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Jan. 26, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
36:19
January 26, 2017, Thursday, Hour #2
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Yes, America's Anchor Man is away, and this is your official EIB anchor baby.
Honored to be here for as long as it lasts.
Just uh snuck over the snuck over the border uh little earlier this morning, came through the first piece of the new Keystone pipeline.
Just uh they're just it's it's just straddling the 49th parallel there at the at the moment.
Just one piece, but uh they hope to have the whole thing completed and it'll be in the Mississippi Gulf by uh next Thursday, I should think.
It's all the but I don't think I don't think the pipeline protesters I think these I think these uh protests uh when people have a different view of this, Mr. Snadley, but the but uh the idea that this is gonna be a new Tea Party movement, these protests in the street, I don't think so any more than Occupy Wall Street uh turned out to be a new Tea Party movement.
I don't think these guy I don't think these people are in the persuasion business.
I think they're in the shoring up the base business.
And that's what that's what these protests, both environmental protests and the so-called women's protests are gonna be.
I mean, everybody loved.
Every you know, everybody loved that Ashley Judd speech when she goes, I feel Hitler in these streets, his mustache transformed into a toupee.
It was great.
It was magnificent.
It couldn't have been any better than if Trump had actually paid her twenty million dollars to go out uh and absolutely entirely subvert the crowd.
But all and it and it will get a lot of money for the George Soros groups and all the rest of it, and going and wearing whatever those pink hats were meant to be.
I don't know.
I I looked at some of those pink costumes those people were wearing.
I was thinking, what is that little what's that little thing over there?
I don't know quite what that is.
Well, I I don't know what it I didn't I understand they were meant to be uh whatever they call them, lady parts or whatever, uh but they didn't look an anatomically correct to me from what I remember a biology classes.
A long time ago now.
Uh but that isn't gonna go anywhere.
That really isn't gonna go anywhere.
That's just shoring up.
Uh that's that's shoring up the people who fund fringe groups.
And the entire Democrat argument uh throughout the election season was that these are not fringe groups.
They're what they're called the coalition of the ascendant.
That old white guys are on the way out, and Hispanics and Muslims and gays and uh transgendered are the wave of the future, and eventually all the old white guys will be dead, and then everyone will be Muslim and transgendered, and the Democrat Party will rule for all eternity.
And in fact, it turned out that the the coalition of the ascendant isn't actually that ascendant.
Maybe it will be one day, but it's not gonna be on the evidence of things like these marches in Washington, which are just driving them uh ever further back into fringe category.
And I I rejoice in that.
I think it's great, I think it's great to see that.
Um something interesting is underway here uh when uh Rush spoke about this a couple of days ago, when when you look at the uh auto guys coming out of uh the White House, and uh and as interesting as anything that happened there was when they said, Well, they'd never been there during the entire Obama years.
Yeah, because they didn't matter.
Because coalition of the ascendant, it has room for public sector unions, government unions, which shouldn't exist at all.
If you work for the government, there's only one government, uh, and uh uh and that's uh the uh and you're paid by the taxpayer, and you should not have a union for that.
But these private sector unions, they've been totally ignored, totally ignored uh during the Obama years, and they were happy just to get an inv invitation, just have Trump come and see what they're saying.
And uh it will be uh problematic for the Democrat Party.
Uh if a third a third, what is it, what is it, a third of their entire congressional representation comes from just three states California, New York, Massachusetts.
And uh what they did on on Saturday is a good way of ensuring they're confined to ever fewer states.
And that's tough because he to you may not like the electoral college and you may want to just have a guy elected by popular vote, but you've got to get actually a majority of the states to go along with that in a constitutional amendment if you want to do it.
And as long as you just can't uh just ghettoizing yourself in fewer and fewer states, that's that's gonna be a uh a problem for you.
I wanted to say a word uh before I forget about Mary Tyler Moore who died uh uh yesterday, age of eighty, can't really I uh for for fellas my generation can't really believe she's she was eighty.
Uh but I loved I love Mary Tyler Moore.
I said rather jocularly on this on this show once uh that I saw the Mary Tyler Moore show as a foreigner.
I thought, wow, that's great, I gotta go to America and live like that.
And it wasn't entirely unserious, because I thought it was just I thought working in the media was like that.
It's like they're brutal uh at the EIB network.
It's not at all like working at WJM TV.
But I got a little tribute to uh Mary on my TV show tomorrow night, uh the Mark Stein show, uh that way it's easy to remember and also easy to forget.
Uh and that's from uh CR TV.
I got a little tribute to Mary.
But uh and I I didn't I'm not gonna talk about the politics.
So I'm just gonna put this out there.
It's the least important thing about Mary Tyler Moore.
But in the 1970s, she was a glorious Steinem liberal.
She wasn't on the show.
That's why you can still watch the Mary Tyler Moore and laugh your head off.
Whereas if you remember other 70s sitcoms, basically all the ones that Norman Lear did, like Maud, where uh B. Arthur became the first sitcom character to get an abortion, all the all the politicized sitcoms that Norman Lear did in the 70s.
You can't, I don't care how many cable channels you've got, you can't find a rerun of Norman Lear'sitcoms.
Because they were all up to the minute, which meant that 20 minutes later they were stale as old cheese, all those activist sitcoms.
And it's the same when you look at a lot of the snarky dweeby sitcoms around today where it's just snippy guys sitting around sniping.
Uh, and they're gonna they're not gonna be re-runnable in five, ten years' time as well.
They'll be like Maud.
Uh you won't you're not gonna see that anywhere.
But Mary, the Mary Tyler Moore show wasn't like that.
But interestingly, she was a glorious Steinem liberal in the 70s who moved very far to the right.
Not total, we're not talking me right, we're not talking Rush right, but she moved uh 75% of the way in our direction.
And at the end of her life, uh she was watching a lot of cable TV, listening to uh talk radio.
She was kind of, she described herself as a sort of libertarian centrist.
But she she had moved fairly uh significantly uh across the political spectrum.
And it's interesting uh to me that uh as I said, it's the least important thing about her.
She was a fabulous comedic actress, she was also a pretty good dancer, uh good singer, she did a lot of things very well.
But it's interesting to me that even Hollywood liberals are open to persuasion.
Poor old uh poor poor old uh Lou Grant, Ed Asna, who who went the opposite way, he played this hard-boiled all American newsroom guy on the Mary Tyler Moore show, and he's like off with Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro uh now.
That's how far he's gone the other way.
So he always found Mary in re in the last few years he he loved Mary, but he found it a little bit hard to take because she'd gone one way and he'd gone the other.
And that teaches us something.
Politics is the art of persuasion.
Uh and uh I'm all for ideological purity and all the rest of it.
That's fascinating.
But not if you're just draining your own swamp.
If you're if you're saying, well, uh this guy only agrees with me on 80% of things, so he can't be in my swamp.
And that guy, well, I thought he was pretty sound, but it turns out he only agrees with me on 95% of things.
So he can't be in my swamp.
And what Trump did, uh, and I think it was necessary to do this, is he found ways to bring people uh to vote for him who would not have voted for Jeb Bush, who didn't want to be told that uh illegal immigration is an act of love or anything like that.
And I think that's that's how he intends to govern.
And that's a real threat to the Democrats.
Because we're really in a new culture war.
It's the same culture war they have in Europe, where people uh don't want to be peep there there's There's policies that the people are opposed to, but that both political parties are in favor of.
And it's the same as in Europe.
In Europe, essentially, uh left and right are agreed that you should let in all the Syrian refugees.
There's nothing can be done about it.
There's no point trying to stop it.
And the people, whether they're of left or right, actually don't want a lot of that.
And it's this exactly the same thing here.
Trump is Trump has issued these executive actions on subjects on which the vast majority of Republicans and a significant number of Democrats are with him.
They want jobs.
They want good jobs.
They don't see the need for mass unskilled immigration.
They don't see why we should just keep uh, even if it's only a tiny, tiny percentage of refugees of immigrants who go full-scale bananas at the Boston Marathon or in San Bernardino or at the gay nightclub in Orlando or Ohio State University or wherever the next one is,
even if it's just a Teensy Weensey percentage, if it's a teensy weency percentage of a hundred thousand people, and then you let in another hundred thousand people, you've still let in more killers.
And uh he uh and and people do not see the need for it.
A government's first duty, first duty is to protect uh the not just uh the security of its citizens, but protect the interests of its citizens and the interests of its citizens have nothing to do uh with with uh with this kind of mass immigration.
So it's interesting to me, uh as someone who liked Mary Tyler Moore as a terrific comedy actress uh to see that she had actually moved, she had evolved somewhere politically uh in the 70s.
And I I found myself uh uh uh I think that I think that that is uh interesting.
And it's uh I found myself as I was listening to Trump on his executive orders, just I've heard of Mary Tyler uh Moore's uh death.
Uh suddenly the who can take a nothing day and certainly make it all seem worthwhile.
That's what Trump has been doing since Monday.
He's taken four nothing days and made them worthwhile.
He hasn't wasted a moment.
And the danger for the Democrats is he's gonna make it after all.
And if he does, you are in big trouble.
Mark sign for Rush, more straight ahead.
Mark Snide for Russia.
Uh, you know, I I made a casual slur against uh Norman Lear and all those unwatchable sitcoms like Maud, you know, the first sitcom character to have an abortion.
Because abortion is comedy gold.
Let's face it.
It's comedy goal.
Who doesn't want to see a sitcom about getting an abortion?
Uh Fred Nashville tweeted, All in the Family, which is a I said you don't can't see these shows anywhere.
No matter how if you've got 75,000 cable channels, you can't see these shows.
He says, Well, uh, Fred Nashville uh tweets, All in the Family as nightly on Family Net and is still genius.
And you know why that is, Fred?
Because that was that's a Norman Lear show All in the Family, but uh based on a British show called Death Us Do Part.
Uh and so Archie Bunker in that show was called Alf Garnet.
And all Norman Lear did was he bought the uh rights to the British uh sitcom and he Americanized it.
And that's why he couldn't screw it up.
And when he did things like Maud, he did screw it up.
And uh when you when you put comedy, when you put comedy, uh you subordinate your comedy to your politics, uh, you are going down a uh you you're going down a road where eventually you end up like uh Saturday Night Live did with their two sir with love parody uh for Obama.
Uh did you see that?
It's out there on the in nobody watches Saturday Night Live, but they watch 45 seconds from it on YouTube uh the following Monday.
Uh and it and if you watch that, it's uh Too So with Love was a number one hit record for Lula.
It's by my uh old friend Don Black.
Uh Don uh also wrote Born Free and Diamonds Are Forever, uh right wrote a lot of the James Bond songs.
And uh Don wrote Two So with Love, number one hit for Lulu, 1967.
It's in the film Two So with Love, where the schoolgirls all sing it to their teacher, Sidney Poitier at the end of the movie.
Uh The guy who has taken us from crayons to perfume.
And the cast of Saturday Night Live sing it to the president.
The whole conservative critique of comedy in the Obama era, of Showbiz in the Obama era, is that they've got a schoolgirl crush on Obama.
And what do they do?
They actually confirm it by singing to Sir with Love.
And I watched the whole stupid number.
Because it's it's Don's lyric.
They actually sang uh the lyric my pal uh Don Black wrote for that song, exactly as he wrote it for Lulu, all those years ago.
God bless Lulu.
I love Lulu.
Uh remind me to tell you I had a wild night on the town with Lulu many years ago.
I adore Lulu.
Uh I would have loved to have seen Lulu on Saturday Night Live.
But instead they get these drones, Saturday Night Live drones singing like dopey schoolgirls to Mr. Principal Obama.
What I kept thinking, this earnestness, this sort of soul sapping earnestness can't be the whole thing.
There's got to be a joke in here somewhere.
Two minutes in, three minutes in, they're just holding it back, so there's going to be some hilarious payoff.
And there wasn't.
Earnestness, great plunking liberal earnestness.
And it gets to, you know, they're all complaining now about strongman Trump.
Oh, strongman, authoritarian Trump.
Whereas they're telling us their preferred relationship is that uh is that the leader of our country is the all-wise school principal, the all-wise school teacher, and we are just his children, and he moulds and shapes us.
That's the sophisticated liberal view of what the head of government does.
Whereas Trump is this uh great leader, authoritarian, it's all gonna end in tears.
We can't have that.
I have never seen any.
That is the death of comedy right there.
Uh and I've I've meant I mentioned this the last time I was here.
You can't they've got they've they they uh they killed their own business for eight years.
And and and during that time, they taught people, you know, because they said you can't make a joke about every joke about Obama is racist.
People then started thinking reasonably enough, they'd like a piece of that action.
So you can't say anything about Muslims because that's Islamophobic.
You can't say anything about transgender people because that's transphobic.
You don't actually have a lot to make comedy about anymore, except uh except dead white males.
So they were the butt of all the comedy.
And you should never lose the ability to see the comedy in your own side.
Uh and for liberals to close out comedians, comedians, and I know Saturday Night Live hasn't technically been a comedy show except for two months in late 1976 when John Belushi was still on it.
But uh just uh it's you're still supposed to be a comedy show.
And to actually say you're right, we did just have a big schoolgirl crush.
We are we are nothing but the adoring uh youth, the children of Principal Obama, the all-wise schoolteacher who has led us for eight years.
You you're killing your own business.
And and for people who like to have a laugh now and again, you might want to think about that, because if the liberals ever do get to make the future they're planning for us, there are gonna be no jokes in it.
No jokes in it.
It's gonna be like they have up in Canada, where uh uh they uh the human rights commissions prosecute people for jokes.
I I wound up in a courtroom in Vancouver in which they'd flown in an expert witness uh from Philadelphia uh to discourse on the meaning of my jokes.
Uh that's how it goes in Canada.
Immediately after that, they uh they they prosecuted a stand-up comedian who'd made the mistake he was heckled in a nightclub, and unfortunately, he was heckled by two lesbians, so he was taken to court for for putting them, he was doing the Don Rickles put-down thing, and that can and that works, except that because he put down two lesbians, he was uh he was convicted of uh putting them down uh lesbianically phobically.
Uh it happens in uh happens in Britain.
In Britain, uh they took a guy to the the police investigated a guy who made a Nelson Mandela joke a week after the uh uh after the funeral.
Uh that's terrible.
there's now apparently rules on when you can and can't make jokes about people.
In the world they're planning for us, there will be no jokes.
There will just be that absolute soul sucking uh glassy eyed re-education camp earnestness of supposed showbiz entertainers pretending to be schoolgirls singing their hymn of devotion to Obama.
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Uh let's go to uh the great Hugh Hewitt.
Hugh is here, and uh he's uh he's got a new book out called the Conservative Playbook for a Lasting GOP majority.
Actually, that's the s I'm uh I haven't been in this country long enough to uh get hold of the way they do subtitles first now on books.
What's up with that?
It's actually called the fourth way.
Don't bother with the subtitle.
It's called the fourth way.
Hugh Hewitt.
He's a professional host, so he knows what a disastrous.
How are you?
I'm great, Hugh.
What was the title of the book?
The book again.
It's called the Fourth Way, the Fourth Way, the Fourth Way.
That's very funny.
They do put the subtitle on top, and I think they do do that.
So how who subtitles with the subtitler daughter when the subtitle is busy subbing titles.
Uh it's an old novelty song from the nineteen twenties, Hugh.
Uh you you have I'll I'll I'll I want to ask you about that fourth way thing in a minute, but uh you're in uh politico all over politico at the moment, uh for saying that Trump is on constitutional thin ice.
What do you mean by that?
Uh I told Katie Curick that if the Democrats win the House, if the Democrats win the House in 2018, they will impeach Donald Trump in 2019 because he has given them uh sword in the emoluments clause that they're building up.
But it's not a prophecy, it is simply a warning about what they will do if they get the majority.
And I don't think you'll disagree with me there.
They're gonna pummel him for two years on the emoluments clause wrongly, because it doesn't apply to him.
George Washington referred to the emoluments clause in his first inaugural address, and it clearly refers to being paid for a salary for a job.
But nevertheless, they'll they will impeach him if they get the House majority, which is why I wrote the fourth way, so that we don't give it back to them.
And and on the the emoluments clause, obviously, uh George Washington had business interests.
Uh but in the modern era, we have basically had uh Republicans and Democrats who come to office and have happen to have a couple of investments here and there, uh that they're involved with rather passively because they belong to the lifetime political class, so it's just a question of selling off a few shares.
Uh th this idea that the emoluments clause can be uh applied to a guy who uh never set a f uh uh foot in the political world until he ran for office is a little bit harder to grasp, Hugh.
The idea that if it's absurd.
I've been arguing with Lawrence Tribe and others that George Washington, as you noted, Mark, had a plantation that was involved in international commerce, as did James Madison, as did Jefferson.
The emolument, as they understood it meant, an office to which a salary was attached.
And Fred Fielding and Doug McCann, Don McCann wrote a uh a great opinion on this, and of course nobody paid any attention to.
Donald Trump is not violating the Constitution.
But if you say it enough times, you know this to be true, they will be believed by our chattering class.
And and and basically they're now saying emoluments means if the uh uh deputy under assistant secretary of trade from Kazakhstan books a room in a Trump hotel, uh that's an emolument.
Exactly.
And what what McGann and Fielding concluded was any fair market arm's length transaction is not an emolument.
And they specifically referenced uh uh Tribe Dead, uh the professor from Parvard got it right this regard.
Ben Franklin received a jeweled snuff box from King Louie, and he had to ask the Congress if he could keep it.
The Congress said yes, by the way, you can keep it.
That's an emolument.
That's what you can't keep.
Right, okay.
It's all ginned up against Trump.
I uh most of that stuff is rubbish.
I was in uh Windsor Castle a couple of years ago, and I saw um a giant uh it was a giant wine cooler that President Pompidou had given the Queen's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, and it was the most hideous thing I've ever seen.
It looked like a giant silver cockroach.
And the uh and the Duke of Edinburgh quite rightly kept it in the basement when in the What were you doing in Windsor Castle?
Uh I was I actually had a reason for wanting to go down into the cellars.
And and one of the footmen pointed out that this was where President Pompidou's emolument of a uh a cockroach-like wine cooler had been placed.
I have the story there.
I'll I'll have to be on my shoe.
Yeah, there is there is a the this is if you gave President Trump a giant gold cockroach, he might actually put it in the lobby at Trump Tower, but it's a different it's a different thing.
Yeah, now your book, The Fourth Way, uh what's the what's the title of that alluding to?
Is that the sort of Clinton Blair third way?
First way is FDR, first way's big government, second way is Reagan, roll back big government, roll back the Soviets, third way was Blair, and the fourth way is Hamilton Trump, which is uh a big, strong 350 ship Navy, some entitlement and uh investment infrastructure spending, which I'm all for if we do it the right way locally, and immigration reform.
We're building the fence, Mark.
I know you've read the executive order.
We're actually you and I've talked about this forever.
We're gonna build the fence, and that is what he promised.
I'm very happy about that.
That's chapter two, and then chapter four is about judges.
It's about stuff we should do.
Just don't do stupid stuff.
Republicans do stupid stuff when they get majorities.
Don't do that, do smart stuff, and Trump will win reelection.
You're trying to square the circle here, because as you know, uh every talk show host in America had a has had a very difficult last 18 months uh because people have been listeners to every talk show have been aware of the gulf, supposedly, between uh conservative ideology and Donald Trump.
And you're you're saying yes, uh they're not quite on the same page, but this is how you square the circle.
That's exactly right.
He uh Trump is actually a Hamiltonian, and he's like Lincoln on the when Lincoln was in Congress, he called for internal improvements.
Trump wants to build things, he's a builder.
And so let him build some tangible Trump trophies.
That's my phrase from the fourth wave.
Let him he campaign for it, he won, he should get it.
And if I hear a Republican stand up and say, we can't give him, say, a tenth of what we gave President Obama in two thousand and nine, I'll be upset with him.
In fact, I told a senior member of Congress today that if you give him a tenth of what they gave President Obama in two thousand nine, he'll accomplish a hundred times more with it because he's a builder.
He will build things like clinics and bridges, he will build uh uh the the the sort of road that was not there before.
We're not gonna repave something.
But I wouldn't give eighty eight hundred and fifty billion like we gave President Obama.
I give him eighty-five billion to build tangible Trump trophies.
Yeah, I mean, the the interesting thing is uh the uh uh that stimulus bill, there actually isn't anything to show for it, except I've seen some of these useless uh massive starship enterprises they put up on the northern border uh for for for border crossings that get two cars an hour.
Uh and and and Obama always went on about the Hoover Dam.
Only government can do the Hoover Dam, only government uh can do the Golden Gate Bridge.
But in fact, we had eight years of Obama.
Where is his Hoover Dam?
Where is his Golden Gate Bridge?
And Trump is actually someone who if he's gonna have if he's gonna spend that money, he's gonna want to see something for it.
That's exactly I to uh in the fourth way I write about uh my first job was at a place called Boadell Pool in Niles, Ohio.
It's a WPA project, the Works Progress Administration project.
It's still there.
It was built in 1936, it's still there, it can still be operated, it can still employ people because it was a building.
If you ask Joe Biden, and I often ask Democrats on my show, would you point me to something That President Obama built with that $850 billion, and they can't.
They really there is a wine train in Napa Valley, which is the only tangible evidence.
Donald Trump will put a critical path out there, and he will be able to point to things that get built and jobs.
And that's why he had the union guys, and he had the trades guys in.
He had the Carpenter's Union, the Steel Workers' Union.
He had the people who build things in to see him on the first day.
He did more outreach in a day than President Obama did in his first year.
It was wonderful.
You you blew hot and cold on Trump during the campaign, including at a couple of points, if I recall correctly, actually asking him to withdraw uh in favor in in favor of somebody else.
How how do you how do you feel about uh and at the time we you a lot of us weren't quite sure whether he was just like staggering through from one fiasco to another, or actually whether there was method in his madness.
And in a sense, uh we're still making that mistake now, aren't we?
When people get upset about why is he still going on about crowd size or voter fraud or whatever.
But in fact, he seems to actually have a very shrewd sense of how to balance uh his personality and his strategic goals, don't you think?
He he plays a great concert with some bad songs in it.
It's like going to see I like John Baez and Jackson Brown or the Eagles or the Stones.
They have a great concert with 20, uh they they have a playlist of 20, and they'll throw a clunker in there.
So occasionally throws a clunker out there, but it doesn't ruin the concert.
I was upset with him over Judge Kiriel number one, and he stopped that, and I stopped being upset with him.
I I like to think that people like me helped get him elected by, you know, here's the guardrail.
You can't attack a federal judge based on their ethnicity.
Access Hollywood jarred me.
I thought we were gonna lose.
I thought it was awful.
I I called on him to get out.
He didn't get out, so I supported him.
I voted for him.
And I've I may have been the only person at 30 Rock on the night of the election to have voted for Trump.
And certainly, if there was a concussion protocol for the media like the NFL has one, we'd all still be in it in the mainstream media because we're still a little bit stunned by him.
But he's had a first great week.
I liked his inaugural address.
And Mark, what did you think about the line?
We will eradicate radical uh Islamic extremism from the face of the earth.
That's uh a pretty big goal.
Yeah, I think so.
And I I uh on the other hand, it's a less insane goal, Hugh, than promising to lower the oceans, which uh Obama did, if you recall.
And and I would say I hope he does it, but because for this reason that I think uh our chances of winning uh are better the quicker we win.
Uh if we don't win quickly, I'm concerned that we lose slowly and incrementally.
And I think that is a I think that's a big danger on on that, Hugh.
But let me let me ask let me ask you about this, because uh just to get back to your fourth way thing.
Uh, isn't isn't the reality that Trump uh, as uh Nigel Farage and the Brexit guys did in the UK, and as uh Marine Le Pen and uh certain other people in uh in in continental Europe are doing,
that they're identifying a group of people that you might call they're not necessarily fiscal conservatives or social conservatives, but they're what you might call cultural conservatives, and that they want their country back, they want to they don't want to lose their country for the sake of a crummy eight dollar an hour service shift at the quickie crap overnight.
Uh in other words, that trade old word for it, patriots.
Uh I don't like the word nationalist because it's been hijacked by the left that defined patriotism.
He's very much a patriot, and the inaugural address, which I replayed today, I was talking about with Dr. Larry and Hillsdale, is very much a classic expression of national identity in accord with the Declaration of Independence.
It's actually quite brilliant after you look at the first time it jarred me because the American carnage line is what stuck out.
But if you do it a couple of times, you realize its brevity is refreshing.
Yep, it's directness is unusual, and it it's gonna last.
It's it left a mark.
And I know when Trump leaves a mark, I've got my own Trump tattoos.
Uh when he leaves a mark, people don't forget it.
And the American Carnage speech is one they will not forget, and that that appeal to patriotism is refreshing.
No, and I think uh I think if you're on the sharp end in Chicago and Baltimore and other uh American cities, uh or in rural areas that have been hollowed out by heroin and meth and the property crime that goes along with that.
I don't think you think that American Carnage line is overstated.
Uh that's great, Hugh.
I'm gonna um because the when you started talking about your Trump stamp, that was uh too much information, as they say.
So we'll leave it there.
Hugh Hewitt's book is called The Fourth Way, subtitle, the Conservative playbook for a lasting GOP majority.
I got it the right way around there.
Thanks a lot, Hugh.
Thank you, Mark.
This is uh Barkstein in for Rush.
We'll take your call straight ahead.
Hey, let's go to uh Carolyn in Cincinnati.
Carolyn, you're live on the Rush Limbaugh Show.
Great to have you with us.
Thank you.
Uh you are definitely my favorite guest host, undocumented or otherwise.
Oh, thank thank you.
I'm uh hoping not to be deported until at least the second term.
I you know, I didn't know there was a registry for Muslims.
That's interesting.
Um, that's a little Madeline Albright fantasy there.
Yeah, I guess so.
I missed that.
Um why can't a Republican controlled House and Senate get the cabinet confirmed?
How is it that little Chuck Schumer is holding the whole process up?
Well, uh, this is uh I mean, putting the House to one side, it's the Senate that's meant to confirm them.
And they have these things that I love the way they always say arcane parliamentary procedures, as if it's something that was chiseled in stone in the 12th century.
It's not, it's basically something that these guys pull out of their butt from one session to the next.
So, for example, uh Harry Reed, uh, we now have we don't need 60 votes, we need 51 votes.
The the difference is, I think the difference this time is that Trump has said, ah, I don't care.
Send me the cabinet in six months' time, no big deal.
Uh, I'm gonna go ahead and start doing this stuff.
And I think that's actually more Chuck Schumer can delay, but he knows that these guys uh are all eventually going to get confirmed.
So all he's doing by the delay, which is completely stupid, completely pointless.
Uh, we're getting uh ridiculous questions at these things.
They've got actually nothing to ask these guys.
They got nothing to say.
Uh and I think I think Trump is actually saying Chuck Schumer can do his worst, and I swat it aside as if it's no more of an irritant than a particularly annoying little gnat who buzzes around me for a bit, but eventually I just squash him like a bug uh against the wall.
And uh that's why he's not bothered about this.
He's not bothered about about little Chuck Schumer flying buzzing round his head for a bit, Carolyn.
Are you still there, Caroline?
I'm here.
I'm here.
I just I don't understand.
And it just it makes me nervous because the Republicans are are just so spineless.
No, no that they appear uh uh you know what what is this parliamentary trick that Schumer has up his fleet?
Well, Schumer can prevent the majority from confirming the cabinet.
No, that's that's that's right.
And you're right to be wary of Republicans, because Republicans always do nothing and then explain to their voters why nothing could be done.
But that's the beauty of this system.
The Republican Party are who they are in the Senate.
Uh and that's that that that's something that can't be changed.
But Trump is saying, I'm gonna do this stuff.
I am moving ahead.
So Chuck Schumer can either try and keep up with me, uh, but the Trump train has left the station.
It's going down the track.
We're doing uh Keystone pipeline, we're doing the border wall, we're doing uh ban on uh immigration from crazy countries.
Uh and uh he can he can sit there tying himself in knots about some deal that the assistant deputy undersecretary of the interior inside a trading deal the guy did in 1978, or a racist remark that the deputy assistant under attorney general did in uh 1953, and he looks stupid.
Uh and yes, you're right, Carolyn.
It would be nice if the Republican majority in the Senate could figure out a way to get these uh uh guys confirmed in a timely manner.
But Trump is showing that this is the Trump administration, and he's not operating to Chuck Schumer's clock.
Chuck Schumer's clock can grind the the wheels of Chuck Schumer can grind exceeding slow, and all that's doing is opening up a bigger gap between the Democrat Party and where the Trump administration is.
Thanks for your call.
We'll take more straight ahead.
President Trump will today sign an executive order related to alleged voter fraud.
An executive order that will follow up on the major investigation into voter fraud uh that was announced a couple of days ago.
So he means it, folks.
That's the message of the past four days.
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