LIVE: Ron DeSantis Speaks at AmFree Presidential Series

And on behalf of all of us, I want to thank you for being here this morning for this important event. Now, at the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, we are committed to the idea that free people and competitive markets are the greatest force for human flourishing in all recorded history. You know, we just had one American century. And during that American century, we more than doubled, more than doubled global human life expectancy. And for the first time in all of recorded history, we'll lose more of our poor to diseases of excess rather than diseases of deprivation. It is a track record of accomplishment of human flourishing unmatched in 5,000 years of recorded human history. At AMP Free Chamber, we're committed to the idea that maybe we ought to have another American century. We ought to have a little more of that shared progress and prosperity and flourishing. And we're thrilled today to have Governor DeSantis with us to talk about how we open another American century, how we do that in a way that shares that progress and prosperity with all of us. We're particularly pleased today to be at Sukup Manufacturing, the largest family-owned grain handling, grain storage, grain processing company in the world, 800-plus employees. We have Mrs. Sukup, the first generation. We have Charles and Steve Sukup here with us today, the second generation, one of the great success stories in American free enterprise and proudly an Iowa success story. Thank you for having us today. Joining me on the stage is former State Senator Charles Schneider. Charles is a great study in the way public service ought to work, if I may say so. He served a couple of terms in the State Senate. When he came into the State Senate, Republicans were in a minority. He served just two terms before he decided to leave public life and go back into the private sector where we create real economic prosperity. It would be nice if a few more politicians behaved that way. But in his years in the Senate, he rose to be Senate President and helped lead us to a Republican majority that has led tax cut packages, economic prosperity and reform in Iowa that we haven't seen in generations. It is my distinct privilege to introduce former State Senator Charles Schneider. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you for hosting this forum. And thank you to Sukup Manufacturing. Thank you to everyone who's here to hear from our featured guest, Governor Ron DeSantis. As Gentry said, my name is Charles Schneider, and I was an early endorser of Governor Ron DeSantis. And the reasons why I've chosen to support him are because a lot of what he's accomplished mirror what we've done right here in Iowa. Cut taxes, cut regulations, educational choice. I've been impressed with what he's done in Florida, not only in terms of seeing policies through, in decisions he's made, causes he's championed, but in his instincts. His instincts just always seem to be right in tune with doing the right thing. And his response to COVID really brought that to the forefront. And what he's been able to accomplish in responding to natural catastrophes too, like Hurricane Ian and rebuilding a bridge in a matter of days, when experts told him it was going to be months, if not years, has just really shown me and hopefully many others that he is someone who can not only do what he says, but do it quickly and do it efficiently. So please join me in welcoming to the stage Governor Ron DeSantis. Well, good morning. It's great to be here. This is our 93rd county in Iowa that we visited, so it's great to be here. It got a little cooler from last week when we were here with Governor Reynolds, but it's all good. I imagine as that temperature starts to get a little lower, I probably can find a critical mass of Iowans down in Marco Island and Naples and all those other places. I've told people we should try to just get a caucus site down there, satellite caucus site, because I've got half the Midwest that comes down to southwest Florida in the winter. Well, thank you for being here with us today, even though the temperature is a little colder than what it's been the last few days. I thought we'd start off the questioning with a broad question about the American free enterprise system overall. A lot of people in younger generations now are romanticizing communism and socialism and looking elsewhere other than the American free enterprise system. What would you as president do to instill the benefits of free enterprise to our young people today? Well, I think addressing the threats to free enterprise, because I think it has been perverted in many different ways, and I think there's a couple of threats to it. One is the growth of bureaucracy and the administrative state with the federal government. The founding fathers created three branches of government. They did not create a fourth branch of government, a bureaucracy that exerts its will over the American people, and indeed is even weaponized against segments of society that the elites don't like, without really regard for the outcomes of elections. These guys just do what they want, and that is not the way the constitutional system was designed. So I think ultimately that's bad for economic success. I think they're putting an agenda on top of the American people, but it's even a larger issue of who governs society. And we have a constitution that's very clear. We the people govern this country, not unelected bureaucrats. So that's the first thing. I think the second threat to a robust free enterprise system is actually the perversion of business and private power to try to impose an ideological agenda. And you see that under the guise of things like ESG, environment social governance. I mean, you look at how they view agriculture. They view agriculture as somehow some big problem. They want to change the way farmers do their jobs. Honestly, if you implemented those policies, it'd create a massive farm crisis in this country. You look at what they want to do to kneecap energy production. You look at what they want to do to impose other types of ideological agendas on society. That is terrible for a free market economy. Because a free market economy, the difference between socialism and free enterprise, socialism is about government power. It's about elites imposing their will over society. Free enterprise is about decentralization. Yeah, you have rules of the road. Of course, you have clear rules and people can make decisions. But ultimately, these are decisions that are made by individuals, small businesses, on and on down the line. That is healthier for a free society. It also creates more opportunity and more growth as well. In Florida, we've addressed both of those threats. We've reduced government agencies in Florida. I've abolished agencies. Your governor here has done that. Very few Republicans actually reduce government in this country. We've done it. We've also kneecapped ESG in the state of Florida. We don't let any ESG in our pension. You had BlackRock, which is like this activist asset manager that wants to impose their agenda. They had $2 billion under management in our pension. I took it away from BlackRock because we're not playing any of those games with teacher pensions and pensions for cops or any of that stuff. We also do not allow the rating agencies to use ESG when they do their credit scores or when they rate state and municipal bonds. We ban social credit scores in the state of Florida. It's an attempt to politicize the economy. We've pushed back against it, and Florida's economy is ranked number one in the nation by CNBC now. I think we've done it right. I think we need to address these nationally. Yes, we've reduced bureaucracy in Florida. Governor Reynolds has done it, and that's admirable. But the federal leviathan is so much bigger than what any state has. You need a president that's focused, that's disciplined, that knows how to use the levers of power so that we can rein this back in and reconstitutionalize this government. Governor, one of the issues that people say is really important to them this election cycle is inflation. The American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce recently conducted a survey, and four out of five respondents said inflation is at the top of their minds right now. Three years ago, the Fed was telling us that inflation was going to be transitory, that it would be over within a few months. Here we are three years later. Inflation is still running rampant. Housing is more expensive. Groceries are more expensive. Going out to eat is more expensive. What would a DeSantis administration do to bring inflation under control and provide a more prosperous future? Do the opposite of what these guys have been doing. Let's just be clear. The prices that you're having to pay, the decline of the standard of living, families falling further and further behind, even raising kids being cost prohibitive, that is a result of government policies. It didn't just happen. There are times when things happen in the economy that the government's not causing. This is starting with COVID. They decided to try to shut down the economy, which was a huge mistake. And your governor handled it well, and we handled it well in Florida, but not everyone did. And the federal government was bad under both Trump and Biden with what they were trying to pursue. They borrowed and printed trillions of dollars in 2020 under the Trump administration, 4.4 trillion between March of 2020 and December of 2020. Of course, you're going to get inflation 16, 18, 20 months in the future. Biden comes in knowing that that is going on. And what does he do? He adds gasoline to the fire by doing another $2 trillion called the American Rescue Plan. I can tell you in Florida, we didn't need rescuing. We were booming. We were doing well. They did that to be able to bail out the blue states that had locked down. And then, of course, the Fed, they expanded the money supply so much. I think it was just a miscalculation, but they did that. And then, as you said, they said, well, inflation is going to be transitory, not going to be a big deal. So they let it get out of hand. Then they've been raising rates, and that's had a devastating impact on families, on small businesses. So the root of it is government spending, overborrowing, overspending, Federal Reserve policy. They should not be an economic central planner. The Fed should focus on stable prices. That's the only reason you would want a central bank. They think they can micromanage the economy. That does not work. You cannot micromanage a $25 trillion economy through central planning. So we're going to have a Fed chairman that understands that. We're going to fight Congress on the overspending. But one of the things we can do to drive prices down is to open up, is to reverse the Green New Deal and open up all of our energy production here in the United States. We've got unbelievable reserves in the Marcellus Shale, the Permian Basin, Bakken. We have Alaska. We have all these great things. That will lower gas prices for people. It will lower prices throughout the economy. And, honestly, it's good for our national security. Russia, China, Iran, they want the U.S. to do a Green New Deal because that strengthens them. When we're the dominant energy producer in the world, that weakens our adversaries. But on day one, we'll take all the Biden rules and regulations under Bidenomics. We'll rip them up or we'll throw them away. We'll take the Green New Deal and all his restrictions on domestic energy, rip it up and throw it away. And that will create a foundation for more growth, but also downward pressure on inflation. Governor, one of the things that COVID really brought to light, or actually created, were a lot of the supply chain issues that we still see rippling through the economy. And it also focused a lot of people's attention not only on the issues themselves, but where we source different materials from in our supply chain. Some of the places where we source our materials from are not friendly countries to us, or are strategic enemies or adversaries. China, for example, is a source from which we get a lot of our medical supplies, materials we need for pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals. How would a DeSantis administration deal with supply chain issues overall, and would it change our policy here in the United States? Oh, we definitely need to change. When COVID hit, almost 100% of the medical supplies came from China. Almost 100%. You couldn't get it in the United States. It was all coming from China. And pharmaceuticals, all these things for military equipment and weaponry, we've put ourselves in a huge position of vulnerability. And, you know, I look to see what's going on, what went on in San Francisco the last couple days. You know, the city is in squalor. There's poop on the streets. There's people using drugs, people getting mugged, crime, all this stuff. But then Xi Jinping's coming to town, and what do they do? They get the poop off the sidewalk. They get to clear the homeless. They stop the drugs. They stop the crime. And then you have this meeting where Xi's there, and you've got some of these American CEOs basically just groveling in front of this dictator. And that just shows you, even with where we are now, and China wants to have more power over our country, but how many people in this country bend the knee to the whims of the Chinese Communist Party? Those guys make money on Wall Street and stuff, but they're empowering an adversary at the expense of the well-being of the American people. So we cannot be in a position where we're relying on an adversary for key things that are necessary for our national survival. So we are going to reshore supply chains. Not everything, every component has to necessarily be here. I want as much as possible. But there's friendly nations where supply chains work, and that's great. But relying on China is a big, big mistake. I think what you're going to need to do is you are going to have tax and regulatory policy that's going to incentivize the reshoring. I don't think you could just say reshore. I think this has happened because there's economic incentives that have pushed us into that direction. So we will champion incentives and restructure some of the things so that it makes it economical to be here in the United States with some of the things like supply chains. One of the things we've done in Florida is, yes, we have no income tax. You guys should try it sometime. I know your governor wants to get there. It works out well for us. We have a very reasonable regulatory burden, light government, and that's attractive. But one of the things that's made us attractive as we've built our economy, particularly since I've been governor, is we focused a lot on workforce and developing skills, particularly skilled labor. So we're producing aircraft mechanics, truck drivers, welder, all this stuff. Well, that has given some of these businesses confidence to know they invest in Florida. They're going to be able to hire good people that are going to be able to do that. So we need to change the way we think about education in this country. You do not need a four-year degree from a brick-and-ivy university to be successful. It's good for a lot of people. I got a degree, degrees, other people. And I'm not saying don't do it. And it's good for a lot of people. But it's not – when I was growing up, they said you're not successful unless you go to a four-year. No. You have kids that are going out of high school in Florida that are certified in some of these key industries. They're making $75,000, $80,000 when they're 18, 19 years old. By the time they're in their 20s, they're making six-figure, no debt. And so don't tell me that that person should be looked down on while the person that goes to a university, $100,000 in debt and has a degree in zombie studies, ends up in a job they could have had at a high school anyways. Is that really such a better pathway? So I think what we just need to do is we need to have opportunities for people to get those concrete skills. That's going to help us build manufacturing capacity in this country. But we also just need to send the message there's more than one way to be successful. You're not any less because you went to trade school or you did this than someone that went to a university. And that's the message we've done in Florida. And we now have – I mean, we've doubled the number of apprenticeships over the last five years that we've done. We were producing 600 truck drivers a year. Now we're doing 3,500. So we've put our money where our mouth is. But I think part of the reason we've been successful is we've just delivered the message that these are good, strong, viable pathways for people to succeed and get ahead in life. And then, of course, it's good for our state because you have the skills that are being put into the economy, allowing businesses to grow. Governor, you've talked about the Green New Deal. You've talked about the need to open up and unleash American energy. I want to bring your attention now to a specific energy-related topic, which is that in order for free enterprise to be flourishing, we need to be able to move people and products efficiently and effectively and affordably. And yet the Biden administration, now working with the state of California, is attempting to ban internal combustion engines, ban internal combustion engines, require electric cars, electric vehicle mandates. And this is not off in the far distant future. The state of California trying to do this to fleet operators as early as 2024. How does a DeSantis administration set this straight and put us on a better pathway? We reverse it. I mean, that's a very easy thing to do. But it's interesting. I'm actually going to be debating Governor Gavin Newsom on November 30th on Fox News. So we have this Florida versus California, kind of two different models. One state's hemorrhaging people. The other state's attracting a lot of people. And we can kind of go through that. But I think this is an example. When I was in California a couple months ago, we did an event with a lot of the truckers because they are putting this electric mandate on the big rig trucks. So you're literally going to be at the port of Long Beach, load up an electric truck, big rig. It's going to go for 100 miles, and it's going to need to charge for 12 hours. And it's absolutely insane. It's absolutely nuts. It will hurt our supply chain. It will cause inflation. It's going to create huge problems just on that alone. But then they want you, when you go to buy a car, to be forced to buy an electric vehicle. When they first announced that, people were patting themselves on the back as if they're saving the planet. But then two days later, California put out an announcement and said, all electric vehicle owners in the state of California, do not plug in your electric vehicle. Our grid is overcapacity. I'm thinking to myself, you know, you have rolling blackouts now. You're going to try to force 10 million new cars, whatever, sold in the next two to be on there. When you don't have the capacity, you don't have enough reliable energy. It's a disaster. So it's also bad for the automobile industry because people don't want these cars, by and large. I mean, there's definitely a market for Elon Musk's cars and stuff like that. But if you want a Ford F-150, 95% of people that want a Ford F-150 want an internal combustion engine. So if you're forcing them to do more electrical, you're just not going to end up having people that are going to want to go for that. Used cars are going to go through the roof because people are going to want the real thing. So we're going to reverse all those mandates. It also just goes into liquid fuels. I mean, here in Iowa with the renewable fuel, it will hurt farmers here in Iowa if you're forcing everybody to get off liquid fuels. The fuel is just more reliable to have than the electric. And also, where do you get the power for to do the electric vehicle? China has all these electric vehicles. People say, oh, China's the wave of the future. China's building two new coal plants every week. So their power is generated through coal. So how is that better than doing what we're doing in the United States, focusing more on internal combustion engine and using natural gas to generate a lot of the electricity? So I think it's bad for consumers. You will pay more. It's bad for mobility. And it ultimately will bankrupt the automobile manufacturers because there's just not going to be the demand to meet these mandates. You mentioned China. And Senator Schneider, I know, is going to ask you another China question before we're done. But let me, before we go back to him, let me ask you a health care-related question. Amfree Chamber represents about 12,000 small businesses around the country. And one of the great issues we hear about all the time from our members is my premiums are going up, going up again and again and again. Let me, in the interest of time, I'll give you two questions in one, okay? One, we're now into a second decade under Obamacare that promised that it would get premiums under control. It didn't do it. And we'd love to hear the DeSantis plan to get those premiums under control. Related issue, and I know you've worked on this as governor. You signed legislation on the PBM matter into effect in Florida. Highest, fastest-growing part of health care costs, increasing drug prices. How do we get premiums under control? How do we get drug prices under control so America's businesses can afford to provide the benefits to their employees? Well, the pharmacy benefit manager, so we tackled this in Florida. It's kind of the middleman with these drugs, and they market up, and they pocket a lot of money, and basically the consumers pay the bill. And it causes their prices to be higher and higher. It's not, it's basically just an arbitrage opportunity. It's not adding value to the overall economy or even the prescription drug market. So we nuke that in Florida. We now have the transparency, and other states have done it too. I know Iowa's probably going to do it in the next legislative session. So that's important. We should definitely do that nationwide. I mean, look, part of what we're seeing with health care is what we're seeing everywhere in the economy. When you have inflation, all this stuff goes up. And health care has been going up for a long time, but you can't have inflation be what it is and expect health care premiums to go down. You've got to get the inflation under control just to even have a chance to tackle this. What we've done in Florida is recognize that markets work when there's sick price signals and when consumers make choices that are efficient. For example, if you were going to go buy a car and similar cars, one is $5,000 cheaper, same performance, you're probably going to go with the one that you can save $5,000 on. I mean, because you'll save money and do that. Well, with health care, if you're on Medicare, private insurance, whatever, that's a third party paying for that. So if the person down the street, if you need something to work on your knee, is charging a certain amount, a person maybe two towns over is charging it cheaper, it doesn't really matter to you because it's going to be paid by a third party. So what we did in Florida is we created price transparency. So you can actually go up and look to see if you need a procedure, how much does it cost at these other areas. But that's not enough because the consumer has to have an incentive to want to shop around for that. So we did through our state employee program something called shared savings. So if you shop and use our transparency tools and you choose a procedure at a place that can do the procedure cheaper, you get reduction in your premiums. So you're making decisions that are financially smart, not just for the overall market by paying less than that, but also putting money in your pocket. So you've got to connect the consumer to some of the things that are happening. Some of that is health savings plans. There's a lot of different things that you can do. The other thing I'd say is we have to make it so that private medical practice is something that's viable in this country going forward. 50 years ago, most doctors would graduate medical school, they'd go into private practice. Now a lot of them are becoming salaried employees at like massive hospital conglomerates. And that means I think a couple of things. One, I do think it's going to be less likely to have people want to even go through medical school because I just don't think the financial payoff is as good as if you were in private sector. So some of these talented people, maybe they'll go to private equity, maybe they'll go to other things. But then the other thing is, is what about the doctor-patient relationship? That's been put to the back of the bus. You have big pharma, big insurance, and kind of these big hospital conglomerates, big government. It's all about moving money around to those four entities. And the doctor and the patient are almost an afterthought. That is not a good pathway. So I think part of it is too much government. I think it's too much regulatory burdens. We don't have the ability to make the choices that we need. And, yes, we do need to do things to get at these pharmaceuticals because it's just not affordable for enough people. And you need to have that to be something that people can actually achieve. Governor, I wanted to ask you a question about our trade deficit. Right now we have about a trillion-dollar trade deficit, including $284 million to China alone. What is your vision for the balance of trade between the United States and other countries like China, and how do we see that through? Well, we have a lack of reciprocity with a lot of our trading arrangements. You know, there are some countries where it's fair and we generate trade surpluses, Brazil, United Kingdom, Canada. But then you look, a lot of these other countries, they do not give us the same access to their markets that we give to our markets. And I think that the president will have an ability to use leverage to be able to open up markets, for example, for agriculture, to be able to sell more products in some of these countries. I mean, ultimately, we have a lot of leverage at our disposal. So you've got to use that. And it doesn't even need to be like a trade agreement. I mean, it can just be saying, hey, we want more access for our farmers. If not, we're going to reevaluate other parts of our relationship. So we're going to do that in a lot of countries. I think with China, they've been ripping us off for many, many years. You have a total lack of reciprocity with how it goes. They flood our market with a lot of cheap goods. That has not happened. They said it's going to allow American manufacturers to grow here and then ship goods to China. That hasn't happened. They've taken a lot of the American manufacturing and grown it in China. They said that it would make China more democratic, more peaceful, that they would join the community of nations. It's been the opposite. They've gotten very wealthy at our expense. They've rebuilt their military. They have the second most powerful military in the world. And they are looking to achieve top superpower status in this world. So we've got to stop letting China eat our lunch. We should not give them preferential treatment when it comes to this. Yes, the supply chains. Yes, the reshoring of critical things. Very, very important. But also being willing to use leverage with our allies and internationally to hold China accountable for what they're doing because they're stealing our trade secrets. They steal our intellectual property. And basically they have no regard for the rules of the road at all. And that's unacceptable. China, when you look at their ambitions, yes, obviously there's a huge military component to it. And I rolled out a plan a couple weeks ago to bolster our Navy so that we can have a strategy to deny their ability to invade Taiwan and dominate the Pacific. But their designs on Taiwan is not just about semiconductors. That would be a big deal because there's so much semiconductors come out of there, give China a huge, huge amount of power over the economy internationally. But they want to use that to get out of this first island chain where they can dominate the entire region in terms of the trade routes. And if they're able to do that, they're not just going to do that and be a benevolent overseer of international commerce coming out of the Pacific. They are going to use their authority to export their authoritarian vision on societies, foreign societies, as the cost of doing business. You see these Wall Street CEOs groveling to them now? Just wait. If they become the dominant power in the world, what's going to happen? And it will impact American families in every corner of this country. So we need to get real with China. We need to recognize the failure of American policy over the last couple decades. We need to do things that are going to be good for the American people and the American economy. Governor, one of the reasons why I supported you early on is because you know what it takes to govern. And you've had to work with the state legislature to get through your vision and see it through and get bills passed. At the federal level, the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has some provisions that are set to expire in 2025. And if those provisions expire, it will effectively increase taxes for everyday Americans. As president, how would Ron DeSantis deal with the expiration of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act? And how would you bring Congress along with you in order to get something done? We can't be having taxes go up. We need low tax rates. We need a transparent and predictable tax and regulatory structure. Florida shows a good example of how that works. If you compare Florida to say like New York. In Florida, I've cut taxes every year by record amounts yet because we have a light tax burden, light regulatory burden. We've been able to expand our economic base in the state of Florida. So even while you're reducing taxes, you're actually taking in more revenue because the economy is performing well. So we've used that revenue to actually pay down 25% of our state's total debt that we've accumulated since the inception of the state of Florida in the 1800s. And that shows you that we've created a virtuous cycle. We treat taxpayers with respect. We treat businesses well. People choose to come invest. Economy grows. We get more than enough revenue that we need to meet government functions. Compare that to a state like New York. They regulate people out of existence. They tax and tax. What happens is that reduces their economic base because people shift their capital to other states. Individuals move. So then what do they do? They lose revenue from that. So then they raise taxes even more. And you can't square the circle. It's a vicious cycle. And that's the same with Illinois as New York and increasingly with California as well where they rely on all these tech people to pay a lot of taxes. They're running massive deficits now in California. So that is, I think, the philosophy that's proven to be right. If you try to tax people, if you try to do that, capital is mobile. People can move businesses offshore. They can move other stuff. So we want the United States to be a good environment for business, for taxpayers. And so keeping taxes low, you absolutely have to do it. Another thing we're going to do with tax, though, is focus on facilitating the investment in areas that we need to. So targeted incentives for reshoring manufacturing, for doing things through, say, the defense industry. You look what China is doing. We need to do more defense research and development. We pour all this money into these universities where you have these people demonstrating in favor of Hamas. I'd rather take that money, put it to DOD, and let them do things in terms of advanced equipment and military. A lot of the technology that you use every day eventually started with defense research. They weren't trying to invent this stuff. They were doing things to make our country stronger in ways that there was not necessarily a chance to turn a profit on. So the private sector wasn't going to do it. But you do it, and then you start developing all these other things, and then there's commercial uses to it. So we've kind of gotten away from that. So I'm going to absolutely do that. We need to have full expensing made permanent for capital investment. And do have a tax and regulatory structure designed to maximize the amount that the economy can grow. If you look, we have not as a country had sustained growth above 3 percent for a long time. And we've been 1, 2 percent. And that's just not going to cut it. We've got to grow at 3 percent or more. It helps with jobs. It helps with the economic base. And it helps dealing with our budget situation. Governor, we have time for one final question before we let you meet the important people in the room. And I think it's the most important question that we have to ask, which is if you're running for re-election in four years, when you're running for re-election in four years, how should the American people measure your presidency? How should they hold you accountable? What will their lives look like? How will their lives be better in four years than they are today? I think it's a great way to look at it because you have people that say all these things. But the question is, is what are you actually going to deliver? That's all that matters. I mean, a campaign slogan that doesn't end up getting put into practice is not worth anything. And so I'm running as the candidate and the only one running. Everything I told the voters I would do, I've delivered. 100 percent of my promises we converted on in the state of Florida. And that's the type of mentality I will have. So what I will be able to say looking back, and I've actually used this in the past of after you serve two terms, you've got to give a farewell address. What am I going to be able to tell you in that farewell address? We'll be able to say a number of things. One, we'll be able to say that we restored the American dream. People that work hard and get the most out of their God-given ability are able to get ahead again. They're not going to be beaten down with high inflation, high interest rates. We will have gotten the bureaucracy and the biodynamics off people's back. We will have opened up energy production so that gas prices and energy prices have fallen. And we have cheap and reliable energy. And we will have fought Congress successfully on reining in the amount of money that they're spending and adding to the debt. We'll also be able to say that we've restored the sovereignty of our country. Drug cartels do not run our border anymore. We have stopped the invasion into our country. And we have held the Mexican drug cartels accountable, including by using military force. We'll also be able to say that we have revitalized our military, successfully fended off the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party, and ensured that the 21st century will be an American century. We'll also be able to say that our school systems are focused on educating kids but no longer indoctrinating kids. That the rights of parents are respected. That there's school choice available for every kid in this country. And that students are actually learning about the founding principles of America, our Constitution, and what it means to be an American. We'll also be able to say that whether you live in a red state or a blue city, criminals are held responsible for their crimes. We're not letting the inmates run the asylum. If there are radical prosecutors who are going easy on them, we will have taken them to account. And every American family will have the right to raise their kids in peace and security. The rule of law will have been restored. And then finally, we'll be able to say we've restored the Constitution of the United States to its central place in American life. And that means a limited government that works alongside us, not an unaccountable bureaucracy that imposes its will on us and has been weaponized against us. We will have returned the government to its rightful owners, which is we, the American people. And if we can say all those things, then we'll be able to say that we have restored what President Reagan called America as a shining city on a hill. We will not be a generation of Americans that's turning over to our kids and grandkids in America less prosperous and less free than the one we inherited. No, we will turn it over to the next generation better than we found it. That is ultimately our task as Americans, given the direction of the country. Every generation has had to step up and right the ship when things weren't going well. Now's our chance to do it. And as president, I will get it done. I said in the opening that the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce is committed to opening a second American century. You can join us at amfreechamber.com. And if you think that this is what presidential leadership that can open another American century sounds like, I'd encourage you to look at rondesantis.com. To the Sukup family, thank you once again for hosting us today. On behalf of Charles Schneider and all of us at Amfree Chamber, thank you for being with us this morning. Thanks so much.