Former U.S. president Donald Trump had increasing momentum on his side toward winning a second term in the White House over U.S. Vice-President Kamala Harris as results from the U.S. presidential election continued to trickle in early Wednesday.
Trump was projected to win the critical battleground states of Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia, according to the Associated Press. The Republican was leading in the other battlegrounds as of 2:30 a.m. Eastern Wednesday: Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. Those states were considered too close to call with millions of votes left to count as of 3:31 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.
The Associated Press has not as of 3:31 a.m. Eastern made a projection for who wins the presidency.
Here is the transcript of Trump’s remarks in which he claimed victory.
Donald Trump:
“Thank you very much. Wow. Well, I want to thank you all very much. This is great. These are our friends. We have thousands of friends in this incredible movement. This is a movement like nobody’s ever seen before and, frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country, and maybe the, and now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal. We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.
We overcame obstacles that nobody thought possible and it is now clear that we’ve achieved the most incredible political thing, look what happened, is this crazy? But it’s a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this. I want to thank the American people for the extraordinary honour of being elected your 47th president and your 45th president. And every citizen, I will fight for you, for your family and your future, every single day I will be fighting for you with every breath in my body, I will not rest until we have delivered the strong, safe and prosperous America that our children deserve and that you deserve. This will truly be the golden age of America, that’s what we have to have.
This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again, and in addition to having won the battleground states of North Carolina, I love these places, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, we are now winning in Michigan, Arizona, Nevada and Alaska, which would result in us carrying at least 315 electoral votes. But that, but it’s much easier doing what the networks did or whoever called it, because there was no other path. There was no other path to victory. We also have won the popular vote, that was great. thank you. Thank-you very much. Thank you. Winning the popular vote was very nice, very nice, I will tell you. It’s a great, a great feeling of love. We have a great feeling of love in this very large room with unbelievable people standing by my side. These people have been incredible, they’ve made the journey with me and we’re going to make you very happy, we’re going to make you very proud of your vote. I hope that you’re going to be looking back someday and say, that was one of the truly important moments of my life when I voted for this group of people beyond the president, this group of great people.
America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. We have taken back control of the Senate. Wow. That’s great. And the Senate races in Montana, Nevada, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania were all won by the MAGA movement, they helped so much. And in those cases, every one of them, we worked with the senators, they were tough races. And I mean, the number of victories in the Senate was absolutely incredible and we did tele-rallies, we did tele-rallies with each one of them, and sometimes we did two or three for, and it was amazing to look at all of those victories. Nobody expected that. Nobody. So I just wanted to thank you very much for that, and we have, you have some great senators and some great new senators, and it also looks like we’ll be keeping control of the House of Representatives. And I want to thank Mike Johnson, I think he’s doing a terrific job. Terrific job.
I want to also thank my beautiful wife Melania and First Lady, for who has the number one best-selling book in the country, can you believe that. No, she has done a great job, works very hard, works very hard to help people. So I just want to thank her. But I want to thank my whole family, my amazing children, and they are amazing children that we all think our children. Everybody thinks and children are amazing, but that’s a good thing when you think they are. But Don, Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, Barron. Lara. Jared. Kimberly. Michael. Thank you all. My father in law, Viktor is tremendous and we miss very much, Melania’s mother, Amalija, we miss Amalija don’t we, she would be very happy right now, standing on this stage, she’d be so proud. She was a great woman that one, beautiful inside and out. She was a great woman.
I want to be the first to congratulate our great, now I can say, Vice-President-elect of the United States JD Vance, and his absolutely remarkable and beautiful wife, Usha Vance. And he is a feisty guy, isn’t he? He and I have said, go into the enemy camp, and, you know, the enemy camp is certain networks and a lot of people don’t like to, sir, do I have to do that? He just goes, okay, which ones, CNN, MSDNC, he’ll say, alright, thank you very much, he actually looks like, he’s like the only guy I’ve ever seen, he really looks forward to it. And then he just goes and absolutely obliterates them. Say a couple of words.”
JD Vance:
“Well, Mr. President, I appreciate you allowing me to join you on this incredible journey. I thank you for the trust that you place in me, and I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America. And under President Trump’s leadership, we’re never going to stop fighting for you, for your dreams, for the future of your children. And after the greatest political comeback in American history, we’re going to lead the greatest economic comeback in American history under Donald Trump’s leadership.”
Donald Trump:
“Thank you very much, he’s turned out to be a good choice. I took a little heat at the beginning, but he was, I knew, I knew the brain was a good one, about as good as it gets. And we love the family and we’re going to have a great four years, and we’re going to turn our country around, make it something very special, but lost that, lost that little and lost that little, that little thing called special. We have to make it so, we’re going to make this so great. It’s the greatest country and potentially the greatest country in the world by far and right now we’re going to just work very hard to get all of that back. We’re going to make it the best it’s ever been, we can do that. We just, if we had to wait longer, I don’t know. It was going bad and it was going bad fast. We’re going to have to seal up those borders, and we’re going to have to let people come into our country. We want people to come back in, but we have to, we have to let them come back in, but they have to come in legally, they have to come in legally. Let me also expressed my tremendous appreciation for Susie and Chris, that job you did. Susie. Come, Susie. Come here Susie, Chris, come here Chris. Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you. The ice [indecipherable], we call her the ice [indecipherable]. Chris. Come here, Chris. Susie likes to stay in the background. She’s not in the background.”
Chris LaCivita, Trump campaign manager:
“This was unexpected, but I just want to thank President Trump for this journey. It was a great one. And he’s a hell of a candidate. And he’s going to be a hell of a great 47th president. And this team that we had the best team. And of course, even my boss, Susie Wiles, the best. Thank you.”
Donald Trump:
“Thank you and thank you Susie. Look at that, she’s shy, I’ve never seen to be shy before. Susie. They’ve been, they’re great. Everybody up here is great. Everybody up here is very special. But, the Trump, yeah, who did you say? Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star. A star is born. Elon. Now he is, now he’s an amazing guy. We were sitting together tonight. You know, he spent two weeks in Philadelphia and different parts of Pennsylvania campaigning. You know, he sent the rocket up two weeks ago, and I saw that rocket, and I saw it coming down, and I saw it, it was, when it left, it was beautiful, shiny white, when it came down, it didn’t look so pretty was going 10,000 miles an hour. It was burning like hell. I said, what happened to your paint job? He said, we’ve never made a paint that could withstand that kind of heat. But I saw it come down and turn around, and it was, you know, it’s like 22 stories still, by the way, it looks a little smaller than that, but it’s big. And it came down and downed. And you saw that fire burning and and I’m saying only Elon can do this. It must be an Elon, and I tell the story, I told it last night.
I had a man on the phone, I had the screen muted, no sound, I was talking to, very important man happens to be here tonight. Very important guy. One of the most important people and I would say the country actually. But you know I was president and now it looks like I was going to be maybe president again. So I figured I could ask him to hold, so I asked him to hold, and because especially because you’re going to be president again they hold. So I took the phone down and I’m looking at the screen, I’m seeing this crazy thing that’s going around and coming down, it looks like it’s going to crash into the gantry. And I said, oh no, and I said, do me a favor, you mind holding for a couple of, I want to see this. I thought it was a space age movie or something. I put the phone down to bed, but I didn’t pick it up for 45 minutes, and he was holding. But this spaceship came down and I saw those engines firing, and it looked like it was over. It was going to smash and then I saw the fire pour out from the left side, and I put it straight, and it came down so gently, and then it wrapped those arms around it, and it held it. And just like you hold your baby at night, your little baby. And it was a beautiful thing to see. And I called Elon. I said, Elon, was that you? He said, yes, it was. I said, who else can do that? Can Russia do it? No. Can China do it? No. Can the United States do it other than, you know, nobody can do that. I said, that’s why I love you, Elon, that’s great.
And, you know, when we had the tragic hurricane Helene and it hit a particular hit North Carolina, they were really devastated, the water. This was a big water as big as we’ve ever seen. What a hurricane it built lakes out of nothing. Fields became lakes, and the danger was unbelievable. And the people from North Carolina came to me and they said, would it be possible at all possible for you to speak to Elon Musk? We need Starlink. I said, what’s Starlink? It’s a form of communication. So I called Elon and I’ll tell you what he had, and it was very dangerous. People would die, they had no communication, all the wires were down. I called Elon Musk. I said, Elon, you have something called Starlink, is that right? Yes I do, what the hell is it? He said it’s a communication system that’s very good. I said, Elon, they need it really, really badly in North Carolina. Can you get it here he had that there so fast? It was incredible. So and it was great, it saved a lot of lives, he saved a lot of lives. But he’s a character is a special guy. He’s a super genius. We have to protect our geniuses. We don’t have that many of them. We have to protect our super geniuses.
I want to thank something. I, you know, we have up here today, the U.S. Open champion, he’s fantastic, slightly longer than me. It’s about a little bit longer than me. Yes, a little bit. Bryson DeChambeau is up here someplace. What happened to Bryson? Where is he? Bryson? Oh, he was. Yeah, he’s hitting balls. Oh, he’s on the way. He’s hitting balls. Bryson. Oh look at him, he had a great, he’s got a great career going. Great U.S. open, Bryson. That’s a fantastic job. And we also have a man, Dana White, who has done some[unclear audio]… he’s that tough guy. So Dana started UFC, and, came to me, do you mind if I use your, nobody wanted to give him [unclear audio] because they said it’s a rough sport, a little rough. And I helped him out a little bit, and I went, and I said, this is the roughest sport I’ve ever seen. But I began to like it, and he loved it, and nobody’s done a better job in sports, and, you know, he’s a very, motivational kind of a guy, what he does, he gets these fighters and they they really go at it. It’s become one of the most successful sports enterprises anywhere at any time doing so. Well, I’d like to ask Dana just to say a couple of words, because people love to hear from you.”
Dana White, Ultimate Fighting Championship CEO:
“Nobody deserves this more than him, and nobody deserves this more than his family does. This is what happens when the machine comes after you. What you’ve seen over the last several years. This is what it looks like. Couldn’t stop him. He keeps going forward. He doesn’t quit. He’s the most resilient, hard working man I’ve ever met. In my life. His family are incredible people. This is karma, ladies and gentlemen. He deserves this. They deserve it as a family. I want to thank some people real quick. I want to thank the Nelkboys, Adin Ross. Theo Von, Boston with the Boys. And last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan. And thank you, America. Thank you. Have a good night.”
Donald Trump:
“Yes, that is a piece of work. No, he’s an amazing. He’s really an amazing guy. But most of all, I want to thank the millions of hardworking Americans across the nation who have always been the heart and soul of this really great movement. He’s a great guy and he really means it, he wants to do some things, and we’re going to let him go to it. I just said, but, Bobby, leave the oil to me. We have more liquid gold, oil and gas. We have more liquid gold than any country in the world. More than Saudi Arabia. We have more than Russia. Bobby, stay away from the liquid gold. Other than that, go have a good time, Bobby.
We’re going to be paying down debt. We’re going to be reducing taxes. We have, we can do things that nobody else can do. Nobody else is going to be able to do it. China doesn’t have what we have. Nobody has what we have. But we have the greatest people also, maybe that’s the most important thing this campaign in this campaign has been so historic in so many ways.
We’ve built the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition. They’ve never seen anything like it in all of American history. They’ve never seen it, young and old, men and women, rural and urban, and we had them all helping us tonight, when you think. I mean, I was looking at it, I was watching it, they had some great analysis of the people that voted for us. Nobody’s ever seen anything like that. It came from, they came from all corners. Union, non-union, African American, Hispanic American, Asian American, Arab American, Muslim American, we had everybody and it was beautiful. It was a historic realignment uniting citizens of all backgrounds around a common core of common sense.
You know, we’re the party of common sense. We want to have borders, we want to have security,w e want to have things be good, safe. We want great education, we want a strong and powerful military and ideally, we don’t have to use it. You know, we had no wars for years. We had no wars, except when we defeated ISIS. We defeated ISIS in record time. But we had no wars. They said, ‘he will start a war.’ I’m not going to start a war, I’m going to stop wars. But this is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. Together, we’re going to unlock America’s glorious destiny. We’re going to achieve the most incredible future for our people.
Yesterday, as I stood at my last stop on the campaign trail, I’ll never be doing a rally again. Can you believe it? I think we’ve done 900 rallies approximately from the, can you imagine? 900, 901 something, a lot of rallies. And it was sad, everybody was sad. Many people, I said this is our last rally, but now we’re going on to something that’s far more important because the rallies were used for us to put, be put in this position where we can really help our country. That’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to make our country better than it ever has been and I said that many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness. And now we are going to fulfill that mission together. We’re going to fulfill that mission.
The task before us will not be easy, but I will bring every ounce of energy, spirit, and fight that I have in my soul to the job that you’ve entrusted to me. This is a great job. There’s no job like this. This is the most important job in the world. Just as I did in my first term, we had a great first term, my great, great first term. I will govern by a simple motto, promises made, promises kept. We’re going to keep our promises. Nothing will stop me from keeping my word to you, the people. We will make America safe, strong, prosperous, powerful and free again. And I’m asking every citizen all across our land to join me in this noble and righteous endeavour. That’s what it is. It’s time to put the divisions of the past four years behind us. It’s time to unite, and we’re going to try. We’re going to try. We have to try. And it’s going to happen. Success will bring us together, I’ve seen that, I’ve seen that. I saw that in the first term when we became more and more successful, people started coming together. Success is going to bring us together, and we are going to start by putting America first. We have to put our country first for at least a period of time. We have to fix it because together we can truly make America great again for all Americans. So I want to just tell you what a great honour this is. I want to thank you. I will not let you down. America’s future will be bigger, better, bolder, richer, safer and stronger than it has ever been before. God bless you and God bless America. Thank you very much. Thank God. Thank you God.”