RUSH: I was watching some videotape of the inaugural, and we’ve since had George W. Bush interviewed on the Today show, and he’s got a new book. He’s promoting a new book. And, of course, Matt Lauer is asking him questions about the current political strife and circumstance, and he said, “Well, I wish our immigration policy was a little more welcoming. He made it clear that Trump’s not his cup of tea. And, you know, it reminded me of the inaugural ceremony, and what I happen to know… I addressed this in the first hour.

I’ve tried to convey it in such a way, ’cause I think it’s a really meaningful. It’s profound in its scope and in the ability that knowing this has to explain all these things that are happening. That is that the Washington establishment — both parties, doesn’t matter — can’t believe Trump won. They have no desire that Trump succeed. They don’t want any reforming of government in any way, shape, manner or form. They don’t want any budget reform. They don’t want anything. They don’t want anything upsetting the little world that they have built for themselves and they occupy, and Trump poses a genuine and legitimate threat to it.

And they are flabbergasted. They literally are in still a state of disbelief that this has happened. As I say, there’s a guy in the New Yorker who said the only explanation for this is that we are indeed a computer simulation and that aliens… We are just in The Matrix. We just exist in somebody’s computer game and they’re programming us, and they’re bored with the way the game’s been going. So they decided to input a whole bunch of crazy things just to sit back and be entertained by our reaction to it, because this can’t be real.

What happened in the Oscars can’t be real. It can’t be real that the Falcons blew it the second half of the Super Bowl. Just can’t be. This stuff doesn’t happen. You don’t get the wrong envelope, and you don’t have somebody who talks like Trump ever get elected. Just doesn’t happen! So they’re in a state of constant panic because everything that they have thought and predicted would happen since Trump announced has backfired on them, and they still are saying the same things. Trump’s still gonna implode, don’t you know? He’s still gonna destroy himself.

Trump is still gonna expose himself as a fraud, and this isn’t real, and Trump’s gonna be long before anybody even… They cannot deal with any other possibility. So I was watching the videotape of the inaugural ceremony, and Trump is the only guy up there… Well, Pence. But Trump’s the only guy up there on his side. (chuckling) That whole stage (chuckling) was made up of the people I’m talking about. I was watching it again last night trying to imagine what was going through their mind, just being there behind him.

And there he is giving his inaugural speech! Just that alone maybe required a bunch of them to have on Depends on something. And then when he actually started into his speech, these people… I think it’s hard to describe what they have actually been experiencing. And I think it’s part of the reason there’s some delays legislatively. Obviously there are. But there seems to be movement on some of these things, particularly in Obamacare. Paul Ryan had a press conference today made it clear, “Hey, no, no, no, no, no! We’ve been working on a replace bill for a long time. We’re ready to go with this baby!”

You know, every time Ryan does a press conference, the things he says are direct contraventions of what’s in the media, because what’s in the media is: “Republicans don’t have a replacement bill! They don’t want to do a replacement bill! They really don’t want to repeal and replace Obamacare! They really don’t want to do tax reform! They really don’t want to do any of this stuff,” and then the Republican leadership goes out and does a press conference, and they say the exact opposite. “We not only want to replace it, we’re well on the way!

“We got our repeal bill. We have our replacement bill. We are marching full-speed ahead. Tax reform? We got our stuff all lined up and ready to go,” and it’s interesting because the things that they say are the exact opposite of what’s reported about them — and this is not a comment on the media. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not just pointing out the tremendous contradiction. I don’t know who to believe on it. At some point, the way to answer the curiosity here is just take a look at what’s actually happening. Is there actually movement on any of these things?

And if there isn’t, then we have to conclude that what they’re saying is not necessarily representative of truth and the media may be right. So time will tell. I really think that much of this is going to require the personal attention, energies, salesmanship, and whatever other characteristics Trump has, ’cause I think he’s going to have to bring all these things home, precisely because — when you get right down to it — the people that he’s working with on Capitol Hill don’t want what he wants. It’s not just the Republicans versus Democrats and not just the disagreement on policy.

This is the fact that they cannot let this outsider succeed! If this guy… Already the damage done may be insurmountable. The guy won the election, and he’s got an army of people out there, and people in Washington know that that army would just as soon overthrow inside the Beltway — at the ballot box. Now that Trump’s making moves on his agenda, it’s panic time. You know, government, folks, is a strange thing. There’s not much ambition there, other than from the true-believer activists that are appointed by Obama and his cabinet heads or some of the embeds in the deep state, the regulators that are eager to advance the agenda.

But for the most part, government’s a slow and plodding place, and there’s nothing that goes on there that’s really merit based. You don’t get raises in government based on your work. There’s no merit consideration. You might get promoted, but an actual raise? Those are related to time and political favors and any number of other things. It’s a far different beast than the way things happen in the private sector, from where Trump comes. And so he’s up against a leviathan that doesn’t like to move very fast. And certainly not out in the open.

All of these environmental regulations. We wake up one day and there they are. We never, ever see the sausage being made because there never ever is any. There never is any debate. It doesn’t show up as a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill. You just wake up one day and find out that you’ve lost control of your backyard, or you wake up one day and find out, “No, you can’t expand your small business because there’s some snail darter or some other little animal out there that you didn’t know existed.”

So nobody ever sees this. Nobody debates this. Nobody ever sees the real punitive things. We don’t see things like we saw with Lois Lerner and the IRS. We normally don’t see how the government retards activity where it doesn’t want it to take place and promotes activity where it wants it to happen, and Trump’s coming in with giant floodlights, exposing all of this with the intention to reform it. And one of the real kickoffs for this will be tonight with his quasi-State of the Union speech.