Closing the Republican midterm convention in Dallas on the night of September 10, 2026, Trump asked the arena to raise their right hands and take a pledge.
The lines, as transcribed by Mediaite, went like this. Trump: “I pledge, to the greatest president in the history of the United States.” The crowd repeated it. Trump: “That loves us so much he can't even breathe.” The crowd repeated that too. Trump then delivered a long line himself: “That I will go out with my family, my friends, I'll do it any way, I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There has never been bigger cheaters, they don't care, I am going to go out and I'm going to get my friends and family and we are going to vote on November 3, or we are going to vote before that.” After some asides he finished: “So we swear that on November 3, we're going to go out and vote... So help me God.” The crowd answered, “So help me God.” Then: “You know what happens if you don't vote? You go to hell.”
One detail in that transcript matters for how the moment has been described. The crowd repeated the lines of praise for Trump and the closing oath. The transcript shows no crowd response to the “cheat like hell” line, and The Hill reported that “some in the crowd tried to repeat” the pledge amid laughter. Several headlines said Trump made his supporters swear or vow to cheat. The record supports something narrower: Trump spoke those words as part of a pledge he was leading, and the part the crowd clearly swore to was voting and loyalty to him.
The framing he gave it also matters. “Like they do” refers to Democrats. Moments before, he had said Democrats oppose voter ID “because they want to cheat,” and the pledge line itself claims “there has never been bigger cheaters.” CNN's fact check found no basis for broadly describing Democrats as election cheaters. Whether Trump meant his own line as sarcasm about the other side or as something more literal is not established by anything he or the White House has said.
What stands regardless of intent: a sitting president led a raised-hand oath addressed to himself as “the greatest president in the history of the United States,” ending in “So help me God,” at an event where he was simultaneously campaigning for proof-of-citizenship voting requirements, and the oath he led included the words “I don't care if I'm registered or not, I'm going to try to cheat like hell” (see Trump Promises Every Adult Citizen a $5,000 'Trump Dividend' if Republicans Keep the House and Senate and Trump Signs an Executive Order Creating Federal Voter Lists and Restricting Mail-In Voting; States Immediately Refuse to Comply).