BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): But I'm not just voting for Donald Trump. Next week, I will be co-hosting a fundraiser for him. Now, this may come as a surprise to some of you. I wanna tell you why. As you know, I didn't support Trump in the primaries. I don't endorse candidates in Republican primaries, but I do tell you who I would have voted for. And I told you I would have voted for Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida if given the choice. But Ron DeSantis isn't the nominee. Donald Trump is the nominee. And he's facing Joe Biden, who is the worst president of my lifetime. Because Donald Trump is the nominee against Joe Biden, I won't just vote for him, I will walk over broken glass to vote for him. Actually, I will go into my own pocket to support him, which is what I'm doing.
My calculus is really simple. America was better off under Donald Trump than it is under Joe Biden. At home, America was safer and more prosperous. When Donald Trump was president, we did not have an open border. We were not flooding our country with at least seven million illegal immigrants, overwhelming our cities, leaving our country wide open to the plague of Chinese and Mexican drug cartel-backed fentanyl poisoning. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have a president who tried to use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to force 80 million Americans to take a vaccine or lose their jobs. And my company didn't have to sue to stop it. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have 40 year highs in inflation and decreasing real wages. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have a federal attempt to teach children that boys can be girls and vice versa, or to force taxpayers to subsidize abortion, or to target religious institutions for the great crime of upholding traditional Judeo-Christian values. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have an administration hell bent on stymieing the police in their attempts to fight crime or an administration that values diversity and inclusion and wokeness above military readiness, all in the name of equity. When Donald Trump was president, we did not have American businesses preparing to have their incomes robbed from them in the name of the biggest spending programs in American history. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have unconstitutional attempts to simply wipe away student loan debt or a Department of Justice dedicated to the targeting of political opposition. When Donald Trump was president, the world was not on fire. When Donald Trump was president, we did not cut and run in the face of 8th century barbarians in Afghanistan who blew up 13 American soldiers, hunted down our allies, and reestablished al-Qaeda bases. When Donald Trump was president, peace was breaking out in the Middle East between Arab nations and Israel, and Iran was in a box. We certainly did not have a multi-front hot war between Iranian proxies and American allies or American soldiers directly. And we weren't trying to pay billions in bribes to the Iranian mullahs. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have a war in Ukraine. When Donald Trump was president, we didn't have China threatening imminent blockade of Taiwan. When Donald Trump was president, America was better off.
Now, as I've said, I will always be honest with you about Donald Trump. He was not my first choice in the primaries. He's a deeply flawed human. I've been open in my criticism of -- I've been open in my criticisms of Trump on both character and policy, and I'm not gonna stop criticizing Donald Trump when I disagree with him. I always will be honest about that and I always will. That's my job. It's the job of all Americans because Donald Trump, as a presidential candidate, works for us. But Donald Trump is the man standing between America and a second Joe Biden term. And a second Joe Biden term means America is in dire, dire trouble. It is that simple.
I encourage all of you, who like me, would have preferred another nominee for the GOP to recognize this is now a binary race. It is Trump or it is Biden. And unlike in 2016, we don't have to guess at what a Trump administration will be. We also don't have to guess what a Biden administration will be. We know. America cannot afford another term of Joe Biden, or perhaps more realistically, a Kamala Harris term. Joe Biden is here to finish the job Barack Obama started of fundamentally transforming America into the image of the far-left. That cannot happen. That's why I'm not just giving Donald Trump my vote, I'm giving him my money because this election matters. And Donald Trump must be the next President of the United States.
