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Feb. 16, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
32:21
February 16, 2017, Thursday, Hour #3
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Time Text
That's right.
Welcome back to the EIB Network.
Rushland Boy here, and we continue now with the Trump press conference.
Over an hour.
And Trump's still standing, still triumphing over these little spitballs that are being thrown his way.
Let's go back.
It's got to be winding down sometime soon.
They're doing this because they feel it, both of them.
And Melania goes back and forth.
And after Baron finishes school, because it's hard to take a child out of school with a few months left, she and Baron will be moving over to the White House.
Thank you.
It's a very nice question.
Go ahead.
Yes.
Hi, this is going to be a bad question, but that's okay.
Because I enjoy watching you on television.
Go ahead.
Well, thank you so much.
Mr. President, I need to find out from you.
You said something as it relates to inner cities.
That was one of your platforms during your campaign.
Fix the inner cities, yeah.
Fixing the inner cities.
What will be that fix and your urban agenda, as well as your HBCU executive order that's coming out this afternoon?
See, it wasn't bad, was it?
That was very professional and very good.
Yeah, we'll be announcing the order in a little while, and I'd rather let the order speak for itself, but it'll be something I think that will be very good for everybody concerned.
But we'll talk to you about that after we do the announcement.
Tells the reporters when they ask good questions and when they're bad.
Very strong on the inner cities during the day.
I think it's probably what got me a much higher percentage of the African American vote than a lot of people thought I was going to get.
We did much higher than people thought I was going to get, and I was honored by that, including the Hispanic vote, which was also much higher.
And by the way, if I might add, including the women's vote, which was much higher than people thought I was going to get.
So we are going to be working very hard on the inner cities, having to do with education, having to do with crime.
We're going to try and fix as quickly as possible.
You know, it takes a long time.
It's taken 100 years and more for some of these places to evolve, and they evolved many of them very badly.
But we're going to be working very hard on health and health care, very, very hard on education, and also we're going to be working in a stringent way, in a very good way, on crime.
You go to some of these inner city places, and it's so sad when you look at the crime.
You have people, and I've seen this, and I've sort of witnessed it.
In fact, in two cases, I have actually witnessed it.
They lock themselves into apartments, petrified to even leave in the middle of the day.
They're living in hell.
We can't let that happen.
So we're going to be very, very strong.
It's a great question.
It's a very difficult situation because it's been many, many years.
It's been festering for many, many years.
But we have places in this country that we have to fix.
We have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people.
We have Hispanic American people that are in the inner cities, and they're living in hell.
You look at them in Chicago.
There are two Chicago's, as you know.
There's one Chicago that's credible, luxurious, and all, and safe.
There's another Chicago that's worse than almost any of the places in the Middle East that we talk about and that you talk about every night on the newscasts.
So we're going to do a lot of work on the inner cities.
I have great people lined up to help with the inner cities.
But when you say the inner cities, are you going to include the CBC, Mr. President, in your conversations with your urban agenda?
Are you going to include the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Caucus?
Well, I would.
I tell you what.
Do you want to set up the meeting?
Do you want to set up the meeting?
No, no, no.
Are they friends of yours?
I know some of them, but I'm sure they're not.
Let's go set up a meeting.
I would love to meet with the Black Caucus.
I think it's great, the Congressional Black Caucus.
I think it's great.
I actually thought I had a meeting with Congressman Cummings, and he was all excited.
And then he said, oh, I can't move.
It might be bad for me politically.
I can't have that meeting.
I was all set to have the meeting.
You know, we called him and called him.
And he was all set.
I spoke to him on the phone.
Very nice guy.
I hear he wanted that meeting with you as well.
He wanted it.
But we called, called, called, called.
They can't make a meeting with him.
Every day I walk in, I said, I would like to meet with him because I do want to solve the problem.
But he probably was told by Schumer or somebody like that, some other lightweight.
He was probably told.
You can't meet with Trump.
It's bad politics, and that's part of the problem in this country.
Okay, one more.
Go ahead.
Lightweight Schumer.
No, no, one question.
Two we can't handle.
This room can't handle two.
Go ahead.
Give me the better of your two.
All of my colleagues, especially by people, it's not your personality or your voice talking about a robot around the country funded by scores in your name.
And can I be honest with you?
And this has to do with racism and horrible things that are put up.
Some of it written by our opponents.
You do know that.
Do you understand that?
You don't think anybody would do a thing like that.
Some of the signs you'll see are not put up by the people that love or like Donald Trump.
They're put up by the other side.
And you think it's like playing it straight?
No.
But you have some of those signs, and some of that anger is caused by the other side.
They'll do signs, and they'll do drawings that are inappropriate.
It won't be my people.
It will be the people on the other side to anger people like you.
Okay.
Anger people like you.
Who is that?
Where is that?
What are you going to do about the education?
Folks, he's enjoying this like I've never seen a president enjoy a press conference.
He's always with these people.
We had a totally divided country for eight years and long before that, in all fairness to President Obama, long before President Obama.
We have had a very divided, I didn't come along and divide this country.
This country was seriously divided before I got here.
We're going to work on it very hard.
One of the questions that was asked, I thought it was a very good question, was about the inner cities.
I mean, that's part of it.
But we're going to work on education.
We're going to work on lack.
You know, we're going to stop.
We're going to try and stop the crime.
We have great law enforcement officials.
We're going to try and stop crime.
We're not going to try and stop.
We're going to stop crime.
But it's very important to me.
But this isn't Donald Trump that divided a nation.
We went eight years with President Obama, and we went many years before President Obama.
We lived in a divided nation.
And I am going to try.
I will do everything within my power to fix that.
I want to thank everybody very much.
It's a great honor to be with you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
That's what he does.
That's okay.
We'll do it later.
That's President Trump wrapping up the pressure.
Wow.
That's what he does at the end of every one of his rallies.
He thanks everybody.
He lets them know that he respects them and appreciates them being there.
And that's what I've always said is the humility of Donald Trump that nobody sees and nobody recognizes because they're not looking for it because they have a bias and a prejudice against the guy.
Okay.
Welcome, folks, to the EIB network.
Our telephone number is 800-282-2882.
We'll be getting to phone calls in a minute.
I just want to re-characterize, or I'm sorry, characterize this press conference.
It started off with the acknowledgement of the new labor secretary, whose name is Acosta.
And then the president literally spelled out what he was doing.
Let's grab audio soundbite number 24.
Here is his opening and explaining what he's doing, what the purpose of the press conference was.
I'm making this presentation directly to the American people with the media present, which is an honor to have you this morning because many of our nation's reporters and folks will not tell you the truth and will not treat the wonderful people of our country with the respect that they deserve.
Unfortunately, much of the media in Washington, D.C., along with New York, Los Angeles, in particular, speaks not for the people, but for the special interests and for those profiting off a very, very obviously broken system.
The press has become so dishonest that if we don't talk about it, we are doing a tremendous disservice to the American people.
Tremendous disservice.
We have to talk about it to find out what's going on because the press honestly is out of control.
And he continued on that theme, and people that were watching this were no doubt cheering because it's absolutely true.
And he gave an example.
And it turned out to be the example that I opened the program with.
I'm at home last night, and I get this news alert from the Wall Street Journal.
And it says that intelligence officials have considered Donald Trump to be so out of touch and so dangerous, they're going to stop sharing intelligence with him.
And I looked, I said, well, this is a coup.
This is a silent coup if this is true.
And I believe it's the Wall Street Journal for crying out loud.
And I'm a student of the drive-bys.
And I thought, man, this is, I started, a couple of people that I respect.
I fired off notes.
Did you see this?
What do you think about this?
Had some discussions.
And I get in here this morning and I find out that the whole thing was bogus.
That there are intelligence people throughout the history of our country who do not share intel with the president because it's bad, because it's not worth anything.
The Wall Street Journal took something that happens all the time and shaped it and made it look like it's brand new, unprecedented, because Trump is so dangerous and unhinged and bad that they can't afford to share the intel with him.
And the underlying theme was, we can't let Trump see the intel because this guy is working with Russia and he and Russia work together to undermine our election.
They continue to have that narrative as what's driving all of their approach to Trump.
Everything they're doing is rooted in that.
Trump's illegitimacy is rooted in a fake narrative that does not exist and did not happen.
That the Russians affected the outcome of the election with the assistance of Donald Trump.
And that's the rubric under which that news alert happened last night.
So Trump addresses it today and mentions how it's just totally wrong and fake news and a disservice to the American people who read it.
And he gave a couple of other examples, citing the New York Times.
He did all of this, however, with good cheer.
He wasn't nearly as animated and quasi-angry as I am about it.
He was, in fact, soft-spoken and measured.
He came across as non-partisan as you can in a political sense.
But it was classic, and he just called them out.
He called CNN out throughout this press conference as hate-filled and strange to the truth, unable to report the truth, focused on not just disagreeing with him, but hating him, and how this is a disservice to the American people.
One of the reporters from CNN, a guy named Jim Acosta, this was classic, stood up.
The whole thing was classic because Trump's on one stage and they're on another.
And they're in that room.
Folks, they're in that room to destroy him today.
He announced a press conference.
They are in that room to destroy him, whether they want to admit it or not.
And there were three or four questions today that I heard that left no doubt that's what the purpose was.
Despite everything he had said today, they asked these insolent questions.
Did you ever talk to Russia during the campaign?
Trump's, how many times do I have to tell you?
I don't know anybody in Russia.
I didn't talk to anybody in Russia.
We didn't talk about it.
He'd just gone on and on.
But they kept asking the question because that's all they've got.
And they've got nothing there.
The stories I have in the stack today clearly state that there is no evidence.
These intel people trying to undermine Trump have had to admit that there is no evidence that A, the Russians had anything to do with the outcome of our election, or B, Trump was working with them on it to undermine Hillary Clinton.
And yet that continues to be the narrative that is fueling the press in their pursuit of Donald Trump.
So the CNN guy stands up and effectively says, I'm paraphrasing, Jim Acosta, don't you think, don't you think that these routine attacks of yours on the press and on the media are undermining the First Amendment by calling what we're doing fake news?
Isn't you, aren't you doing a terrible disservice to the Constitution and to the American people by criticizing the media?
And there it was.
Sure as I'm sitting here watching, there it was.
They can sit there all day and not just criticize, they can try to destroy people.
They can, using whatever they think they have been granted by the First Amendment, power to go out and literally destroy people, let Trump criticize the way they do their jobs, and all of a sudden it's a constitutional crisis.
Well, how about Obama trashing me all the time?
How about Obama trashing Fox News all the time?
Was that not a threat to the First Amendment?
No, they applauded that.
They still do applaud that.
They join in the attacks on Fox News, and more often than not, they join in attacks on me too.
But they want you to believe that they are this watchdog and that they are holding truth to power, that they're holding powerful people accountable.
They're not doing anything of the sort.
The press has gotten to the point where they need a watchdog, and it turns out that Trump is the watchdog.
Trump is the guy holding them accountable.
Trump is the guy calling them out.
I've never seen anything like this today.
I have never seen, we have wanted Republican presidents all of my life to deal with these people this way.
The only thing we ever got was Spiro Agnew.
We've not seen anything like this.
And Trump did it with an air of confidence and self-assuredness.
He was not nervous at all.
He was having fun with them.
He was toying with them.
It's like if you've got a cat, do you know that you've got these little laser pointers and you have a little kitten or a cat and a cat goes nuts chasing the light?
It'll run into a wall.
That's what I was watching here today.
It was, it was just, it was fantastic.
And the American people are going to eat this up.
Now, I said yesterday on this program that what I thought Trump could do to recapture and regain control of the narrative here, if you will, but of the agenda, is simply focus on the domestic agenda.
Just get in gear and very publicly start talking about repealing Obamacare, tax reform, building the wall, immigration reform, all of it.
Just go full speed at it.
And in the process, he'll keep people who voted for him on his side.
And they won't care about whatever these efforts are that the press is engaging in with the Intel community on your mind.
And make no mistake.
And he called this, he accused Obama of running this shadow government.
He accused Hillary Clinton and George Soros of being the people paying for people to show up and protest things.
He held nothing back.
He ridiculed Hillary Clinton for being in part of a deal that gave up 20% of our uranium supply and for having that cheap little red reset button when she became Secretary of State.
And each time he mentions Obama, he mentions, he didn't say shadow government, but he said our opponents are doing what they can.
He called all of this fake news.
He was just, he was on spot with all of this.
It's hard to say.
You get caught up in the moment.
But this was one of the most effective press conferences I've ever seen.
The press is going to hate him even more after this.
Don't misunderstand.
When I say effective, I'm talking about rallying people who voted for him to stay with him.
He made a point of what chaos.
You people tell us you're reporting chaos there.
We're not chaos.
We're a well-oiled machine.
We got one of the smoothest running machines in the history of machines.
We got one of the best administrations in the history of administrations.
And he rattled off the achievements they've had here that the media is not reporting because they're so focused on whether or not Trump worked with Russia to screw Hillary out of the presidency.
And reassuring his people, he's on top of it.
Nothing's changed.
And everything that he campaigned on, he is doing.
All he's doing is fulfilling campaign promises.
And of course the Democrats don't like it.
Of course, the media doesn't like it, but it isn't going to stop him.
And I have to stop myself here.
We'll be back and resume after this.
So now Trump got some action because right now Fox is just reporting that the office of the Director of National Intelligence has just blown that Wall Street Journal story smithereens.
See, any suggestion that serious intelligence would be withheld from the President of the United States is not true, whatever else they want on to say.
Fox is reporting it right now.
That was fake news that started out as a news alert last night, and then it got blown up today.
They ran the story based on the news alert last night, and then people reacted to it.
It turns out that it was something that happens all the time.
It was changed slightly to make it look like it was unprecedented when none of it actually was true.
Let me grab a quick phone call here.
John in San Diego, great to have you, sir.
What do you think?
Wow.
That was a heck of a, that was, I turned the radio on expecting to hear you, and I hear our president.
And I was shocked by what I heard.
It's about time.
I mean, he was just toying with them with the truth.
It's easy to do when you have the truth on your side.
And these guys are just in a, their hair's on fire, and they don't know what to do.
I love it.
It was smart.
It made my whole day.
What do you think about the way he answers the questions?
I mean, they ask him the questions, and he just, were you satisfied with that?
The way he answered the question, the substance of what he said in answering the questions.
Yes, about 95%.
It's off the cuff.
When you have the truth on your side, it's really easy to answer questions.
And it's, you know, it's really simple when you have the truth on your side.
When you have to lie about it, you know, every other question, you have to lie.
It's tough to keep track of all your lies.
And that's the difference between the Democrats and conservatives.
It's great.
John.
Look, I'm happy that you turned in, you tuned in to listen to me, and you heard the president.
I'm glad you weren't disappointed.
I made a decision to stick with this thing all the way through because I think this is so valuable.
I think this is exactly what Trump supporters needed to hear.
And those listening to this program today will have heard it.
There'll be excerpts tonight.
The media is already blowing up.
Chuck Todd just tweeted out that President Trump today did the most un-American thing criticizing the media is un-American, he said.
They're not going to like it.
We will be back.
Okay, folks, I decided to turn into the hate network during the break here, CNN.
Well, the president said there's a lot of hate there, particularly on a 10 o'clock show.
Do you know who hosts the 10 o'clock show?
That'd be a Malaysian Air 337 vanishing a black hole, Don Lemon.
That's right.
Don Lemon hosted.
And he said, it's a lot of hate there on your network.
By the way, go ask Jeff Zucker how he got his job.
Jim Acosta is sitting there going, what?
Anyway, so I tuned in to get a little hate because I knew I was going to get some hate.
CNN.
And they brought in their media analyst, Brian Stelter.
Do you know how Brian Stelter got started?
Brian Stelter started a blog called TV Newser.
And it was a blog about what's on TV.
It was just a blog.
I mean, he was one of these guys that living at home, interested in TV, started.
New York Times hired him as a media critic.
And then CNN stole him away.
Now, get this.
Brian Stelter.
You see if you can understand this.
Brian Stelter, I had to write it down.
He said that it's obvious that Trump is watching the media too much because he had all this criticism for the media.
And he needs to stop watching the media and he needs to start doing his job because he's responding way too much to the media and he's responding way too soon to the media.
So he'll watch the media and then he'll tweet something.
Can you believe that?
Like the media guy at CNN basically says, we think the president should watch less of us.
Well, why is that?
Why in the world, if because there's two things at work here.
Obviously, the media would die to be able to prove they're influencing presidential action.
They would die if they could prove that.
The second thing is that they, if, if, who are they doing these shows for?
I mean, who are these media people doing their shows for?
To say that the president is responding, he's watching too much media, he's responding too much to it, and too soon.
Does that mean that there are questionable things in the media that the president ought not be responding to?
And if that's the case, why?
I mean, if everything new people and media are doing is upfront and above board and straight down the middle, and you're just doing the news, what's wrong with anybody watching it and reacting to it?
Well, the president, he's watching too much.
How can that be?
It's almost like saying he's taking us too seriously.
If you think that the president or anybody watching you is taking you too seriously, what does that say about what you're doing?
It's tantamount to saying, gosh, he shouldn't believe everything he sees here.
Well, why not?
It's the cable news network.
It's CNN.
It's the truth.
It's whatever.
You're the cable news network of wreck.
Why shouldn't the president believe what he sees?
He just thought not.
He's responding too much.
He's responding too soon.
He's reacting way too much to the media.
Well, then there must be a reason why.
It must be a mistake to be doing so.
Why?
Is because what's there not true?
Is because some of it's just half-baked.
Is some of it you're just making it up and having fun here and you don't intend for some of it to be taken seriously?
Why?
Why should the president or anybody else not react to it?
The president also made a big deal of saying he inherited a mess.
And he detailed the things that made up the mess.
He inherited a mess at home.
He inherited a mess abroad.
Instability everywhere, but he was elected to fix it.
He's starting to fix it.
He's beginning to do everything he promised he would do on the campaign.
They have many productive talks already underway in the area of foreign policy.
They have had much more productivity than anybody knows right now because some of this stuff cannot be broadcast.
Some of it has to be maintained in private.
But he said that there is phenomenal success happening already.
That his defense secretary submitting a plan to defeat ISIS.
That ISIS has spread like cancer.
He said, ISIS is another mess that he has inherited, but that he promised to eliminate the problem and will.
He said he's going to build and rebuild the military.
He said there will not be a military in the world anywhere near as good as ours.
He wants a strong military that he hopes he never has to use.
And that is the perfect definition of deterrence.
Left-wingers never understand.
You tell them you want to build a brand new stealth bomber.
It's just a machine of war.
It's a weapon of war.
No, we don't want to use it.
Well, that's silly, then it's a waste of money.
Why would you build a bomber to your military?
Because it's called deterrence.
We build the mightiest military in the world.
It sends a message, if you attack us, that's the end of you.
You build these things for the safety of the American people.
He kept going back to that, that everything he's doing is for the American people and then for the world secondarily.
Folks, it was masterful.
And I don't think it wasn't scripted.
It was nothing that the president had to think long and hard about.
He didn't have to make notes and memorize them and go out.
It was improv.
It was spontaneous.
We had a caller in the last half hour who mentioned how good that was.
It was the truth.
When you've got the truth and when you're telling people the truth of what you really think, you don't have to remember it.
It's in your heart.
It's like anything else you believe.
You don't need a crammed course on what you believe.
You don't really need advisors to tell you what you believe.
You believe it.
It's in your heart.
It's in your mind.
And you can easily explain it to people.
You have to remember it.
And that's who Donald Trump was today.
And they came at him from here.
One of the questions that on CNN, they said, this is horrible.
This was a very, very bad moment for the president.
April Ryan is a reporter for the, I think it's the Urban Network.
It's an African-American network.
She got into a spat with Omarosa earlier this week about something.
And she was asking him, well, you had made some promises about the inner city during your campaign.
What are you going to do with the inner city?
What are the inner city?
And he agreed, the inner city is a mess.
It's been a mess for a long time.
And she said, would you meet with the CBC?
Would you meet with the Congressional Black Caucasians?
And Trump said, I would love to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus.
Well, you set it up.
They won't take my phone call.
I tried to get hold of Elijah Cummings, and he was going to meet with Elijah Cummings in Baltimore.
He's a member of Congressional Black Caucasians.
And Trump said, I had a meeting scheduled with Elijah Cummings.
I was looking forward.
He's a nice guy.
And all of a sudden, he backed out.
And Trump said, I think he had to back out because he was getting a lot of heat from his friends.
Say, you can't meet with Trump.
So he looks at April Ryan.
Could you set it up?
Could you set up the meeting?
She was flummoxed.
She was speechless.
I don't know what she expected.
It's almost like she expected Trump to poo-poo the idea of meeting with a Congressional Black caucus, but she looked shocked that he would do so and then said that, could you set it up for me?
Now, the CNN people thought that he was being disrespectful.
They thought that Donald Trump was insulting her by having her set up the meeting.
And that's where they don't get the guy.
He was including her in the story.
He was giving her a role to play.
He was showing her respect.
But they don't see it that way because they live in a different world, folks.
They come from a world of political correctness and no sense of humor whatsoever.
And because of that, they're never going to understand Donald Trump.
The sense of humor thing alone is going to prevent them.
But they're also on different worlds.
They're in different universes.
They have not encountered somebody who thinks like Donald Trump, who is still around and talking.
In their world, people who talk and act like Donald Trump have been shamed and humiliated and relegated to obscurity because they're so abrasive and mean-spirited and rough around the edges.
But now they're dealing with a president who's this way.
And in their protected little snowflake world, everywhere they've been in their lives, governed and documented by political correctness, they just, they're shocked.
Like, can you imagine literally believing that what you do and who you are is above criticism?
And yet, you get to not only criticize people, you get to destroy them.
If you're in the media, you can criticize anybody, you can destroy anybody, you can do fake news, you can make it up, but let somebody criticize you, and that's the greatest offense, and that is an offense to the Constitution.
Jim Acosta of CNN said, Aren't you undermining the First Amendment by calling what we do fake news?
And I'm looking at the TV.
So, Mr. Acosta, if anybody's undermining anybody, it's you and your cohorts undermining the whole concept of news and media.
Okay, a brief break.
You'll have more of your turn at this and we get back.
Donna in Frederick, Maryland, you're next.
Hello.
Thank you so much, Rush.
It is an honor to be part of your program and exercise my First Amendment privilege.
President Trump did a phenomenal job, especially with regard to the questionable illegal intel issues and General Flynn.
And also, the highlight to me, and I think I could speak for many of we, the people, when I say this, is when he called the fake news the really fake news.
No question that he hits a home run when he does that.
He told them, by the way, he said, you all have a lower approval rating than Congress.
And he said, he made a point of saying, you know, you people can make my job tougher when you tell these things that are not true.
You know, I'm on the phone with the president of Mexico.
And A, you leak it, and B, you lie about things.
The same thing with a phone call to the leader of Australia.
You make me, you leaked it.
He hung up on me.
None of it happened.
He said, you people can make it harder for world leaders to want to talk to anybody here in Washington if somebody finds out about it and leaks and lies about what was said.
He said, I think you could all improve your businesses if you just tell the truth, if you just try to be straight up with the news.
I mean, he could honestly say he was trying to help him.
Of course, it'll never happen because in their minds, their job is to destroy him.
Nothing is ever, ever going to change that.
So I checked the email during the break, and somebody says, Is there anything you saw in that press conference that alarmed you or bothered you or thought wasn't the best?
Yeah.
This Flynn situation, I think, remains a vulnerability.
But of course, I have to share that with you tomorrow.
We are out of time today.
Open line Friday tomorrow, folks.
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