Donald Trump Jr. credits Alabama GOP’s resolve, and Joe Biden, for his father’s election victory

Forget dinner, what they really ate up were the words of Donald Trump Jr.

Trump Jr. was the keynote speaker Thursday at the Alabama Republican Party’s Trump Victory Dinner on Thursday at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex.

The president’s oldest child, 47, gave a wide-raging speech in which he thanked party members for volunteering and helping deliver his father’s election victory in November.

“I want to thank you guys for having the resolve to stay in that game,” Trump Jr. told the BJCC crowd before invoking his father’s rallying cry after an assassination attempt.

“Don’t ever give up. Fight, fight, fight.”

Trump Jr. tipped his cap to the Alabama volunteers who flocked to swing states — Alabamians knocked on 100,000 doors in Georgia and North Carolina, according to state party Chairman John Wahl — to put his father over the top.

“You guys sent so many volunteers to Georgia, to so many states where it is going to matter,” he said.

While the president’s son spent a considerable portion of his speech on culture war issues — “rainbow-haired trans lunatics” and girls in women’s sports — he also made the case for his father’s policies, like the tariffs announced Wednesday.

“He can do the things that are actually right for the American people, for the American worker, for the American manufacturer,” he said.

“And guess what? It’ll take more than a couple days.”

“You have the perfect guys to actually do these things … I think that’s going to be great for the American worker.”

Trump Jr. also gave thanks to Joe Biden, saying the former president fueled his father’s victory.

“The last four years was the wake-up call that America actually needed,” he said.

Trump Jr. also accused Biden of being a “Manchurian candidate” because of the damage caused by the former president’s policies.

“So, if you somehow got access to the U.S. government, you were a foreign enemy and you can destroy us from within, what would you do differently than the Democrat Party?” he said.

Some of the biggest rounds of applause Trump Jr. received were when he turned to the efforts of the Department of Government Efficiency.

“The greatest thing that can come from DOGE … is the transparency that it creates, that Americans can finally see where their money is going,” he said.

Unliked his father’s first term, Trump Jr. said, the president now has a “bench of actual players” to advance his agenda.

“In those four years we learned so much,” he said. We figured out who those people were.”

Trump Jr. shared how much admiration he had for his father after the courage he showed following the July 13 assassination attempt in Pennsylvania.

“These days everyone’s a tough guy on the internet … but when you get shot in the face and you know what’s going on … and you come back up and say, ‘fight, fight, fight,’ that’s the ultimate test in resolve.”

Trump’s family knew everything was O.K., Trump Jr. said, when Trump told them his hair was not ruined in the shooting.

“That was the relief factor that we all sort of needed,” Trump Jr. said.

The dinner included video montages of Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance on the campaign trail, along with their surrogates that included a cheering Elon Musk — the world’s richest man and the top donor to committees that helped elect the president.

In his video message, Sen. Tommy Tuberville backed the Trump tariffs. “It’s time to tell the rest of the world to get off their ass and pay their fair share,” Tuberville said.

The appearance by Trump Jr. follows several previous Alabama GOP events in Alabama featuring the Trump family.

Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, spoke at the Alabama Republican Party’s summer dinner last September.

President Trump spoke at an Alabama Republican Party fundraiser in Montgomery in August 2023, early in his successful campaign for a second term.

Trump Jr., was in Alabama last year for a fundraiser for his father’s campaign in Mountain Brook.

Trump Jr. spoke at a fundraiser for Faulkner University in Montgomery in 2017.