Full Speech: Read Donald Trump's Address After Emergence As 47th US President

"It's a political victory that our country has never seen before," Trump told a victory party in Florida. As supporters chanted "USA!", the 78-year-old added that his "magnificent" win would "allow us to make America great again."

Donald Trump won a sweeping victory in the US presidential election on Wednesday, defeating Kamala Harris in a stunning political comeback that sent shock waves across the world.

The polarizing Republican's win, following one of the most hostile campaigns in modern US history, was all the more remarkable given an unprecedented criminal conviction, a near-miss assassination attempt, and warnings from a former chief of staff that he is a "fascist."

READ THE FULL SPEECH:

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 on this incredible movement. This was a movement like nobody’s ever seen before. And frankly this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s ever been anything like this in this country and maybe beyond.

And now it’s going to reach a new level of importance because we’re going to help our country heal, we 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 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, and 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 know.

This is a magnificent victory for the American people that will allow us to make America great again – oh we’re gonna do it. 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 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 – very proud. 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, 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 good – 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. There 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 – 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, First Lady, who has the number one bestselling book in the country, can you believe it! Oh no, she’s 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. Now we all think our children are amazing. Everybody here thinks their children are amazing – but that’s a good thing when you think they are. But Don, Eric, Ivanka, Tiffany, Baron, Lara, Jared, Kimberly, Michael – thank you all. My father-in-law Victor is tremendous, and we miss very much Melania’s mother Amalia. We miss Amalia, don’t we huh? 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’s a feisty guy isn’t he? You know, I’ve said ‘go into the enemy camp’ and, you know, the enemy camp is certain networks and a lot of people don’t like it, they’re like ‘Sir, do I have to do that?’. He just goes ‘Okay, which one? CNN? MSNBC?’ He’ll say ‘All right, thank you very much’. He actually is like the only guy I’ve ever, he really looks forward to it and then he just goes in and absolutely obliterates them. Say a couple of words…

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. It lost that lost that little, it lost that little, uh that little thing called special. We have to make it so.

We’re going to make this so great. It’s going to it’s a 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 express my tremendous appreciation for Susie and Chris. The job you did, Susie, come Susie, come here, come here, Susie. Chris, come here Chris. Susie likes to stay sort of in the back, let me tell you. The ice maiden, we call her the ice maiden. Chris come here, Chris, Susie likes to stay in the background. She’s not in the background.

Thank you and thank you Susie. Look at her. She’s shocked – I’ve never seen her be shocked before. They’ve been, they’re great. Everybody up here is great, everybody up here is very special. But, uh, the Trump who – what did you say?

Oh, let me tell you, we have a new star. A star is born. Elon. Now he is, 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. I saw it, it was, when it left, it was beautiful shiny white. When it came down, it didn’t look so pretty, it was going 10,000 miles an hour and 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’.

And, uh, but I saw it come down and turn around and it was, you know, it’s like 22 stories tall, by the way, it looks a little smaller than that, but it’s big and it came down and down and you saw that fire burning and and I said ‘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 a very important man – happens to be here – and that very important guy, one of the most important people in 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 favour, do you mind holding for a couple of minutes? I want to see this’.

I thought it was a space age movie or something. I put the phone down – bad part, 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, told 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? No, 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, it particular hit North Carolina, they were really devasted. The water, this was a big water, as big as we’ve ever seen water. 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?’

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, he’s 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 some of the, you know, we have up here today the US Open Champion. He’s fantastic – slightly longer than me, the ball, it’s a little bit longer than me – just a little bit. Bryson DeChambeau is up here. Some – what happened to Bryson? Where is he? Bryson oh… he’s on the way, 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 US Open. Bryson, that’s a fantastic job and we also have Dana White, who has done some job. He’s a tough guy.

So Dana started UFC and uh came to me: ‘Do you mind if I use your…’ nobody wanted to give him any because they said it’s a rough sport, a little rough, and I helped them out a little bit. And I went and they 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, and you know he’s a very motivational kind of a guy what he does. He gets these fighters and they really go at it and it’s become one of the most successful sports enterprises anywhere at any time. It’s doing so well I’d like to ask Dana just to say a couple of word. People would love to hear from him.

Dana White speaks.

Donald Trump takes the stand again.

That is a piece of work. Now 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. We’ve been through so much together and today you showed up in record numbers to deliver a victory like really, I probably, like no other.

This was something, this was something special and we’re going to, we’re going to pay you back. We are going to do the best job, we’re going to, we’re going to turn it around. It’s got to be turned around. It’s got to be turned around fast and we’re going to turn it around, we’re going to do it in every way, so many ways. But we’re going to do it in every, every way.

This will forever be remembered as the day the American people regained control of their country. So I just want to say that on behalf of this great group of people, these are hardworking people, these are fantastic people. And we can add a few names like Robert F Kennedy Jr. He came in. And he’s going to help make America healthy again. And now 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, 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 any-, 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. They 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, we want to have things be good, safe. We want great education, want a strong and powerful military and ideally we don’t have to use it. You know, we had no wars, four years we had no wars, except 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? 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 fulfil that mission. Together we going to fulfil 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, most important job in the world. Just as I did in my first term, we had a great first term, a 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 all 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 you, thank you very much.