As America awaits election results, Donald Trump reveals the real reason he ran for president.

New York, November 9, 2016. Suspense reigns as the last polling stations in Hawaii closed hours ago following one of the most bizarre election campaigns in the history of the United States. At this early hour, the entire world is waiting with bated breath for the final count in Ohio, which will give victory to Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

The Clinton campaign has yet to make a public statement, but Trump decided to break the silence with a surprise announcement that will undoubtedly resonate across the globe. For the first time since declaring his candidacy in 2015, the Republican candidate clarifies his true motivation in running for president.

The text of Donald Trump’s speech delivered on November 9, 2016

The battle is not quite over but let me start off by saying this. We have already achieved our goal. I say that even as they are tallying up the votes in Ohio, the last of three battleground states where the outcome of the election was still in doubt an hour ago. So we still don’t know yet whether our corrupt opponent has succeeded or not in rigging this election. But without waiting any longer I decided to speak out now, accompanied here by my beautiful family—my wife and fantastic children.

Now that the voting is finished, the first thing to understand is that our achievement will never be held in doubt. It’s absolutely huge. And I now want the nation to know the truth about what this means.

Throughout the campaign people asked themselves why Donald Trump—a real estate mogul, a builder, a businessman, fantastic businessman, folks—suddenly decided a year and a half ago to enter the political arena. My detractors said it was ego, narcissism. Others said it was a ploy to develop my brand, implying in the same breath that it was an example of my famed business acumen.

Some corrupt members of the media predicted I would lose badly because I dared to tell the truth. The Washington establishment refuses to hear. Now we know who the losers are. It’s them. They said I would lose by a landslide. But there can be no doubt who the losers are, and in a few minutes you’ll understand why they were so wrong.

We’re still waiting for the final count, but I felt it was time for me to set the record straight and reveal the real reasons I decided to run for president. And believe me, it’s going to surprise you.

But telling the truth is simple, as simple as building a wall, something nobody knows how to do better than me. In fact, if the pundits were really as smart as they think, they should have seen it over a year ago. I thought I made it clear when I said we could make America great again.

The truth is I got into this race because I was worried about the direction the country has taken. A lot of people didn’t believe me or simply denied it, but the fact is America stopped being great years ago. I’ll go further. It even stopped being real. If it isn’t real, how can it be great?

When I got into the race I didn’t know that I would win. Everybody said it was rigged so that Jeb Bush would be nominated alongside Hillary for the Democrats. My mission was to get that message across: “Make America real again.” Walls are real. Towers are real. Nothing is more real than the Trump Tower, the greatest tower since Babylon. But America stopped being real some time ago. To make America great we have to make it real.

As you all know, politics was new to me but I realized that to get to this point—and we’re now on the brink of victory—I had to go through all the motions of a political campaign: the outlandish promises, the wild criticism of the opponent, the manipulation of the media, the barely concealed aggression, the dog whistles, all that crap. That’s what presidential campaigns have always been about.

Now that we are here, I can pull away the curtain and reveal what it was all about. I know a lot of you have been wondering, so it’s time I told you. That’s how negotiation works, as anyone knows who has read the Art of the Deal, the greatest bestselling business book in the history of publishing. You don’t give away your game plan until you get the result.

So what do you need to understand?

Well, I’ll tell you. I played by the rules—the media’s rules—the only ones that count. I did it so that all of you could see that your political parties stand for nothing that’s remotely democratic. They are corrupt, guided by opportunism, by the greed of the elite club their leaders all think they belong to.

The politicians are beholden to whoever provides them with the financial means to win. I’ve been saying it all this time. As a billionaire businessman I knew how the system worked on the inside. I knew that on the outside, public side, everybody lies all the time. So I launched my campaign and respected the rules. I had to lie even more than my opponents.

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It’s obvious now that thanks to this campaign everyone can see that both parties, Republican and Democrat, are now in a total shambles. They’ve no credibility, none! They need to be rebuilt. And whether I win or lose, don’t forget, I’m a builder. I will rebuild both of the parties, build them with a beautiful solid façade like no one has ever seen. Starting with the Republican Party, the party I chose for this campaign.

I could have chosen the Democrats, but Hillary’s camp have been holding a monopoly on that option for at least 10 years. But I’m ready to do it for the Democrats too. I’ll rebuild their party and get them to pay for it. Nobody knows how to build a political party better than me. I can make not only America but also party politics great again.

So here’s the real story, the one I couldn’t reveal until the negotiation we call an election was over.

I did this so that all Americans can start working together, rethinking and rebuilding all our public institutions. They’re all a mess. Everybody, and not just blacks, is living in hell. Our institutions—government, education, the military, you name it—they no longer produce anything that even resembles human reality or responds to human need.

So if nothing is real, what do we see around us?

I’ll tell you. You can see it on this podium: hyper-reality. Yes, we need to understand that hyper-reality—something totally imaginary but based on our past ideas of reality and created and disseminated through the media—has replaced reality in our culture.

Disneyland, Las Vegas, political parties, so-called “reality TV.” We live in a fantasy world where it’s impossible to distinguish between truth and lies because the lies—including the ones I carefully crafted for this campaign—are more believable, more realistic than the truth. Why settle for reality, such a messing thing, when you can have hyper-reality?

So here’s the real story of this campaign. About two years ago I met this French guy in Scotland who told me about this idea of hyper-reality. I liked the idea. It could be turned into a real business opportunity. So I asked around and it turns out there was this other French guy, Pierre Baudrillard, who came up with the idea of hyper-reality and wrote about it. Suddenly I recognized everything that I’d been experiencing all my life. It’s what we were doing on our TV show. It could also be about, who knows, standards for grooming your hair.

So here’s the truth. Listen carefully. I picked up a book by that guy, Pierre Baudrillard, and said to myself we have to do something with this. So I decided to launch my campaign in June 2015. After a long career as a hugely successful businessman—probably the most successful in American history, no one has built as many towers, casinos and golf courses—I wanted to see how I could best serve the country. Isn’t that what a president does? And it was the ideas of Pierre Baudrillard—not Ann Coulter, as some believe—that inspired me.

You remember the launch of my campaign at Trump Tower of course? You know, that time I railed about the fact that Mexicans are rapists and criminals. That was a textbook case of hyper-reality. It set the tone for the whole campaign, it provided the benchmark that all the candidates had to live up to. It meant substituting a totally imaginary idea of reality for the one people see around them every day.

Although I berated them, I really want to thank the press, the media in general for their total complicity. And now, win or lose, millions of electors have provided the final demonstration of Pierre Baudrillard’s thesis. I’m sure that if Pierre were alive today he would be pleased with this proof of his theory, just as Albert Einstein was when astronomers proved the theory of relativity by observing that space is actually curved. You know, when they measured the path of the light behind the gravitational field of the sun during an eclipse? Everybody remembers that.

Finally, I want to congratulate Hillary Clinton for joining me in this effort to educate the nation, along with the indispensable Debbie Wasserman Schultz. By taking the trouble to enact and then reveal, whether it was voluntary or not, how skewed the electoral system is, and how easy it is to rig elections and lead voters astray with imaginary stories of Russian presidents controlling American electoral campaigns, they played a key role in this effort.

And, of course, there was Bernie Sanders who magnanimously accepted to be the sacrificial victim as well as the Pied Piper and without whom none of this would have been visible.

I only wish Pierre were still alive to be present at the inauguration in January. Whoever the eventual winner may be—myself or Hillary—I’m sure Pierre would have appreciated the degree to which the nation has now become aware of the fundamental hyper-reality of our political rituals.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey