I remember one time we called Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader back then, we called him El Diablo here in a parody song.  They went nuts.  They went nuts.  Almost as mad as when you refer to God.

Anyway, greetings, my friends, great to have you pus with us.  Rush Limbaugh back here in action at the Limbaugh Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies.  The telephone number is 800-282-2882, and the email address, ElRushbo@eibnet.com.

You know what’s fascinating to me about this convention?  And I’ll tell you what I’m having to do here, folks.  I’m having to make a conscious effort to watch this convention with a different set of expectations and a different mind-set from what I would normally use in judging and analyzing a convention, because this one’s different.  And it’s not readily apparent that it’s different.

I mean, it looks the same.  There’s a big convention center. There’s a stage. There’s delegates out there all over the floor. There’s media running around pockmarking everything. There are speakers on stage.  So it has all the trappings.  But it’s not the same.  And the differences are subtle.  And if you don’t know, I’ll give you an example.

And Trump just sent a tweet out. Well, I don’t know if it was just sent out, but it’s recent.  And it’s right on the money.  He says: “The media is spending more time doing a forensic analysis of Melania’s speech than the FBI spent on Hillary’s emails.”  That happens to be true.  And the reason they’re doing it is because this is the standard operating procedure of the Drive-By Media, and that is to focus on anything that they think they can use to blow up the Republicans, the conservatives, their convention, or what have you, and bring nothing but negative attention to it.

And the primary objective is to chop down anything that appears to have been a home run, anything that appears to have been successful.  And so they are zeroing in, they’re still zeroing, they’re still focusing here, in addition to things last night, they’re still focusing in on Melania’s speech and the dire consequences that she should face and the party should face over her plagiarism of the lovely and gracious Moochelle my butt — (My Belle) Obama.  And I don’t think that the vast majority of people care.  I don’t think they care.

I think the media thinks they should care. I think the media thinks they may care.  The media knows they care, but I think it’s a disconnect.  I don’t think that’s what people remember from Melania Trump’s speech. No matter how many times the media try to associate plagiarism with Melania Trump’s speech, I don’t think that’s what most people watching the convention or even hearing about it after the fact are going to think about it, remember from it, or take away from it.  And that’s just one example.

There are countless other, I think, disconnects here because the media doesn’t know how to analyze this convention except one way, and that’s through the standard political insider playbook method, which is to take anything that’s on stage and assign it to the racist, sexist, bigotry and homophobia of the Republican Party, report it from that sphere or through that prism. And that’s not how the people who have ended up making Trump the nominee, that’s not how they look at all of this.

And I guess the simplest way to say this is that the Drive-Bys are practicing the time-honored art that they have perfected of destroying the connection that Republican supporters have for their candidates and their elected officeholders. And in this case they can’t. No matter what they do, they are not going to be able to separate Trump’s supporters from Trump.  They just aren’t gonna be able to do it.  They’re going to continue to try, and the effort is going to amount to a giant flailing.

I’m not saying that there are things here that could be done better and there are not things here that are maybe harmful.  My point is the media analysts, they’re doing their best to destroy this every day, every night, no matter how, no matter what.  For example, there are actual media discussions now that the Trumps are overdoing the family component.  Oh, yeah, way, way, way too many family members up on that stage. Way, way, way too many TV shots of all the family members, the children sitting out there in the seats at the convention.

When is the last time the Drive-Bys ever objected to, say, all the Kennedys, the sober ones they could round up, and show on television during every Democrat national event?  When was the last time the media ever worried about too many Democrat family members?  It’s absurd that they actually think they’re gonna score points with this. While the Trump family is hitting home runs from the stage, the media’s out there, “This is an overreliance. This is just despicable. This is unseemly.”

There are now… In addition to that, there are fact-check stories on Patricia Smith, the mother of one of the victims of the sad events that took place in Benghazi.  And there are stories about how Pat Smith exemplifies the sheer hatred of Hillary Clinton at this convention and it’s God awful to see. “Oh, my gosh, this is the worst example of what our politics has become!  There is sheer hatred of Hillary Clinton; it’s just horrible to see — and she got it started!”

So they’re fact-checking her, and then there are the… I addressed this yesterday.  There are all of these Drive-By Media laments that they are bringing too many mothers of victims to the Republican convention and parading them before the convention and making a spectacle of them.  The Democrat Party owns that.  The Republicans have brought one mother up in prime time, Pat Smith.  The Democrats are gonna bring up I can’t tell you how many. I can’t begin to give you the number of mothers.

I betcha Trayvon Martin’s mother is at their convention.

I’ll bet you the mother of the Gentle Giant’s at their convention.

And I’ll bet you we will not hear a word from the media about how the Democrats are overdoing it and they are exploiting these poor families. We won’t hear that, and we won’t hear how there are too many Clinton family members being shown on TV every night.  No, no, no. We won’t hear any of that.  But the question or the point is: Is this stuff effective in this circumstance, against this Republican convention?  And only time will tell.  I think this is what it’s gonna boil down to.

Is there a movement out there that existed before Trump got into the race that he just happened to capitalize on, because everything he happened to believe matched up with what these people in the movement were already feeling, or did Trump create the movement?  This is a key question, the key question.  And the reason it’s a key question is because it has to do with the longevity, the survivability, and the strength of the movement.

It is bigger than Trump, actually?

Will it be around if Trump isn’t?

I think it’s the latter, and this is not to be critical of Trump by any means.  But it’s just as when this radio program started in 1988, the Drive-Bys tried to say that I had created an army of mind-numbed robots who are waiting for me to tell ’em what to think every day, when the truth of the matter was that there are gazillions of conservatives out there who didn’t ever hear what they believed reflected in the national media.  Everything in the media made fun of ’em, laughed at ’em, mocked ’em, criticized them; promoted people and things they disagreed with.

But this show was the first national-broadcast-media conservative program, and people glommed onto it.  And it’s not that I created it; it was already there.  I think the same thing has happened with Trump.  And that’s another reason why they’re not gonna be able to successfully separate Trump from these supporters of his, because it’s bigger than him.  And I don’t mean that as a put-down.  The question is, “How big is it?”  And we’re not gonna know.

The polling data. As of now, there is continued panic in the Democrat Party because Hillary — in the Real Clear Politics average of polls — is now up by 2.4, 2.7. I forget which.  Whatever it is, it’s in the margin of error. (interruption) That’s right. Michael Brown’s mother is going to the Democrat National Convention, and the mothers of other police victims.  You wait.  You think Benghazi mothers are bad?  Wait ’til you see what Hillary Clinton does.

They’re gonna bring out the mothers of as many people they can find have been murdered by the cops and let ’em speak.  I think they don’t have the slightest idea where the majority of opinion is, so let them just throw all of that in our faces.  Let them have a convention where they rip into the US military.  Let them have a convention where they rip into American law enforcement.  Let them have their convention where they rip into America’s health care and the global warming.

Let them have a convention where they try to tear down every institution and tradition, and let them do it in public.  And we’ll just see.  Now, I’ll warn you again: There’s a sizable number of Americans who are gonna agree with it.  You know it as well as I do. (interruption) What is this?  Oh.  It’s already been reported. Our buddy Ben Shapiro at Daily Wire: “Six Figures Speaking at the DNC Who Will Make You Sick.”  I knew it.  I knew it.  I knew that this was gonna happen.

I knew that there were going to be Democrats come out and the media come out and criticize Republicans for what Pat Smith said, whatever she’s doing.  You know, this business, the media is just shocked at how much anti-Hillary sentiment there is out there.  They really… Folks, I know this is hard for you to believe.  But in that cocoon where all the Drive-By Media people live, they believe that all reasonable people love and adore Hillary Clinton.

In the little cocoon where they live, there isn’t anything about Mrs. Clinton that’s negative.  There’s nothing to be suspicious of.  There’s nothing… So all of this criticism of her that they see at the Republican convention, that they hear in the country? To them, it’s unhinged, dangerous extremism.  Chris Christie last night did his prosecution of Hillary Clinton.  I thought that was a brilliant premise, by the way.  I thought that was one of the… I mean, I actually sat up when Christie came out and announced what he was gonna do.

I said, “Holy cow, does this have the potential to be huge!”  And he goes through all these indictments of Hillary Clinton and her foreign policy and then asks the delegates as the jury to render the verdict — and everyone, of course, was (shouting), “Guilty!” And halfway through this stuff, they said, “Lock! Her! Up! Lock! Her! Up!”  The Drive-Bys are beside themselves.  “Oh, my God! What? Lock her up?  What — what — what’s the next thing, shoot her at dawn?  Oh, my God!” They can’t understand it.  They really don’t.

They live in this little cocoon.  They don’t understand. Nobody that they know, nobody that they talk to thinks that Hillary is anything other than a goddess, as the future.  They think any other point of view about Hillary Clinton is rooted in unhinged, insane, dangerous extremism.  The disconnect widens every day.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Phillip in Northville, Michigan.  Welcome, sir.  Great to have you here.  How are you?

CALLER:  Well, thank you, Rush.  I’m well, and thanks for taking my call.  Very simply, what we witnessed last night is a true coronation.  We watched the coronation of an incoming new political dynasty led by not just Mr. Trump, but his family.  It started Monday night with Melania’s speech, I get that, but last night we saw the by-product of this family.  The two kids, the success, principled message from two articulate children in his family.

And I find it very interesting, and for you Never Trumpers that may be listening out there, all you need to do is go back and watch those two speeches, Tiffany’s and Donald Jr.’s and you learn everything there is to know about Donald Trump himself.  How is it that we can’t look at the success principles, the types of messages.  This is what our country needs to hear today.  You know, Rush, I’m 55 years old.  You mentored me all these years, since 1988, as did Donald Trump, as has Ben Carson.  The people who have real stakes in the game.

RUSH:  So you don’t think Chris Christie overdid it here with his indictments of Hillary Clinton and the crowd going, “Lock her up, lock her up,” you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that?

CALLER:  Hell, no.

RUSH:  Right.

CALLER:  Absolutely not.  I think that, again, and you were saying in your opening monologue about has Donald Trump created this, tapped into it.  I had the pleasure of interviewing Donald Trump when I was doing some freelance work for NewsMax down in Boca Raton, and this is back in 2011.  This man was up at a rally.  It was a Tea Party rally.  And I asked him the question at that time, I said, “You’re here at a packed Tea Party rally, what are your thoughts?  Do they have what it takes to move in and really change the Republican Party?”  You know what he said to me?  He said, “You know what, I really like the Tea Party because they’re smart.  They know, they understand, and they see what’s going on.”

RUSH:  That was Trump said that, you’re talking about?

CALLER:  Yes.

RUSH:  Yes.

CALLER:  Yes.  Donald, yes.

RUSH:  And what about Ben Carson, what about Ben Carson comparing Hillary Clinton to Satan?  What did you think about that?

CALLER:  Well, it’s true, and it’s real.  And again here we just saw Hillary Clinton two days ago trying to tie in the membership to gangs of being part of something, part of a family, and we’re either gonna have positive or negative gangs.  It’s such a stark comparison.

RUSH:  Right. Okay, Phillip, I appreciate it. I don’t mean to interrupt you.  I have to because of time and I want to get in a comment on your call before I have to wrap it up here.  See, this is exactly what I’m talking about.  This guy: Last night was a home run, those Trump kids! The media: “Too many Trump kids, overdoing the family, gotta give ’em the hook.”  This guy: This was a coronation! This was the beginning of the salvation of the United States last night.  This was fabulous.

The Drive-Bys think what happened last night was despicable, it was beneath contempt, it was barely mentionable.  It was so bad.  I’m telling you, folks, you can’t look at this convention the way you’ve looked at all the others in your life.  You just can’t.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  No, I loved the Christie premise, but I have to tell you, I thought so much more could have been done with it.  Well, where was all the stuff about the Clinton Crime Family Foundation and all the phony baloney speech income and all this domestic stuff?  But it is what it is.