RUSH: Right here we have it. This is how it works. CNN, even now, is discussing the ABC poll that shows Trump’s approval at 36%. Do not forget, the ABC News/Washington Post poll undersampled Republicans by 12 points. It was 35% Democrats in their sample, 23% Republicans. Now of course you’re gonna get a skewed result. Remember, that Gallup reported last November that 38% of the country identified as Republican. So what they want us to accept is that Trump is so hated and despised that 15% of the population admitting to be Republicans last October have vanished.
Twelve percent of them have gone away and no longer call themselves Republicans, and that’s why they sampled them the way they did in their poll. That’s what they… I guarantee you if anybody from that poll is asked, “How can you only sample 23% Republican?” they’ll say, “Well, that’s how many Republicans have grown disaffected and unhappy with Donald Trump, and so our sample is accurate.” That’s the lie that they will tell. Thirty-six percent approval. There’s no way. And guess what? We actually have evidence.
The Wall Street Journal/NBC poll decided to do a poll of people other than in New York, Boston, and Washington. And in “the American counties that fueled Trump’s victory,” Trump’s job approval rating is at 50%. “Fifty percent of adults in these counties — consisting of Republicans, Democrats, and independents — approve of the president’s job performance, including 29% who strongly approve; 46% disapprove. By comparison, last month’s national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll had Trump’s overall approval rating at 40.” So it’s… No, it hasn’t gone up 10 points. What NBC and Wall Street Journal did was sample just the counties where Trump won.
That’s the hell of a lot of counties. This is another illustration of the brilliance of the Electoral College, by the way. Somebody at NBC or Wall Street Journal — somebody in this polling unit — thought… Look, everybody thinks we’re bifurcated now. Carl what’s his name, Carl Bernstein, thinks we’re in a media civil war and a cultural civil war. Actually, we’ve been in a cultural civil war for a long time. Bernstein’s revelation is that now the media is caught up in it. In his world, the media has always been above everything. Whatever’s going on out in the country, whatever culture wars, whatever political disagreements, the media is always there — unified with a sense of fact-pursuit and -checking and all that.
Mr. Bernstein is now distressed to discover that the media has been divided as well, which is silly, of course. The media’s never been… Not since 1988. The media has never been a singular entity. It was prior to 1988; that’s the whole point. That’s what he misses. But you go out and you interview people, you take a poll of where Trump was elected, and his approval’s at 50%. And there’s no president anywhere that would not take that. Obama would take it. The best Obama could do, even at his best, was 53%. Let’s go to the audio sound bites. I want to go back to me on this program on January 23rd. This is just two or three days after Trump has been inaugurated.
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RUSH ARCHIVE: The entire Washington establishment is opposed to him. The media is trying to undermine him. The Democrat Party’s trying to undermine him as they set up what will no doubt be impeachment proceedings when they think it’s time to do it. That will happen. Trump has nothing but the people that voted for him, and if the media can soften some of their verve — if the media can succeed in separating some Trump supporters from him — then their theory is he will be weakened even further and exposed even more as fraudulently and illegitimately elected and illegitimately serving. …
This election is not over. This election is not cemented. It is not validated. It isn’t real, because Trump is illegitimate, and the only thing Trump has — and it’s important. It’s the most important thing. The only thing he’s got are his supporters. And therefore his supporters have got to stay as energetic and as front and center and as supportive as they were during the campaign. That’s all he’s got. He’s got the power. He is the president, don’t misunderstand.
But in this PR battle, in the image battle, in the buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz battle, in the narrative battle, he doesn’t have anybody. Well, I take that back. Look, he’s got this program for the most part, and he’s got enough people at Fox News, and he’s got some magazines. But he doesn’t have the so-called mainstream media. So it is really important that the people that voted for him maintain their support and be publicly willing to demonstrate it.
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RUSH: Voila! And right here they have in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll: “Trump’s Approval at 50% in the Counties that Fueled His Win.” That was all the way back on January 23rd. Now, last night on PBS NewsHour Weekend, the anchor (let’s see) — this is Hari Sreenivasan — spoke with Jeff Greenfield. He used to be with ABC News. Now he’s journalist and political analyst. He was at CNN at one time too. I don’t know if he’s independent or with somebody now or not. But, anyway, he wasn’t a guest and he was being asked about Trump’s relationship with media.
Sreenivasan says, “You say President Trump’s base doesn’t buy that anything happened regarding the Trump campaign coordinating with the Russians.” Now, listen to this question: “Can anything change that?” Folks, you have here a PBS-media type. The media knows that their key to destroying the Trump presidency is separating Trump’s supporters from Trump. They know that. Right now they, I think, are misaiming all of this collusion stuff, and all of this obstruction stuff is aimed at themselves. I have long believed that journalists at CNN report and write what they say to impress other journalists at NBC and CBS and MSNBC.
And then vice-versa. The Washington Post guys write to impress the people at the New York Times and sometimes beat them. The New York Times writes to impress the people at the Washington Post and sometimes beat them. And, of course, their lunatic base readership. They don’t know how to appeal to anybody else. They don’t know how to appeal to people that live in flyover country. They just don’t know, because they hold those people in contempt. They think those people are stupid. They don’t know. So their objective is to actually destroy support for Trump amongst Trump supporters.
And they are demonstrating they haven’t the slightest idea how to do it. You heard the phone calls we had last week. People are fed up with hearing about Trump and Russia and anything to do with it. They’ve tuned it out. They don’t care about it, they don’t believe it, and even if it is true, they don’t think there’s anything to it. They’re not interested. And yet the media keeps beating them over the head with it. What the media is doing is driving people away from themselves on this story. The very people they are trying to convince that Trump is a bad guy, they don’t know how to reach ’em.
They think they do, because the media makes the mistake of vanity. They assume that everybody thinks the way they do and that everybody analyses the way they do and holds the same values. So if they just continue to bash Trump in the typical way the media destroys Republicans, that eventually they’re gonna drive a wedge between Trump and his supporters. They haven’t… The biggest flaw here that they can’t anyway. As a student of these kinds of things, I’m telling you: The media cannot destroy Trump, and the main reason why — and there are many reasons.
The main reason why is they didn’t create him. The media didn’t make Trump. The media didn’t take some unknown piece of clay here and mold him into a national public figure that they could then later dismantle and destroy. I can give you names of people they have done that to and they can whittle them away any time they want. But they didn’t do that with Trump. Trump made himself. So the only person that can really destroy the relationship he has with his supporters is Trump himself.
So far, he hasn’t even gotten close to doing that. In fact, it’s, I think, the opposite. I think that Trump supporters — as this onslaught continues — become even more glued to him. And yet the media continues to pound away in the only way they know, and this has been noted by Greenfield. So this guy’s question to Greenfield is, “Trump’s base doesn’t buy anything about this Russia story. Can anything change that?” So what the PBS reporter’s asking Greenfield this: What can do you, Jeff? What could we do? What could we do to get Trump’s supporters to abandon him?
JEFF GREENFIELD: In a normal world (laughs) in a normal political world, I’d be kind of confident saying, well, yeah, you know, if the Republicans in Congress begin to really get tough on Trump, say, “What’s going on here? We’re really bothered by this, this is a hostile foreign power, what’s going on?” That that would have an impact among the base. But one of the curious things we’re seeing is that among Trump’s supporters they’re not all that happy with the Republicans in Congress anyway. You’ve seen some really sharp attacks on the part of some of the radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh saying you guys aren’t fighting hard enough, you might be raising taxes on us. But they’re not blaming Trump. So if Republicans begin to say in Congress this Russia thing is bothering us, I’m not sure that Trump people are going to take that as an occasion to leave the reservation.
RUSH: Right. So they’re frustrated. See, they’re thinking about it. They’re pondering it. They’re strategizing. They’re trying to figure out how to bust you up, how to separate you from the Trumpster. And Greenfield gives away that one of the ways they’ve been trying to do it is to get the Republicans to turn on Trump. You heard him. Greenfield said if the Republicans could finally come out and say, “We don’t accept this. This is unacceptable. We cannot stand a president of our own party colluding with the Russians, we just can’t.”
Of course, you wink and nod; Obama did it all the time. Stand by for more on that. But you see, Greenfield’s right. If the Republicans did that, look at McCain. Do you think McCain is held in universal appeal and approval nationally among Republicans? Nope. And precisely because he’s seen as trying to undermine Trump! But Greenfield, in the old way Washington works, if the party, like they got the Republicans to turn on Nixon. Once they got Howard Baker to turn on Nixon, once they found Howard Baker being able to walk to the White House and say, “Mr. President, you no longer have the support of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.” That was it.
They know their ways. That’s how they got rid of Nixon. They forced the Republican Party to turn on him. “Maybe we can do the same with Trump.” If the Republicans turn on Trump, it’s their problem. If they don’t do health care, it’s gonna be their problem. Trump is not being blamed for this. Now, at some point the Trump base, and they may be there now, is gonna start saying, where is this artful negotiator? Where is this guy that can get people in a room and get things done? That’s gonna happen too. If it hasn’t begun already.
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RUSH: Mark in Houston. I’m glad you waited. Great to have you on the show. How you doing?
CALLER: Thank you for being here. Rush, I just wanted to say that these elite Republicans, the Democrats and all the TV people still have no comprehension of our resolve. We won the House. We won the Senate. Not Paul Ryan, by the way. We won the Senate. We won the presidency. We won four special elections after the presidency and even my favorite little kicker is the mayoral race of Ferguson. We won it too. I say, “We won it.” We won it from the media. And we’re not done yet, Rush.
Not only is Alabama coming up, but when you listen to these guys in Alabama, there’s four Republicans trying to vie for the primary, and they’re all trying to, you know, qualify for “best friend of Donald Trump” status. I’m looking forward to the 2018 midterms, and I got one question for any of these people running: “When it comes to Donald Trump, are you with him or are you agin’ him?” I want to know that one answer.
RUSH: Well, you know, there’s no question about this. I keep hearkening back. I told people about this Ed Gillespie story over the weekend. Many of them had not heard it. Ed Gillespie, Republican establishment, wants to be governor of Virginia. He put together a campaign staff exclusively of Never Trumpers and barely won, because he thinks that most real Republicans hate Trump like the Never Trumpers hate Trump, and most Republicans hate Trump. It’s the same with the Republicans in Washington and the media.
They don’t like Trump and think everybody else doesn’t, and they are missing… The caller’s right. I don’t think people understand the loyalty. They don’t understand the connection. That’s it. They don’t understand the connection that Trump has with the people that voted for him. ‘Cause I don’t think, in politics, there’s been anybody that’s had this kind of connection, since Reagan, maybe. But certainly nobody else. They can’t comprehend it, and they don’t want to believe it exists anyway — and then you get down to brass tacks that many people in Washington don’t care what you think anyway. No matter what. Not all. Not all. But some.