Former President Donald Trump, in his first trek to Washington since the end of his presidency, delivered blistering remarks on a country that had been "made great again" but has more recently become "a beggar nation."
"Our country has been brought to its knees, literally brought to its knees, and who would have thought this could happen?" Trump told the America First Agenda Summit, delivering an America First Policy Institute (AFPI) speech which aired live on Newsmax.
"Inflation is the highest in 49 years, 9.1%, and a lot of people think it's much higher than that. Gas prices have reached the highest in the history of our country. We have become a beggar nation groveling to other countries for energy.
"Millions of illegal aliens are stampeding across our wide open borders, pouring into our country. It's an invasion.
"Democrat-run cities are setting all-time murder records. Our country is being dealt one historic humiliation after another on the world stage. And at home our most basic rights and liberties are totally under siege.
"The American dream is being torn to shreds, and we will not have a country left if this economic and social attack on civilization itself is not quickly reversed."
AFPI is a group of former Trump administration officials seeking to lay out the agenda of the Trump doctrine of America First, and Trump said his speech will outline how to make America great again, and how to first provide public safety.
"If we don't have safety, we don't have freedom — we don't have a country," Trump said. "America First must mean safety first. We have to have safety.
"Starting with our new majorities in Congress next year, and continuing on to the next Republican president, we need an all-out effort to defeat violent crime in America — and strongly defeat it — and be tough and be nasty and be mean, if we have to."
Trump called on "defunding the police" to be stricken from America's vernacular, denouncing the Democrat-supported idea "the big lie."
"The mere concept of defunding the police should never again be stated or even heard," Trump said. "It was so, so dangerous."
Trump added, "America is going to hell, and it's going to hell very fast."
Trump repeated his Las Vegas-speech call to add the death penalty for drug dealers, saying drug dealers cost, on average, 500 lives.
"It's time to get brutally tough on the dealers and traffickers and narco terrorists, cartels who are stealing over 200,000 American lives a year — and that's a very low number compared to what the real number is," he continued. "Think of it: 200,000. You don't lose that in wars. You don't lose that in wars.
"And, yes, these drug traffickers should and must receive the death penalty."
Trump lamented the "dirty" streets and homeless encampments in his return to Washington, D.C.
"Coming in today for the first time since I left Washington, D.C., it is not recognizable," Trump said. "What's happened? What's happened? They have tents with homeless and others all over."
Trump made a new and unique call to build homeless housing outside of our Democrat-run cities, admitting some might not like his suggestions.
"Cleaner streets are safer streets, and I will be happy to help campaign for any of those bills and I can tell you, speaking for [House Minority Leader] Kevin [McCarthy, R-Calif.] and [House Minority Whip] Steve [Scalise, R-La.] and all of the congressmen and women in the room and the senators in the room — of which we have many — I think we'll have no trouble getting votes for that: cleaning up our cities and cleaning up our country."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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