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Feb. 26, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:26
February 26, 2016, Friday, Hour #3
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Okay, so Trump is still going down there in Fort Worth, and he just said, hey, they say I'm not loyal.
I voted for McCain.
What do we get?
I voted for Romney.
And they botched it so bad, I just said, I'm going to do it myself.
And the crowd roars.
Live from the Southern Command in sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday.
Speaking of which, you know this Christie endorsement, would you say Chris Christie is before today, would you have thought that he's part of the Republican establishment?
I mean, I would.
Republican Governors Association, head honcho, he's a classic, in fact, member of the Republican establishment.
And these guys just do not go outside the establishment.
Chris Christie has gone way off the reservation doing this endorsement of Trump.
This is way off.
This is thinking about this.
It happened.
It was unexpected.
And I've been following it as it happens down there at commercial breaks, and I was starting to think, this is really – I'm not talking about Christie's stature within the establishment, just his membership.
This is a major defection.
This is what Romney, the kind of stuff Romney was trying to stop by bringing up this tax problem.
But this essentially, now, there's some caveats.
It looks to anybody watching this like it's over, that Trump's going to be the nominee.
So it's not as though Christie broke ranks early on.
It looks like he's breaking ranks, but he is endorsing the party nominee.
But you and I both know this is not what the party wants.
They may have to act like it is by the end of the summer, but they don't want this.
They don't want Trump to be their nominee.
And they are still, I guarantee you, plotting ways to prevent this from actually happening.
They may not be able to pull it off.
But here, here's the story right here.
By the way, welcome back.
Open Line Friday, 800-282-2882.
Rubio prepares for contested convention.
And this story actually leaked yesterday.
It's the one that talks about the 200 donors and Republican establishment RNC power brokers huddling, trying to plot ways to deny Trump the pathway to the 1,237 delegates needed.
Rubio prepares for contested convention.
Marco Rubio's campaign is preparing for a contested convention as one option to take the GOP nomination away from the Trumpster.
And Ted Cruz, his campaign manager, told donors at a closed door meeting in Manhattan on Wednesday night, Terry Sullivan, Rubio's top advisor, used a PowerPoint presentation, took questions from attendees to lay out the two courses that Rubio's quest for the GOP nomination could take in coming months, according to two people who were there and spilled the beans to CNN, speaking anonymously.
The first course of action showed the number of states and delegates Rubio would need to clinch the nomination outright before July.
Who are we kidding here?
Rubio hasn't won a state yet.
And when that was pointed out, he said, well, it's not about states.
It's not about winning states.
It's about delegates.
Yeah, but you, in the proportional states, you win the state, you get a majority of the delegates there.
And some of the states are winner-take-all.
The second course is the scenario in which none of the candidates gain the number of 1,237 delegates needed to clinch, which would unleash a messy and potentially unpredictable battle where multiple candidates are vying for the title.
So Rubio is the establishment candidate now.
I mean, nobody's denying that.
And Christie has broken ranks and has now joined the Trump campaign.
Let's go to the audio sound bites of that.
This is Chris Christie in Fort Worth at an event.
This event is over an hour long and it is still going on.
And this crowd is still at max energy, going absolute bonkers.
As Trump is laughing at Rubio, making fun of Rubio, praising Christie, even praising Cruz.
But he's taken it to Obama.
He's taking it to Romney.
He's taking it to ISIS.
He's taking it to the border.
He's praising Joe Arpaio and all the brilliant people that are supporting him and so forth, explaining how life works in Palm Beach.
He said Rubio got it wrong that he inherited $200 million from his dad.
He said, I wish it was $1 million.
It wasn't $200 million.
So he's even opened a bottle of water, and somehow that was related to Rubio, and he started throwing water all over the stage.
Shaking up the bottle, and this is what happens to little chokers in my camera.
Shake the bottle up and bam.
Throw the water all over everything.
Here's Christie endorsing the Trumpster.
I am proud to be here to endorse Donald Trump for President of the United States.
I'm doing this for a number of reasons.
First is that Donald and I, along with Melania and Mary Pat, have been friends for over a decade.
He has been a good and loyal friend to our family, as we have been to he and his family.
And over the years, we've had a lot of wonderful times together.
Secondly, I've been on that stage.
I've gotten to know all the people on that stage.
And there is no one who is better prepared to provide America with the strong leadership that it needs, both at home and around the world, than Donald Trump.
Now, folks, do not doubt me.
That is a shotgun aimed at the Republican establishment.
Chris Christie has just said that this outsider, who has no political experience whatsoever, is better than anybody he knows to tackle all of these problems, both at home and abroad.
This is, well, I don't want to make too big a deal of it because of the timing, but this is a break.
This is exactly what the RNC does not want happening.
And I still maintain this is one of the reasons Romney was out there throwing down on Trump's taxes was to freeze this kind of stuff from happening.
Here's more Christie endorsing Trump.
The one person that Hillary and Bill Clinton do not want to see on that stage come next September is Donald Trump.
They know how to run the standard political playbook against junior senators and run them around the block.
They do not know the playbook with Donald Trump because he is rewriting the playbook.
He is rewriting the playbook of American politics because he's providing strong leadership that's not dependent upon the status quo.
And so the best person to beat Hillary Clinton in November on that stage last night is undoubtedly Donald Trump.
Well, let's just screw it in even tighter on the establishment.
Let's just throw down even more.
He's rewriting the playbook of American politics.
He's rewriting.
Nobody can keep up with Donald Trump.
Everybody's backwards and behind times.
Trump is so far ahead of the game that these political professionals that have been devoting it their lives have no clue how to keep up with Trump.
And here's even more.
The fact is that desperate people do desperate things.
And I've seen it throughout politics, and so have you.
And so the idea that Marco Rubio can get inside Donald Trump's head is an interesting proposition, but one that's really for the D.C. Pollard game.
What Donald Trump is about is about the people of this country.
You know, you heard, I heard some of Senator Rubio's comments this morning.
None of them were about the people of this country.
When are we going to start talking about them?
All right.
Rubio got to him.
There's no question.
Rubio's out there making fun of Trump, reading his tweets, making fun of his misspellings and so forth.
And they do this deal that Trump's still going on as we speak.
So here's Trump responding to all of his praise from Chris Christie.
They did speculate that he was going to be my vice presidential pick.
Now it's obvious that he's not going to be.
I never even had it in mind.
I don't think he has the right temperament.
I watched Chris do a number in him.
I've almost never seen a meltdown like that in my life.
And you know, it's interesting about people who choke.
I'm, believe it or not, a good athlete.
I've watched people choke over the years.
And once a choker, always a choker.
It never ever changes.
The guy that misses the kick misses the kick.
When he misses the first one, you got to get rid of him because it doesn't work.
Once a choker, always a choker.
And that was one of the epic meltdowns.
He didn't know where he was.
I thought he was going to die.
It's actually a question from a reporter.
Mr. Trump, a few days ago, people were speculating that Rubio wasn't going to go after you and you weren't going after him.
Maybe you had a secret deal to be VEEP.
And that's what Trump's reacting to.
No freaking way.
What if it sent a fact?
No freaking way he's going to be my vice president.
But now, you know, Kasich has to be looking at this and gulping a couple of times because there's only one reason for Kasich to stay in the, well, there's always more than one.
There's fundraising, there's the lecture circuit, there's a chance to earn money the Hillary Clinton way by making speeches.
But I think Kasich did, still does dream of maybe being on the ticket as vice president.
And he's got to be, well, he's maybe doubting his chances now that Christie has officially endorsed, which might launch Christie ahead of Kasich in any kind of line of succession, so to speak.
Speaking of Kasich, here's the second Kasich bite.
I have to say, everybody in that stage last night, Trump included, got the Apple versus the FBI question wrong, in my opinion.
I think they all got it wrong.
And they got it wrong in a way to me that was alarming.
There was an automatic, without any question about it, siding with the government on this.
Let me ask you a question.
Quick question.
Let's imagine a pharmaceutical company.
Let's give me a name of a pharmaceutical company, LaxoSmithKline.
GlaxoSmithKline.
Let's say, give me, no, no, no.
Give me the name of a drug.
What is it?
Prozac, Zolov, give me the name of a drug that's widely prescribed and used out there.
Prozek.
What did I say?
Proloft?
Prozek.
It calms you down, right?
Is that what it's supposed to do?
Anyway, it's widely used out there.
Suppose that you run the drug company that makes Prozac, and you get a phone call from the FBI, and the FBI is asking you in a few pills to put some arsenic or cyanide because you want to make sure those pills end up in the hands of Ayman al-Zawahiri or some other Islamic jihad terrorist.
Would you do it if you ran that drug company?
Would you knowingly poison one of your products with the assurance, oh, no, no, no, it's only going to go to the terrorist.
We're going to make sure that that will only be prescribed to the terrorists.
I know it's rushed.
That's the craziest analogy I've ever heard.
I don't care.
I need to come up with something because this is not about a terrorist's phone.
Apple is being asked to write a specific operating system that ostensibly is only going to be on one phone.
This one, that just doesn't make any sense.
There are Fourth Amendment and Fifth Amendment protections against law enforcement being able, you know, the way this is being done is with this all writs act, this 200-year-old law that basically says if law enforcement's having trouble, you have to help them.
Well, law enforcement is supposed to have trouble.
Where does this end?
If a company can be forced to modify their product in order to make law enforcement's job easier, where does that stop?
Not to mention a company has got a product and the government's coming in and ask them to design it in a way that makes it dangerous and harmful and potentially worthless with the promise, no, but it's only going to be the only version of it.
We don't want you to make more than one cut.
Well, the code's going to be written.
And let me tell you something a little bit about software, folks.
Most people don't think about this because it's too hard.
But these are intricate things, software programs for operating systems.
There are thousands of people that write the software for your iPhone or iPad.
They're in teams.
It's so intricate.
It is so complicated.
But here's the point.
At every stage of development, it has to be documented, recorded, and logged and signed off on by a whole bunch of supervisors in case there's a lawsuit down the road over something that might be a flaw in the software.
There's no way to keep it secret is the point.
Now, Tim Cook at Apple said that it would take a number of people.
You have to take them off their jobs at present, assign them to write this specific government OS, that they would all know what it is, that their supervisors would know what it is, that the logs would know what it is.
It's impossible.
There would only be one copy of it that would then be destroyed.
You can't destroy it.
You've got to keep the record of it.
You have to keep copies of it.
You have to keep the logs of it because of what might involve or be involved with it down the road.
It's not, it can't be a one-off.
It can't be just for Saeed Farooq Skyhook's phone.
But people that normally have this distrust of government, just last night.
Oh, yeah, we can't let anybody stand in the way of getting to the bottom of terrorism.
Well, that's all well and good, but that's not where this is going to stop.
I know.
I can take a break here.
And we will continue trying to get as many of your phone calls in on this because I know you want in.
When do we get back?
Okay, back to the phones.
I promise we're going back to the phones.
We've got Trump soundbites from this rally here where he mocks Rubio.
I'm going to, folks, something happened here.
I'm telling you, this rally, I don't think this was scheduled to go on like this.
Rubio's out there today.
This morning he's in Fort Worth, and he's mocking Trump, continuing what happened last night, laughing at him, making fun of him, reading his tweets, making fun of the fact that they're misspelled.
The audience is eating it up.
I think that what happened in the debate last night from both Cruz and Rubio obviously hit a nerve in the Trump campaign because they are out there today reacting to this.
Not making it try to look like that, but they are reacting to it, and they're going at a thousand percent energy here.
And Trump is just trying to destroy Rubio.
Here, grab somebody 35 real quickly, just give you an example.
I mentioned this in my own words about an hour ago, but this is actually Trump saying it.
I watched Chris take a man apart, and I looked at him, and honestly, I thought he was going to die, Rubio.
He was so scared, like a little frightened puppy.
And he kept saying the Obama phrase over and over.
So then I heard it once, and I said, that's fine.
Big deal.
I'm standing here.
He's right here.
Chris is over here.
And Chris was sort of cool because he's like this.
I couldn't do that.
You know, I want to stand up sort of like straight.
I don't know.
It wasn't over, folks.
He was just getting going here.
Number 36, 3, 2, 1.
This looked like Perry Mason.
That's what it was.
And Chris started going into him.
So he said the Obama phrase once.
I was fine.
Twice.
I said, he just said that.
That was strange, but that's okay, right?
Twice.
Then a third time.
And I said it was like a robot.
And then a fourth time and a fifth time.
And I said, this guy's cracking up on us.
And he was sweating so badly.
I have never seen anything like it.
It looked like he just jumped into a swimming pool with his clothing on.
Now, I'm watching this on both Fox and CNN, and the CNN Info Babe report, I don't know who it is, is reporting on this literally with deer in the headlight eyes.
She cannot believe what she's watching.
And then she's trying to tell viewers what they just saw.
And you can tell she's in shock.
She's never seen anything like this.
And of course, I can totally understand that.
I mean, these CNN people are used to the button-down white shoe caricature culture of pinstriped suits, that foggy bottom of the State Department, everybody prim and proper and so forth.
And they deal with this and they don't know how to react to it.
And they don't know how to characterize it.
And they don't know how to report it.
And so when they do report it, they cannot hide their fascination with it all.
And Trump's out there saying, you know what it's going to be?
It's going to be Merry Christmas.
No more happy holidays.
If I got it right, Pastor, if I get it right, the pastor, he's going to make me, he's going to make me hold to it.
I promise it's going to be Merry Christmas.
We're going to have greatest Christmas parties.
We're going to have the greatest Christmases ever.
We're going to have the greatest country.
We're going to have the greatest borders.
People are going to get in, but it's going to be the right people.
We're going to let them in.
We're going to have the greatest borders.
We're going to have the greatest trade deals, Carl.
It just never stopped for an hour and a half.
Like that.
And wait for it.
Wait for it.
The Politico is out already with an article on the Seven Times.
Chris Christie said that Trump was not fit to be president.
Yes, sir, Bob, that Politico is already out there.
And I guarantee the rest of the conservative media is going to be out there with the long knives out for Christie as well.
This whole thing just got, if it's even possible, this thing got ramped up even more today and this afternoon because it's, as the president of Mexico would say, it's nutcracking time out there now, folks.
And here is, here's Dave and Broad Ripple.
I'm glad I pronounced that right.
Indiana, great to have you on the EIB network, See.
Thanks, Rush.
And intellectual nutritionist dittos to you.
Thank you, sir, very much.
We try.
We try to do our best.
Oh, you do.
You more than try.
You do.
I'm calling the one interesting thing or the dynamic of this election, I think, and you're a big part of this, has been to expose the establishment as the third party that they warned us not to vote for.
And when you think about it, that's who they are.
They're the implausible third party that survives, really.
And this will sound harsh, but when you think about it, it's not.
They survive solely in a protection racket of what is really resume fraud.
They don't deliver.
They promise, they promise, they promise.
They never deliver, and the people have figured it out.
Okay, what does that say about the Democrats, though?
Because the establishment's actually, I mean, when you strip it all the way, the establishment's made up of the same people.
Some of them are Republican, some Democrat, but they're both, they have ideological differences.
But as you see, the Republicans are not standing up for theirs.
No, and the problem is the Republicans figured out they liked all those perks, too.
They abandoned representation in favor of self-service.
And people are at an all-time level of awareness, and they're done with it.
Well, here's what I think about this.
It's interesting that you refer to the establishment now as the third party.
I know what you mean, that they all of a sudden, out of the clear blue, end up the minority.
I mean, they're the outcasts.
They're the ones that are not the primary movers.
This movement, call it what you want, populist, nationalist.
The populism has been around forever.
Nationalism, relatively new as it relates to the current populism.
Nationalism is also a movement that has timeless aspects and characteristics to it.
But this anti-establishment mentality has been around.
It's not new.
It didn't just come to life in this campaign.
And it was not birthed with the Tea Party.
The modern era of this anti-establishment mindset, whatever you want to call it, anti-Washington, anti-professional politician or whatever.
In the modern era, I can trace it back to at least the early 1990s.
And I'll bet you if I thought about it, I could find roots of this stuff all the way back in the 70s.
And I think, now in the modern era, because populism has been around since the country's been around.
I don't mean to say that there's never been populism before.
I'm talking about the current incarnation of it is much older than what people living through it today think.
Trump did not give birth to it.
It's not an insult, a criticism.
You could say Pat Buchanan was the grandfather of all this if you wanted to.
I mean, he's the one that ran against George H.W. Bush in 1992.
And he did it on many of the same premises, sort of Perot, that Trump is running today.
Buchanan's primary assault was on NAFTA, and that was the powers that be, American corporate interests aligned with political interests conspiring to destroy American manufacturing.
I mean, that was a prominent characteristic.
It was beaten back in the 90s.
It was partially beaten back by the ascension of Newt Gingrich's contract with America, the Republicans or conservatives winning the House in 1994.
And that became the home of whatever populism you wanted to describe.
I remember calling Pat Buchanan a populist on this program back in the 90s.
And I remember a lot of people just getting mad at me.
He got a populist.
He's a conservative.
It was considered an insult.
Today it's a badge of honor.
But even back in the 90s and even before that, I think you could trace it maybe even to the 60s with the beginning of the demise of the American culture.
There have been people, small numbers at first, growing and growing, angry and distrustful of what's happening in Washington.
But it was always small.
And the people that gave voice to it were categorized as kooky and fringe.
And then jumping way forward with the Republicans and the conservatives winning the House in 1994, remember what that was thought to be?
That was thought to represent finally a continuation of the Reagan 80s and a further ascension of conservatism.
And there was real anger when that bunch of people failed.
Newt Gingrich, John Kasich, as an example, was a member of that freshman class.
John Kasich of the 1990s is not the John Kasich you saw in that debate last night, for example.
But back then, there was a genuine excitement that conservatism was ascending.
And then the Tea Party comes along in 2010, anti-Obamacare, anti-establishment.
And again, it's thought that it is a conservatism that is ascending.
The media attacks it as such and tries to diminish it by relegating it here to kook status.
When in fact, this has been building and building.
It predates the Tea Party.
You can find definite roots of this all the way back in the 90s.
It has just taken a while.
And I think the reason it's come to a head now is because people understand the country as founded is really at stake here.
The last seven years are not something that portend a bad future.
The past seven years are not something from which we can devise theories of what's to come.
The past seven years are the manifestation of the horror and the evil and all the rotten, terrible things that can happen when the people are ignored and abandoned.
And the political class, for the first official time in people's lives, openly mocks and makes fun of and disregards the people that elect them.
And there's even a strain of this happening on the Democrat side now with whatever's going on with the Bernie Sanders campaign.
But it's real, is the point is.
And this stuff has deep foundational roots now.
This is not just a Trump cult, is the point.
It's, and I maintain to you that the depth of this anti-establishment mentality mood, whatever you want to call it, is so deep.
That's why Trump can't hurt himself with impolitic things that he says or does.
And it's why substantive criticism that in many people's minds exposes Trump as the neophyte, political neophyte that doesn't hurt either.
In fact, the more distance somebody has from anything that reminds anybody of politics as usual, the better.
The more inexperienced, the more incompetent in the ways of Washington, the better.
That's how deep the anger and distrust is.
And that mindset is shared by a lot more people than the establishment thinks.
Now, how big it is, we won't know until there's a presidential race and if all this, as it is now, maintains itself and grows.
But there's sheer panic everywhere in professional political circles.
You can see it.
Here's the evidence of it.
Each and every day, you see the futility.
I guarantee you.
Well, I can't guarantee you, but I'm pretty sure.
Watching a debate last night, certain anti-Trump people, be they pro-Rubio, be they pro-Cruz, be they pro-establishment, whatever, were probably thinking, all right, finally, finally, this guy's been exposed.
This Trump guy's been exposed, and he's nothing there.
There's nothing.
The guy can't handle an assault.
He can't handle any legitimate criticism.
The guy's got nothing.
He's just a big wad of nothing.
And those same people, if they've seen the Trump rally today, have lost all that enthusiasm, and they're sitting there back in the depths of depression, wondering what the hell happened last night.
Because they are still of the opinion this is all fleeting.
Go back to the early moments of the program.
People wanted to know where was all this last night in previous debates.
Where was Cruz?
Where was Rubio attacking Trump months ago?
Why did it not happen till tonight?
And the answer is everybody thought Trump was going to bomb out.
Everybody thought Trump was going to implode.
Or everybody thought Trump was going to quit.
One thing or another, Trump wasn't going to finish.
And in the meantime, nobody wanted to anger his voters.
So they didn't go after Trump because they wanted to be there to pick up Trump's voters when it was widely assumed he would quit the race or be defeated or what have you or implode.
But it isn't happening.
And so now the anti-Trump forces are left to lament that, yeah, it was great last night.
Oh, man, but they're all reporting it's too little, too late.
You can read the fatalism, defeatism in some of these people.
And as far as I'm concerned, I just watch it play out here each and every day.
And I find aspects of it, like you, frustrating, maddening, and others I find uplifting and fascinating.
So we just keep our eye on it.
Keep our heads level here, folks.
And that's what I am for.
Don't doubt me.
Back after this.
Here's Larry San Antonio, Texas.
Great to have you on the program, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Can you hear me?
Well, thank you.
Can you hear me, Rush?
Yeah, I hear you.
Here you just fine.
Yes, Mega CAO Extreme Cigar 20-year ditto to you.
Thank you very much, sir.
Yes.
As a veteran of the armed forces, I have to salute you.
You're a true patriot and conservative to me.
You've worn your true colors as far as I'm concerned each and every day of the 20 years that I've listened to you.
My wife has me beat by about eight years.
But, you know, many may not like it or get it, but I do, and I appreciate it.
No, no, no.
Most people do like it and get it.
Yeah, your humor.
You're in the majority, Laird.
Don't worry about that.
No, no, I'm not worried about it.
I just, because I just appreciate your humor.
Your humor is really, in addition to the history in my education on present-day politics, it's your humor that really gets me through, your human wisdom that really gets me through this undivine comedy that I've had to live with the last seven and a half years.
I appreciate that.
And I especially appreciate that because this program does feature a combination of things that you normally don't find in one presentation.
And it's the serious, I mean deadly serious discussion of issues combined with an irreverent, off-the-wall sense of humor with credibility on both sides with immediate transition from one to the other.
You don't often see that in other places.
And I'm glad that you have picked up on that.
Made my day, Larry.
Appreciate it.
Everybody have a great, great weekend.
And we'll be back on Monday with whatever happens between now and then and whatever else is going on.
See you then.
No, the other Kasich bite was, I mean, I can save it for Monday, was his idea for solving the Apple FBI encrypted phone problem was to get everybody in a room with the president and solving it.
That's not.
Anyway, we'll maybe save that for Monday, but that's what that was.
Anyway, have a great weekend, folks.
As I said, and we will be back on Monday.
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