TUSCALOOSA — Nationally, the University of Alabama is most likely identified by its success on the gridiron during football season, which spans nearly a century.
However, Thursday night, a near-capacity crowd at the university's Coleman Coliseum was the center of the political universe as President Donald Trump became the first sitting president to deliver a commencement speech to the storied institution.
The President's remarks did not come without some politics, but were heavy on advice and encouragement for the graduating Class of 2025.
Partial remarks as follows:
As you embark on this great adventure, let me share some of the biggest lessons I've learned from a lifetime spent building dreams and beating the odds. I beat a lot of odds. A lot of people said, "I don't know," but it worked out okay. Where are we? Oh gee, I'm president. How did that happen?
Now, you're going to be in the same position. Would you like to hear some of these ideas or should I just skip over that part, huh? That's going to be more interesting than all the other stuff, which was slightly political, right? I'm going to give it to you, though—just as I see it and as I've learned it, the hard way and the easy way.
First, if you're here today and think that you're too young to do something great, let me tell you that you are wrong. You're not too young. You can have great success at a very young age. You're all very young. In America, with drive and ambition, young people can do anything.
I was 28 when I took my first big gamble—to develop a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, the Grand Hyatt—and it worked out incredibly well. But I was very young at the time. I was like a very young person in sort of an old person's business.
Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple. Walt Disney was 21 when he founded Disney. James Madison, James Monroe, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson—they were no older than 25 when they began the journeys that etched their names into the history books for all time.
So to everyone here today: Don't waste your youth. Go out and fight right from the beginning—from the day you leave this incredible university. Go out and fight. Fight tough, fight fair—but go out and fight. You're gonna be very successful, because now is the time to work harder than you have ever worked before. Push yourself further than you have ever pushed yourself before. Find your limits—and then smash through everything. Go and smash through.
You've watched that football team smash through—you're gonna do the same thing. You're at the age when you have the time and vitality to do really incredible things, if you give it your all. You'll look back, and a decade from now, you'll be astounded by what you've achieved.
You'll remember this day. You'll remember when the guy named Trump was giving the commencement address and he said, "I could do it." And guess what? I think you're going to remember that very fondly. I hope so.
Second of all, and very importantly, you have to love what you do, okay? You have to. I rarely see somebody that's successful that doesn't love what he or she does. That way, you really like work—it isn't work. It's fun. I find it fun. I work all the time, and I find that fun. If I didn't find it, I wouldn't be successful—whether it was real estate or in showbiz. I had a lot of different careers.
But I loved real estate so much. I was very successful in real estate because I loved it. I learned a lot from my father because I watched him work. He was a workaholic. He loved to work. He was a good man. He was a tough guy—tough as hell, actually. Now that I think back, I don't know if you could even get away with that nowadays. He was tough, but he was a good man, I'll tell you.
He worked seven days a week. He worked Saturdays, Sundays—it didn't matter. And I learned by watching him. He loved his life. He loved what he was doing. He had a great long-term marriage—many, many, many years. He beat me on that one. Now, mine were very successful, but they haven't lasted quite as long. It was close to 70 years. That was a long time. I said, "Pop, you beat me on that one."
But you know what I learned from him? That he loved life. And all he did was work. I see people that don't work hard and they're miserable. So go out and find something you love—and do it.
You have to find something that you love, and you have to follow your own instincts. Listen to your parents—they're very wise—but you have to follow your instincts and your heart, your soul, and you want to be the very, very best you can be. Treat every day like a home game against Auburn. Fight like hell and enjoy doing it—and your coach can tell you all about that.
Third thing is to think big. You know, if you're going to do something, you might as well think big, because it's just as tough. You can think small—I know a lot of people, they thought small. They're very smart. I know others that weren't nearly as smart, but they had a better picture of the big picture. Because it's just as hard to solve a small problem as a big problem. It's just as much energy and everything else, except the result is going to be a smaller one.
So love what you do—but think big, if it's possible. Now, if it's not possible, that's okay too. You do something—you have to do something that you love. You will have all the same headaches and challenges, all the same delays and setbacks, so you might as well do something that's just amazing.
America doesn't aim small. Alabama doesn't aim small. And neither do you. So think big when possible. Think big.
Fourth is work hard. Work hard. Never, ever stop. An example is a great athlete actually—Gary Player, golfer. Great, great golfer. He wasn't as big as other men. He was actually on the small side—don't tell him that, he's a friend of mine. Don't tell him that, because he doesn't understand that. But he worked very, very hard. He made up for it. He never stopped. He won 168 golf tournaments—think of that. I said, "Gary, you're winning like every weekend. Do you ever choke or anything?" He said, "I don't know what choke means."
And he made a statement years ago that I read, and I thought it was sort of an incredible statement. He said, "It's funny—the harder I work, the luckier I get." Think of that. "The harder I work, the luckier I get."
So you really have to work hard. And you're going to be successful, because you have the talent to get into this school. It's not easy to get through it—it's even more difficult. You have a lot of talent.
Fifth is don't lose your momentum. You just want to keep it going. And you have to know if you are losing it. You have to know when you're losing it. So maybe you stop. Maybe it's time to stop. Listen to the feedback. Think through your plan very carefully and keep moving fast. The word momentum is very important.
Let me tell you a little story about a great real estate developer named William Levitt. He built Levittown. Some of you might live in one. He was the biggest developer in the whole country in the 1940s and so on. And he built these jobs. He started with one house, then two houses, then 20 houses, then thousands and thousands of houses.
And a company, Gulf and Western, came along and they said, "We're going to make you an offer to buy your company." And they offered him a lot of money. A lot of money—more money than he ever thought he could make. And he retired. Lost his momentum. He retired. And he led a beautiful life.
He had a wife—I must tell you, it was his second wife. It was a trophy wife. What can I say? I don't like telling you everything, but we're all friends, right? Can we talk? We're all friends. He had his trophy wife and he lived a different life. He moved to the south of France. It was a life of tremendous luxury. He had so many millions of dollars. He was given a fortune for the company.
And ten years went by, and then fifteen years went by, and he got a call from this big conglomerate, Gulf and Western. And they said, "We're not doing well with the purchase." Because he used to pick up every nail, every piece of sawdust, every piece of wood, every chip—everything—and he'd sell it and make a couple of bucks, and everything was perfect. They can't do that. You know, these big companies—they don't do that.
You see it a lot when an entrepreneur sells to a big company, and then he ends up buying the company back for peanuts later on. Happens a lot. But he was the best at what he did. But fifteen years went by, and he was so excited—and they sold him back his company.
He started, and he was going to tear apart the world because he got bored with a life of luxury. And he started building and building and building, and the markets turned on him. And he went bad. He lost everything. And he went bankrupt. Absolutely bankrupt. And it was a sad story to read. It was such an amazing story, because he was so rich. He paid them, and he bought it for the right price—bought it low—but he went wild. But he lost his momentum. He wasn't good at it anymore.
He was at a party on Fifth Avenue—I'll never forget. It was a party of a very, very powerful man who was having the party in a magnificent apartment overlooking the park. I walked in and there were 50 or so people—I recognized most of them—all the biggest business people in the world, actually. Very glamorous.
I was doing well. I was young, and I was going well. And I was invited to parties like that. I looked in the corner and there was Mr. William Levitt, sitting all by himself on a chair, looking very glum. Nobody was talking to him. You'll find that when you're not successful, you lose a lot of friends. It's not a good situation. But there was nobody talking to him.
But I wanted to talk to him because I was in the real estate business, and he was. And most of these people were in different businesses. And I went over and talked to him and I said, "How are you, Mr. Levitt?"
He goes, "Donald,"—he knew who I was—"not well. I'm not well."
I said, "So, can you come back?"
He said, "No, son. I lost my momentum. I shouldn't have done it. I lost my momentum."
I never forgot that expression. He lost his momentum. If he would have kept going instead of selling and relaxing and going into a different life, he probably would have been three times bigger than he was. But he lost his momentum. And you have to know when it's your time.
I mean, there'll be a time when you do lose. You see it with fighters. You see it with a lot of people. They have a great record and they retire. Then four years later they say, "I'm going back. I can beat that." And they get knocked to hell. And it's not good. It's not good.
So he lost his momentum. You have to know when your momentum time is up. I call it momentum time. But follow your momentum. Very important word. You don't hear it from too many, but I've seen it. I've seen it a lot.
Number six: If you want to change the world, you have to have the courage to be an outsider. In other words, you have to take certain risks and do things a little bit differently. Otherwise, if that weren't the case, everybody would be successful. It doesn't work that way.
Progress never comes from those satisfied with the failures of a broken system. It comes from those who want to fix the broken system. And you'll make the bigger money—you'll make more success—by acting that way. The other way may be more secure. But if you want to go to the top...
Change is never easy. And the closer you get to success, the more ferociously those with a vested interest in the past will resist you. They want to resist. So I just say: Trust me on that, because I know. You really do. You have to break the system a little bit and follow your own instincts. But if your vision is right, nothing will hold you down. Nothing.
You have to have the right vision. If you look at some of these internet people—I know so many of them. Elon is so terrific. But I know now all of them—you know, they all hated it.
It's amazing. It's nicer this way.
Now, in the first, you know—they didn't know what happened because I won an election that, you know—there was never a businessman that won a presidential election. Out of 100%, 8% were generals and 92% were politicians. Not even admirals—just generals. General Washington, General Grant, General Eisenhower.
But 8% were generals and 92% were politicians. And when I ran, everyone said, "Well, he can't win. He's a businessman. That's not going to work." But you have a natural instinct for things. I guess I had a natural one.
I said to somebody, "Was I a better businessman or a politician?" And they said, "There are a lot of guys that made a lot of money, but there's only one guy that became president who was a businessman—so I guess you're a better politician." But I don't think of myself as a politician. I think of myself as a businessman. And I'm proud of that.
And I've applied business instinct, and that's why I think you're seeing us doing so well.
So number seven is: Trust your instincts. Common sense. You can go very far in life with common sense. And I apply that to politics, because some of these things—like they had open borders. Let everybody in the whole world flow into our country. That's not common sense.
They had transgender for everybody. We ended that, if you noticed. Okay?
But they had transgenders for everybody. I said, "This is not working. This is not gonna work." As I said before—it's so simple—men playing in women's sports.
Did you ever see some of the records? Did you see some of these boxing matches? You know, we have to protect. These women are great athletes. But we have to protect.
If you looked at the Olympics, where they had transitions—people going into the boxing—where the women had boxing, and they had a great champion, a female boxer... After one punch, she walked back to the corner and said, "I can't get hit like that. I've never been hit like this before."
You look at all the volleyball players that have been hurt so badly with balls that are hit at levels that they've never seen before. But the greatest is weightlifting. You ever see the weightlifting? Where they have a record that wasn't broken in 18 years?
And they have—should I imitate it? You know, my wife gets very upset when I do this. She says, "Darling, it's not presidential." It's here, but people like it. Should I do it or not? Do it!
All right, I'm in trouble when I get home, but that's okay. What the hell. I've been in lots of trouble before.
Now, you look at the weightlifting. Where for 18 years it stands. And they have this young woman—and her parents are right where you are, in the front row—and they're so proud of her. And it's like 209 pounds. And she's going to lift that.
The record stood for 18—think of it—18 years. And they put an eighth of an ounce here, a little tiny bit. And she's going to do it. "Mom, I love you. I'm going to do it for you, Mom." And she goes... and she goes... and she gets it. "Mom, I'm going to do it, Mom." Tantos—
And then a guy comes along—or a gal or whatever—a transitioned person comes along. And he was a failed weightlifter as a man. But he comes along—206 pounds. They put the little thing on. And he goes... and breaks the record by 119 pounds.
That's not right.
The other one is the swimming—you've heard me talk about it. Great swimmers. And you know, they rose to the top—women swimmers. And they grew up together. And they're Olympic-class swimmers. And they're qualifying for some big tournament.
And now the race is getting ready to start—the big race. And one young lady, she was going to set the record. She fought all her life to set the records. She has to win it by one-ninth of a second. Think of that—one-ninth.
I don't like those odds—one-ninth of a second, right? But she looks to the left and she sees all the friends that she grew up with—down in California, from all over the country. They're all the best swimmers. Then she looks to the right and she sees the same thing.
But there's a person next to her who's a giant. And she looks and she's like, "Who is that? I don't recognize that person." That was a person that transitioned. And he had the wingspan of Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain—if anybody knows him.
And as you know what happened—she was very, very badly injured in that meet. Because he went by her so fast that she was windburned. They had to take her out. She got serious windburn. He flew back and forth and back and forth. And she didn't know what—but she got the hell knocked out of her.
No, I'm only kidding. She wasn't windburned. She just was beaten by a lot.
Then the race—did you see the race where they had the best female runners? And they had a guy who was a decent runner. A long-distance race. And he won by five hours and nineteen seconds.
You know, normally you win by like twelve seconds, two seconds, a quarter of a second. He won by five hours and nineteen seconds.
It's crazy.
And, you know, honestly, it's demeaning for women. Very demeaning. These are great athletes—it's very demeaning. And we're going to protect women. We're going to protect women. We're going to protect everybody.
So now that I'm in trouble with my wife, I'm going to blame the University of Alabama for asking me to go through with that stuff. But it's pretty descriptive, isn't it? Really helps.
When you know that borders are not racist. Speech is not violence. America is good. Terrorists are bad. Men can never become women. Police are not criminals. And criminals are not victims.
Eighth: Everybody should believe. Thank you. Thank you very much. Everybody should believe in the American Dream. It's real. It's there. And it's right before you. We're coming back to the American Dream.
Ninth: Think of yourself as a winner. The power of positive thinking. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, from many years ago, wrote a book—The Power of Positive Thinking. And there is a lot to it. The power of positive thinking.
Don't consider yourself a victim. Consider yourself a winner.
In recent years, too many of our young people have really been taught to think of themselves as victims, and to blame people, and be angry. Don't be angry.
But in America, we reject that idea that anyone is born a victim. Our heroes are the ones who take charge of their own destiny, make their own luck, and determine their own fate—despite the odds. Despite all odds. That's what happens. They take—really, they're given a little chance in many cases, very little chance of success—and they become the most successful people in the world.
Whether you were born rich or poor, Black or White, male or female—in America, anyone can be a winner. And our whole country will be cheering you on. And I'll be at the front of the line cheering you—especially because you come from this incredible university.
And next is to be an original. The old-time greats were people who had the confidence to be a little different—Teddy Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, George Patton, Amelia Earhart, Annie Oakley, Muhammad Ali, and so many others. So many others, far too many to name—lived their lives with pride, personality, and flair.
God only created one of you. Remember that. God created one of you. You're all different. Some are close, but nobody is the same. You're one of a kind.
So don't try to be someone else. Just be yourself.
And finally—and most importantly—never, ever give up. Never give up! Never give up!
And if I've learned anything in life—and it's so true—one of the most important things you can learn: if you just went a little bit longer, if you just held out a little longer, you would have been successful. The stories of that are legend. But I've learned that perseverance is everything.
So whatever happens—no matter where you are in life—stay optimistic, and just keep pushing forward. Just don't stop. Never, ever give up. Victory is right around the corner.
I've watched Coach Saban win games that really were virtually over. You've seen it. You've been in the stands. He won a couple of games—I said, "Coach, you got lucky as hell." He said, "I didn't get lucky. I'm a talented guy."
You know those little touchdowns that come out of nothing? He's amazing. But he's a guy that doesn't quit and doesn't know what the word 'quit' even means. He couldn't define it. He took victory out of the jaws of defeat—and you can do that too.
At every stage in my career, my enemies—of which there were many, and probably are right now—I can think of a couple of people that don't like me too much right now. But they said that they have to do everything they can to keep me from winning, to keep me from making it.
Jeff Poor is the editor-in-chief of 1819 News and host of "The Jeff Poor Show," heard Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-noon on Mobile's FM Talk 106.5. To connect or comment, email [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @jeff_poor.
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