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Dec. 6, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:45
December 6, 2016, Tuesday, Hour #1
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Time Text
Welcome to today's edition of the Rush 24-7 podcast.
Trump's favorability rating is just off the charts.
His favorability rating is surging, ladies and gentlemen.
And of course, it's understandable why.
Anybody can understand why this is the case.
But there are naysayers out there very, very, very troubled, very, very, very worried about the Trump transition.
Very, very concerned about how Trump is just like a bull in a China shop.
He's acting like the president already.
He's trumping Obama.
He's going around Obama.
He's ignoring Obama.
He simply is being insensitive about Obama.
And Obama's still a president.
And people very, very concerned over this China thing.
This is all funny to watch.
I have to tell you, I'm getting such entertainment watching this crackup all throughout the Washington establishment.
Anyway, great to have you with us, folks.
Telephone number if you want to join us, 800-282-2882.
So last night, I got an email from a buddy last night who had an observation, and I had been thinking about it too, but it was not in the front of my mind, the top of my mind, consciousness.
But it's a random thought that I'd had over and again a couple, three times.
And basically what this email was, Rush, can you explain something to me?
Why is it that Donald Trump is not rewarding his biggest supporters with positions of substance and power in his administration?
Why is Donald Trump, say, ignoring Rudy and ignoring the Newtster and ignoring others and in fact spending all this time with people who did not support him?
Like Romney is the name that came to mind.
And as I say, I had had that fleeting thought myself.
It was more an observation, not a question.
It was just something I had observed.
And I was thinking about it last night to prepare myself to discuss it with you today.
And it's amazing how things happen.
Because in the process of doing show prep today, I encountered a post by our old buddy Stephen Hayward at Powerline.
We've interviewed Steve.
He's a Reagan expert of sorts.
He's written a book or two on Reagan.
We've interviewed Steve here for the Limball letter.
But his post is called The Machiavellian Trump.
And he basically asks, what's Trump up to?
And here's his post.
News item.
Trump's most vocal loyalist during the campaign, Chris Christie, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, have been completely passed over for senior positions.
News item, Trump meets twice with Mitt Romney, dangling the position of Secretary of State to one of his most severe critics in the whole nomination battle.
And then we see Trump and Ivanka meeting with Al Gore yesterday.
And Trump is meeting with a lot of people who opposed him, a lot of people who mocked him and made fun of him.
And while he has put some of his most ardent supporters in very close positions, like White House advisor staff positions, some of the most visible and prominent longtime supporters of Trump are being passed over.
And in the case of Chris Christie, you could even say publicly shamed to an extent.
And Hayward has posted a couple of, well, an excerpt from the book The Prince by Machiavelli, which deals with this exact phenomenon.
And essentially, without reading the writings of Machiavelli, I'll just paraphrase it for you.
It's his book, The Prince.
And it's uncanny.
It's uncanny how applicable what Machiavelli wrote hundreds of years ago is to what Trump is doing today.
You've always heard the allegation, that's very Machiavellian.
And it's an insult in many cases, because Machiavelli was a strategist and he was practiced in the art of deceit and in human nature.
But I'll read it to you explicitly, but here's the paraphrase.
The paraphrase is that it's always better for the prince.
In this case, Trump, the prince is the primary subject.
The prince is the leader.
The prince is the winner.
The prince is the offender.
Prince is the person everybody bows down to.
Not a royalty prince, just top dog.
And Machiavelli didn't theorize.
He stated that the prince is much better served by putting opponents, people who opposed him, in positions of power because they must, in order to secure and save and operate in those positions of power with approval, they must perform by action their duties in unquestioned loyalty to the prince.
Whereas if the prince goes out and finds the people who were his most vocal supporters from the get-go and puts them in positions of power, the odds are they're never going to be happy because they're always going to think they should have had more.
And so they're going to be resentful in large part throughout the term of their service.
Whereas the people who oppose the prince will end up being owned by the prince because the prince is saving them.
Normally, opposing somebody who's been elected president, you're done.
You're finished.
But if the prince brings some or any of those people into his orbit, those people are grateful.
And if, and true, I think it's true in this case, this is public life.
These are people who live and die by their reputations.
They live and die by virtue of what people think of them, by their resume.
And so the Machiavellian theory is that the people who opposed you the most vociferously, the most rudely, I mean, that you bring them in, if they're qualified, you bring them in and you own them because they will have to continue to prove their loyalty day in and day out by virtue of action, not words.
So the theory is bring in Romney and he'll become Trump Jr.
He has to in order to stay there.
He will not come in and try to sabotage and overthrow Trump.
This is the Machiavellian theory.
Now, it doesn't apply to everybody.
Romney might be somebody who might try to perform sabotage internally, but that would have to be remained to be seen.
This is theoretical here from Machiavelli.
Anyway, I just find it amazing.
Last night I got this email from somebody observing the fact that Trump is really not giving these ardent supporters of his much attention at all.
They're not showing up at a Trump Tower elevator cam.
They're not being reported as visiting with Trump.
The news about them is that no positions are being considered.
In the case of Rudy, you couldn't find a more eager, a more loyal, a more tireless, day in and day out advocate and supporter and campaigner for Trump.
And what is the story on Rudy?
Well, we have some problems here with potential conflicts of interest.
His business ties, Secretary of State, not sure.
And then the list of potentials expands and the news then, the narrative becomes, it's sad for Rudy.
I guess he's not going to get the gig.
And who is, for a time, at the top of the list?
The one guy who went out of his way to destroy Trump.
Mitt Romney.
And yet, that's who Trump went to dinner with, had a couple of meetings with, very public, praised Romney.
This is all very Machiavellian.
Machiavelli.
Well, it's not that.
It's being asked here if it's kind of like keep your friends close to your enemies closer.
Perhaps, I mean, that might be a good way for low-information voters to look at this.
But it's actually far deeper.
It's much more intertwined.
I don't want to say manipulative, but it's brilliant in its theory.
And again, here I am thinking about how I'm going to answer this question because this guy emails me last night, and I've noticed it too.
And then today, before the program starts in the process of show prep, I just happened to check the Power Line blog, and there's Stephen Edwards Post.
You want to hear a little bit about how Machiavelli actually wrote it?
Remember now, Machiavelli goes back to the time of the Borgias.
So this is like listening to William Bradford's journal.
I mean, you have to read it two or three times.
It's from book 20 of Machiavelli's The Prince.
The Prince will always be to win over to himself with the greatest ease those men who in the beginning of a principality had been enemies.
The principality in this case is the campaign.
So the prince will always be to win over to himself with the greatest ease those men who, in the beginning of a principality, had been enemies and who are of such quality that to maintain themselves, they need somewhere to lean.
In other words, they've just been decimated.
They've just been wiped out.
The prince has just made mincemeat of them.
Associating with the prince is the only hope they have of staying relevant in the principality, i.e., politics.
These people are all the more forced to serve the prince faithfully as they know it is more necessary for them to cancel out with deeds the sinister opinion one has taken of them.
In other words, they have to prove it every day.
They have to prove their loyalty every day, not just saying it.
They've got to prove it by deeds.
They've got to show every day.
In other words, Trump will own them in sense of loyalty, loyalty to the agenda, fealty to the cause.
And so the prince always extracts more use from men who had been his enemies than from those who, while serving him with too much security, neglect his affairs.
Meaning, you go out and get the people that were with you from the beginning, and their motivation for wanting to be with you is different from the guys you vanquished.
He goes on to say in the next paragraph that the problem with picking the people who were your most ardent supporters is they're never happy.
They think they should have gotten more.
Whoever gets press secretary thinks they should get a policy position somewhere, like in the cabinet, or people that get secretary of agriculture think, no, I should be state.
And they're always thinking Trump doesn't see them the way he should see them.
They're always dissatisfied.
Not always.
I mean, look, these are works in human nature, but this is the Machiavellian theory: your friends, you bring them in, they always think they were the most loyal.
Every one of them does.
Every one of them thinks they are the most deserving.
Every one of them thinks that they need to be the most rewarded.
Here's the next paragraph.
And again, I'll translate as necessary.
And since the matter requires it, I do not want to leave out a reminder to princes who have newly taken a state through internal support within it.
Meaning, I don't want to leave out you people who just won an election.
That they consider well what cause moved those who supported them to support them.
In other words, Trump must figure out why the newts, the Giulianis, the Christie's, and pick any name you want, he must figure out why they supported him.
Very, very important.
If it is not natural affection, if they supported him for reasons other than they genuinely like him, if it's only because those supporters were not content with the state of affairs beforehand, he will be able to keep them his friends with trouble and great difficulty because it is impossible for the prince to make them happy.
And while reviewing well the cause of this with examples drawn from ancient and modern things, he will see that it is much easier to gain as friends to himself men who were happy with the state beforehand and therefore were his enemies than those who, because they were not content with the state, were his friends.
They gave him support in seizing the state, but their motivations must always be ascertained.
Why did they support?
Was it to be chosen?
Was it to be on TV?
Was it to get close to the seat of power?
Or was it genuine?
All of these things the prince must ascertain in deciding which of his supporters and enemies to surround himself with.
You can agree with it or not.
You can think it's full of it or not.
To me, it's karma.
I'm sitting here last night.
Well, I'm sitting there, as I was in my library at home last night, and I got this email, and I'd been thinking about it anyway, and then it all comes together by happenstance when I check the power line blog today.
Let's take a brief time out.
We'll come back and continue after this.
Don't go away.
Having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have El Rushbo serving humanity simply by showing up.
Grab audio soundbite number two.
You might remember a discussion we had on this program after the Hamilton cast dissed Mike Pence when he was in the audience for a performance.
Last night on Tucker Carlson tonight, the Fox News channel, he spoke with a law professor at George Washington University by the name of Jeffrey Rosen.
And he had an op-ed in the New York Times: States' Rights for the Left.
Everybody's worried about how does the left deal with Trump?
What do they do?
Democrats have been emaciated.
They have no, no power in the states anymore.
They don't have any control.
No governorships are very few, no state legislatures.
And everybody's how the Democrats going to battle Trump.
This guy had an op-ed in the New York Times that Tucker Carlson wanted to talk to him about.
And so the question is: my entire lifetime, the left has derided the idea of states' rights because they're big, big federal government people.
They want the states to be totally subservient to the federal government.
Here you come saying the Democrats need to start advocating for states' rights.
What are you talking about?
From the time of the founding until the New Deal, it was the Democrats who were the party of small government, of Jefferson, of farmers and producers.
And it was Republicans who were the party of big government and Hamilton.
I thought Rush Limbaugh was correct to call out the cast of Hamilton for attacking Donald Trump because as Limbaugh said, Donald Trump is Hamilton, the same way that a lot of Democrats have embraced Hamilton.
So this old Jeffersonian tradition has been forgotten to a large degree.
Well, now, when I saw that on the audio sound roster, I said, hmm, I needed to go back and check exactly what he heard me say.
So I went back to it.
It was November 21st.
And I remember it well.
The cast of Hamilton, we later learned, had not even registered.
Well, they hadn't voted.
I think only a couple of them had ever registered to vote back in 2006.
And they lecture Pence from the stage after performance, telling Pence they're very scared, they're very worried because Trump doesn't seem to respect gay marriage, the gay lifestyle, transgender choices of bathrooms and stuff.
And then Trump's just a great danger.
And here they are extolling the virtues of Hamilton.
And I pointed out that when you get down to it, Donald Trump is Hamilton.
Did you know that Alexander Hamilton was an immigration hawk?
He was.
He thought there should be a test to make sure only certain kinds of people were allowed entry to emigrate to the United States.
Here these people portray it.
And I made the point, they don't even know who Hamilton is.
They know their lines and they know their press clippings, but they don't even know the guy that they are celebrating and lionizing here, Alexander Hamilton, because Donald Trump in many ways is Alexander Hamilton.
Thomas Jefferson, this law professor is right.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams did not like Hamilton at all.
They were agrarians, farmers, big believers in states' rights.
And Alexander Hamilton didn't want anybody getting in a country he didn't approve of.
Founded the New York Post, born out of wedlock in the Caribbean, grew up in St. Kitts.
In modern day terms, he came from a broken family.
He was in the Dutch West Indies where he grew up.
It was just uncanny how similar to Alexander Hamilton in many ways, not all, but many ways Donald Trump is.
And this Dumkopf cast pontificating, I mean, it was clear ignorance on parade, and it was arrogance, and it was contestant.
They were preaching as though they're the experts.
It's like all actors who play roles.
They think they become experts in whatever person or situation they're portraying.
And in many cases, they don't know Jack back after this.
And welcome back.
Okay, folks, let's now head to the Donald Trump Air Force One tweet.
And as with most everything that you see in the drive-by media, there's much, much more to this than meets the eye.
There's much, much more to this than it might appear.
Let's start with the Trumpster himself in New York City in the lobby of Trump Tower.
He came out of the elevator and sought out the media for this.
He was not being peppered with questions.
He came out of there.
I watched it.
He came out of that elevator and walked up to where the bank of cameras or microphones, or maybe some journalist was there.
Walked up and purposely made the point here that the Air Force One replacement order is just out of control and we need to cancel it.
The plane is totally out of control.
It's going to be over $4 billion for Air Force One program.
And I think it's ridiculous.
I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number.
We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money.
All right, now there's some things that I was reading my tech blogs on this today, and I just love this.
They're typical young whippersnappers.
They think they know everything and that Trump is this raging idiot.
And so they cite all the stats of what a Boeing 747 costs without factoring in the modifications necessary to make it an Air Force One.
They don't know that there are two of them that are being bought.
I mean, it's just, it's just, it's just funny.
So here's the deal.
As it's currently understood, we're talking about the Boeing 747-8.
That is the largest version of the Boeing 747.
They are not selling well.
Boeing has had to reduce production because orders for this plane are not what they had hoped.
As with all Air Force Ones, there are two, and both travel on every presidential trip.
One is either a decoy or a backup, and the other is the primary.
But they both fly because if one of them has a mechanical, you can't put the president on anything other than this airplane.
Trump cannot fly his own plane as president.
I mean, he may try, but it doesn't have anywhere near the security, the avoidance technology for attacks, missile attacks, and so forth, shielding for various kinds of other attacks to disrupt communications.
Air Force One has a legitimate, fully outfitted operating room on board.
If the president is shot, rather than take him to a hospital, if it's close by, they'll take him back to Air Force One.
And they can even do some turns they wouldn't want to at flight, but if they had to get out of there real quick, if they were, they could.
I mean, Trump's plane simply doesn't have what the law requires for the president to be kept safe and secure.
Plus, it's not big enough.
Now, some of the naysayers here say, well, Trump's just mad, just mad because he's not going to get to fly on it because these two 747-8s are not going to be ready for service till 2024.
So the tech blogs think Trump is just mad because they're not going to get them built soon enough for him to use.
That's not what's going on here.
Now, the actual money involved, Trump says that the contract is $4 billion, and that's just out of control.
That's just irresponsible.
We're wasting money here.
Well, the actual contract details as best I've been able to come up with are these.
There are three contracts to get this whole production going.
And the first three, which are the down payment, totals $169 million.
The two brand new Air Force Ones, according to Pentagon estimates that have been made public.
Now, there could be hidden costs, other things that haven't been made public, but the public cost of the brand new two Air Force Ones is $165 billion.
That's $2.5 billion short of Trump's $4 billion that he says Boeing is going to be paid.
The Air Force announced this plan two years ago.
They promised to use the most proven and advanced technologies and commercially certified equipment to keep costs under control.
Remember, now it's for two airplanes, not just one, and $165 billion is the published cost.
However, there's much, much more going on here, ladies and gentlemen, than meets the eye.
The first item of interest is that the Pentagon, Bob Woodward at the Washington Post, has an exclusive that the Pentagon has buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste.
$125, this is not the $600 toilet seats.
This is $125 billion being given to people and payments to support the existence of a bureaucracy that really has nothing to do with the defense of the country.
It's just a bureaucracy supposedly out of control.
Now, we've got to take this under advisement, too, because it's the Washington Post, it's Bob Woodward, and the left automatically hates the Department of Defense.
They despise them because that's where we go to war, and that's where the weapons of war are.
And you know, leftists and weapons of war from guns on up to nuclear missiles, they just hate it all.
They don't like it, and they've been trying to cut the Pentagon budget for years.
It's interesting that this story comes out as Obama is on the way out, even though it's been researched for a year.
Isn't it interesting the Washington Post never published a story about bureaucratic waste at all for eight years under Obama?
And here we are on the verge of Trump being inaugurated, and here comes this massive story of Pentagon waste.
But we'll throw it in the mix because Trump is making the same case.
$4 billion to two airplanes.
It's ridiculous.
We can't pay Boeing that much.
There's also, ladies and gentlemen, additional information.
In addition to the Pentagon and this $125 billion, are you aware that Boeing donated $1 million?
Whoa.
Is it $1 million or $1?
Boeing were huge underwriters of the Clinton Foundation.
Boeing paid Bill Clinton a number of millions of dollars to go out there and do speeches.
It could well be that Boeing is engaging in business overseas that Trump doesn't approve of, that he doesn't like.
He thinks Boeing ought to bring some of that business, some of those jobs back.
It could also be that Trump is simply negotiating.
This is what he does.
If you've read the art of the deal, you know that he will publicly negotiate and he will call out the people he's negotiating against.
And it could well be that by calling Boeing out and claiming they're charging $4 billion, he's negotiating with them in public.
There's a whole lot here.
And the drive-bys are just treating this as the tweet and the tweet alone.
Look at Trump.
He's out there ripping Boeing $4 billion, Air Force One.
These are the kinds of things that experts are brought on TV to say, this just isn't done.
This is not what happens in transitions.
This is not presidential at all.
This is embarrassing.
I've got a president that doesn't even know what he's doing.
These kind of discussions of contracts should be kept behind closed doors in private matters.
And so we're not airing in public like this.
I don't think you can rule out the fact that Boeing was dancing big and riding hard with the Clintons.
The amount of money that Boeing donated to the Clintons.
I had it right here in my stack, and I must have thrown it away thinking it was a dupe or something that wasn't.
But I'll find it during the break here.
But Boeing and the Clintons have been inseparable.
A humongous amount of money that Boeing donated and expected Hillary to win.
That's part and parcel.
Boeing underwrote the Hillary presidential campaign by virtue of this campaign donation.
Well, on a charitable donation or whatever to the Clinton Crime Family Foundation and hiring Bill to do speeches all over the world for 200 grand a pop.
So it's much more going on here than anybody knows.
Other people are accusing Trump and his ignorance of attacking Boeing's stock price.
And it's just unseemly.
It's not right.
It's not fair.
One thing people are going to have to understand about Trump, he's not stupid.
He's not a bull in a China shop.
You may end up disagreeing with him profoundly.
You may end up not liking him at all before this.
I don't know.
But he's not dumb and he's not ignorant.
And it's not that he doesn't know what he's doing.
He knows exactly what he's doing and is doing it for a reason.
He's doing this on purpose.
There is an objective to this.
The left just can't help themselves, though.
They have to cast this guy.
They have to portray him as somebody that's a walking mental midget that literally has no idea what he's done here by winning the presidency.
Has no idea how to talk, has no idea how to behave.
And they continue to make the mistake of plugging him into their model.
They're plugging him into what they think an accomplished politician is.
And he's not that.
He's never been that, and he's not going to be that.
He doesn't want to be a politician, successful or not.
He is president, and he's going to lead this country in the ways that he's being very open and honest about.
Anyway, let me take a brief time out here.
I'll find these exact Clinton numbers after this and get back to you.
We'll get started on the phones here fairly quickly as well.
So sit tight.
Okay, here's the numbers, the Boeing numbers with the Clintons.
By the way, also keep in mind, Boeing is in the middle of selling planes to Iran.
Let me remind you about this.
Remember the Corker bill, folks?
Senator Corker, Tennessee, came up with a bill during the time Obama was negotiating a nuclear deal with the Iranians.
And the Corker bill was presented to us as the way the Republicans in the Senate were going to keep Obama honest and make sure that he didn't do anything nefarious.
It was a way of getting around the Senate having to vote on this as a treaty.
It actually green lighted Obama to do whatever kind of deal he wanted without the Senate being involved.
That's what ticked everybody off.
The Republicans told us that the Senate was not going to invoke the treaty clause and therefore require 60-some-odd votes in the Senate for passage of Obama's deal.
Instead, they did the Corker deal.
And the Corker bill was going to be a substitute way of the Republicans making sure that Obama dotted all the T's and crossed all the I's.
It was a, well, I'm trying to think of another word for lie.
We were misled.
The Corker bill was actually a green light for Obama and the deal.
And we later came to find out why.
We know that the Republican Party has become a pro-amnesty party because of donors.
Republican Party, as we discussed for the past number of years and really intensely during last year's campaign, the Republican Party became more devoted to its donors, i.e.
money, than to its voters and their desires and ideas.
And we were, we couldn't figure out why are the Republicans, of all people, facilitating a nuclear deal with Iran.
Why would the Republicans want their fingerprints on a deal that allows the world's state-sponsored terrorism to nuke up?
Well, it turns out it was Boeing.
Not totally, but one of the reasons, remember this, Mr. Snirdley?
Iranians, the Iranian national airline, is essentially falling apart.
And because of sanctions and freezing of their money in our banks, they haven't been able to modernize any of their infrastructure, including purchase new aircraft.
So the Corker bill was about getting the sanctions lifted and approving Obama's deal because Boeing wanted to go sell the Iranians new commercial airliners.
And they couldn't do that with sanctions in place.
They couldn't make a deal.
And so the Republicans were instrumental here in making it possible for Boeing.
And Boeing had donated to Republicans to make this point.
You can't throw this here.
You know how Trump is talking about the Iranian deal?
He hates it.
And don't think he doesn't know about all this.
You know, Trump going out tweeting about $4 billion in Boeing and a new Air Force one.
There's so much more behind this than what it's being portrayed.
So there's a possibility here that Trump is really irritated at Boeing for helping facilitate the Iranian nuclear deal or not.
I mean, I'm throwing out possibilities here, but I'm telling you something's going on.
Now, here's the story of Boeing and the Clintons.
In 2010, two months, you ready for this?
Two months after Hillary went to Moscow to broker a $3.7 billion trade deal with Russia, Boeing announced a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation.
In July of 2012, months after the State Department helped Boeing secure major deals in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, Boeing sponsored a speech by Bill Clinton for which he was paid a quarter of a million dollars.
And Boeing also gave Hillary $166,835 in 2016 for her campaign.
So Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State had helped Boeing broker two deals, one in Russia, $3.7 billion deal, which got them a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation.
And in 2012, Boeing hired Bill to do a speech for a quarter million chump change compared to what they've been sending Hillary.
Plus, they sent her about $170,000 in campaign donations.
Trump knows all this.
He's very much aware of the cronyism that's been going on.
And now he's out saying.
Hang on, folks.
Somebody's calling me here.
It's the wrong number.
I heard this.
What the heck is that?
Sounded like a tech malfunction.
I looked over and I saw that was my phone.
Did that sound like a phone ringing to you?
All right.
I did not lose my place.
You thought it was some tech snafu too, wondering what the hell was going on.
I'm sure you thought, what are you doing wrong in there that I'm going to get mad at?
So, Trump is very much aware of all this and goes out and publicly says, We're throwing $4 billion away in this Air Force One plane.
And he said, tear it up, cancel the order.
Well, it's a little late to cancel the order, but I'm telling you, folks, there is much, much more going on here than one little Trump tweet would indicate.
And I think you should use this as a little bit of a teachable moment.
Trump is not the dummy.
He's not the ignoramus.
He's not the inexperienced bull of the China shop that they want you to believe he is.
And as we've just demonstrated here with this one little 140-character tweet about canceling the order for the new Air Force Ones because Boeing is charging too many.
Look at what all the backstory is: Boeing in Iran, Boeing in Russia, Boeing with the Clintons.
This may not sit well with Trump.
So, point is, there's always stuff going on behind a Trump tweet or a Trump story that you don't know.
Trump is not a surface individual.
There's more depth to him than anybody wants to acknowledge here.
Quick timeout.
Back in a moment.
You could buy 65 EIB-1 aircraft, 65 of them for $4 billion.
They're about 60, 65, depending on, well, actually, it'd be a G650, but you could buy between 61 and 65 of them, depending on how you chose to outfit them and paint them.
And so it's a lot of money.
Anyway, we have to take a timeout, folks.
We'll be back.
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