Trump Says ‘Internet People’ Are ‘Kissing My Ass’ in Bizarre School Speech

President Donald Trump gave a speech to 2025 graduates of the University of Alabama on Thursday night, where he rambled about tariffs, the so-called “golden age” of America, and trans athletes. But it was Trump’s comments about tech CEOs that really shone. You see, Trump knows that all of the “internet people,” as he called them, hated the president during his first term. But thanks to Trump’s consolidation of power, they’re all bowing down.

Trump told the graduates that in order to succeed, you have to “take certain risks” and do things “a bit differently.” Then the president said that it was important to “fix the broken system” before pivoting in a way that made it clear he was actually speaking about breaking the system entirely—something that he’s currently doing with the help of Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Trump argued, “If you want to go to the top, you’re just never going to do it unless you break the system.”

“You have to break the system a little bit and follow your own instincts,” said Trump. “But if your vision is right, nothing will hold you down. Nothing. You have to have the right vision.”

That’s when Trump got into the way that he had successfully broken the system by making tech CEOs fall in line. Many tech companies and CEOs donated to Trump’s inauguration, shelling out big in one of the most nakedly corrupt attempts to buy a president’s favor in recent memory. Apple’s Tim Cook, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman were just a few of the tech leaders who each gave Trump $1 million, to say nothing of the quarter of a billion dollars Musk gave to help get the fascist president back into office.

“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 me in my first term. And now they’re kissing my ass.”

The internet people are indeed kissing his ass. And many of them are seeing the returns.

Musk, for example, has been given unprecedented access to the federal government, destroying anything he likes on a whim and getting a unique view into sensitive information that would give the oligarch a huge advantage as a federal contractor. Musk’s companies, like SpaceX, make boatloads of money from the government, and that’s only going to accelerate as Republicans push through a new spending bill that’s bound to help Musk.

President Trump’s latest budget proposal includes things like the “Golden Dome,” a missile defense platform that will deliver enormous revenue to SpaceX, according to the New York Times. And you’ll notice that in all of DOGE’s supposed cost-cutting, not a single contract for SpaceX has been on the chopping block. What are the odds, right?

The rest of Trump’s speech was filled with the kinds of things he says every day, along with some elements from the campaign speeches he would give in the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election. For instance, Trump demonized trans athletes and trotted out a cartoonish impersonation of weightlifters he’d done many times before. The president also mentioned that his wife, First Lady Melania Trump, didn’t like it when he told the story, a fact he also mentioned many times at his hate-filled campaign rallies.

Trump also touched on his tariffs, which are currently causing chaos in the global economy. The president slapped a 145% tariff on all goods coming from China, which means ships that would normally be sending goods to the U.S. right now simply aren’t coming, according to the Wall Street Journal.

“I said, you know, a number of times, ‘tariff’ is the most beautiful word in the world. And I got absolutely decimated by the fake news,” Trump told the University of Alabama graduates. “They said, ‘What about love? What about your wife? What about your parents? What about religion and God?’ So I said, ‘All right, it’s the fifth nicest word I’ve ever seen.'”

There’s no evidence anyone in the news media took issue with Trump calling tariffs the most beautiful word in the world. The issue is that tariffs have the potential to cripple the economy and make things much more expensive for Americans. But Trump will often create stories from whole cloth that he thinks will make his speeches more entertaining. He’s also come to understand that dropping in some curse words here and there can play well, enough if a couple of decades ago that would’ve been considered beyond the pale for a U.S. president. It would’ve been notable if President Barack Obama said something like “kissing my ass” during a speech to a bunch of college kids. Today, it doesn’t even seem remarkable.

Trump’s use of profanity isn’t new, and is really the least objectionable thing about the man, but it is particularly funny that Fox News has been leaning into the idea recently that Democrats are using curse words too much. Friday morning, Fox did yet another segment about how the Democratic Party had become the “party of profanity.”

But the profanity doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. The thing that matters is the fact that Trump continues to destroy the U.S. government with the help of oligarchs and teenagers named Big Balls. And it doesn’t seem like the U.S. system is prepared to stop them.