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Feb. 20, 2017 - Rush Limbaugh Program
34:51
February 20, 2017, Monday, Hour #3
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Righto, here we are back at it.
I promise you we're going to get the audio sound bites here and the analysis of said soundbites.
There we go.
Cool.
Here's the phone number, folks.
You want to be on the program the remaining hour today.
800-282-2882.
If you're going to send an email, lrushbow at eibnet.us.
Here's another, you know, I said there was a small but expanding stack in my show prep today of stories that indicate some of the pizzazz is beginning to wane, as it were, from the collective anti-Trump energy out there.
And it is.
And I've given you three examples so far today, and here's the next.
And this is from our old buddies at Breitbart News.
And the headline, LGBT anti-Trump protest in D.C. fizzles bigly.
Even on a beautiful day with temperatures in the high 60s, organizers could not muster a decent-sized protest turnout against Donald Trump at an LGBT event on Sunday outside the Trump International Hotel a few blocks from the White House.
A group of little more than 24 protesters.
Now, you mentioned this.
Here the call goes out from a swarm, a throng of people to show up.
And supposedly shouldn't take much because there's such hatred for Trump out there.
There's such animus for Trump out there that it should have been just a snap of the fingers.
And you get thousands of people to show up.
A group of little more than 24 protesters danced, kissed, held signs, and played music as an almost equal number of photographers captured the spectacle of social justice warriors who lacked any coherent message except free-floating contempt for the president who took office less than one month ago.
Now, I realize saying this could just stoke them to go out and reignite themselves and find more energy.
But remember, all of this has a purpose.
And the longer it goes without any objective being realized, then, and it's a human nature is human age.
At some point, some in the group start saying, what are we doing here?
What are we accomplishing here?
By the way, I want to know something.
Can anybody tell me what has Donald Trump ever done to offend the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender crowd?
What has he ever done?
I mean, it was Obama who came out and was originally anti-gay marriage, and then when it became politically expedient, flipped.
But what's Trump ever done?
What has Trump ever done to homosexuals?
Other than maybe take a swipe at Rosie O'Donnell.
That's right.
She took the swipe at him first.
So I don't know.
Okay, here we go to the audio soundbites.
I appeared on Fox News Sunday yesterday.
And I've always suggested to Fox News, you have me on and put me on the panel that comes later in the show to analyze what I said and if necessary, criticize what I said.
I'd be willing to do it.
They've never taken me up on it.
They probably will at some point.
So we're going to do it here.
And we start out.
And by the way, for those of you, it was a totally enjoyable experience.
I never think Chris Wallace is interrupting me.
He and I always have an agreement going in that he wants to ask me as many questions as he can squeeze in in 12 minutes.
He also doesn't want to get flack from any of you thinking that he's mistreating me.
So he asks me if I be kind enough to give him a papal exclusion before the program airs in understanding that all he's trying to do is get me to say as much as I can about different things.
So they added three minutes to the segment yesterday, but he said to me, he said, this doesn't mean I want you to have longer answers.
It means I want to cover more things.
So I'm never offended.
And I always try to make my answers as brief as I can with him knowing going in.
So that I want you to know going in.
The first bite, he says, you say that what's happening in Donald Trump right now is that the left-wing courts, left-wing media, left-wing bureaucracy trying to, in your words, sabotage his presidency.
Sabotage?
Well, actually, I do.
And it is driven by two things, actually.
The first thing that's going on, Chris, in my view, it is preposterous to believe that the Russians had any effect on the outcome of voting in this country.
It's absurd.
There is no evidence.
Zilch, zero, nada.
The New York Times has run two stories that are basically propaganda on this: one in October and one this past week.
And both stories clearly say no evidence.
Nobody they've talked to has any evidence whatsoever to suggest it.
The second thing I think that's important for people to remember: people that voted for Donald Trump, people that support Donald Trump, really, really believe that they were going to lose the country if Hillary Clinton won.
This is not an idle thought.
It's not an exaggeration.
They really believe that the country as founded was up for grabs.
It was over if Hillary had won.
If the Democrats had another four or eight years to do what they do with the judiciary and so forth.
This is a point, by the way, that I don't think is understood by people that don't like or didn't support Trump, people that opposed him.
And this includes even Republicans.
Another way of saying this is that most in Washington never thought the country was facing any kind of a crisis.
Whereas clearly, a majority of Americans who voted think there's a crisis.
And it's fascinating to me that the people in Washington didn't.
And it comes down to the elites are fine where they live.
Their incomes are up.
Their job security is supreme.
They don't even have to really worry about meritocracy.
All they've got to worry about is politically correct membership status.
The effects of their policies don't impact them.
They don't live amongst a bunch of crime-ridden illegal immigrants and refugees.
They don't have to deal with any of the results of their policies.
And as such, they don't really experience life like a bunch of Americans who have been stagnating for 15 years in terms of their economic circumstances.
And then when you come along and say that those people really thought that we're going to lose the country if Hillary won the election, they really think that.
You know, people poo-poo this.
The media poo-poos it, and the Washington establishment poo-poo, they think it's insane talk.
They think it's extreme talk.
What do you mean, lose the country?
It doesn't mean that we're going to lose America.
There's always going to be an America.
But what kind of America is it going to be?
And I think to the extent that Democrats want to win again, and I know they do, I think it's something they should look at.
They were actually fostering.
And look at what's happened to them.
They've lost 1,200 seats all across the country since 2010.
Actually, outside of presidential race, you go back to 2008 to trace this decline.
There's a reason this is happening.
People were rejecting what the Democrats were doing.
People were rejecting en masse every chance they had, every Obama policy.
The only thing they didn't do was vote against him, and we all know why.
There's two primary reasons for that, which we don't need to rehash here.
But the fact is that everything on this Obama agenda was repudiated in 2016.
It was sent packing.
Nobody wanted any more of it.
And if the Democrats have any hope of ever winning again, they're going to have to stop making fun of people who really thought they were losing their country.
I mean, for correct, when you run a bakery shop and you have the government and the media and thousands of people outside protesting your little small business, demanding you do this or do that, or they're going to throw you out of business.
That to them is not America.
And to see so many people trying to damage them and harm them for all of these rising political increments, but it's worse.
It's rampant runaway immigration and the crime that comes with it.
It's what's happening to the dilapidation of cities where people live and neighborhoods where people live and the never-ending destructive protests and riots and bombing.
And none of this happens where the elites live.
So they don't face it.
It's always happening out there in flyover country to them.
But this was a real sentiment.
And the reason that it's important also is it gives Trump a wide berth.
If you think.
That we're on the verge of losing the country and by that, your kids' futures, if you think we're on the verge of losing that, you're not going to be worried what Donald Trump did on The Apprentice 10 years ago.
And it isn't going to make you divorce him.
The traditional ways of destroying politicians are not going to work on Trump because he represents too much that is too important to too many people to have it derailed by traditional political games.
And that's why I think that the media can't destroy Trump because they didn't make him.
And these two points, the fact that people thought we really were going to lose the country and that people are going to stick with Trump no matter what are the two things that I don't think his detractors have bothered to take seriously.
They ridicule the idea that people think we're going to lose the country.
They laugh at it.
They mock it.
They make fun of it.
But I'm telling you, it is real.
And it's not over.
They're going to continue to support Trump because they can see right now there are people that want to take Trump out, led by the media and who knows who else in the establishment.
They can see it.
They know full well if they could, they'd find a way to make Hillary president.
Short of that, make Pence president and have the Republican establishment back in charge of things.
So it's still dire consequences as far as Trump voters are concerned.
Here is the next question from Chris Wallace.
You use a phrase which I have to say I only heard for the first time in the last couple of weeks, the deep state.
And that's the notion that there's an Obama shadow government embedded in the bureaucracy that's working against the new president.
I think some people are going to think that's right on, and some people are going to think it's awfully conspiratorial.
Well, I would love to claim credit for that.
But actually, I think a reporter by the name of Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept, who has got a relationship with, what's his name, Assange, I think he actually coined the term, and I think it works.
I don't think there's any, who's driving this business that the Russians hacked the election?
It's the Democrat Party.
It's Hillary.
It's Obama.
It's all those people who just can't accept the election.
And they think they're behind the election.
Absolutely.
Of course they are.
Look, if they can't win at the ballot box, you know they're down 1,200 seats since 2010.
They've become a marginal party electorally.
All they've got is their embeds in the bureaucracy and the judiciary, and they're pulling out all the stops.
There's no question.
This business that the Russians hacked the election, this is serious, serious allegation that is impossible.
The Russians could not have had any impact whatsoever on voting, either how they were cast or how they were counted.
In fact, if you want to say they did, they did their job.
Hillary won the popular vote.
How could they have possibly had any this whole premise?
And it's been driving news coverage here ever since Trump took office and even before.
You don't need any more evidence than that to suggest and to know that the left, which is run by Obama and Hillary and the hierarchy of the Democrat Party, is doing everything they can to undermine, to sabotage, and to prevent Trump from implementing his agenda.
There's no question about it.
There isn't.
I don't need to add anything.
That was well stated, coherently stated, cogently stated, and there's nobody reasonably who could disagree with it.
What do you mean?
You think somebody can reasonably disagree that they're not trying to undermine the Trump agenda?
Hell's bills.
There's no question about it.
I think we have to squeeze one more in here question.
You suggest there's some things that Trump may be doing wrong.
You said that you're skeptical about his idea.
They're going to come up with a new executive order and a so-called travel ban and that this new one's going to pass muster with the federal courts.
You're skeptical about that.
Not so much skeptical.
I think they're going to do it, and I think they should do it because the judiciary, again, is pockmarked with judicial appointees that Democrat presidents have made for years, and they're in there for life.
And as we have seen in the first executive order, you know, Chris, his executive order hasn't even been ruled on.
The judge in Seattle said, well, the president said during the campaign that he wanted to ban Muslims.
And I thought, no, we could.
It's irrelevant.
They're not even using the law to try to stop the president on this.
I think what the president has to do, and I was happy to see it, this rally was something that I hoped he would do.
And in the rally, he really focused on domestic agenda.
Look, here's the thing.
Donald Trump has nobody helping him other than the people that voted for him.
Obama had the media.
Obama had the judiciary.
Obama had all kinds of support.
At an Obama press conference, a typical question, what enchants you?
I mean, Obama was never challenged seriously by the media.
Trump doesn't have any of that.
He's got to keep his supporters on board.
He's got to keep them revved up.
So the rally was great.
But the thing that will really make all this Russia stuff and all this deep state stuff not take hold is getting to work, implementing the repeal of Obamacare, getting to work and really doing tax reform and getting to work and really shore up our borders because that is the primary area where people that voted for Trump felt that we were on the way to losing the country.
We've even lost the definition of immigration.
Immigration today, if you listen to the left, equals anybody who wants to come into the country should be allowed.
That's not what immigration is.
That's illegal immigration, and we ought to all oppose it.
We are all in favor of immigration that determines who gets in, the quantity of people who get in, whether they assimilate or not.
Nobody's opposed to that.
But immigration has been defined now as people flooding the country who are non-citizens.
And that's called immigration, according to the culture of the left.
Well, nothing much to add there.
I mean, what would you add, Brian?
Anything much there to add?
Anything left unstated?
Anything ambiguous about that?
That'd be exceptionally brilliant there, too.
So let's go to the obscene profit timeout.
We'll just continue on this big roll when we get back.
All right, next question from Chris Wallace.
He cites the Chris Elizabeth, saying it was very, very smart of me to suggest that Trump get going on the domestic agenda.
And he pointed out that by all standards, you know, Trump's running way behind.
Even Obama had a lot of stuff done by this time.
Trump hadn't done anything yet.
What do you say to that, Rush?
Well, now, here I have to tiptoe.
We're not talking Republicans and Democrats opposed to Trump.
We're talking establishment versus Trump.
Trump considered to be an outsider.
The establishment doesn't want any part of Trump.
They don't want him to succeed.
And I would throw some Republicans in that as well.
It's just the way Washington works.
And this is why I think moving forward on this agenda is crucial.
You mentioned Obama's stimulus.
Here's the difference.
And this is what Trump supporters know.
It wasn't a stimulus.
It was a payoff to unions, Chris.
It didn't stimulate anything.
We don't have a growing economy.
We don't have jobs being created at a replacement level for those we had lost.
We don't have anything Obama said.
He lied about Russia.
This is important stuff.
Well, no, I'm not disagreeing with you.
I'm just saying at least he passed his program, and President Trump hasn't passed any of his programs yet.
Well, it makes my point.
Here you had, I tiptoe again.
You have the story.
You have to say, African-American.
Well, it's television.
It's Fox News.
I have deep respect.
No, seriously, you have a first African-American president.
You have everybody falling all over themselves to acknowledge that, to reward that.
Obama was going to get everything he wanted in the first year, because if anybody opposed it, they were going to be accused of being a racist or bigot or who knows what.
But don't ignore the substance.
The voters know that his stimulus, it doesn't matter when it got passed.
He misled everybody about it.
The people of this country are tired of being misled.
They're tired of voting based on what candidates have told them they're going to do, and nothing ever changes.
Trump has a wide berth here, Chris.
The media did not make Donald Trump, and they can't destroy him.
But the media thinks, and when I say media, let me define ABC, CBS, NBC, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, LA Times, that cadre.
They have a formula.
They have a blueprint for destroying Republican political officials they don't like.
It's not going to work on Trump.
He doesn't fit that mold.
They're trying to every day.
It's kind of comical to watch.
And the media went to town on this one, that the media didn't make Trump, so they can't break Trump.
They're going to never stop trying to break Trump.
But they haven't been able to do that since the day he announced.
They weren't able to stop him being elected.
But that's not going to stop them.
But they don't understand why they're flailing at this.
And I've seen some journalists today.
We're not trying to destroy the president.
We're just trying to hold the president accountable.
You are trying to destroy him.
And so you're trying to defeat his agenda.
You're trying to make sure that what he ran on doesn't happen.
As opposed to trying to help Obama with his.
In the interest of time, I truncated the question for the previous soundbite that Chris Wallace asked me.
Let me get that.
He said, but I've got to tell you, Rush, by historical standards, Obama's stimulus had already been passed by this time.
President Trump is pretty slow on Obamacare, pretty slow on repealing Obamacare, pretty slow on tax reform.
There's a lot of disarray inside the Republican Party on Capitol Hill.
And that's where I said, well, now I have to tiptoe.
And what I meant by that was that there's opposition to Trump on Capitol Hill.
Obama didn't, look to the stimulus.
The Republicans didn't have the votes to stop anything Obama wanted to do the first two years.
People have forgotten this.
But Obama's election over McCain, and I know we haven't talked about McCain today, but Rand Paul's exactly.
We're lucky McCain did not become president.
Rand Paul is exactly right about that.
And this is purely personal.
McCain's just got his underwear in a wad.
It's a personal thing he's got with Trump.
And maybe some of it understandable.
You know, Trump out there saying he doesn't like military people and got captured like McCain does.
It was clearly goosing McCain.
McCain has taken it personally.
And McCain's out there on foreign soil, ripping into Trump is unstable, and his administration is in disarray or what have you.
I mean, this, it's really beneath saying McCain's filled with dignity.
It's beneath all of that.
But the point is, back to this Obama business and the timing framework, the Republicans were able to voice opposition to Obama's stimulus, but they had no prayer of stopping it.
And I don't know how many Republicans actually voted for it.
Look at how many people that were not Democrats who voted for Obama strictly thinking they were ending race problems in America.
And then Obama gets inaugurated, and I'm sure on Capitol Hill, there's a lot of people.
You know, if we just go along with a guy and we praise Eric Holder and that we can do a lot to ameliorate race relations.
The point is, Obama had steady cooperation based on the historical aspect of his presidency, not because of his agenda.
The Republicans really didn't want to do much to stop Obama because they couldn't.
They had to talk a good game to keep their base engaged, i.e.
us.
But Capitol Hill is actively aligned against Trump.
If you ask me point blank, you know, I've heard Paul Ryan's press conferences on Obamacare, and he swears up and down that we're going to be dealing with this in March whenever he gets back from the whatever recess and before they go on the next one.
And yet, multiple times a week, you'll see stories in the media that it's getting less and less likely that any action will take place this year on Obamacare.
And they want you to see that, and they want you to get mad, and they want you to get depressed, and they want you to hate the Republicans.
And they're doing the same trick on tax reform.
You know, Reagan didn't sign his tax reform bill the first time until August of his first year.
And it took a while.
He won in an unchallenged, unquestionable landslide.
And Tip O'Neill ran the Democrats, and they did their best to oppose him, but at the end of the day, they couldn't.
They had to go along with it.
But there is, and you'll never see it because they can't dare display this on TV, but there is unity among Republicans, some Republicans and Democrats in stopping Trump.
And folks, understand this.
It's not that they oppose the Trump agenda.
It's that they oppose Trump.
Trump is an outsider.
Trump is an invader.
Trump is an interloper.
It's like he's made his way into Freddie's fashion mart in Harlem.
He's just not wanted.
And the last thing that the Washington establishment, the thing they fear is Trump succeeding.
I can't tell you how much they fear this.
Republicans and Democrats alike.
I'm not naming names because, look, there's plenty of Republicans that are full force behind Trump.
I'm thinking of guys like Jim Jordan and the conservative caucus that they're 100,000% behind Trump.
But you've got some establishment types that would not be unhappy if the Trump agenda fizzled.
To the extent that Trump is able to get his agenda passed, that's just another bit of evidence that an outsider can come in and upset the apple cart and govern.
So Trump has got opposition everywhere he's going, and it takes many different faces and forms.
Some of it on the Democrat side, the opposition to his agenda is substantive.
And on the establishment side, he's opposed just because he's an outsider and he's making no bones.
Look, Trump, one thing Trump doesn't do is soft sell himself.
I mean, when he's coming after you, he tells you he's coming after you, and he tells you why.
So he's throwing the gauntlet down here.
Now, the Republicans in the House and Senate are on record the past eight years being opposed to Obamacare.
They have to come through on this.
They're on record.
They have won elections based on their promises to get rid of this.
There have been numerous repeal votes that didn't have any teeth, but they still have the votes.
They still took them.
Tax reform, I know that there are many Republicans who are dead serious about it.
A lot of them.
The Democrats want no part of it, but they can't stop it because they don't have the numbers.
So once again, we're faced here with Trump needing to get the Republicans on board.
This is where Trump needs to be Trump.
This is where Trump needs to show off his prowess as a negotiator and as a guy that does deals, quote unquote.
This is a guy he's told everybody we've got too many dumb leaders that don't know how to do deals.
Well, it's time to go in there and do deals.
And it's time to do deals on tax reform and repealing.
But just get the balls rolling.
And of course, immigration.
We don't have to wait for the wall to be built on this.
We can start enforcing immigration law right now.
And I think we are, in fact.
And you can see how the media is having a bunch of kittens over that as they're writing stories about how ICE agents are treating every illegal immigrant like El Jan Gonzalez that are storming homes and they're throwing innocent women and children out and doing their best to characterize this as typically inhumane Republican behavior when it's simply the enforcement of the law.
That this is what it's always been going to look like.
You think the Queen of England would just sit around while a bunch of people said, we don't think we need a monarchy anymore.
Well, let's throw it up for a vote.
And if people think I should go back to living in a flat, two-bedroom brownstone, fine.
Let's see what happens.
She's not going to put up with it.
Well, people in power just don't throw it open to a vote.
That's why you have power.
So you can basically say, votes don't affect me.
That's the point of having power, to be immune from votes.
So really what we're talking about here, to get right down to it.
So Trump needs to start doing his deals, and he needs to start being smart, showing us the smart.
He needs to get up there and he gets in these rooms, get whoever is standing in the way, get them in a room, bring them up there, be public with it, or maybe not.
Maybe, you know, don't put them on display.
Make them quiet meetings here or there and sit down and talk to them and sell them on it from the standpoint of what's good for America.
Whatever he takes, however he does deals, do it.
So I think the more he does this, the greater insurance insurance that he's going to have, the wider berth even that he's going to have.
This is why he was elected.
Trade deals are all well and good, and NATO and going around this international and foreign policy stuff.
Fine and dandy, very, very important.
But it is, and stuff so far that's happened with the miners and putting them back to work.
I mean, there's been a lot of good things, and he detailed a lot of it at the rally on Saturday that it's not being reported on.
So all of that was good too.
But you get going on Obamacare.
That's such a big, and it's going to implode.
Here's the danger I fear with Obamacare: it's going to implode anyway.
It's designed to.
It's designed to kind of blackhole itself.
It's designed to suck itself into oblivion.
And when it does, then you have a crisis, then you have an emergency.
The plan was for Hillary to be in the White House when this happened so that we could then move almost automatically to either everybody on Medicare or single payer or what have you.
So you've got to get in gear and get your reform plan in there and start working on it before this thing totally folds in on itself.
And the speed with which Obama was able to do things versus Trump is irrelevant.
Circumstances were all different.
Yeah, Obama had opposition.
I'm not denying that, but the opposition Trump faces is entirely different.
Now, one thing before we go to the break, just because I've had some email, hey, Rush, we hear you on the Russian bit.
Can you move on?
Well, look at this.
CBS this morning, just today, former Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook stated that Russia could have been the reason Clinton lost the election.
I'm telling you, folks, they're not going to let go of this.
I'm going to keep telling you this till I'm blue in the face.
This assertion is what provides the opportunity for all the other attacks on Trump.
This allegation, which is preposterous and absurd and unprovable because it didn't happen, that the Russians are the reason Hillary lost.
What that means is the Russians stole the election for Trump.
You'll note there's no specificity here.
They're just taking the fact that all these intel people say the Russians were trying to hack.
The Democrats are not going to give this up.
They will never admit they lost because of their ideas.
They'll never admit they lost because Hillary was a lousy candidate that nobody wanted anymore.
They'll never admit any of that.
They'll never admit they were rejected by the people.
The only way they ever lose is if the people do stupid things as a result of cheating or lying or if there's theft.
They're going to continue this business on the Russians because if the Russians stole the election, Trump and everything he does is illegitimate and we don't have to do it and we can oppose all of it because it's not what the people really wanted.
And they'll even claim that they're favoring the entire Democratic process.
Obviously, the people didn't vote for Trump.
If it took the Russians putting him in the White House, that means people don't want Trump's agenda.
Do not let this slide.
It's the only thing they've got, the Democrats and the media, to justify the continued attacks on the Trump administration.
Hey, did you see that tweet from Chelsea Clinton over the weekend?
Oh, you're going to love this.
Chelsea Clinton tweeted out: I need a thesaurus.
What's another word for horrifying?
Sick, awful?
Running out of adjectives these days that mean unconscionably bad or whatever.
And so Juanita Broderick replied: Well, Chelsea, since you asked, here's my definition of horrifying, sick, and awful.
Answer your father, Bill Clinton.
Chelsea deleted a tweet shortly thereafter.
And look at this.
This is from Reuters.
I know you're getting tired of me talking about this.
I beg you not to.
I'll try to ride her on it, too.
U.S. inquiries into Russian election hacking include three FBI investigations.
Three.
Not one of them have produced.
Why do we even know they're happening?
We still haven't been told there's an official investigation of the Clinton Foundation for crying out loud.
Why do we know this?
Three different investigations, FBI investigations, into Russian hacking the election.
And MOOC from the Clinton campaign today is saying, we know the Russians are the reason Hillary lost or whatever.
So West Point graduate H.R. McMaster is the next national security advisor.
Bolton didn't get it, but Bolton will be involved somehow.
And the national security apparatus, President Trump just making an announcement here at Mar-a-Lago.
And H.R. McMaster wrote a book called Derelection of Duty, highly acclaimed.
And he said he's very honored to have the position.
So we'll have more on that.
And whatever happens, it happens fast between now and then.
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