RUSH: Folks, I have so much here. I have enough audio sound bites just to fill up the whole show. I have over 40 of ’em. I mean, it’s gonna be a major, major task to get to this, and a lot of it is stuff that is not big and in the forefront of the news like the summit in North Korea and the aftermath of the G7 summit.

It is amazing to me, we’re now well at the probably almost dead middle of the year and a half mark of the Trump administration, and it just fascinates me how the opponents of Donald Trump have not learned a single thing. They have not picked up on a single thing. They have not changed their tactics. They’ve not changed their modus operandi. They’re becoming even more unhinged. And it isn’t gonna work.

I mean, De Niro at the Tony Awards last night with the F-bomb a couple of times and getting a standing ovation for it. Fine and dandy in New York, but everybody knows — Snerdley, back me up on this — everybody knows that in the theater of New York, New Yorkers don’t go. It’s out-of-towners that go. I mean, they may go to openings and this kind of stuff, but if the theater business in New York lost the tourist business, they’d be out of business. And who do you think the tourists are?

The tourists are not showing up in New York wanting to hear that kind of stuff from the stage. They’re just absolutely tone-deaf. They’re seeing Trump succeed, they’re seeing the economy succeed, and they can’t deal with it; so rather than come up with a different kind of strategy to deal with it, they’re doubling down on insanity. They’re doubling down on ununhingedness.

And while it’s comical to watch, there are destructive things happening to our culture in the process of this, and one of the reasons why I think it is lingering is — and I mentioned this last week — and I must admit that I’m not the only one who mentioned this — the Republican Party in general is not calling any of this stuff out. Trump alone is dealing with — I don’t mean Trump is calling it out, but I mean Trump’s got no backup or no support.

But it’s not even that. It’s just the whole idea of informing, educating, validating the public. I mean, if you’ve got, say, De Niro doing what he’s doing or Bill Maher, any of these unhinged activists out there and the things that they’re doing and saying — and isn’t working. This is the thing. It is not working. It is not hurting Trump. It’s hurting them.

This blue wave that they were anticipating isn’t there yet. We don’t know if there’s gonna be one or not. You can’t take polling data this far out and have it be meaningful when you have a bunch of elections in November ’cause I still think we’re at the point here where the things that are gonna have a major impact on the election haven’t happened yet.

But these people are just refusing to understand the destructive — maybe they want to be destructive I think when you get down to it, but nobody is calling them out, other than us and maybe some outposts in the so-called conservative media, but my point is this. I guarantee you if the situations were reversed, the entirety of the Democrat Party and their buddies in the media would be calling out this aberrant behavior each and every day and signaling that it isn’t okay and signaling that it’s crazy.

The Republican Party leadership in the House and Senate, RNC, you just don’t see any reaction to all of this, at least not enough. They are doing something, you know, we played an audio sound bite of Obama last week, when he went out to the Carrier plant in middle America. He was doing a town hall, and people there asked him about the job that they’ve been losing and that Trump was gonna bring ’em back.

And Obama said, (imitating Obama), “I don’t know how. What’s he gonna do, gonna wave a magic wand? I mean, just ’cause you say you wanna do it, how’s he gonna do it?” And of course Trump has done it and it’s a perfect ad and somebody’s been thinking and they’ve made an ad out of it. We have the audio sound bites coming up.

Here is another example on the Republican side. During the Republican primaries there were a whole bunch of think tank, foreign policy eggheads, a bunch of thinkers, a bunch of intellectuals and faux intellectuals working at all the different think tanks in and around Washington, about 150 of them. You would not know these names. I mean they’re deep, deep, deep in the so-called swamp. I’m not saying these are deep state people. I’m saying these are conservatives that are somewhere in the deep, deep, deep Washington political class working at think tanks, foreign policy specialists.

And every one of them signed or wrote letters condemning Donald Trump as an upcoming disaster, as unfit, as uncouth, as somebody who doesn’t know American foreign policy. Well, as a result, none of them got hired. So now they’re all complaining that they haven’t been hired! They’re complaining that Trump is blackballing ’em. I mean, it’s hilarious. Let me get the exact story here. ‘Cause I put it near the top.

“Two Years Later, No Amnesty for the GOP’s Never Trump Camp — Many remain critical, others have repented, but all are shut out from the Trump State Department.” The story appears in Foreign Policy magazine, the publication of the New World Order.

“On paper, Matthew Kroenig would be a strong candidate to serve in U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration. The 40-year-old professor of government at Georgetown University is an expert on nuclear proliferation. He has a record of public service at both the CIA and the Pentagon. And he says he supports much of the Trump administration’s foreign policy.

“But there’s one hitch. During the 2016 Republican primaries, Kroenig signed a letter criticizing Trump’s candidacy and calling him unfit for the presidency. Now, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo races to fill key positions in an understaffed institution badly neglected by his predecessor –” that would be Tillerson they’re referring to here “– he’s finding that some of the best-qualified people in Washington remain unacceptable to a president notorious for his thin skin.”

Really? It’s Trump that’s got thin skin? When I read this, “What do these people think this is? What do they think Washington is? Just a game?” And, folks, do not slough this off. In large part, in their minds it might be a game in the sense, okay, let’s go back to the primaries. We have 16 Republicans including Trump, and everybody’s sizing things up, and at that time nobody thinks Trump has a chance, and all of these eggheads want to march up and be in a Republican administration.

So they do what they think is necessary to get there. They choose somebody that they think is gonna win and then they support them, and then they start kissing rear ends. And part and parcel of that is condemning people that they have not chosen to support. In the case of Trump, it was unilateral opposition, and all these people believed that it would serve them well to rip Trump a new one the way Trump was being ripped a new one by everybody, unqualified, incompetent, dumb, stupid, dangerous, all of that.

So they went all-in on it. But apparently it was just what you do. Apparently they didn’t really mean it, because now they’re coming around, saying, “Oh, yeah. Trump’s doing some really great stuff, but we’re being blackballed.” What do you mean, you’re being blackballed? What do you mean Trump has a thin skin? What’s he supposed to do? You spent the entire campaign ripping him a new one, claiming he was unqualified, claiming he was incompetent, claiming you wouldn’t work for him, claiming he was the worst thing that could happen to American foreign policy.

Now he wins. Now American foreign policy is such that these people want to be in on it. Remember my brilliant observation that all of these Never Trumpers are sitting around watching everything they’ve devoted their lives to be instituted, policy-wise. I’ve never seen anything like this, and they’re still opposing it. Everything they claim to have devoted their life’s work to is being implemented, and still they run around and voice opposition to it.

It’s not Trump that has the thin skin. Why should Trump hire a bunch of people who might end up being sandbaggers or saboteurs? “Ah, Mr. Limbaugh, he’s supposed to look the other way. That’s the way of Washington.” See, that’s the game. The game is, “No, you’re not supposed to take us seriously. We had to say that. That’s what was called for at the time.”

They want to be held unaccountable to their words and deeds. They don’t want people to think they really meant it. Well, then why did they say it? Why did they voice this opposition in the first place? I think it illustrates some of the nature of what goes on in Washington inside the Beltway. Much of it is pro forma. It’s a lot of people doing what’s expected of them.

I mean, everybody there is trying to climb the ladder of success and kissing up to the people they think should be kissed up to and criticizing those that they’re kissing up to want criticized and so forth. Then it all backfires on them, and now they want to say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That was then. This is now. We really kind of support what the president’s doing.” Well, no, you don’t support everything, you didn’t.

And it would be foolhardy for him to turn to this group of people to fill these positions without deep interviews, extensive background checks, because why let saboteurs in the administration? But the idea that these people are acting like Trump is still the problem, they signed all the letters. They wrote all the letters condemning Trump as the worst thing that had ever happened. And if he got elected, it was over for America.

These were caustic. These were deeply just plain mean letters that these people wrote. Now they want to be held blameless? Now they want to be exempt from any accountability? Well, yeah, people in Washington say a lot of things they don’t mean, you know, they just have to say these things at the right time because it’s what’s expected. Well, it’s taking a lot of people a long time to learn that there is a completely new way of doing things in that town, and they are having trouble with it.

And that might be one of the many recurring themes on the program today, is how people are just refusing to see what’s happening, learn how this particular game is being played, looking at the results of it. I saw a story over the weekend, New York Times, Washington Post, I forget which — it may not have been either of those two — it was a story about how the Washington political class loved and admired Obama despite failure after failure, despite scandal after scandal, because he talked smart, because he seemed cool. You know, the old crease-in-the-pants-leg business.

Then they look at Donald Trump and here are massive achievements left and right, serious policy improvements and implementations, foreign policy, domestic policy, economic policy were off and running, and everybody seems to condemn that ’cause of the way Trump talks. It reminds me of an observation I came up with early in this history of the program where liberals and Washington are devoted to symbolism over substance. Now it’s now become style over substance. But it’s still true.

And I think, when you boil it down, the people in Washington, what they’re having trouble with here is the genuine substance of things because I think they are very rarely devoted to substance or involved. Everything’s symbolism; everything is perception; everything is PR; everything’s spin; very little is real.

And now a whole bunch of reality is hitting people upside the head day in and day out, and they simply don’t know how to deal with it, from Republican Never Trumpers to the Democrat Party, the American left, the media, and on and on and on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, on this De Niro business at the Tony Awards last night, you know, the F Trump, F Trump, let’s remember, we’re coming up on the one year anniversary of a deranged leftist opening fire on Republicans at baseball practice. Republican congressman Steve Scalise was shot, seriously injured on June 14th of last year. That’s three days away from being a one-year anniversary. You’ve got De Niro and you have a these other people out there just literally inciting who knows what kind of unhinged behavior.

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RUSH: How about the Twitter CEO? You want to talk about lunatic deranged. Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Twitter. Jack Dorsey is the founder of Twitter. Jack Dorsey went to Chick-fil-A to eat recently. Jack Dorsey then tweeted photographs of his receipts. He spent like 28 and 31 bucks at Chick-fil-A.

The left went bat excrement crazy and demanded that he apologize for going to Chick-fil-A! You know why? Because the CEO of Chick-fil-A has publicly said many times that as a Christian, he doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage. It violates his religious beliefs. And because of that, Jack Dorsey was made to walk the plank. And what did Jack Dorsey do? He bent over and walked the plank and apologized and did whatever else necessary.

My friends, that’s not freedom. That’s not liberty. That’s authoritarian, totalitarianism. That is scary stuff. “Twitter CEO Caves To Liberal Backlash, Says He Was Wrong To Eat Chick-Fil-A — Dorsey tweeted a screenshot from his phone that showed a purchase he had made at Chick-fil-A using a mobile application. After a liberal backlash, however, Dorsey apologized for eating at the popular fast food restaurant,” and promised never to do it again.

A former CNN infobabe, Soledad O’Brien, was one of those who called out Jack Dorsey publicly for eating at Chick-fil-A. She “indicated that Dorsey had sinned by publicly eating at Chick-fil-A during gay pride month.” Well, how do they know that the local manager wasn’t gay? How do they know that some of the employees at this Chick-fil-A are not gay? How do they know that the supply chain doesn’t have gay people in it? How do they know that the janitor isn’t gay? How do they know that the guy driving the truck delivering the food to Chick-fil-A isn’t gay?

They don’t know any of that. How deep are they gonna take this? And trust me: They’re not gonna win elections like this. This is not the kind of thing that’s going to build a movement. It’s gonna verify and validate the deranged that are already out there. But I guarantee you there is this timeless, silent majority out there watching and observing and noting all of this. And they are not joining it. And they are not applauding it. They are repulsed by it.

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RUSH: It’s fascinating, it’s hilarious to listen to the traditional Washington crowd bemoan and criticize Trump. It’s almost becoming a parody of itself. It’s almost becoming a joke. It’s almost to the point now — don’t worry, it still enrages me, and it always will. But now I’m having other emotional reactions to it, too, as well as intellectual or thinking reactions to it too.

I’m stupefied by the stupidity, the genuine closed-minded stupidity and bigotry of your average Washington political class Trump critic to whom substance of anything doesn’t matter. That is the biggest take-away from all of this, is that the substance of what Trump is doing does not matter. All of this great economic news, it doesn’t matter.

In fact, Bill Maher on his show Friday night was actually wishing for a recession. If Bill Maher is wishing for a recession, I’ll guarantee you a lot of other Democrats are hoping for an economic downturn so that they can win the election, which should tell everybody that all this talk about how much the Democrats care about people, care about the little guy, it’s all bogus. Wishing for a recession.

This is like last week there were other prominent Democrats wishing that North Korea would make a joke out of Trump and succeed in getting nuclear weapons! All to make Trump look bad! But I guess that’s not so inconsistent because these were the same people that apparently were happy with North Korea getting nuclear weapons, and they were happy with it because Obama seemed so smart.

And Obama isn’t smart. Obama is a faux intellectual, but he’s not smart. Have you heard the latest, by the way? That all of the Democrat 2020 presidential hopefuls are in the process of meeting with Obama so that he can advise them on how to beat Trump? How did that go in 2016? Barack Obama was on the campaign trail more than Hillary was. Barack Obama ran out there, and he was campaigning for Hillary on the basis that she would be his third term, because with Obama and noted egomaniacs like him, it’s all about them.

Democrat National Convention, there’s Obama telling everybody and Bill Clinton (imitating Obama), “Bill, let’s be honest. She’s better than both of us, buddy. She know more, she more qualified than you and I will be, brother.” What? How did it all work out for ’em? They got shellacked! And they’re turning to the guy who doesn’t know how to beat Trump. There isn’t a single one of them that knows how to beat Trump.

The only thing they can do is try to reverse the results of an election with this bogus investigation, because they haven’t yet demonstrated they know how to beat Trump. It’s an amazing thing to watch, when you consider these are professional political people whose jobs it is to win elections. And they are closed-minded, know everything, can’t be taught anything. And it’s all rooted in an arrogant contempt for average voters.

And make no mistake about it, the objective is to fool people. Not to relate to them. The objective is to fool you. The objective is to con you into thinking that they care about you, that they’re looking out for you, that they have your best interests at heart. But look at any Democrat consistency group and ask yourselves if any of them are happy at the job the Democrats are doing for people. They’re miserable, they’re angry, all over the country, any leftist group you can imagine.

George Soros. Is this not great? George Soros came out and said none of what I’m doing is working! None of my money has worked. I funded everything, and it’s losing. I funded Hillary. I funded net neutrality. I funded everything, and it’s all blowing up. I’ve been living in a bubble. Soros admitted it. You want to see how much frustration that must really equate to, for Soros to come out and admit that he has not understood what’s going on and that all of these issues he has funded have fallen by the wayside, that Trump keeps swatting him away at every point?

And yet they keep doing the same stuff over and over again. Now wishing for a recession. Meaning they don’t have what it takes to persuade people, Trump is bad, Trump’s not the guy, they don’t have the ability to persuade people to vote for somebody besides Trump. They want people’s lives to worsen so that they will vote against the incumbent, who just happens to be Trump. And look at this. Several gun-related businesses were suddenly and without warning disrupted in recent weeks when Intuit stopped processing credit card payments ’cause sales were gun related.

This is in the New York Post. Some of the payments that were stopped didn’t even involve firearms but simply T-shirts and coffee mugs and gun safety classes, according to small business owners. Okay. So Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, eats at Chick-fil-A, tweets about it, tweets out a copy of his receipt for whatever reason, the left jumps all in his chili and demands that he recant and demands that he apologize and promise never to go there again. And he does.

And now Intuit. They make financial software and they have all of a sudden stopped processing credit card payments if the payments are gun related. And YouTube has canceled a couple of gun channels overnight and without any explanation whatsoever. This is a crackup that we are witnessing. This is an all-out general disintegration.

Tell me if you think this works. The CBS station in Washington yesterday replayed an ad run by Virginia Democrat Dan Helmer, the ad that compared Trump to Osama Bin Laden. They replayed it, meaning they gave him free broadcast of the ad. They wanted to run an ad where a guy compares Trump to Osama Bin Laden.

Now, while at the same time these people are running around pulling their hair out and going nuts because of Trump’s tweets say nothing about this? Seriously, Donald Trump compared to Osama Bin Laden? Three thousand people died on 9/11. Anybody in those families you think are gonna be sympathetic to this?

Anybody in the United States military actually gonna fall for Donald Trump is Osama Bin Laden? Donald Trump, who single-handedly is standing up for the flag, the U.S. military and America, is Osama Bin Laden, that was in an ad that a Democrat in Virginia is running? And the CBS station in Washington replays it free of charge.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Yeah, George Soros came up empty in the California primary in the DA races, Soros complaining everything that could go wrong has gone wrong. Frustration on top of anger.