RUSH: The disconnect, the divide is even bigger than I thought it was, and I thought I had a handle on it. But I’m telling you, folks, the distance between those, for lack of a better term, that govern us in Washington and the majority of us out here, they don’t have the slightest idea who we are anymore. I mean, they really, really don’t have any idea who we are. It’s striking. It’s genuinely striking, and they like to tell us that it’s us out of touch. And I’m telling you, I have never encountered a more out of touch bunch of people who are otherwise, at least reputedly, intelligent and aware and at the top of their game.
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RUSH: The divide, the distance between those who are supposed to be our betters — and I say that in a sense that you hope to be governed by the brightest people in the country. That’s why you elect ’em, vote for ’em. That’s why you entrust that they are extraordinary people. It’s striking to me how little they really know about us. It is just striking, and it is illustrated by this whole thing with Trump.
They are bamboozled. They haven’t the slightest idea. I’m literally serious. It’s not they’re just saying that they can’t figure it out. They can’t figure it out. There is not one aspect of the Trump phenomenon they understand. They really, really don’t. When they talk about it, you may hear them get close, but they don’t have the slightest idea.
There’s a Washington Post story today. Headline: I Asked Psychologists to Analyze Trump Supporters. This Is What I Learned.” This is the Washington Post. They don’t know. They haven’t the slightest idea why anybody would support Donald Trump, especially after these Muslims comments. They just don’t have the slightest idea and it scares the tar out of them. So they have to come up with some explanation. They have to come up with something to tell themselves, to have it all make sense. And they come up with reasons that they tell themselves that comfort them, that assure them there’s really nothing to worry about here. That whatever’s going on with Trump really, really is way, way out there and such an outlier.
And the way they are beginning to do that is to say that all Trump is, is me. I kid you not. They have never understood this program from day one. They have not understand the bond that exists between me and you. They don’t understand why you like this program other than to assign reasons that are insulting to you. You’re stupid, you’re mind-numbed robots, you’re racist, sexist pigs, whatever, that’s how they comfort themselves because other than that they can’t explain it, they can’t for the life of them understand it.
So it comforts them, since they think they have me figured out, they think they have me pigeonholed into this tiny little compartment. If they can tell themselves that this Trump phenomenon is just an offshoot of me, well, then there’s nothing to worry about. “It’s okay. We just have to assign some shrinks to confirm what we already know here and then we’ll move on about our way and be confident in the fact that at some point we will prevail, because we always do prevail. We’re the powerful and the Trump people and supporters are the idiots and they’re gonna implode.” Then days go by and none of that happens, and the panic just intensifies.
Here. I’m gonna back all of this up with a couple of sound bites starting last night on CNN The Situation Room, Wolf Blitzer speaking with Jeffrey Toobin. Jeffrey Toobin’s a CNN legal analyst. He likes to hang around with Fareed Zakaria GPS. They talk about what’s going on in the world, as Fareed says. And they’re talking about Trump’s call to temporarily stop admitting Muslims. Do you realize what fools they’re making of themselves on this, by the way? Here’s another disconnect. We’re the ones who know what’s going on. We’re the ones who know what’s constitutional and what isn’t. We’re the ones who really know what constitutes threats to this country. They don’t know.
They are so isolated and so cocooned in their own alternative universe that they only know what they tell each other and what they write for each other and what they have learned at their Ivy League institutions of propaganda. They really don’t know the Constitution. The point I made yesterday and I want to continue to make it today, and there is a section of US law that I’m gonna bore you silly with today reading it. Not bore you. But I’m sure many of you, by the time I finish the program today, “Come on, Rush, okay, we heard it, we heard it. Can you just not mention it again?” I’m gonna mention it over and over again ’cause you know the trick here is repetition.
There’s an actual 1952 United States statute that practically commands a president to do exactly what Trump is suggesting. And the wizards of smart in Washington don’t have any idea. They think Trump is blowing up the Constitution. Tom Brokaw, they think that Trump is shredding the Constitution. We have a genuine constitutional crisis because Trump’s getting people all revved up over something that would destroy the roots of this country, the fabric. I can read to you the roots of this statute, which I will do in a moment, that practically empowers the president to do exactly what Trump is suggesting, given circumstances at the moment.
All the way back in 1952 and in fact it was a statute employed by Jimmy Carter, who kept Iranians out of the country during the Iranian hostage crisis back in 1979. There are so many precedents, meaning we’ve already done it, Trump’s idea. The wizards of smart are acting like this is extraconstitutional, destruction of the Constitution, they don’t even know. And it’s even worse if they do know and are pretending that they don’t. But I think it’s that they don’t know. I think they’re not half as aware and brilliant as they believe they are.
It’s stunning how not only are they disconnected from us in a huge way, they have no desire to get closer. They have no desire to understand. It’s like liberalism has taken over the entire establishment. They have no desire to disprove what they believe, no desire to find out if they’re right or wrong because they can’t possibly be wrong and anything that exists that shows them they’re wrong has gotta be buried, done away with, destroyed, blown up, or what have you.
Anyway, back to Jeffrey Toobin. He’s on CNN last night. He’s talking to Wolf Blitzer who said, “The words the White House used addressing Trump’s comments among other words, ‘morally reprehensible.’ As support continues, does Trump speak to the base?”
TOOBIN: He speaks to a lot of people in the Republican Party. There’s no sort of mystery secret sauce going on here. If you listen to what he says, it is very similar to what highly rated talk shows say. It’s very similar to what Rush Limbaugh says. He is getting a very substantial portion, not a majority, but a very substantial portion of the Republican Party electorate. I don’t see anything that is gonna happen that’s gonna change that. You know, we have spent our time talking about, “Oh, he said a mean thing about John McCain. He said a mean thing about Megyn Kelly. Oh, his support’s gonna go away.” It never goes away because people like him.
RUSH: And they don’t understand why. But note the comparison. See, they have to somehow dial this into something they can explain to themselves. I mean, they’re scared to death of Trump and what he’s doing, for the exact reasons I mentioned yesterday. They can’t touch him. He owns the media. He is using them each and every day to advance his position. They know it and they can’t stop it. And they have to come up with some explanation.
So, “Oh, you know what? He’s just like Limbaugh! He’s just like talk radio,” which they think comforts them because that’s no big deal. It amazes me — it always has amazed me — the audience of this program. If you really want to be honest about the audience of this program, forget the way the traditional ratings are taken. We measure it and so forth. Well in excess of 20 million people — unique people — in a week listen, and the dirty little secret about numbers in this program is 12 million people listen during a three-hour program.
Twelve million unique people will tune in at some point. Jeffrey Toobin on CNN, at most, will reach 80,000 in an average CNN appearance — and maybe on a good day, 150,000. And what do they disregard, or what do they hoist up as something that’s irrelevant and not worthy of coverage? A program with an audience of 12 million or 20 million, depending on how you define it. They’re sitting there talking to 80, 100, 150 thousand people, and they have no interest whatsoever in trying to find out why does this program have 12 million, 20 million.
They don’t care. All they want to do is be able to say, “Well, it’s 12 million or 20 million bigots,” or, “It’s 12 million, 20 million idiots,” or you name it. But it’s a reality they don’t want to face. So here we are listening to people on cable news with a combined audience, at the time this program is on — cable news, the three cable news networks — with a combined audience maybe of a million. Maybe let us be beneficial here and generous and say a million and a half. And here these people are acting like this is the sideshow, acting like this or Trump is the outlier.
This is the majority here. This is what is dominant, not them and not their little audiences or their little networks and their little shows. The difference is they’re on television, see, and this is radio, and radio is the lowest rung of the showbiz ladder. “Gee, it’s just, you know, yuk! TV? That’s really important because people can see us. Pictures! They recognize us at the baggage claim. So, I mean, we’re important.” So now Trump is just saying what I say, and they comfort themselves with this.
That’s how they just relegate it to meaninglessness. But Toobin here is wrong in his analysis of the Trump base. You know what’s ironic about this, is the base of support that Trump has is exactly what the Republican Party claims it wants. There’s all kinds of independents. There’s all kinds of women, and through all different demographics and age brackets. Conservative Republicans are not the majority of Trump’s support base. They’re large, but it’s not the majority.
There are a lot of blue-collar — known as union, known as taxpayers, known as laborers, known as the middle class — who make up Trump’s support. Trump’s support is broad-based. It covers practically every demographic. There’s Hispanics in his coalition. There are Jewish people in his coalition. You don’t read about it ’cause the media doesn’t want to confront that. They have to tell themselves that Trump’s base consists of people who would star in Deliverance.
And that’s how they comfort themselves, saying that’s who you are. As they sit there with their — what — elite, brilliant audiences of a hundred thousand and preach as though highly successful, many more successful, much more success media enterprise attract many more people and hold them? I mean, it is elitism run amok. Gayle King. Grab sound bite three quickly. Yeah. This is CBS This Morning. Just a brief little comment from her, same thing Toobin says.
KING: Politicians’ outrage over the idea of keeping Muslims from entering the United States does not tell the full story. Many of Donald Trump’s supporters say his proposal is worth a try, and conservatives on talk radio agree.
RUSH: So you see, that’s how they’re trying to destroy Trump is by linking him to me and claiming: You know what, I’m the guy that paved the way! You know who paved the road for Trump? You know who’s made Trump possible? Barack Hussein O, folks. If you people on the left want to be honest, Barack Hussein Obama is who makes Donald Trump possible. Learn it, love it, live it, deal with it.
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RUSH: Okay. You noted thinkers in the establishment — the elite on the left or wherever you are — I want you to know, I am more than honored to be lumped in here with your attempt to explain Donald Trump. I know you’re looking to comfort yourselves; I know you’re trying to tell yourselves the equivalent of a bedtime story. “The big, bad wolf is not gonna get you.” As I say, I’m honored and happy to be in your equation. But I just have to tell you something: It’s not me. I mean, I don’t have anything to do with why Trump’s doing what he’s doing.
You guys do. You guys. Barack Hussein Obama. You people who have been running the country the last seven, 10, 15, 20, whatever years. You have paved this road, the Donald Trump Memorial Highway. You made the circumstances possible. You created the attitudes, policies. You implemented things. You’re putting this country at risk in ways you don’t even know. And when you find out people think that, you can’t for the life of you understand it.
But if you want to explain Trump — and I’ll get into this in detail as the program unfolds, and I’m gonna read this section of the US Code (passed by a Democrat Congress, signed by a Democrat president in 1952) right after we get back from the break at the bottom of the hour. But you don’t need to ask psychiatrists or shrinks to explain Trump supporters. You just need to look at the last seven years. Barack Obama birthed the Donald Trump movement. There’s no question about it.
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RUSH: One more audio sound bite just to show you the theme carries throughout the media. This is local Los Angeles television news, KNBC Eyewitness News at Five. Correspondent Conan Nolan reporting about Trump and his call to temporarily stop admitting Muslims to the country. You hear a bunch of other people in the report, but Conan Nolan is the Eyewitness News reporter here for KNBC Los Angeles.
NOLAN: Doubling down, Trump today indicted the Muslim population already here!
TRUMP: The Muslim community is not reporting what’s going on.
NOLAN: This from the California Council on American-Islamic Relations.
MAN: Donald Trump just trying to outdo his previous statements. You know, it looks like he’s enjoying himself.
NOLAN: To that degree, CAIR and conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh may be in agreement. On his program today Limbaugh said the most recent dustup over Trump’s comments is, quote, “a glittering, glaring example of how he is playing the media like a Stradivarius.”
RUSH: Okay, so, you see the point of that bite is, “I mean even Limbaugh and CAIR are saying the same thing!” So they’re trying to put me right in the middle of this. You know why? Because they think that will discredit Trump. Their opinion of me is that my reputation’s mud. They’ve destroyed me. They think they have convinced everybody, including people that listen to me, that I’m a reprobate. And they’re very confident they’ve convinced people that don’t listen to me that I’m a worthless reprobate.
So therefore, all they have to do is attach my name to Trump, and that will tramp into Trump also being a reprobate. That’s what they think. That’s why I say, “They’re the ones sitting there with audiences 150,000 versus our 12 million to 20 million here, and whatever their readership is in their magazines and newspapers.” It’s folly. It’s humorous, but this is… They have to resort back to these comfort zones that they have to explain what is to them the inexplicable.
You know, yesterday on this program we had a couple sound bites of… Well, Mark Halperin was one and there was another one saying, “Before we really get a handle on people are gonna think about Trump, we gotta wait for talk radio. We gotta wait to hear what Limbaugh says before we’re gonna know for sure how the country is gonna react to Trump.” So Halperin on Bloomberg TV last night — his show With All Due Respect — is talking with his cohost John Heilemann. Listen to this.
HALPERIN: We asked our chief political meteorologist to take on the mentally fatiguing task of listening to a lot of talk radio. What he found is that the decibel level and the focus was a lot lower, a lot more mild than what it was elsewhere in the political and media world. Rush Limbaugh. They werenÂ’t super negative about Trump to say the least.
HEILEMANN: We all note all the time that the conservative media echo chamber is powerful but we don’t actually understand its power in any meaningful way. Um, it seems to me that if this thing does not bring forth a defection of that part of the base echo chamber, uh, nothing will.
RUSH: The last voice you hear there belonged to John Heilemann. He is the one who said, “You know, we note all the time the conservative media echo chamber is powerful, but we don’t actually understand its power in any meaningful way.” And he’s right. They don’t. They’ve never endeavored to. They have used their own prejudice and political bias to explain the success of this program and who you all are.
And rather than acknowledge any professionalism that might be a part of this program — and rather than acknowledge the achievements that have taken place here on this program — they instead assign it this oddball, kook status that’s way, way over there, outside the mainstream of the country. Which is what they think they are. They are the mainstream. And this, our 12 to 20 million audience? We’re just (laughing), you know, the oddballs. They’re the normal. They’re the common-sensical ones, with their audiences of 80,000, 150,000, or what have you.
It’s just… They assign somebody to listen to this program all day yesterday. Not them. They couldn’t of course. No, no, no, no. They had to assign a staffer to do it. They could have just waited and read the website, but at least they listened to the program. And you know? They were puzzled. They didn’t hear any anger here. They didn’t hear any super negative. They expected it, and since they didn’t hear any anger. “Super negative.” They said, “Wow, okay.
“Then we’re not gonna get any help from Limbaugh taking Trump out. Uh-oh. We got a problem.” See, they were hoping to tune into this program and find that I, too, was going to join everybody else over there. Why would I do that? I never do. Conventional wisdom? You never find me there. And not by design. I just don’t think the way the conventional wisdom thinkers do. And I just want to stress again, I talked about the political reality of this Trump statement with Muslims and so forth and entry to the country.
Look at what he did. I mean, in a political sense, folks, this is undeniable. He owns a position. He’s the only guy. He and Cruz. Cruz did not come out and condemn his position or condemn him. Everybody else, everybody is way over there all saying the same thing, all actually exhibiting their lack of knowledge of the Constitution, their lack of knowledge of the law. But the point is, they all sound the same. And guess what? They are all on the side of Obama. And I don’t know if you people in what we call the elites or the ruling class, establishment know: Obama is no longer popular here.
This is not 2007 and 2008.
Barack Obama is a drag on the Democrat Party, he is a drag on this country. And the magic, if there was any, is long gone. When Trump succeeds in unifying everybody else about himself with Obama, that is a political victory for him. The lone occupant of a particular political position? And everybody… Look at how fast everybody ran to condemn what Trump said. This is something this nation needs to talk about, if you ask me. We are a great nation at risk in a very dangerous world, and we are in the crosshairs of a lot of dangerous people.
And this is going to require a very thought-out strategy to win, to defeat the enemies that everybody acknowledges that we have. Except in the White House. They will not acknowledge that they’re facing an enemy here. Their big enemy is us, Republican Party, conservatism. We need to be having a discussion, and yet everybody in the establishment — everybody, Democrats, Republicans — are not interested in having the discussion. They’re just immediately acting as though Trump, “Oh, my God! Get him outta here! He can destroy us!
“Oh, we’re panicking. What are they gonna think of us?” Do you know, folks, even Hamas…? Hamas is a terrorist group. Do you know that Hamas came out in opposition to Trump’s statement? That puts the Republican Party, the Democrat Party, and everybody else in the establishment and Obama on the same side Hamas is on. And over here all by himself is Donald Trump speaking out against it all. Now, if you’re the establishment, you don’t think people are sophisticated enough to understand it.
“So what, Rush? You may say that’s a brilliant political move but the average voter in this country doesn’t understand anything of the sort.” This is where you people in the establishment go off the rails more often than any other time, and that is underestimating what the people of this country know, what they think, and what they are willing to do to protect themselves and their communities, their towns and cities and their families. That’s where the disconnect is so great. So therefore, it’s a bunch of unsophisticated rubes.
Everybody on that side is trying to tell everybody, “Oh, no, no, no! I’m not an unreasonable bigot. I’m not biased. I’m not prejudiced! I don’t hate people of different religions. No, no, don’t count me among them.” It’s a position not rooted in any substance whatsoever. It’s a position rooted in, “Gosh, I don’t want the media to hate me!” It’s just childish and immature, given the real threats that we face.
So rather than take this subject up and try to defeat Trump on the substance of the ideas… What defeats a bad idea? A better one. That’s all anybody’s gotta do: Come up with better ideas than Trump’s got. You can’t just sit there and insult Trump’s ideas and just act like you’re so offended. “Oh, jeez, that’s so beneath us! Oh, my God, I can’t believe him.” You gotta come up with a better idea. And so far the opponents of Trump have not come up with better ideas. If you did… I give you an example.
Many of you might think this is going to be mean and insensitive. I assure you it’s not because we’re speaking here in the political sense. By the way, a guest host of this program, Mark Steyn, was on Greta last night. Did you hear what he said? This is great. Stein said, quote (paraphrasing), “To most Americans, Donald Trump sounds a lot less nutty than John Kerry did when he said in Paris that Islam’s not the problem, while they’re still mopping blood up from the streets in Paris.” Bingo. To most Americans, Donald Trump sounds a lot less nutty than John Kerry trying to explain that there is a rationale for Islam bombing and shooting up Charlie Hebdo.