RUSH: We’re doing everything we can to help people enjoy their lives on this program each and every day. And it’s an ongoing balance. It’s an effort to keep you informed, but not depressed. Engaged, but not defeated. Optimistic, not pessimistic. As I say, it’s a delicate balance because elsewhere in the media you are being bombarded with pessimism, defeatism, fatalism. If you pay attention to it, there’s no way, there’s nothing you can do. If you’re gonna watch it, you are not going to be able to maintain a positive outlook on anything.

That’s the design. That’s what happens to you if you endeavor to have a steady diet of mainstream media news. The end result is going to be a life spent in despair and futility if you happen to be a person engaged in daily news events, as they affect and impact the country and you. Well, I do all of that, too, except I don’t watch it anymore at night, and I cannot tell you the difference it’s made. In fact, because I don’t watch it at night, I sometimes am not conversant on things that people ask me about.

For instance, this past weekend I went out to LA to play golf, ’cause there was nobody to play golf with here. Everybody’s gone or the courses are closed. So I had to go to LA to play golf. What are you shaking your heads at for? I’ve got great friends out there I hadn’t seen in a while, so I was able to kill a bunch of birds with one stone. Anyway, on the golf course I got people asking me about things they had seen in the week or two prior on cable news at night and I said, “I didn’t see it.”

“You didn’t?”

“Nope.” I was still able to tell them, fully inform what I thought about it, but I didn’t see what they had watched. They were worried about it or mad about it or whatever, and I sad, “I stopped watching it because I don’t want to be like you are right now.” Plus, I pay people to do that for me. But these people do not report to me. In other words, I don’t get updates every day on what happened on cable TV at night. I don’t want them. It does make a difference if you just turn it off.

You have to avoid the steady diet of it. And that is what we attempt to do here is to keep everybody or everything on as even a keel as possible, ’cause this bombardment is relentless and it’s unending. And there’s no indication it’s gonna let up at any time. And there is no Republican who could be elected that would change this. It wouldn’t matter if Romney had won or if Kasich had won, got the nomination, it wouldn’t matter. One way or the other it wouldn’t matter.

If Kasich had won the nomination and the presidency, he’d have turned the Republican Party into the Democrat Party by now in order to get their acclaim and favor. And you’d be just as ticked off at Kasich as you are at the Republican House and Senate.

If Ted Cruz had won, they would be on the same search-and-destroy mission they are on with Trump. Folks, there isn’t a Republican who can win that will not get the treatment Trump is getting. He may be getting the extreme of it because the added specter of him being an outsider and he can’t be allowed to succeed on that basis alone before they even get to policy.

What would be interesting to me is if Trump were a mainstream liberal, I’m not all convinced that the media would be doing anything differently. So personal is this Trump invasion of their home and their territory that stopping him and destroying him, no matter what, I think would always be the objective. Therefore, it is up to Trump and his administration to find ways around this.

And I still maintain that many of the people who voted for Trump expected him to be to be able to do just that. “Drain the swamp” was a big campaign phrase and slogan, and I fully think and still think people expect him to do that, ultimately. Tax cuts, repealing Obamacare, these are things that if and when they get done, they’re going to be the two biggest weapons Trump has. Not silencing the left. They’re never gonna go away. They’re never gonna be silenced.

But they can be rendered impotent, particularly in the eyes of Trump’s base and fence-sitters. If just those two things would happen. Because the immigration policies he advocates already are happening simply by virtue of enforcement of existing law. It’s not even requiring the wall be built, for example. The number of illegal immigrants coming into the country is way, way down in the millions and therefore food stamp usage is way, way down in the millions. And so many other pressures on the so-called social safety net are also way, way down.

I’m optimistic that things are gonna happen, because that’s the way I choose to look at this. The only time I’m pessimistic, folks — because people ask me, “How do you do it?” I’m pessimistic. I get down. You know the only time I really am? I wonder if I should admit this. What do you think it is, Mr. Snerdley? When is the only time I get pessimistic? No. No. When I’m playing golf. I get so frustrated and sometimes I get down, especially if I’m playing with people that can hit the ball 350 yards and are scoring, you know, breaking par or playing even par, I sometimes say, “What am I doing here?”

I have to pause and stop and figuratively shake myself say, “Wait a minute, bud. You don’t make your living doing this. Stop having such high expectations. You’re out here with people you like. You’re on the right side of the grass. Just try to enjoy it for what it is!” But it’s the only thing in life that I’ve tried that I have not overwhelmingly, unalterably exceeded at. So from that it becomes frustrating. Which is why I say, I think they should make prisoners play this.

If you really want to punish prisoners, make them play golf. But I try to stay on an even keel and optimistic, and in my life I’ve got every reason in the world to do so. And I love sharing my passions with people. So the purpose of this program is to strike that delicate balance of acknowledging the crap that’s out there and talking about it and trying to blow it to smithereens without becoming a nattering nabob of pessimism. ‘Cause those people are everywhere.