RUSH: The answer that Trump gave to the question on Tiananmen Square versus the answer Kasich gave were 180 degrees different.

I asked a Trumpster this morning: “What do you think of what Trump said about Tiananmen Square?”

“Ah, it was great!”

“Really,” I said. “You think when Trump credited the ChiComs for stopping ‘what could have been a riot’?”

“Yeah, man, that was great.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“No, no.”

“Um, you realize he was crediting the government for putting down a protest of citizens demanding freedom, and the guy standing in front of the tank? The ChiComs did a good job in wiping the guy out and stopping a riot?”

“Yeah, I totally think so. I’m sick of these people.”

I said, “Okay.” I just left it there.

Kasich’s answer… I forget what it was. But it was, of course, the exact opposite from that. Let me take a brief time-out, folks. Cookie, don’t go get it. I got more sound bites than I can squeeze in today.

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RUSH: Oh. I got e-mails during the break. I checked ’em. My question that I mentioned I’ve been asking Trumpists about Trump’s answer on Tiananmen Square? I kid you not, folks. You know the answer I got on these e-mails? “Hey, Rush, not every candidate’s perfect. Let it go.” That’s exactly what I mean, folks. “Not every candidate is perfect.” Here’s Amanda in Dothan, Alabama. It’s great that you testified. I appreciate it. Hello.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s such an honor, and I’m gonna get right to the point. I hope I make the host look good. I’m calling about Trump’s comment that Islam hates America and the media and political insiders are all outraged. They keep talking about how we need American Muslims and Muslims around the world to help defeat ISIS and we need them on our side, and this can’t be tolerated. And my comment is that the Kurds over in the Middle East, and pro-American Muslims all over the world and in America, agree with Trump, and they understand that he’s not talking about them. They agree there’s a problem and an atmospheric of hate.

RUSH: Here we go again. This is another one. Let me ask you, Amanda. I’m assuming that you agree with Mr. Trump when he said that we have a big problem. There’s too much hate on the part of too many Muslims and it’s widespread and we better deal with it. We’d better understand it. And when he was asked about it last night, he did his old double down on it. He didn’t backtrack from. Do you agree with him?

CALLER: I totally agree. I think that, as usual, they’re out of touch, and they don’t understand the feeling of people and it’s the same thing as far as immigration goes, how they’re all outraged on behalf of Mexicans and on behalf of Mexican-Americans on the fact that you can’t say these things. “We’re gonna lose ’em in the general! You can’t say these things about Mexicans. We need ’em to win,” and yet Mexican-Americans who are here and who follow the law and came her legally, they agree with him. He’s not offending any of them. They agree that there’s a problem, and it’s the same dynamic where they completely miss the point and they misunderstand the people, as usual.

RUSH: I have to say… Amanda, thank you much. I have to agree with that for the most part. Let’s look at the modern three-legged stool of Trump campaign: Anti-free trade, bad trade deals, NAFTA, globalization, what have you. Bringing jobs home. Most of the elites, they don’t get it. They don’t understand. “How can anybody oppose free trade?” They don’t understand the opposition to it. They don’t understand the white working class, blue-collar objection to it. They think, “Well, look, okay. So we’re not leading the world in making sewing machines anymore. But nobody buys them, so, you know, we’re ahead of the game here.

“Why is everybody worried about what happening with sewing machines? Horse and buggies! Yeah, we lost the horse and buggy industry when the automobile was invented, but so what? Bye-bye, horse and buggy. We’re not gonna subsidize it to keep it around just for jobs.” There are now people seriously in the establishment, the elite quadrants, in the elite sectors — I read it last night — that are petrified that Trump is building a groundswell of people that want tariffs, that want penalties on foreign governments, that want to end free trade.

Whether it’s NAFTA, whether it’s TPP, whether it’s TPA, the global court where all these supposed violations are tried, they hate it all, and they’re worried that this is gonna happen if Trump’s elected, that we’re gonna get rid of all these trade deals and reverse them and it’s gonna be an 80-year period in the darkness again. Then you have this Islam thing. That’s another one they don’t get. I mean, Amanda here is exactly right. It didn’t take but a week after 9/11, and the political correctness practically swallowed the country. “Don’t criticize Islam! We must find out what we did to make them mad.”

And since 9/11, there have been Americans in large and growing numbers who don’t understand this. “They killed 3,000 Americans. Why don’t our leaders see what’s happening?” Then there’s ISIS, then there’s Al-Qaeda, then there’s these beheadings, then there’s all this terrorism, hijackings, and nothing seems to be done about it. It’s been festering. It is effervescing. Trump focuses on it. A whole bunch of people think, “Finally somebody’s talking common sense about it.” This stuff is not hard to understand, and when it comes to what Trump said about Islam, he is right. He is. There’s no question he’s right. They know it.

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RUSH: This is Tiananmen Square as it happened last night. Jake Tapper said, “Mr. Trump, some of your Republican critics have expressed concern about comments you’ve made praising authoritarian dictators. You have said positive things about Putin as a leader, and you’ve said positive things about China’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square. You said, quote, ‘When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the [ChiComs] almost blew it, and then they were vicious, and they were horrible. But they put it down with strength. It shows you the power of strength.’ How do you respond, Mr. Trump?”

Trump: “Hey, that doesn’t mean I was endorsing it. I wasn’t endorsing it. I said, ‘That’s a strong, powerful government that put it down with strength,’ and they kept down that riot. It was a horrible thing. It doesn’t mean at all that I was endorsing it.” He was simply admiring the strength or pointing out what a powerfully strong government can do. Hey, this is why what’s-his-face, Sean Penn, loves Castro. It’s why Sean Penn loved what’s-his-face down in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez. They envied the power. No question about.