But Trump tweets out the following:  “Crooked Hillary said her husband’s gonna be in charge of the economy.  If so, he should run, not her.  Will he bring the ‘energizer’ to D.C.?”  It’s logical.  It’s fair. It goes right to the heart of Hillary’s phony feminism.  It touches on the Clintons’ wacko marriage.  It puts both of them on the defense. It’s funny. It’s clever. It uses the nickname that Trump created and captures this “Energizer” stuff. But, more importantly, it didn’t take a team of consultants. It didn’t take any focus groups. It didn’t take any polling. It took no test runs, trial runs. It didn’t cost a lot of money. It’s just one guy tweeting out what he thought on the spot — trolling. Trump trolling.

You know, this New York Times story on Trump on Sunday.  I saw that, I read that.  You know what my reaction to it was?  I said, “These people at the New York Times, they do not get it.” Everybody is still trying to attack Trump the way you would attack any Republican or any politician you want to decimate, but he’s not that.  His supporters are gonna brag about that story.  Trump supporters are gonna say, “Finally we got a Bill Clinton-like dog in our party.  Right on, dude!”  They’re gonna celebrate.  To the people that were not reacting to it that way, that were concerned about it, we learned that the whole thing’s made up, that the vast majority of that story is a bunch of lies, assembled lies.

And you know what?  We lament social media a lot on this program for various reasons ’cause I think it is destructive to individuals in this quest for fame that young people have and causes ’em to vomit everything there is about themselves. They give up any aspect of their privacy. But on the other hand social media has made it more and more difficult for traditional media to run hit pieces like this and get away with it because social media people can glom onto this, find the errors, find the mistakes, find the bias, find the outright lies and combat it instantly and put these two reporters on the defensive.

And Trump has done that.  Trump has put these two reporters on the defensive. Another Republican candidate probably would not have done this.  They would have left it to a consultant, “I’ll take care of it, Donald,” and nothing would have happened.  “Because you can’t fight the New York Times. The best we can do, just let the cycle pass, let it go and we wait for the next big story to come along and people forget about this.”  And that’s not the way this crowd plays it.  That’s the way traditional Republicans play.  It’s the way the Bush White House played everything.  “Ah, let this go, don’t respond to it, don’t dignify it.  We aren’t gonna take the White House to the gutter and respond to this stuff. It will be forgotten by tomorrow when the next story comes around.”

Except there was a new attack, sometimes two or three a day.  Nobody forgot anything.  Trump doesn’t allow any grass to grow under any of these assaults.  When he feels he’s been wounded, he wants to go in and unwound himself, as he says.  Anyway, when I saw that New York Times story, I didn’t know what Dr. Krauthammer said, I just did my cramming when we got the audio sound bite roster.  Krauthammer said, “If that’s the best they’ve got, we better just get to the inauguration here.”  Dr. Krauthammer.  Bill Kristol was in tears when he read it, but Dr. Krauthammer said it.

I said, “What’s the hit piece?”  I could see how they’re trying to do a hit piece.  They’re trying to defame Trump.  But, for crying out loud, where was anything like that with Bill Clinton?  See, these people forget that everybody has long memories, and they are demonstrating, the New York Times is demonstrating their bias and their fraud and everything else by engaging in a Trump story like this and in the Bill Clinton story guess who ended up being the sex pervert?  Ken Starr, who may to this day still be a virgin. Ken Starr became the sex pervert in the Lewinsky saga.  And Bill Clinton became the angelic victim of the vast right-wing conspiracy.

So the New York Times tries to run this hit piece on Trump and some of the women say, “Hey, I was misquoted, I wasn’t fully quoted. I was taken out of context.”  Norah O’Donnell of CBS was virtually seething in an on-air interview with Ivanka Trump. (imitating O’Donnell) “How can you even admit to being the daughter of such a bullying swine,” some such thing.  I mean, that’s not what she said, it’s the attitude.  You could see Norah O’Donnell’s face, nothing like the bathwater she’s in. She has so much contempt for Ivanka, and Ivanka just rolled right over her with her definition of feminism.  All this is coming up here in the audio sound bites.

Bill Clinton running the economy.  A lot of people had the reaction that Trump did.  Well, if he’s gonna run the economy, he should be running for president.  My reaction to it is, not only that, it’s Hillary admitting she can’t get there without the guy.  Plus there’s this nostalgia of how great the nineties was economically.  See, the problem here that nobody can address is that Hillary will not lay a hand on this lousy economy in her campaign.  She’s imprisoned by it because it’s Obama’s. She can attack Obamacare here and there, but the overall economy she’s gotta be kind of hands off, because to go after that is to go after Obama and the last seven and a half, eight years.

So bring Bill in there to try to make everybody nostalgic for the great economy that was the 1990s which was simply, if truth be told, the economic boom of the nineties was that which began in 1984 when the Reagan economy and tax cuts finally kicked in.  And it just kept on and kept on and kept on and came to full fruition in the mid-nineties with the Clinton presidency.  But beyond even that, how about this idea that there’s a guy out there who can fix the economy. There’s one guy, “I’m gonna put my husband, Bill Clinton, in charge of the economy. Bill Clinton’s going to revive the economy.”  As though there’s one guy who’s got the answers.

Well, if that one guy has the answers, why doesn’t he fix it now?  Why hasn’t he advised on what to do the last seven and a half years?  Why, if one guy has the means to fix the economy has he stood mute?  Of course it’s a flawed premise.  One guy doesn’t run the economy, good or bad.  It’s too massive and too big.  But the low-information voters on the Democrat side don’t think that way at all.  They do think of things like kings and dictators waving magic wands to make magic happen.  So I doubt their attitude toward it would be anything like mine was.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  The views expressed by the host on this program documented to be almost always right 99.8% of the time. The Wall Street Journal has a piece today on the Clintons and their economics.  This misses the point.  Hillary Clinton says she’d expect Bill Clinton to help fix the economy. So the Wall Street Journal sets out in traditional Wall Street Journal fashion — it’s predictable — to meticulously compare Bill Clinton’s policy position in the nineties with Crooked Hillary’s economic policies of today.

It’s nicely done, it’s smart, and it’s boring as hell.  Worse than that, it completely misses the political point that Trump raises in his tweet.  Okay, so I understand the Journal’s relationship, and I understand that the people that read the Journal think they’re top-notch businesspeople and da-da-da-da-da.  And so we’re gonna have in-depth comparison of Bill Clinton’s policies and economics and Hillary — it misses the whole point.  That’s not why Hillary is putting Bill in charge of the economy because of his economic policies or principles.

She’s doing it to try to revive a moribund campaign relying on the one Clinton that has some vestige of popularity remaining even though both have been corrupt.  You know how much these two have made in speeches in the last 16 months?  Over $6 million in the last 16 months.  In the last 16 months, over $6 million in speeches alone.  They make more in one speech than many Americans will make in five or 10 years.  But an in-depth comparison of Hillary’s economic policy and Clinton is not what is called for here.

In the first place you’ve got Hillary, “I am Woman.  I am feminist.”  She’s so economically inept she’s gonna put her husband in charge of it.  Not up to the job herself, needs her husband’s help.  I mean, it’s not about the discrepancies between then and now.  First woman president can’t do the job without her husband, in name only.  The most cheated-on woman on the planet holds onto her cheating husband because he’s the brains of the partnership, at least on this side of the divide.

Look, I’m not ripping the Journal.  I’m trying to point out how people are covering this campaign, particularly the Trump campaign, and they’re trying to plug Trump and the way he does things and who he is and how he’s gotten to where he is, they’re trying to plug him into the ages old political playbook for covering campaigns, and you can’t do it.  Square peg, round hole.  It misses the whole point when you try to do that.

You know what I think?  I think that part of this, I think part of the reason why so many on all sides, you’ve got conservative media types doing it, liberal media types, are trying to cover Trump in traditional ways in which campaigns of candidates and campaigns have always been covered, because they’re trying to assure themselves that Trump isn’t unusual.  They’re trying to assure themselves that Trump is pretty much like what we get with any candidate when you strip away the surface and you dig down deep.

And the reason they want to do that is ’cause I think they’re trying to find assurances that Trump can lose because I think a whole lot of people are getting very, very worried that Trump not only can win, but is going to.  If you take a snapshot of this point in time, if the election were today, who knows?  The Democrat Party is imploding.  The Republican Party, you can say it’s imploding, but where’s the momentum?

By the way, it’s now official:  Trump has received more votes than any Republican ever, in a Republican primary.  Broke the record set by George W. Bush.  What is he now, 60 delegates away from the — (interruption) Why are you frowning in there?  Do you disagree with that?  It’s absolutely true.  Okay, so 66 or 77 away from actually securing the nomination, minus whatever trickinology Curly Haugland’s gonna try at the convention.

So many people are still trying to plug Trump into traditional campaign coverage, and it just doesn’t work.  But I think the reason is they’re looking for assurances that Trump can lose, that he will lose. And the way he will lose is as a normal Republican.  He’s not gonna redraw the electoral map, for example.  “No, no, there’s nothing special about Trump. He’s not gonna bring New York or Michigan into play. No, no, no, just a regular Republican, can’t possibly win any of those states.”  And they’re digging deep and doing analysis to try to prove that they are correct.

The bottom line is nobody knows.  Nobody has slightest idea where this is all headed.  We don’t even know what’s really gonna happen on the Democrat side.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Matt in Lincoln, Nebraska, as we kick off the telephone portion of the program today.  Hello, Matt.

CALLER:  Hi, Rush.  Hey, let’s go back to 2012.  The Republican National Convention (unintelligible) and hammering Obama on the economy constantly.  So what did Obama do at the Democrat National Convention?  They brought on aging Bill Clinton to tell everybody that he could not have done a better job than Barack Obama.  And now we see how horrible Obama has made the economy.

RUSH:  Wait a minute.

CALLER:  So I don’t know what Bill Clinton’s gonna do if Obama was so much better than him.

RUSH:  Hey, you’re exactly right, and this is not a small point.  This was a major focus of the Democrat convention.  The economy, like it is today, four years ago was in a tatters.  Obamacare had just been implemented and nothing about it was going right because it couldn’t go right.  It was not designed to go right.  You were never gonna be able to keep your doctor.  You were never gonna be able to keep your plan.  They lied to you left and right.  They’re laughing about how easily they got away with it.  And they did, they had to bring Bill Clinton on, and he pointed his finger, it was a major point of his speech.

Matt, you’re exactly right.  I’ll bet if we searched our audio archives — ahem — that we could find this.  Clinton standing up on the stage, where were they? Where was the Democrat convention?  Baltimore?  I forgot where.  It doesn’t matter where it was.  Clinton standing up there (Clinton impression), “I just want to tell you people, not even I could have done any better on this economy.  There’s not a single person that could have done any better.  I couldn’t, I couldn’t have done better than Barack Obama has done.”

And the reason it was such a big deal is because in the Democrat Party, Clinton does have this reputation as a great, great economics micromanager.  That’s right.  It was in Charlotte, home of the transgender bathroom issue, by the way.  And it was Clinton that went out there to get Obama’s rear end out of the bacon because it was steaming.  And Clinton does have this this reputation of just the greatest economic micromanager ’cause the nineties is what the Democrats used to counter the Reagan eighties when they say Clinton is what saved the country from Reaganomics and trickle-down and so forth.  So for Clinton to come out in praise of Obama, say nobody could have done better, was big.  It was huge.

And so here’s Hillary now saying that she’s gonna bring Bill on to run the economy.  See, she can nibble around the edges about how bad things are now by talking about how she’s gonna improve this or improve that, but she can’t conduct a full head-on attack on the economy because to do that would be attack her very principles and her party and her president.

So the way she does it is to say she’s gonna bring Bill on to run the economy.  But Bill has admitted, and Trump could put this in an ad (Clinton impression), “Nobody could do better than Barack Obama, not a single person ever.  I couldn’t do it; nobody could do it.”  That’s an amazing recollection, Matt, and I appreciate it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Okay.  Grab sound bite 42.  We got Bill Clinton at the Democrat convention.  This is it. This was from September 5, 2012.  This is where Clinton said that not even he could have done a better job than Barack Hussein O.

CLINTON:  I had the same thing happen in 1994 and early ’95.  We could see that the policies were working, that the economy was growing.  But most people didn’t feel it yet.  President Obama started with a much weaker economy than I did.  No president — not me, not any of my predators, none — could have fully repaired all the damage that he found in just four years.

RUSH:  There you have it.  There’s Trump’s ad. There’s Trump’s ad — the Republican ad — for when Hillary says she gonna put Bill in charge. (impression) “Nobody coulda done it. No president. Not anybody, not nobody could have repaired the damage in just four years. But remember, Obama started in a much weaker economy than I did.”  Really?  You lying sack of whatevers are running around in 1992 claiming it was “the worst economy in the last 50 years.”

Remember that?  It was “the worst economy in the last 50 years”! We had people calling here saying, “It can’t get much worse, Rush,” and it proceeded to.