RUSH: I think it’s important to keep in mind something that’s — and, by the way, I am not assuming the role of apologist here. I don’t want anybody mischaracterizing what I’m doing here with what I’m going to say next. I think what we should all try and remember is that Trump is about blowing up Washington as it exists. He’s about upsetting the way it’s always been done, including timelines, including the order in which things are done, and even how.

I think one of the reasons that Trump won the election is precisely because he represented everything but what happens in Washington and how it happens. He was sent there — and make no mistake about this. He was sent there with an agenda, with a mandate to go to Washington as an outsider and blow it up, clean it up, straighten it up, however you want to characterize it. And I was just… During the top-of-the-hour break, I was watching a little bit of Priebus and Bannon. By the way, Priebus is still alive there on the stage at CPAC. (chuckling)

And Bannon. You know, Matt Schlapp was asking him questions. “What are the three most noteworthy things you think Trump has done?” Bannon’s third thing that he mentioned was that we are going to destroy the administrative state, meaning the deep state, meaning this unelected bureaucracy that just churns out regulations and rules. They’re not elected. None of what they do is sanctioned by statutory law. They just issue regulations on how can you can live your life with your backyard if it’s environmental, or they issue regulations on things you have to do if you want to start a business.

These things are never passed in Congress. He said that one of the primary objectives we’ve got — in addition to reestablishing our national sovereignty and restoring America’s economic might and so forth (he referred to it as “economic nationalism”) — is blowing up the administrative state. None of this can happen inside the first month. Well, not none of it. It all can’t happen in the month. And in fact you can’t even make your first move on all of it in one month. If you look at what’s happening in Washington and say on Capitol Hill, you have the Democrats filibustering everything.

Trump still does not have every cabinet member approved. It’s gonna happen. They can’t stop it forever. But they are doing what they can to stop Trump as best they can with the parliamentary rules that they’ve got. And again, this is not apologizing or even excusing it. But I don’t think Trump is operating on what you would call Washington time. And by that I mean we’re talking tax cuts and we’re comparing when Reagan got his done.

Reagan’s first wave of tax cuts were signed into law in August of his first year.

And people are saying, “Well, if Trump doesn’t get it done by then, it’s over because then the next year comes and that becomes a campaign year, and we got people running for reelection, and they don’t want to make voters mad.” I think Trump is not looking at the things in the standard, ordinary, everyday world of politics. That’s what he’s about, is blowing that up — and I mean this euphemistically. I don’t doubt if Trump said that he’s gonna have a tax cut plan, he’s gonna have a tax cut plan and he’s gonna announce it.

And if he says he’s gonna have a plan to repeal and replace Obamacare, it’s gonna happen, and he’s gonna do it no matter what the Republicans in Congress are doing. He’s going to get it, and he’s not gonna defer to them. But he’s gonna do it on his time. He’s going to do it in combination with everything else that he’s doing, and so far everything Trump said that he was gonna do, he’s done. And it’s been a remarkable amount of things that have taken place in just the first month.

Do you think any other Republican would have rolled back these so-called regulations on transgender bathrooms? Do you think any other Republican would have actually said, “It’s law and order again in America — and ICE and Border Patrol, enforce the law!” Do you think any other Republican president would have done that? (interruption) Okay, maybe Cruz. Maybe Cruz, true. But there’s nobody on Capitol Hill that would have done it. My point is that there are amazing achievements that have already happened.

And they continue to happen, and they’re happening within an atmosphere of it appearing that everybody’s opposed to Trump, and everybody isn’t. The vast majority of people are still in favor of Trump, are applauding Trump, and eagerly awaiting Trump to do even more. But the media is creating this narrative, if you will, and this picture — this series of pictures, this overall image — that Trump is stalled, that everybody’s opposing him, that his agenda is backlogged.

And guess what?

They are attributing this to all of the protesters that are out there. “Trump is being stopped by all these protests!” None of this is true. The media is lying. They’re reporting things that aren’t true. They’re reporting circumstances, situations, and facts that are not true. And while all of that’s happening, Trump just keeps chugging down the tracks, doing things that he said he was gonna do. And you can tell how successful he’s being because the left and the media are still running around acting like they’re in an unhinged panic.

They want you to believe that Trump has been stalled and derailed, but they’re not acting that way. They’re not celebrating anything. They are continuing to present themselves and everybody else as this core opposition, and making it look like Trump can’t get anything done. But he is. And I think this speech that he’s got to a joint session of Congress next Tuesday holds a lot of potential. But the bottom line is this. Here’s another thing that I think.

This is the primary way that I think Donald Trump differs from virtually everybody else in politics. After studying this for as many years as I have, I am convinced — inalterably convinced — that the vast majority of Washington politicians are indeed prisoners to media. I think particularly on the Republican side the media has had the power to derail Republican agendas, stop Republican initiatives, and freeze Republican behavior.

I have concluded that the media is the number one obstacle because of the success they have. The people in Washington, media is every bit as big a part of the establishment as anybody else is. Everybody in Washington (particularly politics), you want to be loved, you want to be liked, you want good press, and I think people tailor what they say and what they do in accordance with how they are reported on. There are exceptions to this, of course.

And I think this is one of the ways that the Republicans have been stalled over so many years is simply with the onslaught of never-ending, blanket negative media coverage. And I don’t think anything like that is gonna stop Donald Trump. I don’t think he’s intimidated by it. I don’t think he’s derailed by it. I don’t think that he is in any way affected by it. He’s going to do what he thinks needs to be done. Whether we agree with some of it or not, he’s going to do it. And whatever the media’s caterwauling about is not going to stop him.

They have grown used to being able to do it. As I’ve discussed all week, there’s a blueprint for taking out Republican politicians. There’s a playbook on it. There’s a way you can do it, and the media succeeds more often than not. If they want to stop a Republican career dead in its tracks, they can do it. If they want to paralyze a Republican, if they want to derail a Republican agenda or agenda item, they have been able to do it over the years.

I don’t think any of this works on Trump, and I think this is one of the things really frustrating the media. Because when they’re unable to control what happens in Washington, that’s when they get panicked about their own lack of influence, and then they ratchet up the unhinged behavior, which is where we are right now. That’s what we are essentially living and seeing now. But I don’t think Trump is in any way like your…

Now, we all know Trump, as a human, loves to be loved. And I think, you know, Trump probably thought and hoped there’d be a little bit more national unity already by now than there is. But the fact that there isn’t isn’t gonna stop him. And I’ll tell you this: I don’t think Donald Trump is ever gonna blame himself, because he’s not going to stop attempting to do what he was elected to do. He’s not a politician. He doesn’t live and die by the same techniques that politicians do.

He doesn’t get up with the same mind-set of politicians. When we’re studying politics and watching Washington — which is politics — it’s hard to remember that Trump is not of that world. We assume that anybody entering it is going to become of that world and be sucked in by it and maybe even corrupted by it. But I think the thing to keep in mind with Trump is that’s not what is happening and probably will not. He’s just a different animal, a different ball of wax.

And he’s in his office at the White House or wherever he is, and he’s plotting and calculating and strategizing and moving things forward. And outside that bubble is all the usual garbage that goes on in Washington that has in the past affected elected officials, been able to stop them, put the brakes on, what have you. Not with Trump. So there’s no Trump timetable. So even if tax cuts don’t happen by August… I’m not saying that they don’t want them to.

But I don’t think Trump’s doing things by virtue of the timetable, per se. Sure he wants to do as much as he can as soon as he can, but he doesn’t have a timetable that says, “Well, if I don’t get it done by such-and-such a time, I have to give up on it and move to something else.” I don’t think that’s the case. But we’ll see. It won’t be long before we find out all of this, whether any of my opining here is relevant or not. I think I’m pretty much on the money.