DALLAS—President Donald Trump used his Wednesday keynote address at the Republican National Convention to frame the upcoming election as a stark choice for the country: continued prosperity if Republicans keep control of Congress, or a setback if Democrats take power.
Trump walked onto the stage at the American Airlines Center to Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA,” opening the first night of an unusual midterm Republican National Convention. The Dallas arena, home to the Mavericks and Stars, hosted an event that breaks from tradition, as national party conventions have typically been reserved for presidential election years, when parties formally nominate their White House candidates.
From the outset, Trump made clear that his speech would center on the stakes he believes voters face in November.
“In 55 days, Americans will be going to the polls in one of the most important elections in our country’s history. Your vote will decide whether our country stumbles at the starting gate of the next 250 years or surges forward and never ever looks back,” he said.
Trump warned that giving control to what he called “the radical left Democrats” would leave the nation struggling for years to recover. By contrast, he urged voters to back Republicans, saying the party would position the United States to “leave the world in our dust for generations to come.”
Trump stressed that 35 key races will decide the majorities in the Senate and House come November. Republicans hold the Senate with a 53-47 majority over Democrats and independents in their caucus, and in the House, Republicans hold a 218-214 majority. Republicans look to defend key Senate seats in Texas, North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio, and can flip Democrat seats in Michigan, Maine, and Georgia. Trump carried all of these states, except for Maine, in 2024. He intends to visit every state where a race is on a knife’s edge.
“We have a very short period of time, and we really have 35 races. They all count, but we have 35 races that are, I guess you’d call swings, right? Like we had seven swing states, we won all seven, right? Yeah. So I said, not that I’m looking for the work. You know, I said the other day I got so much of a schedule. I said, ‘I thought I won. What do I have to do? I’m campaigning,’ But I am. We’re campaigning to make it incredible,” he said.
“The ones that are very close—they might be winning by a little, or losing by a little, or tied—we can win every one of those races,” he said. “But I’m going to go to every one of those states for congressmen and Senators… and we’re going to have rallies just like this.”
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Democrats have worked for much of Trump’s second term to make “affordability” a key midterm issue, but Trump hammered Democrats on Wednesday for the nearly five-decade high inflation they sparked in the Biden years through immense spending and green energy policies.
“Our predecessors killed and buried the American dream with trillions of dollars in waste and green energy scams—the greatest scams in American history—green energy… Most of them had no idea what it was, they just said, ‘Let’s go green,’ And every country that’s gone green is down the tubes, you do know that, but it caused prices to skyrocket,” Trump said.
“They used the word affordability, right? They are so fake, because it was them that caused the affordability, to use their word, crisis, and I’m bringing the prices way down, way way down…We’re fixing it. We’re fixing it,” he added.
Trump also predicted that the Iranian regime is holding out on a deal in efforts to leverage a big win in favor of Democrats in November, who the president says the regime would rather deal with. He predicted the war would soon end after the elections and the Iranian regime would be quitting.
“And prices right after this very important election on November 3 will be plummeting. The war will be over very shortly after the election. They’re hanging on for dear life, hoping that we lose, so they can deal with dumb, weak Democrats, and they can have their bomb,” he said. “We’re not going to let that happen.”
“So they’re going to be quitting or dropping out or who knows what the hell, whatever it is, right after Election Day, because they…. desperately want to deal with Democrats like Obama, Barack Hussein Obama,” he added.
Republicans look to defy historical trends in the midterms this year. Only twice has a party that controls the presidency, the Senate ,and House kept both congressional majorities in a midterm election. It most recently happened in former President George W. Bush’s first term. Before that, Democrats held majorities in 1934 during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency.