Watch Donald Trump Jr. Speak at the Republican Convention

Thank you. Good evening, I’m Donald Trump, Jr.

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Thank you. Thank you.

I’m the father of five young children, from 2-year-old Chloe to Kai who just turned 9. I’m the husband to Vanessa, an amazing wife and mother, and the son of a great man.

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I’m an American. And tonight I want to talk to you about the country we live in, the country our children will grow up in.

TRUMP: For my generation, this is the most important election of our lifetime, one that will determine the future of our country and, in turn, the future of the world.

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For too long, our country has ignored its problems, punting them down the road for future generations to deal with. In business, I was trained by my father to make the tough investments and decisions today to assure a brighter future tomorrow.

We’ve actually started to believe that solving our great problems is an impossible task, and that’s why we need to elect a man who has a track record of accomplishing the impossible.

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For the first time, parents no longer think that their kids will be as well off as we were. We’ve lost the confidence in our leaders and the faith in our institutions. But remember one thing: We’re still Americans, we’re still one country, and we’re going to get it all back. We’re going to get it back better than ever before.

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I know we’ll get it back because I know my father. I know that when people tell him it can’t be done that guarantees that he gets it done. I know that when someone tells him that something is impossible, that’s what triggers him into action.

When people told him it was impossible for a boy from Queens to go to Manhattan and take on developers in the big city, rather than give up he changed the skyline of New York.

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I’ve seen it time and time again, that look in his eyes when someone says it can’t be done. I saw that look a little over a year ago when he was told he couldn’t possibly succeed in politics. Yes, he did.

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For my father, impossible is just the starting point. That’s how he approaches business projects, that’s how he approaches life, whether it’s teaching his granddaughter how to swing a golf club, or tackling the toughest negotiations, he’s always fully committed.

That’s why the person who had never run for office before stood on the stage 11 months ago in this very arena with 16 professional politicians and this week that same man will stand before you as our party’s nominee for the president of the United States of America.

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As a proud son and family member, it was one of the great honors of my life to be able to put him over the top in the delegate count earlier today.

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His unrelenting determination is why he’s going to become our next president and why I know that when my father says he can fix the country he means it.

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You want to know what kind of president he’ll be? Let me tell you how he ran his businesses, and I know because I was there with him by his side on job sites, in conference rooms from the time I could walk.

He didn’t hide out behind some desk in an executive suite, he spent his career with regular Americans. He hung out with the guys on construction sites pouring concrete and hanging sheetrock. He listened to them and he valued their opinions as much and often more than the guys from Harvard and Wharton locked away in offices away from the real work.

He’s recognized the talent and the drive that all Americans have. He’s promoted people based on their character, their street smarts and their work ethic, not simply paper or credentials. To this day, many of the top executives in our company are individuals that started out in positions that were blue collar, but he saw something in them and he pushed them to succeed.

His true gift as a leader is that he sees the potential in people that they don’t even see in themselves…

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…the potential that other executives would overlook because their resumes don’t include the names of fancy colleges and degrees.

I know he values those workers and those qualities in people because those are the individuals he had my siblings and me work under when we started out. That he would trust his own children’s formative years to these men and women says all you need to know about Donald Trump.

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We didn’t learn from MBAs, we learned from people who had doctorates in common sense.

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Guys like Vinnie Stellio, who taught us how to drive heavy equipment, operate tractors and chainsaws, who worked his way through the ranks to become a trusted adviser of my father. It’s why we’re the only children of billionaires as comfortable in a D10 Caterpillar as we are in our own cars.

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My father knew that those were the guys and gals that would teach us the dignity of hard work from a very young age. He knows that at that heart of the American dream is the idea that whoever we are, wherever we’re from we can get ahead, where everyone can prosper together.

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The other party also tells us they believe in the American dream, they say we should worry about economic inequality and immobility. You know what? They’re right. But they don’t tell you that it was their policies that caused the problem and it was their policies that have no accountability.

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They gave us the worst immigration system in the world, one that imports immobility, one that drives down employment and wages for Hispanic Americans, for African Americans and for everyone, an immigration system that favors illegals over those trying to go through the process legally and, at times, even over law-abiding citizens.

It was Bernie Sanders himself who warned that a large tide of new workers keeps wages low and poverty high.

The other party gave us public schools that far too often fail our students, especially those who have no options. Growing up, my siblings and I we were truly fortunate to have choices and options that others don’t have. We want all Americans to have those same opportunities.

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Our schools used to be an elevator to the middle class, now they’re stalled on the ground floor. They’re like Soviet-era department stores that are run for the benefit of the clerks and not the customers, for the teachers and the administrators and not the students. You know why other countries do better on K through 12? They let parents choose where to send their own children to school.

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That’s called competition. It’s called the free market. And it’s what the other party fears. (APPLAUSE)

They fear it because they’re more concerned about protecting the jobs of tenured teachers than serving the students in desperate need of a good education.

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They want to run everything top-down from Washington. They tell us they’re the experts and they know what’s best.

The other party gave us a regulatory state on steroids. Dodd- Frank was a thousand pages long and it’s already spun off 22,000 pages in regulations.

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Imagine trying to digest all that before you even open your doors for business. That doesn’t help consumers. What it does is destroy small business in favor of big businesses who can afford the vast number of lawyers and accountants needed to comply. Dodd-Frank is consumer protection for billionaires.

We’ve produced the thickest network of patronage and influence of any country at any time in world history. It’s composed of a self- satisfied people at the top, our new aristocrats. We can’t live that way any longer, it’s too risky.

Let me talk a little bit about risks. The other party is the party of risk. I’ve spent time with many great Americans who have served this country in the military, and they know what’s at stake. When we have weak leaders in positions of power, Americans risking their lives for our freedoms are less safe.

You know, almost daily I get a call or a text from a real American hero. His name is Mark Geist and I’m proud to call him a friend.

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Mark was part of the security team at the annex on our grounds at the consulate in Benghazi. Mark was one of the men who received frantic phone calls from his buddies at the compound, calls that pleaded for help, calls that he and his team tried to answer. But calls didn’t save all his friends because Secretary Clinton’s State Department had ignored their requests for help, both on the night in question and even in the weeks and months leading up to the attack.

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It was a tragedy and one that would be repeated were she to win the election.

Ask Mark who’s fit to lead, who has the judgment to lead, who will take that call at 3:00 in the morning? Or better yet, ask yourselves, if you were in Mark’s shoes that night, who would you rather call?

AUDIENCE: Trump! Trump! Trump!

TRUMP: Let me tell you something about risk. If Hillary Clinton were elected, she’d be the first president who couldn’t pass a basic background check. It’s incredible.

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Hillary Clinton is a risk Americans can’t afford to take. She says she’ll issue executive orders to take away Americans’ guns. She wants to appoint judges who will abolish the Second Amendment.

Just look at how effective those laws have been in inner-city Chicago, a city with the toughest gun laws in our nation, where 70 people were murdered last month alone and where over 3,400 American lives have been lost since this administration took office in 2009.

You know why those laws fail? Because criminals by definition don’t follow laws.

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Rather than prosecuting real criminals, she would strip hardworking, law-abiding citizens of their rights to protect themselves and their families.

She’ll throw every possible obstacle in the path of safe, reliable, affordable energy produced in America, by Americans, for American businesses and families. Rather than being energy independent, our country will be forced to remain beholden to her buddies in the Middle East.

Those are risks we can’t afford to take. And when we win, we’re not going to have to.

There’s so much work to do. We will not accept the current state of our country because it’s too hard to change. That’s not the America I know. We’re going to unleash the creative spirit and energy of all Americans. We’re going to make our schools the best in the world for every single American of every single ethnicity and background.

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We’re going to put Americans first, all Americans, not a special class of crony elites at the top of the heap.

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We’re going to elect a president who will work with everyone to pass legislation that will make our country great again, a president who will give us a tax code that will free the American economy and end special loopholes for the wealthy, a president who will give us an immigration law that protects American citizens and gives them jobs, a president who will repeal and replace “Obamacare” without leaving our most vulnerable citizens without health care and who will do it without destroying Medicare for seniors, as Hillary Clinton has proposed.

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A president who knows we can’t simply delete our problems, but that we have to tackle them head on. A president who won’t allow PC culture to put the safety and well-being of our children and our loved ones at stake. A president who won’t bow and pander to nations that shudder at the very thought of America’s existence. A president more concerned with the safety and comfort of his fellow Americans than the feelings of those hostile nations abroad who, if given the option, would wipe America off the face of this earth.

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A president not beholden to special interests, foreign and domestic, and one who funded his entire primary run out of his own pocket just to prove it.

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A president who will secure and defend the borders of the United States and who will appoint judges who believe that freedom requires a limited government. A president who won’t use the highest office in the land as a path to personal enrichment.

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A president who’s actually created real jobs, who has actually signed the front of a paycheck, and who doesn’t just talk about it in theory. A president who has real people’s families and livelihoods dependent on his success and the success of his company for decades.

A president who speaks his mind, and not just when it behooves him to do so, who doesn’t have to run a focus group or use data analytics to be able to form a simple opinion.

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Who says what needs to be said and not just what you want to hear.

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A president who will unleash the greatness in our nation and in all of us, who will give the hardworking men and women who have built this great country a voice once again.

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That president can only be my mentor, my best friend, my father, Donald Trump.

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And when we elect him, we’ll have done all that. We’ll have made America great again, greater than ever before.

Thank you, and God bless.

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