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Sept. 26, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
30:17
September 26, 2016, Monday, Hour #3
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Time Text
Sam, you people, have you have you heard about Trump's debate prep?
What do you think of Trump's debate prep?
Well, he's really not doing any.
I mean, not in the not in the traditional sense.
Just to give you a contract, Mitt Romney started preparing for his debates against Barack Hussein Oh in August, mid-August of 2012.
Romney actually had somebody had a series of Obama impersonators, play Obama to debate.
He replicated the the uh podiums and the lecterns.
He tried to get close to the size of the arena.
He had people come in as uh moderators, and he actually did 90-minute and two-hour actual debate rehearsals, a series of them running through a plethora of issues, and a number of different people playing Obama in one where Trump is doing none of that.
Trump has steadfastly refused to do a single rehearsal.
He has not rehearsed, he has not prepared for these debates by standing at a lectern with somebody pretending to be Hillary, and then somebody pretending to be Lester Holt.
He has studied up on issues from what I'm told, but he has not over-prepared.
He's he's not going to show up paralyzed, not knowing what to say next because he's trying to remember so much of what he's prepared for.
And when people hear this, it depends on who they are.
Some of them go, oh no, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
You mean he's not even trying.
He's not even trying to familiarize himself with the format and the proceedings.
Nope, none of that.
And I think what people don't understand, by the way, greetings, welcome back.
800 282-2882.
It's the Rush Limbaugh program here on the EIB network.
I think a lot of people, many more than I realize, by the way, just cannot relate to.
It's not winging it.
But I guess improvisation is the best way for me to describe it.
Trump is obviously very confident in himself.
He's confident in being on TV.
Big deal, too.
Most people on TV who are not paid professional TV people, are so self-conscious on TV that who they are doesn't come through.
And you can spot them.
You can spot an amateur on TV in a moment's notice.
Their eyes dart all over the place.
And if there happens to be a monitor anywhere nearby where they can see themselves, you will see them constantly glancing at it.
They are so self-conscious they worry about how their tie is hanging.
They will worry about how they look, how they are coming across, and they just are unable to help it.
It's that self-consciousness that destroyed anybody who wants to be an actor cannot be self-conscious.
Not while you're doing a gig.
I mean, you can be self-conscious all day long, but not while you're you've got to get outside yourself.
Now what overcomes self-consciousness is confidence.
And Trump obviously has it.
And he is very familiar and very comfortable being on TV, and he's obviously very comfortable being in confrontational situations, which is what debates can often be, and by definition are.
And so he doesn't feel the need to prepare to do something he does or has done so often, in the in the sense that he doesn't have to rehearse for it.
Now some people say this is he's not taking it seriously.
I don't think it's not taking it seriously.
It's just that most people don't have the confidence that Trump has, and therefore they think they've got to work so hard in prep that they overdo it.
They end up being overcoached, over prepared, and they end up being paralyzed.
Let's say the subject is ISIS, and you've been preparing with counselors and advisors, and they've been giving you this answer if this is said.
If Lester asks you this, this is what you say.
If Hillary points out that you said this back in September, here's your retort.
And by the time they're finished with it, you've got a bunch of things to remember instead of just being who you are.
And Trump has decided he's going to be who he is, rather than try to remember a bunch of coaching.
And it's been this way pretty much through his whole campaign.
You know, people have tried to force various strategies on him and behavioral modes and consultant type behavior, and he's for the most part blown it all off.
One of the most often heard complaints I have, I know some of the people advising Trump.
And the most often heard complaint I hear from him, he doesn't listen to anybody.
Which gives me a little comfort.
One of the things I've often wondered, not often always, is why does somebody need advisors on matters of your heart or your intellect?
I mean, for example, I know what you give me an issue, I know what I think about.
I don't need an advisor to tell me what I think.
I don't need an advisor to tell me how to say it.
But there are all kinds of people who think that they need to tell me, or in this case, Trump.
Well, you know, Donald, you may know what you think, but let me tell you how you better not say it.
Don't do this, don't do that.
So you flood the candidate with a bunch of don'ts or a bunch of things to remember based on what she says or what the moderator says, and you can end up being overcoached into paralysis and paralysis.
And it's obvious Trump has gone the other way to avoid that happening.
But it's all rooted in confidence.
And I think most people don't have the kind of self-confidence Donald Trump has.
And as such, they get queasy when they hear of his uh his his prep routine.
They don't think it's enough.
Or they think he's not taking it seriously.
They think he's being lackadaisical about it.
Not the case at all.
Now, back to the caller's point right before the end of the hour.
I think that this is actually a great, great point.
And in making it, let me use myself as an example.
I've told the stories countless times.
When I run around in public and I meet people who have never listened to me but think they know who I am because of what has been said about me in uh the drive-by media.
The vast majority are shocked and stunned that I am a nice person.
They have been so conditioned to believe.
I mean, even now, folks, even I've been doing this coming up 28, 29 years, even now, if I attend a party or a social gathering where people who have not met me are there, you'd be amazed what they prepare themselves for when they find out I'm going to be there.
And one of the things that I am told most often is people expect me to walk in the room, start finding the liberals and picking fights with them.
Start shouting at them and telling them they're wrong and so forth.
This is what people actually think is going to happen.
Or they think that I'm some ogre or some extreme buffoon or couthless impolitic, impolite loud enough, whatever it is, and they're always shocked and stunned to learn it isn't true.
Now the left puts that stuff out because they they can't debate me on ideas, so they try to destroy reputation character, and they do that with everybody on the right who they think is effective.
The problem is they end up believing it themselves.
And I think with Trump, they're coaching Hillary or they're coaching Lester, and they're trying to tell Lester what to do and how to fact check.
And don't let Trump get away with this, and don't let Trump get away.
They really have got themselves, I think they believe that Trump is a fascist, that he's quasi Hitler, that he's all these horrible rotten things.
They actually end up believing the things they end up saying.
And as such, Trump is none of those things.
Trump is not who they believe he is.
He does not behave as they think he's going to.
And it ends up, they always end up shell-shocked or stunned, or their strategies to take him out don't work because Trump is not an unlikable person.
Trump is not a mean guy.
Trump's not a bad guy.
But to them, he embodies all of that and more.
And they end up believing it themselves.
And so they want Lester to take Trump out on the basis that he is all of these negative personality-oriented things.
Because they don't understand how Trump operates.
They don't understand the pacing and the leading that he does.
They don't understand self-confidence.
They think everything is scripted and rehearsed and because that's how they do it.
So they always, in many cases, end up like how many of them thought George W. Bush is an absolute stupid fool idiot.
And then they find out he's not.
He beat them twice.
And both times they thought they had it done in a slam duck because Bush is a stupid idiot, dumb cowboy-sounding loco weed.
They end up underestimating everybody because they have such an extraordinarily high opinion of themselves, coupled with their false construct of their enemies and opponents.
That up against the wrong person, and Trump is the exact example of the wrong person.
It can backfire on them big time.
And I think that is a possibility as well.
You notice that on the Hillary side, we read stories about Hillary's debate prep and the consultants and their advice.
Nobody, nobody is saying, hey, look, this is easy.
Just let Hillary be Hillary.
That's all she got to do, just let Hillary.
Nobody don't, oh no, no, no, no.
We can't.
We can't trust that.
But with Trump, it's let Trump be Trump.
Just let him be who he is.
Don't do this overcoaching and all of this positioning and just let him be who he is.
They don't dare.
Now Obama's advice was Hillary, just be yourself.
Worst piece of advice he could have given her, by the way.
So anyway, it's going to be fascinating to watch this all play out.
Because I know that the left creates these false, these erroneous stereotypes of people.
And it's not just for public consumption.
They end up believing all of this insanity that they attach to their political opponents.
And oftentimes, not always, I mean, sometimes they, as you well know, get away with it, but oftentimes it comes back and uh and bites them big time.
Let me take a brief time out.
I want to get back to more of your uh your phone calls.
And I we need to go back and touch on this document up from Friday.
Uh Hillary's emails and what we've learned.
I mean, this is just stunning when we learn that Obama knew all along that she had her own private server and was communicating with her under a pseudonym, a fake name, while Obama has maintained that he didn't know she had a private server until he read about it in the news.
And because now we know Obama knew and was communicating with her under a fake name.
We now know that the FBI investigation was a smokescreen and cover-up from the get-go, from the beginning.
They were never, there was never going to be any serious investigation because it involved Obama.
And that just wasn't going to happen.
There was no way the FBI is going to investigate and recommend that Hillary be prosecuted if it involves and hurts Obama.
It just, and now we know that's they gave immunity out to people that otherwise would have been charged and punished if convicted.
It was just, it was a cover-up from the get-go.
And I remember Andy McCarthy wrote about this a long, long time ago.
When the when Hillary's email scandal first surfaced, McCarthy wrote a great piece, what if Obama is in on this, essentially.
What if Obama knows?
What if Obama is communicating, sending her emails?
What if classified information is passing back and forth between Hillary and Obama?
And it would be because everything the president does is born classified.
That's the term.
He writes you a memo.
It's classified.
He shares with you his his midnight basketball in CAA picks.
That's classified because it comes from him.
So Hillary was lying.
Oh, there was no classified information.
I didn't, I don't I didn't even know what it was.
I saw C, I thought it was for paragraph C. Lying like you can't believe from the highest levels of our government about this.
And a smokescreen FBI investigation that was meant to do nothing but distract and obfuscate from the beginning.
And we learned all this only on Friday.
Some suspected it early on.
Some just couldn't believe it Obama didn't know, like he maintained.
I didn't know she had one of those uh servers.
I read about a news.
I found about about it like the rest of you.
No, he knew about it.
He was so aware of it, and he was so aware of the dangers that he used a fake name, a pseudonym.
Be back, folks.
Sit tight, more straight ahead.
Back to the phones we go, as I assured you and promised you, we go to Elkton, Virginia.
This is Daryl.
Great to have you with us, sir.
Hello.
Hello, Rush.
Thanks for taking my call.
Uh I was wanting to get your take on Pat Cruz's uh coming out supporting the Republican nominee and his uh said he would vote for Donald Trump.
I heard him on Beck this morning and it got pretty contentious with Beck.
And Beck pretty much said that it was a calculated decision.
What's your take on it?
Well, of course it was calculated.
What uh before I go is it bother you that it was calculated?
No, not at all.
So you you don't have a problem with him endorsing Trump.
Absolutely not.
Okay.
Um yeah, this is I think Ted Cruz is a great conservative.
I I've and I always have.
And I think he is a he's trustworthy with conservatism.
This was not handled well.
Uh my my take on this, I I couldn't believe that he didn't understand.
I don't know putting it that way.
Because I don't think he's dumb.
Okay, Trump offers you a prime time slot at the convention.
You have to figure, if if you're Ted Cruz, that that offer means that there's an expectation that you're gonna join the party, that you're gonna endorse.
And if you don't endorse, you're at least going to say you support that you're gonna vote for the for the nominee.
But I I think it was a miscalculation to think that he could go to the convention and stand on principle, as he was trying to do, and not endorse because the cal you need to talk about the calculation, the calculation that he was making was to stay true and loyal to the conservative base for his future.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, that's what politics is.
He wants to run again.
He's Mr. Conservative, and he wants to maintain his credibility, and he decided that endorsing Trump at Trump's convention Would not be appreciated by the conservative base.
And I thought I I think he thought he would have many more accolades doing what he did than what he ended up getting.
I think he got the exact opposite of what he was expecting to get.
So I think that was a miscalculation, because he ended up.
I mean, after all, this is about winning the White House now, not in 2020.
It's about winning it now.
It's for a host of reasons, chief among them is keeping Hillary out of it.
And doing it the way Ted did, he managed to upset some clearly conservative donors, and he got a lot of Trump people mad at him.
And if he was going to endorse Trump anyway, as he did, then what he did at the convention wasn't necessary.
He could have avoided all of that.
Now it's easy to look back in hindsight and be critical, but he could have, if he was going to endorse any, if he knew he was going to endorse anyway.
And I at some point he's still a Republican, whether he's estranged from the Republican leadership or thinking conservatism as a branch of the party, but still at election time, you know, you come together.
But this has a lot of moving parts.
It's not just that simple.
But I hear the ear-splitting tone.
We'll be back.
And we are back.
Rush Limbaugh executing his signed host duties flawlessly, zero mistakes.
One more thing on the on the Ted Cruz uh situation.
The way things turned out, Ted Cruz ended up being for some, I don't know how many, but for some the last great hope of conservatism.
There are many out there who believe that other conservatives watered themselves down, diluted their effectiveness by supporting Trump or by not opposing Trump.
And in the press, I think Ted Cruz believed and considered, maybe calculated, that he was indeed the last viable remaining conservative in the elected political realm.
And because of that, thought that if he maintained his principles and steadfastly refused to support Trump for principled reasons, plus the continuing honoring of his father and others,
uh his wife, who'd come under criticism or uh defamation, as Cruz thought, uh, that this would redound to his benefit to the rock solid conservative movement uh in the country.
But if he knew all along that he was going to endorse Trump, then the the play he made at the convention by saying vote your conscience and having that interpreted as vote against Trump or don't vote Trump or however it was interpreted, it just he went through a bunch of things that turned out to be not necessary to go through.
Either don't go, if if you're not going to endorse ethics, don't go.
That was not the place to make a principled stand.
Not the Republican convention, when at that point in time the enemy is Hillary Clinton.
Donald Trump has ceased being the enemy at that point, except to uh well, you know, some conservative organizations and so forth.
But in terms of the the vast majority of American people are not in the conservative movement, wish it were otherwise.
There are a lot of conservatives, don't miss that, but the conservative movement and the people who think they define what that is, it's not a majority club, wish that it was, but it isn't.
And at the convention, the focus obviously had become on beating Hillary Clinton, and Trump was the vessel for that, and a lot of people were unhappy with it, obviously so at Trump.
Ted tried to uh establish his principal bona fides there, and now he's got people questioning whether he is principled, and I think it's unfortunate.
Some of the reaction that he's gotten is oh my God, we've lost, we don't have anybody now.
Oh my god, Ted, we lost that really contrary, oh no, what and it's not that dire.
It isn't that dire at all.
Except to some it is.
But I don't believe that it is.
Anyway, I don't want to get too far in the weeds on that.
That's another subject as far as as far as uh Ted Cruz is concerned.
Uh I I have no question about his conservative credentials, bona fides, commitment, principles, any of that.
I just think he made an error in his political calculation over how to deal with things at that convention.
If he wasn't going to endorse, I think it would have been better not to go.
Pure and simple.
Especially if he I don't know what he knew then.
I don't know if that night that he spoke, if he knew that he eventually was going to endorse Trump or not.
But if he did, if he knew that eventually he was going to have to, and look, he's still a Republican.
There are still demands on Republicans.
Let me tell you why.
Let me find something here.
Uh I'm gonna have to find this after the break because I got things out of order here.
But I've got a great example in front of me.
Here it is.
This is why there's still a future for Ted Cruz and any number of conservatives.
This little blurb, it's a tiny little story here.
It's in the Washington Examiner, and the headline to this piece, Wolves in Sheep's Clothing.
And I'm just gonna read a couple of excerpts from it to really get to the point of this.
The summit, backed by groups representing young conservative and Christian voters, will hear from a number of Republican lawmakers who support renewable energy and want conservatives to take back leadership from the left on the subject and to some degree climate change.
Former presidential candidate Lindsey Graham of South Carolina tops the list of Republicans, addressing the conservative clean energy summit being held Thursday on Capitol Hill.
Graham will be joined by Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a key Republican advocate for wind energy subsidies, and a senior member on the Senate Finance Committee.
Michelle Combs, the founder and chairwoman of Young Conservatives for Energy Reform, said the summit will be mainly focused on educating lawmakers and voters on the issue.
And to believe that it's okay for a conservative to support clean energy from wind, solar, hydroelectric, biomass, and other resources.
Now, some people are going to look at that and they're gonna think they're gonna conservatism is dead.
The conservative movement is dead.
If this is what it's become, that we have got to on a yet another issue, we have got to join the left.
We've got to get ourselves involved somehow in the climate change movement by showing that we are for renewables because we are desperate to get ourselves in the conversation where people understand we are for sustainables.
Sustainable, by the way.
Don't doubt me, sustainable is a key word in the vocabulary of millennials.
They believe the way to reach them is through sustainability.
The reason they believe in global warming, by the way.
Aside from the fact that they have been inundated with it since the time they've been watching Captain Planet cartoons on Saturday morning, thank you, Ted Turner.
They have just been deluged with all of this propaganda on climate change.
And a huge number of millennials, 18 to 34-year-olds, seriously believe that by the time they're 65, the planet might not be habitable.
It's absurd.
I have a story in the stack today.
All of these little islands like Diego Garcia and some others that were thought to be dwarfed by rising sea levels are actually expanding.
The square mileage of some of these islands, remember you've seen the pictures and the predictions.
In a few short years, this little island will be overrun by rising.
None of it's happening.
But they think it is.
By not caring and destroying the environment with driving certain cars and all the things that they've been told their parents have done and their grandparents.
And so sustainability is a key word to millennials or young conservatives.
And if you tell them that something's not sustainable, then they will not be for it.
So you tell them fossil fuels are not sustainable.
You tell them modern-day capitalism isn't sustainable.
They fall for it.
Sustainability because they're afraid that their parents and grandparents literally have damaged the planet so bad it may not be able to support life by the time they reach retirement age.
I'm stunned when I found out just how many of them think this.
So obviously, here's an effort to get in on this, not by informing them of the truth, but by trying to convince them that, yeah, we think what you think too, even though we really don't, and even though we know they're wrong, we're gonna get out on it.
We can't afford not to.
Well, that's not what conservatism is, but that's what it's become in so many damn ways.
It's become that way on immigration for some leaders, not all.
Take your pick.
Any number of issues like this, where you you combine electability with conservatism, and what ends up being compromised is the conservatism.
And this is what there's there's still opportunity for principled conservative leaders, but the pressure is on to join the Democrats and the left on all of this wind, solar, renewable stuff.
Not that there's anything wrong with it, folks, but it's not.
The motivation behind it is all wrong, and how far along we are in it is all wrong.
There's no money to be made in it anyway.
I'm I'm way long here, and I don't have much time, and I'm not really gonna be able to say everything I want to say about this, so I have to do it another day.
Back after this.
Don't go away.
Okay, well, we're primed and we are ready, and all we can do now is sit back and see what unfolds and measure that against all the expectations the media tried to set.
It'd be fascinating to compare what happens to what they hope today and right now happens.
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