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Aug. 26, 2015 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:26
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 a one and only excellence in broadcasting network, Rush Limboss serving humanity.
Just by being here.
Telephone numbers 800-282-2882, the email address, Ilrushbow at EIBNet.com confirmed the shooter.
The man who murdered Alison Parker and Adam Ward.
As they were doing their jobs today in Roanoke, Virginia, the shooter, Vester Flanagan, Vester 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 uh the reporter, Alison Parker, had made racist comments.
And it was unacceptable.
And so he uh 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 uh of the state, the punk, Terry McCaula, is uh he's the second, Hillary Clinton was first to politicize this and go out there and start saying we gotta get guns out of the hands of people that have no business having them.
We gotta 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 them on the air.
I mean, whatever.
What's what's what's gonna happen here?
You know, I 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 on the one hand he had the gun, on the other hand, he had his uh cell phone shooting it.
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 uh local woman from the Chamber of Commerce who is is uh I think she's okay.
She's she's she was also shot.
She's uh in surgery or recovery now, whatever, but they they say she's in stable condition, I think.
But they're standing there 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 the uh at this poor reporter, and she she shrieks and cries out in terror and begins running.
Running away.
And it was after that the cameraman gets shot.
You don't actually see that.
This video has been pulled down.
He had posted it on his Facebook page.
Uh it's since been pulled down at uh at Facebook, but there's a link to it at the uh at the Drudge Report.
The uh station manager, station manager came out and said of WTBJ.
He said, I'm gonna have to I'm gonna drop my journalism hat for a second and say, I don't know whether I hope this man lives or dies.
So we he couldn't, 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 McCulliffe and Hillary out there coming, we're calling for gun control.
The authorities are calling this a workplace violence.
Even though the shooter said, hey, that woman would 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 uh this guy that was Well, no, no, no, no.
It started with the uh the guy that was read Al Gore's books, he had the shack out there, Ted.
The unabomber, the unabomber had this massive manifesto.
He was a fallen liberal.
Remember?
Ted Kacinski's a fallen liberal, fallen liberal academic, fallen liberal intellectual, and he had his massive manifesto, and the New York Times succumbed and published the whole thing in response for him turning himself in and they found Al Gore's books all over the guy.
Had a one-room shack somewhere out in the woods where he was uh where he was hauled up.
And ever since then, these the shooters have manifestos.
And it becomes, you know, obligatory that we read them.
Folks, I have to tell you, this was funny as it could be.
On Monday, I 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.
And I said, Well, I wonder what this is.
Snurdly, Snerdley does not bother me with email because he knows so many other people do.
So he tries to go judicious.
So when I get an email from Snerdley, I know it's something.
And the link was to uh 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 I started laughing uncontrollably.
I said, You you gotta 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 uh 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 re at the New Yorker that she's her paranoia over began when the Thomasons 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 the Queen's bedroom.
Uh 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 there's uh 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, you know, it's it's a unique experience.
I didn't want to leave.
I didn't want to sleep.
I 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.
This election's in November.
After the election, I um I hear Harry Thomas.
Now, Harry and Linda Blood Thomas and her TV producers, they produced a show called Hearts of Fire that I guess starred on as me.
Was out there for a whole week shooting an episode of Marcy Markey Post and John Ritter.
And they were great.
Uh 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 it 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're at the inaugural ball.
Well, during my trip there, 1992, during the White House, I'd 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-Smith, some C-Span show, and he was.
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, and there's this note.
We were turning down the bed, get us his note just from Rush Limbaugh.
And they were it's it was clearly bugged by this.
The note was innocuous.
You know the notes, the notes 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 have had to put that notice.
Somebody had to undermine whatever.
And it made her paranoia.
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 Elinor 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 time out.
Now, folks, I'll tell you what, I've I've got the audio of the Trump presser with Jorge Ramos.
I have I watched it on TV and and I've I've listened to some of the audio and I I've watched it again when I there's a lot of noise on an airplane.
I I still haven't been able to hear the whole thing.
I'm 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 uh we've got the Trump stack.
There's 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 hill and the uh the the bed pillow of Harry and Linda Blood Thomas and Hillary writes about that twice in her memoir that nobody read, by the way.
It's the one she got a 14 million dollar 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 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 she the the moving of the furniture, she didn't order it moved around.
She came to find out that it was something it 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.
So 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 that's the thinking.
By the way, uh Vester Flanagan, as is the usual case, we're beginning to learn more and more about the man.
He uh 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 ten years ago claiming that they were racist in their attitudes toward him.
Um he claimed that he was 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 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 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.
That'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 his he says what comes to his mind.
Uh he may be repetitive.
Uh that's a a trick you use while you're thinking of what you want to say next.
I recognize it well.
Uh but you're right, it is from the he doesn't need notes.
He knows what he wants to say, but more than he likes himself.
He has no compunction telling people everything they want to know about him.
He's he's 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 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 sit hit me up.
This may have happened to you too, Mike.
You know, Trump he says contradictory things.
Uh well, I heard him say this, and I said you it doesn't matter right now.
That's that's not what he represents to people.
You know, just like you know, Rush, this guy's not conservative.
You gotta be real, real careful.
I'm not 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 um the the phenomenon here.
I know exactly what's going on here.
Uh and and I've I've tried to explain it as best I can without giving a whole lot of it away.
But look, you you're talking about a speech in mobile on Friday night, that's the one you're talking about.
Yeah.
I I watched that.
I didn't think it was all that great, frankly.
I thought last night's was a hundred percent better than what, but I didn't see all of Friday nights after.
But it doesn't matter.
The point that 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.
Uh and and it it it was okay.
It didn't matter what he said.
Uh 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.
Uh 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.
Yeah.
So I think there would have been a full stadium had it not been announced that morning.
Well, you maybe.
You never know.
Okay.
But yeah, but still it was it was it was a hot night.
I mean, there's no question it's a hot night in the 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.
Uh people said, Oh, he was rambling, his style was rambling.
Well, we've already talked, as you've pointed out, no telepromp, no canned speech.
But the other thing that was happening, he would be talking, and someone in the crowd would uh 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 uh 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 see you saw last night when he 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.
He 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.
Uh 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'll shout, I love you, I love you back.
And he might you're you're gonna ramble in circumstances like that as you 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 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 gonna 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 prompt.
I teleprompter is the most restricting thing in the 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.
Um 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 prompters.
My idea was put on a prompter and make sure.
And you could tell it was just stiff as hell.
You know, reading a prompter is a talent, too.
And I 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 his his is mentioned last night of banning a teleprompter from political speeches, biggest applause line of the night, is that's when you find out what's in people's hearts.
That's when you find out what they're made up, when you find out can they tell you?
Can they tell you who they are?
Can you tell they 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.
Um you learn it fast.
Uh 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 gonna have it.
Some days you're gonna have it all, and it's gonna be a hundred and ten percent great.
Other days it's gonna be eighty or ninety.
It's it's just it's like your golf game.
The 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 that's what's got the establishment all confused.
They think he's just a walking gaff and should have been embarrassed and 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 uh, and John Fedoritz wrote about this, I think, yesterday in the New York Post.
Um, I've had conservatives say to me, you know, Rush, this is really dangerous guy, not a conservative.
You've got to be real careful, Rush.
This guy's not a conservative, and he's gonna embarrass you if you don't 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 the theory I'm hearing is, you know, Rush, he's he's just like Obama, except for the right.
He's you know what the real danger here is Rush.
And Pedoritz is a 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'll 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.
It's not what we are, Russia.
That's not what conservatism is.
I said, well, I don't you you can look at it that way, but I don't think that's what this is.
I don't I don't think Trump's supporters are in any way, shape, manner, or form intellectualizing this or internalizing it like that at all.
The 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 if we go and try to fix it, but life goes on is 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 it was uh that's what this is about.
It's about somebody who's gonna put a stop to it.
And then hopefully we can reverse some of this.
I and I that 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 and furthermore, they think you're nuts if you think that.
What do you mean?
We're not on a verge of losing America.
What are you talking about?
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.
Uh and at the same time, they're saying you're really gonna make a big mistake.
If you think the country's in that dire shape and you're gonna invest in some right wing totalitarian or supposedly right wing totalitarian to fix it, then all you're doing is creating another Obama.
That's this is the latest attempt that I have seen that's gonna use being used to persuade supporters of Trump to be suspicious of him.
And uh maybe abandon him.
You have to say, if if Trump wins, you'd have to say there'd be a Republican Congress.
The question the question then is would the Republican Congress try to stop Trump?
I'm serious.
Serious, legitimate.
Okay, uh let me grab one more before the break.
Jason in Brooklyn.
I'm I'm glad you waited.
I appreciate your hey Jason, how are you?
Good.
Megadetto's from the gardens part of the world, Brooklyn, New York.
Well, it's great to have you here.
Thank you.
Um 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 Wolf 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 uh of 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 I'm really struck by this.
Well, maybe, maybe I ought not be.
But there's a there's a headline here, I think it's the uh is it the the uh uh 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 then who is black news media?
BET, Al Sharpton, okay.
Who is Asian news media?
Well, there's gotta be one, right?
Well, who is the gay news media?
The blade, okay.
Very no, who is the blue-collar news media?
See, you see, here's the thing.
This this this use this use of Latino news media is a way the position.
The the it's is legitimate.
Because Latinos, what are now victims, victims of Trump and victims of anti illegal immigration, victims of 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 gonna say this to my face is blue.
This is an invasion.
There's nothing of this that's immigration.
Immigration's 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 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.
Don't go.
Okay, here's what I've decided to do.
We're gonna start going on the uh working sound bites of all this stuff in in the next hour, top of the next hour.
In the meantime, Kirkville, Texas, and Rich.
Great to have you.
Um the question I wanted to talk about was um I I saw a story in time that Frank Lunz did a he did a focus group with about 20 something people, and they showed them a bunch of uh clips of Trump flip flopping and you know, uh some just the way he talks and addresses, you know, uh, for instance, women.
And the the conclusion was that they the Trump supporters came out supporting Trump more than when they had gone in.
Um and and I don't want to be the dead horse because one of your uh other callers had already talked about this.
Um but can you really explain what the what the mindset is behind that that they go to the state?
Well, let's 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, Lunz 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 Lunch 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, Lunch does this focus group that you're talking about.
This was a specially put together group, there were 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 Lunz 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 re jog your memory in case people had forgotten that.
I think I mean the only way to to explain this is that is that Trump is likable.
He has a huge likability factor, and people trust a couple of things that he says.
A, he's gonna 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 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 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 you 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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