Trump’s speech in Phoenix, at a Turning Point USA gathering of conservative activists celebrating his victory last month, largely echoed the rhetoric he used on the campaign trail — including lies about widespread fraud in the 2020 election — but were tempered with his satisfaction at having won.
“We had no riots. We had no anything. It was a beautiful thing to watch,” Trump said, noting Democrats’ concession of the 2024 election. “They just said, ‘We lost.’ And we want to try bringing everybody together.”
“President McKinley was the president that was responsible for creating a vast sum of money,” he said. “That’s one of the reasons that we’re going to bring back the name of Mount McKinley, because I think he deserves it.”
Trump also said he would restore the names of military bases like North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, the former name of what’s now Fort Liberty. The name was changed in 2023 to strip the military base of its Confederate namesake.
“Woke has to stop. Because along with everything else, it’s destroying our country. We’re going to stop woke,” Trump said. “Woke is bullsh*t.”
Trump defended his controversial pick for Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — and seemed to suggest he would allow Kennedy to probe for links between vaccines and autism, despite no evidence supporting the connection that Kennedy has long claimed exists.
Trump pointed to rises in diagnoses of autism, childhood cancer and chronic diseases, and said that “something’s wrong.”
“Together, we’re going to make America healthy again,” Trump said. “Something bad is happening.”
Kennedy’s long history of vaccine skepticism has been a source of focus for some Republican senators who are meeting with Trump’s Cabinet nominees ahead of confirmation hearings. Both Kennedy and Trump have in recent weeks sought to address those concerns — with Trump at a recent news conference describing himself as a “a big believer in the polio vaccine” and Kennedy saying he’s “all for” the vaccine.
Still, at the same news conference, Trump similarly noted higher autism rates, and said he wants Kennedy to “come back with a report as to what he thinks. We’re going to find out a lot.”
Trump again expressed openness to allowing the social media app TikTok to continue operating in the United States, suggesting that the app may have helped reach some key voters.
His comments come as the Supreme Court last week agreed to decide whether a controversial ban on the social media app violates the First Amendment. The high court agreed to expedite the case and hear arguments on January 10.
Trump touted his popularity on the app and the gains he made with young voters in the 2024 election, saying he is “going to have to start thinking about TikTok.”
“We did go on TikTok, and we had a great response. We had billions and billions of views,” he said.
Trump said he was shown a chart highlighting the views his campaign had received there. “As I looked at it I said, ‘Maybe we gotta keep this sucker around for a little while,'” he said.
