of a prompter, subdued, I would say. And ad libbing fewer times than we're used to. And when he is on message, it works for him.
TAPPER: He was once a fierce critic of politicians that use teleprompters, but he has since become converted, as they say. He is adherent in the church of teleprompters.
CHALIAN: It's working for him. It is working for him. He is getting really consistent on the teleprompter, at the same time he changed the campaign structure and the staff around him. That was key.
The one thing he did not do was completely jump on North Korea news today in the way that I expected him to. He mentioned it, but I thought he was going to go much bigger with it.
TAPPER: All right. David Chalian and Gloria Borger, stick around.
Hillary Clinton is expected to speak any minute now, after her national security briefing. We're going to have that for you live. Stay with us.
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