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What I Know About Trump, Joe and Mika

by Rush Limbaugh - Jun 29,2017

RUSH: Let’s look at Trump here and his tweets now on Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough. If you go back to the campaign, Trump has branded people that he considers his opponents. We got Low Energy Jeb. We have Little Marco. We had Lyin’ Ted. We had Crooked Hillary. Now we have Low IQ Crazy Mika and Psycho Joe. Trump’s tweets today have everybody bewildered. What in the world is he thinking? And it’s actually not that. The tweets tell us what he’s thinking. Why in the world did he do it? What is the point here?

I don’t claim to know, folks. I’m like everybody else. I would just have to start guessing. But I do have some insight for you that might — nothing can justify this, but it might make you look at it a little bit differently. Here are the tweets. “I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came to Mar-a-Lago 3 nights in a row around New Year’s Eve, and insisted on joining me. She was bleeding badly from a face-lift. I said no!”

Those are the tweets. (interruption) What do you mean, you can’t believe the uproar? He cites bleeding here after what he’d said about Megyn Kelly? This stuff doesn’t happen here — well, but look, the media is predictably beside itself. CNN is literally — we’ve got the sound coming up. Little Brian could not contain himself, Little Brian Stelter couldn’t. I mean, they’re just, “This is just horrible.

Oh, my God, I wish the American people would wake up and revile what they voted for and understand what a reprobate they voted for. Oh, my God, it’s horrible.”

They’re having collapse fits at CNN. And a lot of — (interruption) Is what true? Yeah, they are, Little Brian says (paraphrasing), “I got pictures of her down there at Mar-a-Lago, New Year’s Eve, and she’s not bleeding. It doesn’t look like she’s had a face-lift.” All right. Well, let me take a break here. Do you know that back on June the 8th of this year — right here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers — from TheHill.com: “Morning Joe cohost: Trump May Be Mentally Ill — MSNBC Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski said Thursday President Trump is ‘not well,’ and even possibly ‘mentally ill.'”

So this June 8th, roughly three weeks ago. Brzezinski said, “I think he’s such a narcissist, it’s possible that he is mentally ill in a way. He’s not well. At the very least he’s not well.”

“Brzezinski explained that Trump may be narcissistic because ‘he does not believe the rules apply to him,’ adding that this belief likely led to a sort of ‘ignorance’ and applied it to the 2005 Access Hollywood tape recording in which Trump made lewd comments about women.”

Mika Brzezinski three weeks ago said, “And he’s so narcissistic he does not believe the rules apply to him. That’s where the ignorance label may apply because this is a man who says he can grab women anywhere because he’s famous. The point is, he feels he can say or do things different from the norm because he’s famous, because he’s a celebrity, because he has power.”

“Brzezinski’s comments come the same day former FBI Director James Comey is set to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee about his investigation into Russia.” I don’t know if you know this or not, that when Brzezinski and Scarborough announced their engagement — and that was fairly recently — that Trump offered to officiate, and Brzezinski said (raspberry) no. (imitating Mike) “I mean, if Jimmy Carter were in the White House like when my dad was there, but no. No. No way.”

Last summer during the presidential campaign and even during 2015, Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough were salivating all over Donald Trump. Trump appeared regularly on PMSNBC in the morning, and they loved him and they were sucking up like you can’t believe, and it was like three great friends. Everybody was mad at Mika and Joe for not being objective and acting like they were best buds sucking up to Trump. So something has gone wrong in paradise.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Just a couple of stories here. And folks, I’m just trying to add spice, information to this. I have no idea why Trump decided to do this. No clue whatsoever. I can tell you that the establishment, as you could well understand, is just beside itself at this display of barbaric behavior, this insolence, this crudity, this yuk!

Paul Ryan has been wringing his hands today: We’re trying to establish civility, and this is making it increasingly hard to do that, which is true. The Republicans are seeking civility. They have been for about 30 years.

So I don’t know when this was. Yes, I do. It was 2012. So five years ago, and I believe it was a Friday afternoon. I’m sitting here minding my own business, and I get a note that Mika Brzezinski and Scarborough are in town. There’s something going on in town that they’re here, they’re here making an appearance. It might have been Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend or some such thing as that. I think it was at The Breakers. And they asked to come by.

I met Scarborough a long, long time ago. He was a member of the freshman class in 1994. I had never met Mika Brzezinski. They came by here and they were here for about an hour. Could not have been nicer. And I asked Mika, you know, her dad was Zbig, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and I asked her what it was like growing up with her dad national security adviser to Jimmy Carter. She said, “Oh, we went everywhere. Every foreign trip he packed everybody up, we went as a family.”

I heard some fascinating stories. Scarborough was talking about his rock band and playing the guitar. And I ended up giving each of them an engraved EIB iPad. Do you remember? And they were thrilled, they were happy, and they walked out of here with them after about an hour. And Mika even used her EIB iPad on MSNBC. I have a picture of her using it, showing, flashing it. It was about three weeks later that they started trashing me like I have never been trashed. I don’t even remember what about. And I didn’t hear it ’cause I don’t watch MSNBC. I was told about it.

I had no clue. “What did you do to them?” I didn’t do anything. I gave them an iPad. They came down here unannounced. I brought ’em in here for an hour, and they sat here and talked. And then this I haven’t told you. Kathryn and I had dinner at the White House on March 23rd. It was a Thursday night. It was the night before what was going to be the first vote in the House on repealing Obamacare. It did not happen.

We got there right at five o’clock, right as Trump was meeting with the Tuesday group, a group of Republican House members. There were 17 “no” votes. We watched the whole thing, right off Oval Office. He converted 16 of those votes to “yes” votes. At dinner — I’m down to 30 seconds here. I have to go through this faster than I want to. At dinner, I don’t know how it came up, he asked me if I knew Scarborough and I said, “Yeah, I’ve met him.”

He said, “Those two are weird.” And I just sat there. He said, “Yeah, New Year’s Eve, they call, they begged to come to Mar-a-Lago. They want to be around me. They come to Mar-a-Lago. I said, ‘I gotta let ’em in, I’m president-elect, they want to come.’ I didn’t want them there, but they wanted to come. And they hang out for all three days, and I kind of felt obligated to have ’em.” I read this tweet today, and apparently he’s been bugged by that ever since it happened. I mean, just told me, told us out of the blue about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, I have an entirely different approach to this. Look. Mika Brzezinski and Scarborough have been going after me for I don’t know how long despite the fact that when they wanted to come by here and say hello, I let ’em in, I spent an hour, gave ’em both an iPad, walked away. There was nothing contentious or confrontational about it at all. But they have been relentless in their smears and attacks. I just ignore it. That’s been my philosophy since two years into this.

I struggled with how to deal with this kind of criticism all the time, and nobody gave me any advice. Nobody had any. Everybody had theories, but there’s not a tried-and-true way to deal with this. What I found was that the more you react to it, the more it’s gonna happen. And now it’s to the point, like Snerdley walked in, I apparently got ripped in the Washington Post. I didn’t even know until he comes in here fuming. “You ought to see, you ought to see –” Stop. I don’t care. I really don’t care.

Now, Trump is not that way. Trump obviously cares. And Trump, when you hit Trump he is gonna come back at you times five harder. That’s just the way he does it. By the way, folks, I want to remind you of something else that I, El Rushbo, have been pointing out for many, many moons. Because of some things that happened along these lines during my television show, which is ’92 to ’96 — oh, I could tell you some stories, what Roger Ailes and I did trying to get back at media people who were trying to smear me back then, and we succeeded. But those stories are best kept private so as not to portray, give away techniques, strategies.

But for the longest time, you know, I’ve made the point, could journalists handle it with people going after them the way they go after people? I mean, journalists, many of them, believe that one of their objectives is to destroy people. And as you and I well know most of the people they think need to be destroyed are Republicans and conservatives. They do it under the guise of speaking truth to power. Meaning holding the powerful accountable, except they salivate and sycophant all over people like Obama. I have an example of that coming up here in just a second too.

So it’s a one-way street with them. And I often suggested that if you really have a problem with the media, go after them the way they go after everybody else. Well, we have somebody now that’s doing that, and his name is D. J. Trump. And this is what it looks like. If you’ve always wanted, if you have thought that it would be nice for journalists to get a taste of their own medicine, you’re watching it happening here. It may make you nervous, you may think, “Gee, I wish he’d have somebody else do it. I wish he weren’t doing it.”

I’m also gonna tell you this. I’m gonna make a prediction. There’s no way to know this ’cause we can’t talk to ’em all, but I’ll bet you’d be surprised by all the Trump people not bothered by this. The media would be shocked and stunned to learn — there’s some Trump people that are unhappy with it too.

Selena Zito today was on CNN and she thinks there’s no excuse for this, in her words, no excuse. Going after the way people look like this, it’s just beyond the pale no matter what. Aside from the plastic surgery or face-lift comment, what Trump said about Scarborough-Brzezinski today is not new. He’s been saying things like this about them for quite a while.

But these two have spent months trashing Trump after sucking up to him all during the summer of 2015. The summer and fall of 2015 they couldn’t get enough of him. He was on MSNBC. They were sucking up like you can’t believe. Now they’ve done a 180 for who knows whatever reasons, and if you do that to Trump, from what I gather, he’s gonna come back at you.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was on Fox this morning with Bill Hemmer. And he said, “What is the White House saying about why that tweet –” what he’s asking here is, you people in the press office and all the other people that work there, the president does this, what do you guys think of this, what are they saying up there in your shop about the president?

SANDERS: I don’t think that the president’s ever been someone who gets attacked and doesn’t push back. There have been an outrageous number of personal attacks, not just at him, but to, frankly, everybody around him. People on that show have personally attacked me many times. This is a president who fights fire with fire and certainly will not be allowed to be bullied by liberal media and the liberal elites within the media or Hollywood or anywhere else.

HEMMER: I got it, but is that necessary?

SANDERS: Look, I think what’s necessary is to push back against unnecessary attacks on the president, both personally. I have seen far worse things come out of that show, again, directed not just at the president, but everyone around him, personal attacks, mean, hateful attacks. And, again, this president isn’t gonna sit back and not push back and he’s gonna fight fire with fire.

RUSH: That’s her explanation. He’s not gonna sit back and take it. He’s not gonna sit back and take it. If you’re gonna say despicable things about him — by the way, this is not new. I mean, Trump has been doing this ever since he became a candidate. And this is what it looks like.

Here’s Paul Ryan earlier today. This was the weekly press briefing that he holds, and he got a question, “You have been critical of the president when he’s made some comments that you felt were out-of-line. Are these comments out-of-line?”

RYAN: You talking about this morning’s tweet? Yeah, I just saw it a little bit ago. Obviously I don’t see that as an appropriate comment. I think — look, what we’re trying to do around here is improve the tone, the civility of the debate and this obviously doesn’t help do that.

RUSH: Yep. That’s — (laughing) — that I guess is the, what would you say, the boilerplate Republican response. “We’re always trying to improve the civility around here, and this doesn’t quite get us there.” You heard Sarah Huckabee Sanders say that Trump wasn’t gonna be bullied by these people and he’s going to fight back. You know this term “bully” as its used by the left has gone through a definitional change. When you think of a bully, what do you think of? What is the activity? What is the action that someone takes that results in you calling them a bully? It is sometimes violent. It threatens violence. It’s intimidating. It’s mocking. It’s designed to scare you. Right?

The Drive-Bys have changed the definition of the term “bullying.” The leftists love the mantra now of claiming they are being bullied. You hear it a lot now, and it’s the worst thing ever. The members of the White House press corps now say they’re being bullied by virtue of the no cameras being turned on in the briefing, or Sarah Huckabee Sanders firing back at the Playboy reporter, he said, “I’m not gonna sit here and be bullied.”

Except she wasn’t bullying. He started it. She reacted to it and didn’t back down. In his world, in the left-wing media world, that’s bullying. You know what bullying is to them? If you disagree with them. That’s it. All you have to do is disagree with a leftist and you automatically become a bully. The people that were bullies when I was growing up were constantly attacking and mocking and making fun of and attempting to take advantage of and usually trying to force an army of people along with them. They would isolate you and they would genuinely try to scare you.

But that’s not what it is anymore. Today’s bully is simply somebody who doesn’t back off their position. And so they call Trump a bully. Or they call Spicer or whoever a bully. If you don’t change, if they attack you because you don’t agree with them, and you don’t sit there, if you fire back at ’em, you are bullying them. It is another way that they have tried to take control of the language, like changing the definition of marriage to now changing the definition of bullying.

Let’s face it, civilized people don’t want to be bullies. You don’t want to be called a bully, you don’t want to be a bully, you don’t want to be thought of as a bully. All you have to do is disagree with the left and you’re a bully. It’s designed to make you to stop disagreeing, designed to get you to stop opposing them. It’s a classic way they co-opt the language.

But calling Sarah Huckabee a bully like the Playboy guy, do you know what he really meant? He really meant b-i-itch, that’s what he really meant because she wouldn’t back down. He’s the one that leveled the charge and she fired right back so she became a bully. What he really meant was she was a b-i-itch because she wouldn’t acquiesce. Plain and simple.

Let’s let you hear some of the high dudgeon on CNN. This is a standard Democrat strategist commentator. She’s been around commenting on campaigns and candidates for I don’t know how many years. Her name is Maria Cardona. And Poppy Harlow, the info anchorette said, “Maria, my producer reminds me in my ear importantly about Ivanka Trump giving an interview just a few weeks ago to Fox and talking about what she called a level of viciousness in the media. She said it was a level of viciousness that I was not expecting,” and Ivanka did say this.

“Well, Trump is a father of daughters. I’m the mother of a daughter. To all the parents out there, this attack on women and appearances, what is this country supposed to do with this, Maria?” So Trump has attacked all women now. He’s attacked all women and their appearance because Poppy Harlow is the mother of a daughter and also the daughter of a mother, by the way, or else she wouldn’t be here. So she’s the daughter of a mother, mother of a daughter, all the parents out there, “What should we do, what should we do, Maria, what can we do with this?”

CARDONA: I think the country should take a hard look at who they have elected as their commander-in-chief. The ironies are unending, starting with Ivanka, who, you know, prides herself on being a defender of women, but yet she backs her father and blames everybody else for vicious attacks against him. And then I actually feel bad for the first lady. What makes us think that the man who, in his life and in the campaign, has acted like a misogynist, a sexist, a sexual predator, who has talked about women in an incredibly demeaning and objectifying way, is this really all that surprising, that he would do this now, even sitting in the Oval Office?

RUSH: Okay, what does Trump have to do to talk about women in a demeaning and objectifying way? I have example. I have an example right here. This is a story from the New York Times. Ready for this?

“Trump Interrupts Call to Compliment Female Reporter’s ‘Nice Smile.'” They are livid at the New York Times. Get this. “President Trump was at his desk in the Oval Office and on the phone with the new prime minister of Ireland on Tuesday when a journalist for an Irish news organization caught his eye. ‘Well, we have a lot of your Irish press watching us,’ Mr. Trump said to the prime minister, Leo Varadkar, as several reporters looked on.

“Then, interrupting his conversation with Mr. Varadkar, Mr. Trump pointed at the journalist, Caitriona Perry, and gestured for her to come to him. ‘And where are you from?’ he said. ‘Go ahead. Come here, come here. Where are you from? We have all of this beautiful Irish press.’ After she introduced herself, Mr. Trump told Mr. Varadkar, ‘She has a nice smile on her face so I bet she treats you well.'”

They are livid. This is objectifying the reporter. How dare he comment on the fact that she’s got a nice smile. This is misogynistic. This is prejudicial. This is chauvinistic. This is anti-woman, it’s anti-feminist. he noticed that she smiled well, and he called her over to compliment her. Trump was probably shocked to see a reporter smiling, period. The exchange which was captured on video, my friends, so there’s evidence, there’s indictable evidence that this indeed happened.

“The exchange, which was captured on video and widely shared on social media, drew criticism about how Mr. Trump treats women and the message it sent about the attitude toward women as professionals in their fields.”

Yeah. You know, I don’t recall the New York Times or anybody else ever blaming Obama, blasting him for his sexism. You remember when he gushed about Kamala Harris? You may not. Obama said, “She’s the best looking attorney general in the country.” People applauded. Obama has wonderful taste. She’s now a crackpot senator, right? It’s the same Kamala Harris.

So Trump notices an Irish reporter with a nice smile, calls her over, compliments her on it, and Trump hates women. Trump is objectifying, he’s bullying women, is a misogynist, he’s a chauvinist pig. What’s that? Oh! It was the memorial for Nelson Mandela. Obama’s down there, he slides away from Michelle, and he’s sidling up taking selfies with this blonde babe from Scandinavia somewhere, and Michelle is shooting ’em daggers. Oh, yeah, I do remember that.

Obama can do that because he comes from a disadvantaged history in America where African-Americans were not allowed the same freedom. To see Obama break from the surly bonds of prejudice and be able to be who he is, it was a wonderful thing. That’s how they look at it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is John in Indianapolis. Great to have you, sir. How are you doing?

CALLER: I’m doing fantastic. Hey, Rush, you know, it’s true, you do have the best radio show ever, capital E-V-E-R. Congratulations.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir. I sincerely appreciate that.

CALLER: Awesome. Hey, you know what? I find I’m addicted to Trump’s Twitter feed. I actually find myself looking forward to the next tweet. Not only were today’s astronomically funny, but I always remind myself with these tweets, the best tweet he ever tweeted was the photos of Schumer having doughnuts with Putin and the one with Pelosi having lunch with Kislyak. Now, ask yourself, Rush, do you think MSNBC or CNN would have ever shown us, the deplorable us, those photos?

RUSH: Oh, of course not. You would have never seen Schumer at the doughnut shop with Kislyak and you would have never seen Pelosi — no, no, you would have never seen those photos. Never, ever.

CALLER: My point exactly.

RUSH: But you don’t think this went beyond the bounds of civility or propriety in any way?

CALLER: No. Absolutely not. I think you were right months ago, I think you said in February where the media, if Hillary were president, they’d actually get bored. Now, at least with Trump they have something to talk about. And again, sir, you’re right. Congratulations.

RUSH: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. They more than got something to talk about here. They’re livid. They’re taking all this personally. You’re not supposed to be able to get away with this. You’re not supposed to get elected president after they showed the NBC Access Hollywood video. That’s supposed to kill you in the Drive-By Media. Other things Donald Trump did, what he said about McCain, that’s supposed to kill you. Trump has survived the best they’ve thrown at him. Grab sound bite number 25. I think Pelosi, you know, she’s not happy about this either, but understandably she might be sensitive about face lifts.

PELOSI: That really saddens me because it is so beneath the dignity of the president of the United States to engage in such behavior. I just don’t know why the Republicans, they can tolerate almost anything, a candidate beating up a reporter and then cheering him on as he arrives in Congress. The tweets of the president of the United States, they set a low standard for public officials in terms of their demeanor. It’s really sad, though. This is the president of the United States. Something’s wrong here.

RUSH: You know, I’m gonna throw something in the mix here. These people applauded Ted Kennedy when he set out to savage, destroy, and ruin Robert Bork with one lie after another. Now, I know that Ted Kennedy was not president, but that was as far from civility. I mean, it was vicious, it was personal, it was mean, and it was all a bunch of lies. I know, two wrongs don’t make a right. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying these people have selective outrage.

These Democrats, they can tolerate almost anything. A deranged Bernie Sanders supporter shoots and tries to mass murder a bunch of Republicans, the endless lies they tell about Republicans about killing old people and pushing them off the cliff in a wheelchair, and they have the audacity to say this is out of bounds?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Dennis, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Great to have you, sir. How you doing?

CALLER: Hi. Thanks, Rush. A while back on PBS there was a biographer doing the history, discussing the history of Hillary Clinton, and what he said was that when Hillary was young she wanted to be a beauty queen, but she wasn’t pretty enough. So she decided to go for power and politics, but she has no charisma, as we all know. So that’s why she latched on to Bill Clinton, because he has charisma. She knew from the get-go that he was a womanizer, and now we understand why she didn’t ditch him when he did that with the intern in the White House. Here he’s doing adultery with a White House intern while his young daughter Chelsea’s there. That doesn’t even compare with what somebody said. What Donald Trump said is normal boy talk. Most normal men at one time or another have talked or do talk like that. That’s nothing.

RUSH: Yeah. But it’s not presidential, they’re saying, but I get your point. Here’s Clinton actually stooping interns in the Oval Office, in the bathroom off the Oval Office, defacing cigars at the same time, getting semen on a blue dress, lying to his wife about it, who probably knows about it from the get-go, as you say, and here comes Trump tweeting a bunch of things and you’d think it’s the end of civilization and the end of the presidency.

The same people bitching about Trump defended Clinton, and to this day defend Clinton. It’s a good point, Dennis. Thank you much. So much I want to get in here. A.B. Stoddard was on TV today and she was asked, “Have you heard about the president’s tweets, have you heard about these? What do you make of the president’s tweets about MSNBC Scarborough and Mika?”

STODDARD: President Obama’s base didn’t like Rush Limbaugh and all the things he said about him for eight years, but they expected him to do his job and not get obsessed with fits of vindictive pique over everything that Rush Limbaugh said about him.

RUSH: A.B., A.B., I’m sorry, ma’am, but you’re wrong. Obama was bothered for all eight years. A.B., do me a favor. Look this up. You’re not gonna trust me. Two weeks after Obama’s inaugurated, he has a meeting of the joint leadership of Congress in the Oval Office or somewhere in the White House, and he’s got Boehner there, he’s got McConnell, and he’s got Democrat counterparts. He’s got a bunch of people from the Senate House leadership, both parties. And he looked at John Boehner, Boehner told me this two weeks later but it made the news.

He looked at Boehner and said, “You’ve got to stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. That’s not how things are gonna get done here now.” And Boehner told me this two weeks later even though I had known it. Boehner looked at me, “Why would he say this to us?” I said, “Mr. Speaker, are you serious? You don’t know why he would say that?” “No, why would he say this to us? It’s our first meeting.”

I said, “You’ve got microphones out there. When you guys finish a meeting and you walk to the microphones, you tell everybody what happened, he was hoping that one of you would walk out there and agree with him, that it’s a new day and that the rabid voices like Rush Limbaugh, we can’t afford to be governed by. That’s what he was hoping for.”

I mean, there were numerous instances throughout all eight years where Obama made plain his irritation with me. What you won’t find, A.B., is any response from me about it other than to tell people he said it. That’s the difference.


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