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Aug. 26, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:29
August 26, 2015, Wednesday, Hour #2
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Time Text
Greetings folks and welcome back.
It's great to be here.
Great to have you with us on the one and only Excellence in Broadcasting Network, Rush Limbos, serving humanity just by being here.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882.
The email address, LRushbo at EIBNet.com, confirmed the shooter, the man who murdered Allison Parker and Adam Ward as they were doing their jobs today in Roanoke, Virginia.
The shooter Vester Flanagan, Vestor Lee Flanagan, stage name, Bryce Williams.
He did shoot himself.
He's hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.
Law enforcement found him.
They confronted him on I-66.
That's when he shot himself.
He's injured and facing life-threatening injuries.
ABC News says it got a fax containing a 23-page manifesto from somebody named Bryce Williams, who happens to be Vester Flanagan.
Turns out that Vester Flanagan was canned a couple of years ago, couldn't get along with anybody, and he hasn't gotten over it.
Two years ago, he was canned.
He was still lurking in the area.
And he said that co-workers had turned him into human resources after having worked with him for one day, that the reporter, Allison Parker, had made racist comments, and it was unacceptable.
And so he's been festering here.
He hasn't been able to find a job, find work.
So he finally got the best of him.
And he went out there and pulled the trigger.
Now the governor of the state, the punk, Terry McAuliffe, he's the second.
Hillary Clinton was first to politicize this and go out there and start saying, we got to get guns out of the hands of people that have no business having them.
We got to do this.
There are too many guns out there.
Gun control.
What we need, journalists need to be armed.
Journalists' lives matter, right?
Arm them.
Journalists' lives matter.
Hands up, I'm on the air.
I mean, whatever.
What's going to happen here?
You know, I just watched the video.
This guy, this guy sunk to depths never before seen.
Social media.
What an ugly media and social media episode.
This guy, in the one hand, he had the gun.
In the other hand, he had his cell phone shooting at camera.
And it's, I don't know, it's about a minute long.
And you see him walking to the area, and he's standing there.
His camera aimed at the reporter and the cameraman interviewing the local woman from the Chamber of Commerce who is, I think she's okay.
She was also shot.
She's in surgery or recovery now, whatever, but they say she's in stable condition, I think.
But they're standing.
They're all standing there.
Reporter is asking the questions.
The guest is answering them.
The cameraman is alternately shooting them and then rotating and shooting the lake or the scenery.
And then you see the gun raised.
The guy fires two shots at this poor reporter and she shrieks and cries out in terror and begins running.
Running away.
And it was after that the cameraman got shot.
You don't actually see that.
This video has been pulled down.
He had posted it on his Facebook page.
It's since been pulled down at Facebook, but there's a link to it at the Drudge report.
The station manager, station manager came out and said of WDBJ.
He said, I'm going to have to, I'm going to drop my journalism hat for a second and say, I don't know whether I hope this man lives or dies.
So he couldn't say that as a journalist, see.
Jorge Ramos could, but he could.
He couldn't say that as a journalist.
So he had to say, I'm not wearing my journalist hat now.
I can't honestly say, I hope this man lives.
Meaning, Vester Flanagan, aka Bryce Williams.
Now, the shooter is a person of color, African American, and the reporter and cameraman are white.
So this will undoubtedly provide a, well, not provide, it'll present a bit of a conflict for the media once they get through this day.
Subsequent days looking back at the incident, reporting on it when they will then try to shape it for whatever benefit they think it has.
And I look, I hate saying this, folks, but I know the drill here, and so do you.
We've already got McAuliffe and Hillary out there calling for gun control.
The authorities are calling this workplace violence, even though the shooter said, hey, that woman made racist comments about me.
That's in his manifesto, facts.
How come now all of these murderers have manifestos?
You know when that started?
That started with the guy that was no, no, no, no.
It started with the guy that was read Al Gore's books.
He had the shack out there, Ted, the Unabomber, the Unibomber, had this massive manifesto.
He was a fallen liberal.
Remember?
Ted Kaczynski is a fallen liberal, fallen liberal academic, fallen liberal intellectual.
He had his massive manifesto.
And the New York Times succumbed and published the whole thing in response for him turning himself in it.
And they found Al Gore's books all over the guy.
He had a one-room shack somewhere out in the woods where he was holed up.
And ever since then, the shooters, they have manifestos.
And it becomes obligatory that we read them.
Folks, I have to tell you, this was funny as it could be.
On Monday, I wake up and there's an email from Snerdley.
He said, I love the first two paragraphs, this, and he gave me the web link.
I said, well, I wonder what this is.
Snerdley does not bother me with email because he knows so many other people do.
So he tries to go judicious.
When I get an email from Snerdley, I know it's something.
And the link was to The New Yorker.
And it was a story on Hillary and her email server and problem.
And I read the first two paragraphs, and I just started laughing uncontrollably.
I said, you got to be kidding me.
All of this is my fault?
Or all of this is the reason she did this?
And then I found that Stein did a whole little bit on this as Monday's program opened.
Hillary Clinton, in her memoir, Living History, recounts her struggle to defend her privacy while residing in the White House.
Some of her stories have a gothic tone.
After Bill Clinton's first inauguration, Harry and Linda Thomason, friends from Hollywood, found a jocular note under a pillow in the Lincoln bedroom.
It was from Rush Limbaugh, the conservative radio host.
How did the note get there?
I don't believe in ghosts, but we did sometimes feel that the White House was haunted by more temporal entities.
Temporal entities?
So Hillary Clinton's telling this guy, Steve Call, at the New Yorker, that her paranoia began when the Thomason found a note from me under a pillow at the Lincoln bedroom on the night of the Clinton inauguration in 1993.
You want to hear the story about this?
All right.
In 1992, I was invited to the White House by George H.W. Bush, and I spent the night in the Lincoln bedroom.
I called my mom from there.
She didn't believe it.
You know, it was never a bedroom during Lincoln's presidency.
It was his office.
And the bedroom is a museum room with a bed in it.
It's a full-functioning bed and bathroom and so forth.
And they treat it as a hotel room.
It's got steward service, room service.
It's on the same floor as the living quarters of the first family.
It's all the way down at the end of the hall.
Across the hall is what's called a queen's bedroom.
I guess named because a queen once did something in there, probably slept.
And the Lincoln bedroom.
And it's a museum room.
There's artifacts from the Lincoln era.
There are artifacts to denote the ties to Abraham Lincoln.
But everybody thinks it was where Lincoln slept.
And it wasn't.
It was never a bedroom in his day.
And it's a unique experience.
I didn't want to leave.
I didn't want to sleep.
I bet I slept no more than two hours all night.
I wanted to stay up and just absorb the fact that I was there.
So we fast forward to after the election.
This is 1992.
The election's in November.
After the election, I hear Harry Thomason.
Now, Harry and Linda Bloodworth Thomason are TV producers.
They produced a show called Hearts of Fire that I guest starred on as me.
Was out there for a whole week shooting an episode of Markey Post and John Ritter, and they were great.
What else?
Linda knew my dad.
Her dad knew my dad.
She's from Poplar Bluff, which is some miles south of where I grew up.
But the point is, I knew them.
I wouldn't say they were friends, but I'd spent a lot of time with them shooting that episode of their show.
So I saw Harry, he was bragging that they were going to be spending the night in a Lincoln bedroom on inauguration and how excited they were, and they couldn't wait for us.
I thought, hmm, hmm, I wonder if I have the juice to get a note put in there while they were at the inaugural ball.
Well, during my trip there, 1992, during the White House, I made some acquaintances with White House staff, and one thing led to another.
I composed a note, and I then checked to see if it were remotely possible that the note could indeed be put under the pillow.
I was told, no guarantees, give it our best shot.
I sent the note to where I was told to send it, and that's the last I heard of it until March of 1993 when Harry, Harry Thomason, was on Meet the Press.
No, he was on C-SPAN, Sim C-SPAN show, and he was, you know, I couldn't tell if he was laughing or complaining, but he was shocked.
He said, yeah, we got in there and we come in from the inaugural ball and we get ready to go to bed.
There's this note.
We were turning down the bed.
It says, note is from Rush Limbaugh.
And it was clearly bugged by this.
The note was innocuous.
You know, the notes, the note said, Harry and Linda, remember, I was here first, and I will be back.
Period.
Have a good night, Rush.
That's all it was.
And the next I know of it is Hillary is, it's the lead item in a story in the New Yorker about her email service and server.
And it's one of the reasons why she is paranoid living in the White House.
She couldn't understand how in the world something happened in there that she didn't know about.
Somebody had to have snuck in there.
Somebody had to put that note.
Somebody had to undermine whatever.
And it made her paranoid.
She said, I've got to do my own email if I ever become Secretary of State.
Or what have you.
Now, she wants to talk here about temporal entities.
And she says, I don't believe in ghosts.
P.S. She told everybody she was communicating with the ghost of Eleanor Roosevelt at night in the White House after this incident happened.
She bragged that she routinely, almost in seance-like fashion, was able to contact Eleanor Roosevelt and get advice from her on what it was like to be a strong-willed woman in the White House surrounded by men who were not interested in what you had to say or some such thing.
And I said, my God, this is just, this is fascinating.
And for her, here it is, 2015, and there's a story in The New Yorker about her email server.
And she remembers something that happened in 1993.
It's at the top of her mind.
This is why I say I live rent-free in these people's heads.
Okay, brief timeout.
Now, folks, I'll tell you what, I've got the audio of the Trump presser with Jorge Ramos.
I have, I watched it on TV and I've listened to some of the audio and I've watched it again when I, there's a lot of noise on an airplane.
I still haven't been able to hear the whole thing.
I'm not able to hear what Jorge says.
I've got a transcript.
That's the only reason.
So I don't know if it's productive or worthwhile to play this thing, particularly, since probably everybody's seen it by now.
But play maybe a little bit of it just to give you a sample.
And then dig deep into all of these.
We've got the Trump stack.
There's just all kinds of stuff here to get to, including your phone calls.
So take a brief obscene profit break here.
We'll be back.
Get to it right at it after this.
You know, this note that I arranged to be placed under the Hillary, the bed pillow of Harry and Linda Bloodward Thomason.
Hillary writes about that twice in her memoir that nobody read, by the way.
It's the one she got a $14 million advance for.
Nobody showed up at her book signings other than donors.
And I don't think anybody's read it.
She recounts the incident as I just shared it with you in The New Yorker.
And the second mention in her book is even weirder.
She says she came home to the White House one night and found that things had been moved around, that they weren't where they normally were.
She was told a security team had searched the room because they thought it might be bugged.
And then she said it reminded her of finding your note under her pillow.
But my note was not for her.
I didn't have a note for her, and it wasn't under her pillow, unless she slept with the Thomasons.
No, no, no, I'm not saying I'm telling you that note was under the pillow in the Lincoln bedroom.
And if Hillary didn't sleep it, there was no note for her.
But the moving of the furniture, she didn't order it moved around.
She came to find out that it was something that happened regularly.
They come and sweep the place for bugs.
And whoever moved the furniture didn't quite put it back where it was.
And she noticed it.
All of this, she claims, made her paranoid.
There were things happening in the White House she wasn't controlling, things happening in the White House she didn't know.
And if it was that easy, if it was that easy to get that close to her, like a note under the pillow in a Lincoln bedroom, and suspiciously out-of-place furniture.
Why I need my own email server.
I mean, that's the thinking.
By the way, Vester Flanagan, as is the usual case, we're beginning to learn more and more about the man.
He sued another TV station for racism a decade before he was asked to leave the Virginia station amid claims of racial bias.
So there's clearly race on this guy's mind as a motivation for his activities.
He sues a station 10 years ago, claiming that they were racist in their attitudes toward him.
He claimed that he was called a monkey by one of his bosses at a station in North Florida.
And then he claimed that this reporter that he shot this morning had made racist comments about him.
But it was just workplace violence, you see.
That's what the authorities are saying.
Okay, back to the phones.
Mike in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Thank you.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Mr. Limbaugh.
Yeah, hi.
Hi, the point I'd like to make is that there's a lot of people out there who doubt who Donald Trump truly is, whether he's a conservative, you know, is he a Democrat.
And I think he gave a great speech on Friday in front of 40,000 people with millions of people watching.
And I'd kind of like to go back and talk about when you gave your first address to the nation at CPAC.
And later on, you described how you didn't use a teleprompter.
You didn't have any notes.
And you're able to do that because it was from your heart.
It's what you believe, you know, and it's who you are.
And I kind of believe that that's kind of what's happening with Donald Trump.
He didn't use a teleprompter.
He doesn't use notes.
And he's getting out there and he's just telling people who he is.
And he's not got any boundaries.
You're exactly right.
He's had a stream of consciousness.
He says what's come to what comes to his mind.
He may be repetitive.
That's a trick you use while you're thinking of what you want to say next.
I recognize it well.
But you're right.
It is.
He doesn't need notes.
He knows what he wants to say.
But Morton likes himself.
He has no compunction telling people everything they want to know about him.
He's perfectly comfortable in his own skin.
He doesn't think he has to be anything to be ashamed of or nervous about.
There's nothing he's trying to hide.
And when you have those characteristics, I mean, it's great.
You're wide open.
There's nothing you're afraid to say.
And that is what I think is drawing people to him.
And I don't think, in large part, you know, people hit me up.
This may have happened to you too, Mike.
You know, Trump says contradictory things.
I heard him say this.
I said, it doesn't matter right now.
That's not what he represents to people.
And just like, you know, Rush, this guy's not conservative.
You've got to be real, real careful.
I've never said that he is.
I've never said he's the voice of conservatism.
I don't think that's why or what explains the phenomenon here.
I know exactly what's going on here.
And I've tried to explain it as best I can without giving a whole lot of it away.
But you're talking about a speech in Mobile on Friday night.
That's the one you're talking about.
Yes.
I watched that.
I didn't think it was all that great, frankly.
I thought last night's was 100% better than what, but I didn't see all of Friday nights after.
But it doesn't matter.
The point is he showed up and he spoke off the cuff and he told people what was on his mind.
He told people what he was thinking about.
He got enough meat in from previous things he had said to make a connection with the crowd.
And it was okay.
It didn't matter what he said.
Specifically, although it does, that's a bit contradictory.
Anyway, I grant the call.
Thank you.
Here's Lyndon Mobile, Alabama.
She was at the Trump event on Friday night.
Hi, Linda.
Great to have you with us.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Thank you so much.
And thank you for your commitment to conservatism.
You're welcome.
Well, let me say this.
The thing is, the national media did not really report the flavor of the crowd.
And they, I think, underreported, misreported.
And a couple of points I wanted to make.
The first one being probably the reason for the attendance was lower than Trump had anticipated.
Our local CBS affiliate announced the morning of the event that they would be televising it live.
And just in my group alone of four people, there were eight others who stayed home to watch it on TV.
So I think there would have been a full stadium had it not been announced that morning.
Well, maybe.
You never know.
Okay.
But still, it was a hot night.
I mean, there's no question.
It's a hot night and afternoon.
If you got a chance to watch it at home, you probably would take it.
Now, what was it?
Was it 30,000 people showed up in a 40,000-seat arena stadium?
Is that what it was?
And you also missed something if you saw it on TV.
People said, oh, he was rambling.
His style was rambling.
Well, we've already talked, as you pointed out, no teleprompter, no canned speech.
But the other thing that was happening, he would be talking, and someone in the crowd would shout out a topic like, what about Israel?
And he would immediately switch to talking about Israel.
And for me, that's huge, that he can just switch back and forth.
For now, he's rallying people to making America great again.
He'll put meat on the bones of issues, I think, as we go forward.
Well, you know, look, the technique is if you can pull it off, the technique is great.
If you can go out, I don't even think he's got a speechwriter.
I mean, he doesn't need a speechwriter.
He's informed.
He knows what he thinks about things.
The only thing he needs, you saw last night when he'd finished, he had some notes on that podium and he folded them up and he put them inside his jacket pocket.
Okay, that means speech is over.
And I'm sure what was on that piece of paper was just bullet points to remind him of things he wanted to talk about.
Pick a subject he talked about.
I'm sure it was one line just to jog his mind.
He didn't have on that page what he wanted to say about it.
That's not the problem.
Just remembering to talk about it because it's all improv.
And he does react to the crowd.
Somebody will shout, I love you.
I love you back.
And he might, you're going to ramble in circumstances like that as you reclaim your place or as you try to remember your place when you were interrupted or allowed yourself to be interrupted.
But he does this because he's not nervous.
He has no self-consciousness about it.
So he's relaxed and he's confident enough to know that people aren't judging him on that basis.
So, yeah, to the media, he's rambling.
To him, he's just organizing as he speaks.
And some days you're going to have it doing that, and some days you won't.
I mean, that's the risk of not having a prompter.
Of course, I can't use a prompter.
The teleprompter is the most restricting thing.
My mind stops working when I'm reading something I'm supposed to be saying from my heart.
My mind stops working.
It's the teleprompter.
I can't use it.
There were times in my TV show that there were things I really wanted to say.
So I said, let's put it on the prompter.
It was my idea.
Let's put it on a prompter, make sure.
And you can tell it was just stiff as hell.
Reading a prompter is a talent, too.
And I do that as well as anybody else does, but still compared to being mean naturally, you can tell.
And he's the same way.
And his mention last night, banning a teleprompter from political speeches, biggest applause line of the night.
Because that's when you find out what's in people's hearts.
That's when you find out what they're made of.
Can they tell you?
Can they tell you who they are?
Can they tell you what they believe?
Can they make sense?
Can they entertain, be charismatic?
Can they capture you?
Can be compelling?
All of that.
You learn it fast.
Obama can't do it without one, see?
I mean, people are different.
But when you go that route, when you go the Trump route, some nights, some days, you're just not going to have it.
Some days you're going to have it all, and it's going to be 110% great.
Other days, it's going to be 80 or 90.
It's just, it's like your golf game.
A teleprompter is the way you ensure that you say what you want to say and nothing else.
A teleprompter is for people in a defensive posture, largely to make sure they don't go off-message, off-script, and commit gaffes.
In Trump's case, he's not worried about gaffes because there aren't any when you are who you are.
And that's what's got the establishment all confused.
They think he's just a walking gaffe and should have been embarrassed and slinking out of this race weeks ago.
That's because they don't understand again the connection that the audience has with him.
Now, people are also hitting me with, and John Fedorich wrote about this, I think, yesterday in the New York Post.
I've had conservatives say to me, you know, Rush, this is really dangerous.
This guy's not a conservative.
You've got to be real careful, Rush.
This guy's not a conservative, and he's going to embarrass you if you don't.
It's not going to embarrass me.
I haven't endorsed anything here.
I'm just telling people why this is working, in my opinion.
Right now, it is, and I'm trying to tell people why.
You want to listen to it or not?
Up to you.
But the theory I'm hearing is, you know, Rush, he's just like Obama, except for the right.
He said, you know what, the real danger here is Rush.
And Pedoritz, as they wrote about this in the New York Post yesterday, people are fed up with Obama because he's a totalitarian leftist and they don't like what he's doing, but we don't want to answer that with a totalitarian right-winger Rush.
We just don't want to do it.
We don't want to have a guy that we want to give all kinds of executive powers to to fix this mess, just like executive powers have made a mess of this.
That's not what we are, Rush.
That's not what conservatism is.
I said, well, I don't, you can look at it that way, but I don't think that's what this is.
I don't think Trump's supporters are in any way, shape, matter, or form intellectualizing this or internalizing it like that at all.
The people who make it very abundantly clear they do not understand why Trump is drawing a crowd are the very same people who do not think the country's in crisis, folks.
They're the very same people who think this is just politics as usual.
Democrats win one year, Republicans win the next.
Democrats make a mess.
We go and try to fix it, but life goes on.
It's the way politics is.
We share power.
We share chairmanships.
We share stewardship of the money, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
They don't understand that this country is populated by people who think that we're on the edge of losing it forever.
And by the way, Trump mentioned that last night.
He said, if we lose this next election, we may lose the country.
We're that close.
It got overwhelming SRO applause.
It was, I mean, people stood up and cheered.
It was, that's what this is about.
It's about somebody who's going to put a stop to it.
And then hopefully we can reverse some of this.
There's just a group of I'm running out of things to call them.
The establishment, the elites, the ruling class, whoever they are, you know, the inside the beltway political professionals, they just, they don't see that.
They don't, they don't, and furthermore, they think you're nuts if you think that.
What do you mean?
We're not on the verge of losing America.
What are you talking?
That's paranoid.
That's tinfoil hat stuff.
Don't be, I mean, be serious.
Don't be ridiculous.
Like, they don't.
And so they are dismissing this legitimate concern that people have.
And at the same time, they're saying you're really going to make a big mistake.
If you think the country's in that dire shape and you're going to invest in some right-wing totalitarian or supposedly right-wing totalitarian to fix it, then all you're doing is creating another Obama.
This is the latest attempt that I have seen that's going to be used to persuade supporters of Trump to be suspicious of him and maybe abandon him.
You'd have to say, if Trump wins, you'd have to say there'd be a Republican Congress.
The question then is, would the Republican Congress try to stop Trump?
I'm serious.
Serious, legitimate.
Okay.
Let me grab one more before the ring.
Jason in Brooklyn.
I'm glad you waited.
I appreciate your.
Hey, Jason, how are you?
Good.
Megadittos from the Garden Spot of the World, Brooklyn, New York.
Well, it's great to have you here.
Thank you.
This is a pattern between Univision and Trump.
If you remember, and I'm hopefully going to make the host look good, when Dylan Roof killed nine people in a church, the president of programming and content for Univision, Alberto Ciorana, posted on his Instagram account a picture of Donald Trump to the left and Dylan Roof to the right with the words no comments on it.
In other words, tying in the racism to Trump.
Trump and Univision are in a legal battle right now over the Miss USA pageant.
So Jorge Ramos' behavior at the press conference last night is a continuation of a pattern of negative activism towards Trump, plain and simple.
There's no question about that.
There's no Jorge Raymond.
Not that it matters.
But look, I'm really struck by this.
Well, maybe, maybe I ought not be.
But there's a headline here.
I think it's the New York Times.
As Donald Trump and Jorge Ramos clash, Latino news media airs its offense.
Latino news media.
You see how fragmented the country is?
We have Latino news media.
What is the New York Times?
Is the New York Times liberal Caucasian news media?
It is?
Okay, then who is black news media?
B.E.T., Al Sharpton.
Okay.
Who is Asian news media?
Well, there's got to be one, right?
Well, who is the gay news media?
The blade.
Okay.
Very no.
Who is the blue-collar news media?
So you see, here's the thing.
This use of Latino news media is away the position is legitimate because Latinos are now victims, victims of Trump and victims of anti-illegal immigration, victims of the opponents of amnesty and so forth.
So if Latino news media doesn't like you, you probably are racist.
Yeah, if Latino news media, because they're a protected class now, Jorge Ramos has become the news anchor of illegal immigrants and illegal immigration.
That seems to be his purpose.
Jorge Ramos has allowed himself to become the anchor, the official news anchor of illegal immigration.
He sponsors it.
He seems to support it.
He seems to be urging it.
And I'm telling you, it isn't immigration, folks.
I'm going to say this.
My face is blue.
This is an invasion.
There's nothing of this that's immigration.
Immigration is a process.
It takes a while if you do it legally.
There's nothing about this.
This swarm of people crossing the border, we're calling that immigration.
It's not how people immigrate to the country.
It never has been.
That's why it's been called illegal.
But it's not immigration at all.
It's an invasion.
And Jorge Ramos is the general.
That's exactly what's going on.
That's what Latino news media is.
That's what Univision is.
And that's what Jorge, whether he knows it or not, that's what he's become.
I'll take a break.
Sit tight.
Back after this.
Okay, here's what I've decided to do.
We're going to start going on the working sound bites of all this stuff in the next hour, top of the next hour.
In the meantime, Kirkville, Texas.
And Rich, great to have you rich.
The question I wanted to talk about was: I saw a story in Time that Frank Luntz did a, he did a focus group with about 20-something people, and they showed them a bunch of clips of Trump flip-flopping and, you know, just the way he talks and addresses, you know, for instance, women.
And the conclusion was that the Trump supporters came out supporting Trump more than when they had gone in.
And I don't want to be the dead horse because one of your other callers had already talked about this.
But can you really explain what the mindset is behind that?
That they go to the next one.
Let's go back to a previous Luntz focus group.
And that would be after the first debate, or the debate, that was on Fox News earlier this month, back in August 6th.
After that debate, Luntz had a group that walked in there largely in support of Trump, at least favorably disposed towards him.
After the debate, easily 75% of them thought Trump was a disaster.
They thought he blew it.
They thought he was mean.
They thought he was off topic.
They thought he didn't make any sense.
And they were vastly disappointed in him.
I don't know if you remember this or not, but that was the first focus group that Luntz did.
It was after the first debate, and it was some people who were let down.
They walked in.
They were Trump supporters.
They were let down.
Okay, next, Luntz does this focus group that you're talking about.
This was a specially put together group.
There were Republican consultants and others on the other side of a two-way mirror watching this.
And in that focus group, it didn't matter what Luntz told them Trump had said.
It didn't shake their support for him.
It was a total 180 from the focus group after the first debate.
And I don't think this was tied to that.
I just wanted to mention that focus group in the first debate to jog your memory in case people had forgotten that.
I think, I mean, the only way to explain this is that Trump is likable.
He has a huge likability factor, and people trust a couple of things that he says.
A, he's going to make America great again, and he's going to do it from outside the political process that these people all think is corrupt.
And so if they are reminded of Trump conflicting statements over here or over there, those are not enough to shake the faith they have in their belief that he's serious about making America great again, and that he's serious about blaming the people they also blame for the mess, and that is the professional political class.
So that's another thing that has, after this focus group, Luntz said that he thinks, the one you're talking about, he thinks the Republican leadership in the House and Senate needs to come in there, and they need to watch one of these and find out how far out of touch they are, because Luntz said these people in his focus group were the Republican base.
And as far as they were concerned, Trump couldn't say anything wrong.
Now, that's going to scare the devil out of professional politicians because they don't think you can survive with that kind of reaction.
At some point, people are going to hold you to what you say.
But right now, that's the explanation for it.
That's the best one I could come up with.
He's got enough likability to overcome these misstatements here, misstatements there.
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