RUSH: Well, I have to tell you, my email is overflowing with people calling Trump’s speech a home run. People are saying, “Finally! It’s about time somebody started telling the truth about Hillary Clinton, and it’s not you. Finally somebody that’s an official Republican starts telling us what we already know!” People are jazzed by this, according to my email and other feedback that I’m getting. We’ve got all the audio sound bites coming. Of course, I, as a powerful, influential member of the media, had a transcript of the speech before it was given.
It happens it was a speech given on the prompter today down at SoHo, one of Trump’s hotels that he owns. So Trump basically said things about Hillary Clinton that you just don’t hear Republicans saying. You’ve heard them before. You’ve heard them on this program, of course. You’ve probably heard similar things that Trump said in other areas. But you just do not hear Mitt Romney say this, for example. You wouldn’t hear the Bush family talk this way about Hillary. You wouldn’t. You just wouldn’t hear it.
You wouldn’t hear fellow establishment types talk about this, ’cause it’s too close to home for all of them. But Trump can say this stuff as an outsider. He can say this stuff as a nonmember of the elite or the establishment, and it’s gonna be interesting to see, because while everything Trump said about Hillary has been said before by people — and, of course, we have the Peter Schweizer book, Clinton Cash, which Trump quoted from extensively. You don’t see things like that happen, either.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Clinton camp and the Democrats and the media react to this, because these are the kinds of things the Democrats have grown accustomed to not having to deal with, within campaigns. They know this kind of stuff’s gonna be said about Mrs. Clinton, and it’s gonna be said by surrogates. It’s gonna be said by opposition media such as this program. But they think they’ve successfully marginalized all the critics, and the evidence is that they’re still in power, and when they run for office, they win elections.
So they don’t really worry about this kind of criticism no matter how correct it is and no matter how specific it is, because they think that they have created and deployed systems to overcome all of this, all of these details about their operations being made public. But Trump came out and literally fired both barrels. And, I tell you, folks, I think — and he was not yelling and screaming. It was a prompter speech, so it was quote/unquote “presidential.” And I’ll also be interested to see if that aspect of this..
Because compared to a normal Trump speech at a Trump rally it was low-key. Some will say, “No, no, no, Rush. It was studious. It was serious. It was contemplative. It was thought out, and it was delivered carefully.” Trump veered away from the prompter a couple times, and there were a couple times… Folks, this is interesting now, and it matters. There were a couple times he misread the prompter, and I watched and said, “Okay, how’s he gonna recover here? He misread the prompter,” and he recovered just fine.
I don’t think… You wouldn’t have known he misread the prompter if you didn’t have the transcript in front of you. He’d leave out a preposition or he’d leave out an adjective in the sentence that would change the entire meaning of the sentence. He caught it. He didn’t panic. He didn’t turn away from the prompter. Most people that do not have prompter experience, whenever they either screw up themselves or the prompter has something wrong with, they freeze. They become to dependent on it.
Even first-time prompter users — people that are accustomed to going out, not needing a single note like Trump. I do not need a single note. He goes out and says whatever he wants to say for an hour and a half. But you put a prompter in there and it’s gonna be naturally constricting to people who don’t use it. And the reason why is they all say, “We’re writing this. You’ve gotta do this! You’ve gotta do the specifics. Don’t go off on too many tangents with it. You try to stay glued to this.”
And some people, they will go off on a tangent and maybe the prompter operator will not know to pause it there and wait for the guy to get back to that point. Maybe they’ll just keep rolling the prompter, and by the time the guy looks at it, it’s total discombobulated. That didn’t happen. The teleprompter… You know, using a prompter and making it look like you’re not using one is a skill. It’s a talent that has to be developed, and I thought Trump did okay with it. Like I say, he goofed a couple of times just reading what was on the prompter.
The prompter was correct, I think, but it turned out not to be a factor.
But he just came out… You’ll hear it coming up in a second. He came out and he said of Hillary Clinton, “She is the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.” The most corrupt person to ever seek the presidency. He said things like, “For the amount of money Hillary Clinton would spend on refugees, we could rebuild every inner city in America.” He made it clear to anybody watching that Mrs. Clinton’s policies, which are an echo of Barack Obama’s policies, are gonna continue to wreak havoc and damage on America’s minorities.
These things are just not said. You gotta… I mean, you and I say them, everybody else says them, but in official campaigns where the Clintons are involved, nobody goes this far with them. And you know it as well as I do. We’ve always wondered why for 27 years. “What are people afraid of? Why do they always pull back?” Well, Trump didn’t pull back much today. He pointed out all of the money that she gets from these Islamic states that execute gays and LGBT people.
By the time Millennials — who are thinking they’re gonna vote for Hillary just ’cause it’s a cool thing to do. By the time they see this, is it gonna open anybody’s eyes? We don’t know. Time will tell. Trump made it clear throughout this speech that he’s with the American people. Everything he does… In fact, that was a very strong beginning to his speech, why he even wants to be president. He said, “People have asked me why I’m running. Well, I’ve built an amazing business I love. I get to work side by side with my children every day.
“We come to work together, we turn visions into reality, we think big, we make it happen. I love what I do. I’m grateful beyond words to the nation that’s allowed me to do it. So when people ask me why I’m running, I answer, ‘I’m running to give back to this country which has been so good to me.'” You know, some of you may be saying, “Oh, no! Don’t!” Folks, that’s not bad. This is how the people Trump needs to reach talk. It is how they think. You and I all know the only people who need to be “giving back” are thieves, criminals and corrupt individuals that are taking things that are not theirs.
The successful don’t need to be giving anything. But to the people Trump needs to reach, that’s a big deal. Giving something back is a huge deal. You’ll notice every successful athlete uses that at some point in his career during an interview. “I’m gonna give something back. Gotta give something back to the community.” “Yaaaay! Right on!” People just fall for it. It’s a necessary inclusion. Trump put it in there. By the way, this comes one day after a Hillary Clinton speech where she created the biggest illusion in the world, and that is that we have a roaring economy out there.
That everything is phenomenal, but it could be better, and she’s gonna do it. And Trump came out and blew that sky-high. (summarized) “When I see crumbling roads and bridges or the dilapidated airports or the factories moving overseas to Mexico or to other countries, I know these problems can all be fixed, but not by Hillary Clinton. Only by me.” And he made it clear countless times throughout the speech that his desire is to be with you. His desire is to be with the American people, not “with her.”
He’s not with the Democrat Party. He’s not with the insiders. He’s not with the elites. He’s winning. He went back to that, zeroed back to that or circled back to it countless times. He spoke positive… You know, this is another thing. I made the point yesterday that I’ve never seen pessimism so successfully sold as the Democrats and the progressives and the left of today are doing it. Barack Obama and the Democrat Party convince people that America’s best days are over.
They’ve convinced people that America’s best days are in the past and we’re a nation in decline, that we deserve to be in decline in some ways, and it’s up to the right people now to manage that decline. And so we have a president and a Democrat Party which seems obsessed with telling people that it’s as good as it’s gonna get. “And in order protect yours from ‘as good as it’s gonna get,’ you need to vote for us. You need to let us run your affairs, and you need to let us handle the tough things in life while you go out and cruise and do whatever you do.”
That’s Hillary’s message. “Yes, she tried to make it better. Only government can. You can’t. You’re not capable. This country’s greatness does not rest on your shoulders. This country’s greatness relies on government programs administered by experts in Washington, DC.” Trump said the exact opposite today. “Everywhere I look,” he said, “I see the possibilities of what our country could be, but we can’t solve any of these problems by relying on the politicians who created them. We will never be able to fix a rigged system by counting on the same people who rigged it in the first place.”
But as they’re stating their opinions today, 40%, even more, of Bernie Sanders supporters would not support Clinton. It means they’re gettable. Trump made a pitch for them today. He described how everything is rigged, “Rigged by big donors who want to keep wages down, rigged by Big Business who want to leave the country and manufacture their products overseas and sell them back to the US with no consequences for them. It’s rigged by bureaucrats trapping kids in failing schools. It’s rigged against you, the American people.
“Hillary Clinton — who, as most people know, is a world class liar. Just look at her pathetic email and server statements or her phony landing in Bosnia?” When’s the last time anybody brings that up? But he brought it out! This is the old sniper fire thing. She said they corkscrew landed in Bosnia. She got out and had to dodge sniper fire. It’s a totally made-up thing. Totally manufactured. Trump calls her out on it, and it’s a pretty powerful close. Look, we’ll have audio sound bites of this coming up.
Judge for yourself if you didn’t hear it, but among the people who did who have taken the time to send me emails, the vast margin of it’s overwhelmingly supportive. Trump has also launched a new website, LyingCrookedHillary.com. So he’s off and running. I’ll tell you something, there’s a little… The Democrats are being awfully contradictory. You know, Trump doesn’t have a whole lot of money in the war chest right now. Not sure exactly how much, but it’s nowhere near what Hillary has.
And it’s interesting to listen to some of these leftists. You have people out there the constantly… The leftists — like with Citizens United, the Supreme Court case — are constantly whining and moaning about all the money in politics. They want campaign finance reform, right? They want to get all the money out of politics. They want government money governing campaigns. They want all the money out, they say. But then you look at their coffers, and it’s overflowing with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Here’s Trump. He doesn’t even have $10 million in the bank, and he’s out there running his campaign. He’s not even doing official, formal fundraising, and you listen to these Democrats, and they’re complaining about it. It is not complaining. They’re criticizing that, “Well, Trump’s not a serious candidate. He’s not serious about raising money, doesn’t have a serious campaign staff. He’s an amateur, doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Wait a minute. I thought you guys all said there’s too much money in politics.
I thought you guys all said that there’s way too much and it’s gotten out of hand and we’ve gotta dial it back. Well, here’s the direct result of that being put into play. Donald Trump doesn’t have nearly the amount of money Hillary does. Why aren’t you giving him credit for this? Why don’t you talking about Trump doing what you always advocate? And it’s another example of the hypocrisy they get away with. They run around and they whine and moan about all the money in politics, and then they Hoover and shovel as much of it as they can.
So there are a lot of opportunities here. And Mrs. Clinton is gonna be… She’s in a tight spot here. She’ll go out and she will do with this however she does. But a lot of what he said today — the vast majority, maybe all — of it is dead certain true. That’s what makes it so powerful, in a sense. Not the way he said it; it’s just that it’s out there. It’s no longer just in Peter Schweizer’s book. It’s no longer just Peter Schweizer on radio and TV being interviewed as a guest promulgating the information. It’s now all out there. It’s officially part of the presidential campaign, and it’s not ever gotten to this point with the Clintons being so fully exposed in this venue.
We’ll see if it matters.
RUSH: I want to start here… I’m gonna play a sound bite with me in it from Greta Van Susteren last night, ’cause Trump mentioned this. And I think this is a great example of the kind of stuff… It’s been reported. It’s been reported in the Drive-Bys.
But they report it and they let it go. There has been no reaction to it whatsoever. It’s out there; it was out there one time. I don’t know who else is making a big deal of it, but the fact that Trump did… See, by having it not made a big deal of, the low-information crowd — the Yahoo News consumers and whoever gets their news in the Fakebook news digest (whatever that thing’s called, the feed) — they’re not hear anything about it. But they will now.
And, remember, it’s crucial. Here’s Hillary Clinton getting away with tying the Republicans to rich people. She’s tying the Republican Party to Wall Street, the Republican Party to the big banks. She’s tying the Republican Party to the financial crisis in 2008. It’s all their fault. She’s tying herself as with the low-income crowd — and the average, ordinary middle class American — as their champion, as their defender.
They don’t know that it’s not the Republicans in bed with banks. They don’t know that it’s the banks that are practically paying for and underwriting the Democrat Party and Hillary Clinton today. And because Trump is mentioning this, it’s gonna get out there now. So here’s Greta last night on her program playing my comments about Hillary taking money from all these big banks and how much she has earned in just two years.
RUSH: That’s a great question, and it was up to me to ask it. Trump has put it out there now in his speech today. We’ll see. We’ll track it. Here’s Greta’s next sound bite…
VAN SUSTEREN: And it’s not Rush Limbaugh who doesn’t believe her. A brand-new Quinnipiac University poll of the three major swing states — Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania — asked, “Do you believe Secretary Hillary Clinton will try to rein in the power of Wall Street?” And a majority each state said, she won’t even try.
RUSH: Great news. I had not seen that aspect of that poll, so it’s a positive that more and more people are catching on to this. Now, it doesn’t say these people are gonna vote. It doesn’t give us much of an indication how the election is gonna go. But these are step-by-step things. And in dealing with the Clintons, remember, they’ve gotten away with so much, it’s never come back and haunted them. It’s gonna be a long slog here. It’s gonna require Trump consistency. He can’t say this stuff just one time. And Hillary’s gonna have her surrogates out there replying to it and so forth. It’s gonna be heated. It’ll get intense, like Game of Thrones out there — without the spears, without the arrows. It may even come to that.
When we come back, Trump sound bites from the speech.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We’re just gonna start randomly here in order. And, you know, Trump said a lot of things. Have you heard “the politics of personal destruction”? You’ve heard that statement, “the politics of personal destruction.” Well, Trump turned that around, and “the politics of personal profit” is how he described Mrs. Clinton. Look at these phrases. The shorter, the briefer… You know, brevity is the soul of wit. These are the kinds of things that permeate. These are the kind of things that connect with people.
Not these long, detailed intellectual exercises in explaining Whitewater and how the Clintons did this and did that. He just goes to the nature of the behavior in as few words as possible. “Politics of personal profit.” Since so many people think the game’s rigged already, so many people think… By the way, it is. I’ll give you an example, a great example I heard a couple days ago. “Poor old Denny Hastert.
Harry Reid’s another example. He goes to Washington a pauper and is now a major landowner and baron in in Nevada. Everybody instinctively knows this. They just think there’s nothing anybody can do about it. But here now is part of a presidential campaign, a person who is as guilty of this kind of corruption as anybody ever has been, being called on on it. Here we go. This is Trump, Hillary’s a first-class liar.
TRUMP: She’s a world class liar. Just look at her pathetic email server statements, or her phony landing — or her phony landing in Bosnia, where she said she was under attack, and the attack turned out to be young girls handing her flowers. A total and self-serving lie. Brian Williams’ career was destroyed for saying less. Yesterday she even tried to attack me and my many businesses. But here is the bottom line: I started off in Brooklyn, New York, with a small loan and built a business that today is worth well over $10 billion.
AUDIENCE: (applause
TRUMP: I’ve always had a talent for building businesses — and, importantly, for creating jobs. That’s a talent our country desperately needs.
RUSH: Let’s contrast that with Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton admitted, claimed, that when she and her husband left the White House, they were broke. Now they have a net worth approaching $300 million. How does that happen? Hillary Clinton has never created a single job other than government jobs or the staffers that work for her. She doesn’t know the first thing about a private sector business other than being in the Rose Law Firm.
Okay, so I don’t care if Trump has $100 billion. He’s earned it. He’s had a job. There are ways you can track what he has earned. The Clintons don’t want to admit how they’ve earned their money. They love to brag about their wealth, but how did they get it? Making speeches, $750,000 for one speech from a firm that now has close ties with Mrs. Clinton as a secretary of state and potentially as president? It’s $750,000 for one speech. I was watching some… It was Brad Sherman, Democrat from California.
He was being asked about this. He was being asked about the Clinton speech income on CNN. “How in the world can somebody get that rich? How do you make $21 million in two years making speeches? Who else can do that?” The Clintons ought to be a prime target. If you have questions about how people earn their wealth, for crying out loud, the Clintons have a way of doing it that virtually nobody else could parlay. So Brad… His name is Sherman, Brad… I forget what. He said, “Well, well, that’s nothing!
“You know, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan made $2 million for one speech, I think. Yeah, two million.” Reagan did one post-presidential speech, $2 million bucks he got for it. They’re trying to say that that’s far worse than the Clintons making $350 million in speeches since 2001, with $21 million of it in two years. I mean, it just… They got no leg to stand on. No Democrat has a leg. You can criticize Trump and his wealth all day long, but you can’t say he hasn’t worked. You can say that about the Clintons.
TRUMP: Hillary Clinton has perfected the politics of personal profit and theft. She ran the State Department like her own personal hedge fund, doing favors for oppressive regimes and many others in exchange for cash. Then when she left, she made $21.6 million giving speeches to Wall Street banks and other special interests in less than two years — secret speeches that she does not want to reveal to the public. Together, she and Bill made $153 million giving speeches to lobbyists, CEOs, and foreign governments in the years since 2001. They totally own her, and that will never change if she ever became president.
RUSH: Exactly right. They own her.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Back to the audio sound bites of Donald Trump’s speech today, and we are gonna get to your reaction to it ’cause I know you’re eager to weigh in here as soon as we get a little bit more of it aired, because some people didn’t hear it and didn’t see it be. And before we get to your reaction I want the audience here as informed as they can be on what was actually said. Here is Trump quoting from Peter Schweizer’s book.
This is what so upset David “Rodham” Gergen. He went out there and said (paraphrased), “You can’t do this! You can’t start slandering Hillary Clinton like this. This book’s been totally, fully discredited.” It hasn’t been. The New York Times, the Washington Post have both quoted from it. The book has not been discredited, nor has the movie that has been made. The movie… 
They actually did something clever. They made a docudrama movie type of the contents of the book.
And they rented a theater in Cannes in France on the first night of the Cannes Film Festival, and they ran it in that theater. It had nothing to do with the Cannes Film Festival, but the way they ended up having it written about, it made it look like — if you didn’t know — that the Clinton Cash movie was part of the Cannes Film Festival. It was not. It was at a theater theoretically across the street, but it does have a wide national release, I think, on the first day of the Democrat convention. So here’s Trump referencing it. We’re at number six here, audio sound bite number six.
TRUMP: Hillary used the State Department to enrich their family at America’s expense.
RUSH: Let’s go back and play this from the beginning where people can hear what he actually said at the beginning because that’s where he mentions the book. Three, two, one…
TRUMP: The book Clinton Cash, by Peter Schweizer, documents how Bill and Hillary used the State Department to enrich their family at America’s expense. She gets rich making you poor. Here is a quote from the book: “At the center of US policy toward China was Hillary Clinton. At this critical time for US-China relations, Bill Clinton gave a number of speeches that were underwritten by the Chinese government and its supporters. These funds were paid to the Clintons’ bank account directly while Hillary was negotiating with China on behalf of the United States.” Tell me, folks, does that work? She sold out our workers and our country for Beijing.
RUSH: Here’s the next bite in which Trump sort of mocks one of Hillary’s latest campaign slogans in which he points out, “You know, with her it’s all about her.” A Hillary campaign slogan is what you need to be saying about her. This is how Trump exposes it and responds to it.
TRUMP: Hillary Clinton wants to be president, but she doesn’t have the temperament or — as Bernie Sanders said very strongly — the judgment to be president. She does not have the judgment. She believes —
AUDIENCE: (applause)
TRUMP: She believes she’s entitled to the office. Her campaign slogan is, “I’m with her.” You know what my response is to that? “I’m with you, the American people.”
RUSH: Let me tell you something: That one is being quoted and repeated all over the internet today. Many of the emails that I have received cite that as a great sound bite. And, of course, he’s right. Hillary Clinton is so self-absorbed, all of these people are. It’s all about them. Obama is the same way. And that’s the way news coverage of these people is, as I have so delicately and elegantly advised and explained. So let’s take the Trans-Pacific Partnership, just to pick a story. They don’t tell us what it is.
Talk about the Drive-Bys. They don’t tell us what it is. They don’t analyze it as good or bad for America. They don’t analyze it good or bad for the American people. They don’t tell us whether it’s gonna help or hurt job cration. No, no. They cover it as: “Will Obama get it? Will Obama get what he wants, or will he not get what he wants? Will Bill and Hillary Clinton enable Obama to get what he wants?” That’s the total spectrum of the coverage. It’s all about them. They’re the MacGuffin.
They never tell us the details of whatever the proposal. Same way with Obamacare. They didn’t take the time to tell us what was actually in it. Didn’t matter! “It’s Obama’s, and he wants it, and therefore our job is to help him get it.” And so the coverage every day: “Were the Republicans being mean to Obama? Were the Republicans doing everything they could to stop Obama?” Just because he wanted it, it was automatic it should happen.
TRUMP: The Hillary Clinton foreign policy has cost America thousands of lives and trillions and trillions of dollars, and unleashed ISIS across the world. No secretary of state has been more wrong more often and in more places that Hillary Clinton. Her decision spread death, destruction, and terrorism everywhere she touched. Among the victims of our late ambassador Chris Stevens… I mean, she… What she did with him was absolutely horrible. She was left helpless to die as Hillary Clinton soundly slept in her bed. That’s right. When the phone rang — as per the commercial — at three o’clock in the morning, Hillary Clinton was sleeping. She started the war that put them in Libya, denied him the security he asked for; then left him there to die. To cover her tracks, Hillary lied about the video being the cause of death.
RUSH: Okay. So you and I all know this, and we’ve said it ourselves countless times. But when have you heard such a pointed allegation/criticism of her at this high a level? Did you hear Mitch McConnell ever say it? Have you heard Paul Ryan? I’m not trying to call anybody out. I’m just trying to pick high-ranking Republicans. Have you ever heard anybody try to discredit Mrs. Clinton on this, or even go after Obama on this? Yeah, a lot of people did, but not at this level. And on this level is important, because at this level is how everybody hears about it, not just in bifurcated media. Here’s the next it bite.
We’ll take a break after this one and get back to your calls.
TRUMP: Hillary Clinton may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency. To cover up her corrupt dealings, Hillary illegally stashed her State Department emails on a private server. Her server was easily hacked by foreign governments. Then there were the 33,000 emails she deleted. While we may not know what’s in those deleted emails, our enemies probably know every single one of them. So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be the president of the United States. This fact alone disqualifies her from the presidency.
RUSH: Well, there’s a little tit-for-tat there because yesterday Mrs. Clinton’s whole point was that Trump is temperamentally unfit. He is saying she’s legally and morally unfit, that she’s “the most corrupt person to ever seek the presidency,” and focusing on these emails. He mentioned it in another bite today that it’s clear something happened, but it looks like nothing’s gonna happen to her. The implication was that because everything’s rigged.
“He’s eventually gonna step in it. He’s eventually gonna put his foot in it — his mouth is too big — and not be able to recover.” Everybody’s waiting for that implosion; it never happened. I reminded everybody. I said, “You don’t know how to watch this. You don’t know what you’re watching. You’re not watching a candidate with supporters out there. You’re watching something much, much different. You’re watching somebody appear who has a deep bond with his audience.
“Whether you want to call them supporters or voters or followers, he’s got deep bond. And if you listen carefully, you’ll find out why.” It may take five seconds, may take 30 seconds, but in every Trump public appearance, he let it be known how honored he was they were there, how honored he was they supported him, and how grateful. Sometimes he did it in five seconds. As I say, sometimes he spent 30 seconds. But he did it at every appearance. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t have the ability to do it because she doesn’t feel it.
Mrs. Clinton is not humbled by support. She has more of the royal queen mentality where you’d better support her. That’s your role. She’s entitled to your support, and it’s matter of fact. There’s nothing special about it. It’s just you better do it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s another question that I have: If Hillary Clinton has the answers for the economy, why doesn’t she tell Obama what to do now? Why do we have to wait until she maybe gets elected and then gets inaugurated and then starts putting her ideas into practice? If she’s got the answers, why wait? Why doesn’t she make it a point to meet with Obama, who’s in the Oval Office and say, “Barack, this is what we need to do to fix the economy,” to which he’s gonna say (impression), “Uh, there nothing wrong.
You see what the NPR…? That would be National Public Radio. You see what their headline of the Trump’s speech is? No, I’m sure you didn’t, because you didn’t go there. But I did during the break. The headline at NPR — they just posted it — “Trump Just Gave the Speech Republicans Have Been Waiting 20 Years to Hear. — It’s the speech Republicans have been itching to hear, in a crystallized way, since the 1990s. Trump gave them exactly what they wanted and likely quelled some fears about his candidacy. They might not be totally behind him, but Republicans are virulently opposed to her.”
It’s a pretty good observation on Republicans have been wanting to hear something like this for years.