Full speech transcript:
Erika Kirk: Okay, last year, my husband introduced to all of you our incredible president of the United States. This year, it’s my blessing, amfest, and privilege to be able to introduce to you our incredible vice president, J.D. Vance. J.D. Vance lives the American dream because he wants you guys to be able to live the American dream.
JD Vance: I grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a small town where people spoke their minds, built with their hands, and loved their God, their family, their community, and their country with their whole hearts. But it was also a place that had been cast aside and forgotten by America’s ruling class in Washington, despite the closing factories and the growing addiction in towns like mine. In my life, I had a guardian angel by my side.
She was an old woman who could barely walk, but she was tough as nails. I called her Mamaw, the name we hillbillies gave to our grandmothers. Thanks to that Mamaw, things worked out for me.
After 9-11, I did what thousands of other young men my age did. I enlisted in the United States Marines. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from the financial crisis to the Great Recession, from open borders to stagnating wages, the people who govern this country have failed and failed again.
That is, of course, until a guy named Donald J. Trump came along. President Trump represents America’s last best hope to restore what, if lost, may never be found again. A country where a working class boy born far from the halls of power can stand on this stage as the next vice president of the United States of America.
For Charlie, we will speak the truth every single day. For Charlie, we will rebuild this United States of America to greatness. We will never cower, even when staring down the barrel of a gun.
For Charlie, we will remember that it is better to stand on our feet defending the United States of America and defending the truth than it is to die on our knees. May our Heavenly Father give us the courage to live as Charlie lived. That is what we must do for Charlie.
Narration: Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Vice President J.D. Batts. Wow. How’s it going, Phoenix? It’s so good to be here with you all on this amazing day to close out an amazing AmFest 2025.
JD Vance: What an amazing crowd all of you are. And I have to admit, today solves one of the great insecurities that I have. Because as I’ve watched Nicki Minaj come out and declare her support for the truth, for courage, and for wisdom, I’ve had this little nagging voice in the back of my head wondering whether she thinks I look like the J.D. Vance meme.
And it turns out, and I confirmed when she walked down the steps, Nicki Minaj actually knows what I really look like. And that is the best tribute that I could possibly imagine. I have to start off with a note of gratitude.
Erica, I cannot thank you enough for your strength, your grace, and your kind words of support for this administration and for me personally. You lead an incredible movement at turning point. And I will fight alongside you and President Trump and every patriot in this room to defend the country that we so dearly love.
And when I say that I’m going to fight alongside of you, I mean all of you, each and every one. President Trump did not build the greatest coalition in politics by running his support for the truth. He did not through endless, self-defeating purity tests.
He says, make America great again because every American is invited. We don’t care if you’re white or black, rich or poor, young or old, rural or urban, controversial or a little bit boring or somewhere in between. People of every faith come to our banner because they know that the America First movement will make their lives better.
And they also know that the Democrats don’t care about anything other than maybe transing their kids. So if you love America, if you want all of us to be richer, stronger, safer, and prouder, you have a home on this team. I didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform, and I don’t really care if some people out there, I’m sure, will have the fake news media denounce me after this speech.
But let me just say, the best way to honor Charlie is that none of us here should be doing something after Charlie’s death that he himself refused to do in life. He invited all of us here. Charlie invited all of us here for a reason, because he believed that each of us, all of us, had something worth saying, and he trusted all of you to make your own judgment.
And we have far more important work to do than canceling each other. We have got to build, and President Donald Trump is a builder. We’re building a better country right now, and you have a rightful place in the success of your nation and the success of this movement.
And we build by adding, by growing, not by tearing down. Charlie Kirk was a great builder, too. He understood that any family can have its disagreements, its tough conversations.
We can learn and improve and treat one another better. We can love each other despite the disagreement. But winning demands teamwork, and I am honored to be on Turning Point’s team.
I’m honored to be on your team, and I will stay that way. There’s still so much important work to do, my friends. We’re barely a year into this administration, not even a year into the administration.
But I’m so proud of the accomplishments of the president and the entire administration. In just a year, we ended Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’ border crisis. December marks seven months straight of zero releases at the southern border.
More than 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States, the first time in over 50 years that we have had negative net migration, and it’s just the start. When you restore sanity at the border, it shows up everywhere else. Rent prices are dropping four months in a row, and more native-born Americans are working than ever before.
Kamala Harris opened the border and destroyed the economy. The Trump administration gave you net negative migration and much more job creation. Real wages are finally growing.
Inflation is half of what it was under Democrats. Gas prices are their lowest in years. And we have finally made it clear that in the United States, we believe in hard work and merit.
Unlike the left, we stand against treating anybody—and I love what Nikki said about this—we don’t treat anybody different because of their race or their sex. So we have relegated DEI to the dustbin of history, which is exactly where it belongs. In the United States of America, you don’t have to apologize for being white anymore.
And if you’re an Asian, you don’t have to talk around your skin color when you’re applying for college because we judge people based on who they are, not on ethnicity and things they can’t control. We don’t persecute you for being male, for being straight, for being gay, for being anything. The only thing that we demand is that you be a great American patriot, and if you’re that, you’re very much on our team.
Just consider the contrast. Kamala Harris used the government to censor you. We’re using, in the Trump administration, the government to protect your free speech, whether it’s on college campuses or in the digital marketplace of ideas.
Today, our military is welcoming patriots instead of firing them for refusing to accept an unlawful vaccine mandate. And to honor Charlie, but also to honor all of you, we’re working to end the scourge of left-wing violence in the United States of America. We’re going after the far-left crime networks, but we’re also going after the monsters that fund them.
We don’t just want to go after the Antifa member who threw a brick at an ICE agent. We want to know who bought the brick, and we’re going to prosecute them too. We’re making America healthy again with our great HHS Secretary Bobby Kennedy.
We’re bringing drug prices down and purging our food supply of the poison that had built up over a generation. But my friends, there is so much more to be done. And the people saying we need to be doing more, we need to be doing it faster, trust me, I hear you.
Greatness awaits every single one of you in the America First movement we are building together, but we need your help to get there. Do you want more prosecutions? Great. So do we.
Donald Trump and I have a list of better judges and prosecutors to enact swifter justice. So join us in the fight against the stupid Senate rules to stand in their way. Do you want faster deportations? So go to ice.gov slash join because we’re building an army of patriots and we need good people who care about the country to help us secure the border and do it even faster.
Do you want rents to keep dropping and wages to keep rising as they have over the last few months? Then mobilize with us. Don’t hand power back to the people who tanked the economy in the first place. Join the America First movement and you will always have a place on our great team.
Next month will be the official one year anniversary of the Trump administration and I am damn proud of our record so far. Now the Democrats are always already talking about 2028 and it looks like they’re going to nominate a California liberal who’s presided a California liberal who’s presided over rolling blackouts, open borders, and unchecked violent gangs. They’re just trying to settle on whether it’s going to be Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris.
And in the meantime, what are the Democrats offering you in the meantime? I got to say, ladies and gentlemen, they are not sending their best. Omar Fateh was Ilhan Omar’s candidate for mayor of Mogadishu, I mean Minneapolis. A little Freudian slip there.
The candidate for Senate in Maine for the Democrats calls me a Nazi, which is rich coming from a guy who literally has a Nazi tattoo on his chest. And Jasmine Crockett, oh Jasmine Crockett, oh. The record speaks for itself.
She wants to be a senator, though her street girl persona is about as real as her nails. But ask yourself, what do all of these people have in common? And the unfortunate answer is they are puppets. They don’t actually matter.
They are cogs in a machine that wants to make you poorer, that wants to make you less powerful, and wants to make you less safe in the country your ancestors built. And while President Trump and I are doing everything we can to break that machine, the left is still there, my friends, and they are still very powerful. Don’t delude yourselves.
It’s the activist groups who want to poison your kids with hormone replacement therapy and toxins in your water supply. It’s the corporate boardrooms pushing diversity quotas while whining about the fact that Donald Trump won’t let them ship American jobs overseas anymore, and boohoo to that. It’s the rogue district judges who issued nationwide injunctions every time the president lifts a finger.
It’s the Soros DAs who cheered on as their cities burned. What unites them? They win when our country loses. They get rich when you get poorer.
They hire the illegals that they bring in to take your jobs. They drink fine wine in the countries they ship your jobs to. They censor you because they’d rather destroy the Constitution than risk losing an argument.
They bring in millions of voters because they know they can’t win the argument with the people who are already here. And you know what else unites them? We are going to kick their ass next November and every year after that. Part of the American dream is the idea that we’re all, every single one of us on the same team, we’re all part of the same American family.
If you want to destroy that, do what Democrats have done not just for the last five years, but for the last 30 or 40. Make one race the enemy of another. Make one gender the enemy of the other.
Make Americans suspect and despise each other instead of loving their shared country. When I think about some of the most impassioned debates happening in our country, the nature of citizenship, of what it means to be an American, it all speaks to an obvious truth. Americans are hungry for identity.
We’re hungry for belonging. We’re hungry for a sense of our place in the world. And it’s no surprise why.
For many years, our fellow Americans have been dealing with a globalized economy that homogenized cultures and hollowed out our towns. Academics and activists pushing race and gender politics down everyone’s throat 24-7. Big tech overlords using their internet platforms to censor stories that challenge the dominant far-left narrative in our country.
More than any time, I can recount, people are talking about American identity and figuring out what it is that unites us. But I want to say something here. The only thing that has truly served as an anchor of the United States of America is that we have been, and by the grace of God, we always will be a Christian nation.
Now, I want to be explicit because, of course, the fake news media will twist everything that I say. I’m not saying you feel about them the same way I do. I’m not saying you have to be a Christian to be an American.
I’m saying something simpler and truer. Christianity is America’s creed. The shared moral language from the Revolution to the Civil War and beyond.
Across that history, our country’s major debates have always centered on how we could best, as a people, please God. That creed, think about it, that creed motivated our understanding of natural law and rights, our sense of duty to one’s neighbor, the conviction that the strong must protect the weak, and the belief in individual conscience. Even our famously American idea of religious liberty is a Christian concept.
Because we’re all creatures of God, we must respect each individual’s pathway to that God. But over the last 50 years, there has been a singular focus, a war that has been waged on Christians and Christianity in the United States of America. And let me say, of all the that Donald Trump has ended, that is the one we’re proudest of.
For decades, the left has labored to push Christianity out of national life. They’ve kicked it out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of the fundamental parts of the public square. Freedom of religion transformed into freedom from religion.
And in a public square devoid of God, we got a vacuum. And the ideas that filled that void preyed on the very worst of human nature rather than uplifting it. They told us not that we were children of God, but children of this or that identity group.
They replaced God’s beautiful design for the family that men and women could rely on and turn to one another with the idea that men could turn into women so long as they brought the right bunch of pills from Big Pharma. They had all the religious fervor of a zealous convert without any of the grace or forgiveness of a true Christian. Scripture tells us, by your fruits ye shall know them.
And we might ask, what are the fruits of these people and their principles? And the answer is a man named Tyler Robinson who killed my friend. Think about it. He has everything that the far left want from our young men.
He rejected the conservatism and the spirituality, the values of a small town family. He moved into a small apartment. He became addicted to porn.
He became addicted to hate. And he ended up sleeping with somebody who doesn’t know whether they’re a man or a woman. That is the nightmare scenario, but that is the scenario that the left has actively advertised they want for American families and the young men in the audience in particular.
That is exactly why we have to fight them. Because the fruits of true Christianity are men like Charlie Kirk. The fruits of true Christianity are good husbands, patient fathers, builders of great things, and slayers of dragons.
And yes, men who are willing to die for a principle if that’s what God asked them to do. Because so many of us recognize that it is better to die a patriot than live a coward. I’m going to tell you something I haven’t talked about publicly before, but in the days after Charlie’s death I struggled a great deal.
I’m sure many of you did too. I remember watching every video of the assassination looking for clues, trying to understand what happened. I’d try to hide my friend and that terrible bullet hitting him, but I would try to look around.
I stayed up all night for many nights in a row researching every conspiracy theory going down every rabbit hole. When my lovely wife Usha told me to come to bed, I told her I owed it to Charlie to try to uncover every stone, and so that’s what I tried to do. I remember I was consumed by this fear that Charlie’s death wouldn’t just deprive a family of their husband or of a good father, but that it would deny our movement of a great unifier of people and a great doer of great deeds.
It’s the only time I can remember my wife ever telling me that she was really worried about me. She told me many times. But what saved me was not lying to myself, but accepting the reality of the fight that we’re in.
Charlie’s death was an immense loss, an irreplaceable loss. We got kicked in the teeth, my friends, and there’s no sugarcoating it or pretending that it didn’t happen. We need to accept that.
And what saved me was realizing that the story of the Christian faith, like the story of these United States of America, is one of immense loss followed by even bigger victory. It’s a story. It’s a story of very dark nights followed by very bright dawns.
What saved me was remembering the inherent goodness of God and that His grace overflows when we least expect it. Not long ago, I spent time at a Christian men’s ministry just a or homelessness, and they help them get back on their feet. They feed them, they clothe them, they give them shelter and financial advice.
They live out the very best part of Christ’s commission. Now afterwards, I had lunch with four of these men. It was a couple of white guys, a Hispanic guy, and a black man.
They had all struggled in their unique ways. Some had lost contact with their family, some of them for a very long time. Others were desperate to rebuild relationships with their kids so that they could see them on Christmas.
But all of them were back on their feet. And what saved them? It wasn’t racial commonality or grievance. It wasn’t some philosophical jargon.
It wasn’t a DEI prep course, and it wasn’t a welfare check. It was the fact that a carpenter died 2,000 years ago and changed the world in the process. If you go to almost any food pantry in this country, you will find Christians feeding the poor.
If you go to addicts whose families won’t even speak to them like my mom was at a certain point of her life, it’s often the Christian ministries that stay with them at their very lowest moments. You’ll find Christians sitting patiently beside hospice beds and in recovery rooms and in all the places of the world where people have given up on other people. And this is the moral truth we strive to center in our work in the Trump administration and in this great movement of ours.