RUSH: Here’s Kelly in Dover, New Hampshire. Welcome.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: I just… (sigh) This past week, I just turned 53, and I’m retired Navy, worked for the federal government. I just… Everything that’s going on with this special counsel, I lived it before — you know, Iran-Contra, Bill Clinton, all of that — and I’m sitting here thinking to myself: I gotta tune out of all of this because there’s gonna be no end to it and all the good that you just expounded what Donald Trump is doing, it’s getting lost. It’s getting lost to the point where even myself, who is very engaged politically, am tuning out. Laura Ingraham’s my favorite. I even watched her debut last night.

RUSH: I know where you’re coming from. You were on a big high, Trump wins, “Okay. All right. The country’s seen the light. We’re off and running.” And then the establishment started putting the brakes on everything, and now the establishment’s got their chief special counsel investigating Trump to destroy him, and you’re distraught.

CALLER: I am. It’s Ryan, it’s McConnell, it’s come to the point that —

RUSH: I understand. Look, I’m not trying to deemphasize this or sweep it away, but this is what pushing back looks like. Kelly, keep the radio on, ’cause you raise a great point here, and it’s a teachable moment. I’m out of time to deal with it right now, but we will.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, as to Kelly, our last caller, I’m glad he mentioned this. This comes up periodically. For those of you who have heard me say this a number of times, I beg your indulgence as I run through it again very briefly here. I maybe need to change some of the words I use to avoid it sounding so redundant. My phrase is, “This is what pushing back looks like.” Kelly… Did he say he was 53 or 63? (interruption) He’s 53 years old, voted for Trump, all excited. I’m sure that every Trumpist was thrilled.

I mean, what a high that was on election night. Hillary was so depressed she didn’t even show up to concede. She had to send Podesta out there and, you know, the rest is history. Look, I know a lot of people who expected a short period of time of anger and upset and disbelief. But then people expected that the country would come together, and the losers would realize they lost and would set about trying to figure out why they lost and getting back in the good graces of voters, which is what used to happen.

You know, whether Democrats or Republicans — and I’m going back 20 or 30 years now. After a presidential race, the losing party would at least try to make voters think that it got the message and was endeavoring to find out how they could get better. Well, none of that happened here. None of that surprised me. I was expecting everything that’s happened and more. I never expected the establishment to lay down. I never expected the establishment to welcome Trump; treat him as a winner, as a valued member, as a qualified member. I never expected any of it. But a lot of people hoped.

A lot of people hoped that there would be at least some unity on the premise that the country’s in bad shape and needs to get better and things need to happen to improve areas like the economy and health care and immigration. Instead, it got worse, in terms of the partisanship — and it’s only continued to get worse. My explanation to people for this is, “This is what…” Look, we’re pushing back here against decades not of Democrat control. We’re pushing back against decades of establishmentarian dominance and ownership of the power structures of this country.

However you want to define ’em: Corporate America linked to the federal government, linked to the Federal Reserve, and then the State Department doing what it does around the world and this push for globalization, the diminishing of the United States to just another nation in the world. And these people having working on this mission for… Well, since World War II and in some cases before that. McCain kind of gave up the ghost during that speech of his where he couldn’t believe that we’re squandering 75 years of leadership in the world after arranging it the way we wanted it to be after we won World War II.

He was exactly right. We set up the world as we wanted it to be. We set up NATO, set up the good guys and the bad guys. No need to recount all that history, but that’s what everybody that voted for Trump is pushing back against. “Make America Great Again” simply means, “Hey, can we restore this country to what it’s always been and what it was intended to be by virtue of its founding? The simple stated values and principles in our founding. What was ever wrong with those? Can’t we just go back to it?”

Well, 75 years of an attempt to reverse those principles and water them down and make this nation nothing more than yet another nation or citizen of the world with rapidly erasing or evaporating boundaries, nation states. So this was a major, major, shocking surprise, and the people who lost do not consider anything about this victory legitimate, including the electoral process that produced it or the voters in it. So you who voted for Trump and Trump are forever going to be rubes, enemies, idiots, dupes, dolts, whatever they think of you.

The effort to defeat them is a daily thing. It didn’t just happen on Election Day, and the idea of these people setting aside their grand plans for America and the world after 75 years of having those plans at various stages of implementation, I’m sorry to say is just not realistic. Look, these people are not going to stop trying to get rid of Donald Trump. They are not going to stop trying to disqualify him in as many minds as possible. It is a daily thing. You know, I think a number of you are gonna have to redefine success.

You’re gonna have to look at the Mueller indictment and its emptiness as a sign of success rather than the fact that Mueller exists and his investigation is ongoing as a negative. Do anything about that. It’s there. It’s real. It’s happening. You know, we’re all raised to want to be loved. We’re all raised to want to be respected. Most of us are raised to be open to liking everybody else and respecting everybody else. But none of that’s realistic. You’re gonna be hated. You’re gonna be disliked. You’re gonna be resented. You’re gonna be envied. You are gonna envy. You are gonna resent. You’re gonna dislike.

How you deal with all of that is what we’re facing here. Yeah, our side won. But the other side doesn’t even concede it. Everything they’re doing is on the premise that this whole thing was illegitimate. Even if it was real and legal, still illegitimate, ’cause not supposed to happen. Trump’s a boob; you’re a boob if you voted for him and all. So it’s an ongoing thing. There was never gonna be any euphoria with this, beyond, you know, the excitement you felt election night and the anticipation maybe on Inauguration Day.

This is what trying to recapture the country and “Make America Great Again” is going to require. It’s hard, I know; you don’t want to be dispirited. You want to be positive. You want to be upbeat. You want to be excited after this kind of incredible accomplishment and victory, and you want people to be with you in the mission to Make America Great Again, and it’s frustrating and depressing as hell to realize that there’s so many Americans that hate this country and do anything they could to take it down.

And that’s really what this NFL stuff is about. When you boil it down to brass tacks, that’s what this is really all about. Of all places to have to sit there watch your country get beat up, you don’t want to watch it on Sunday afternoon or Monday night watching football — and it’s depressing as hell to think that it’s even happening there. And then you find out that the people that own teams and run the league don’t even have the guts, in many cases, to stop it! So, yeah. I mean, it’s got its aspects that are depressing.

But, folks, it was never going to be easy, and it was never gonna be conventional. This election cycle and victory cycle were never going to replicate election victories of the sixties and seventies and eighties or whenever your fond memories of elections are. As I say, there were times in the past where the losing party would at least fake it and make it look like they cared where they went wrong and would at least try to recapture the voters that they had lost. But that’s not what’s happening here. The left has decided to continue to divide the country and to continue to categorize people with identity politics and victim status.

And they want the chasm to get bigger. They want the anger to be more intense. And they want more people expressing it, because, to them, showing their resistance is how they get rid of all of this that they hate and don’t like. This is why I’ve always said, crossing the aisle, reaching across the aisle, showing we can work with Democrats, showing we can cooperate, work together to show that Washington works, that’s not what this is about.

This is about beating those people every day. That’s what it’s gonna take. Not just elections, but beating them every day. They want to take Trump out, they lose tomorrow in their effort. They lose the next day. They lose the next day. They lose tonight. But even when they lose, they’re not gonna give you the pleasure, satisfaction of knowing they lost. They’re gonna restructure and replan to make it look like their onslaught’s continuing and that it’s successful.

Their experience is that they can beat you down. Their experience is that they can dispirit you and depress you so much that you’ll just say the heck with it and stop caring or paying attention. That’s their objective. And you realize that many of the people on this mission to get rid of Trump are also Republicans. So it’s a double whammy of disappointment and disillusion.

It’s a game of expectations. You have to manage your expectations, have ’em tempered in reality. It simply is incorrect to expect the country was gonna unify after this election. It’s a great hope, but it was a terribly inaccurate expectation. The reason expectations matter is they’re real. You expect something to happen, you live it that way, you hope it, you look for signs. And if your expectations are way off the mark, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed as every expectation is not met.

So you have to redefine what success is, redefine what defeat is and realize, folks, they have thrown everything they have at Donald Trump. And they still have not made a dent in the bond that exists between Trump voters and supporters and Trump. They have been trying with everything they know. This dossier is actually a new technique. They learned early on with the Access Hollywood video that traditional methods of destroying political opponents don’t work on Trump. If the Access Hollywood video didn’t do it, there’s nothing in their arsenal that will.

They haven’t yet learned that they can’t destroy Trump. They still think they can. The only people that can destroy Trump are Trump and his voters. But the media can’t. And the Democrats can’t. But they haven’t figured that out yet. So they go off book and spend $12 million creating a phony, fake intelligence document that they all conspire on to make it look like it’s genuine and real intelligence. There’s nothing political about it. This is intelligence, Trump did this, Trump did that, we’ve got the evidence, the Russians and the MI6 guy.

Now we find out and learn that the whole thing is nothing but a political document that they bought and paid for outside the mainstream of political tricks because they figured out traditional tricks don’t work. And this didn’t work. And now Mueller’s announced his two big indictments and guilty pleas, and there’s nothing that ties anything to what he’s got now to the real target, Trump colluding with Russia.

And you know why? Because there isn’t any evidence of Trump colluding with Russia. And you know why? Because it didn’t happen. But these people are used to getting what they want without evidence. They’re used to getting what they want without facts. They’re used to getting what they want simply by be being able to use the media to overpower and intimidate their opponents into quitting, conceding, giving up.

But Donald Trump doesn’t do that. He doubles down every time he criticizes. When they act like stuck pigs, he doubles and triples down on it. Trump is showing the way. Trump is showing you how to deal with all of this. They want you to believe Trump is alone and detached and wandering the halls of the White House late at night in his underwear talking to the portraits of past presidents seeking guidance.

Yet every time you see Trump he’s upbeat, positive, doesn’t seem to be unhinged or deranged, doesn’t seem to be unattached, doesn’t seem to be lost or anything. It just flies against every mainstream media report about Trump’s psychological, physical condition. So it’s an ongoing, day-to-day thing. Kelly calls here, “I’m I’m,” he was depressed, he was disillusioned. This actually, to me, been a couple of really good days. The NFL, the players are losing.

Did you see the ESPN news? ESPN’s losing 15,000 subscribers a day. ESPN is faced with the real possibility of not being able to afford the rights to Monday Night Football when this contract expires. ESPN may have to give up the NFL. They can’t afford it if this desertion by subscribers continues, 15,000 a day. Multiply every one of those by $20 that ESPN is not getting. It’s all of that money they use to purchase the rights to broadcast the NBA, Major League Baseball, the National Football League.

They used to not have the NFL rights. Before that all they had was scoreboard shows and pregame shows and so forth. They never had the rights to any live content. Got the story in the Stack here. I don’t know how imminent it is, but you look and Hollywood’s imploding. The Kevin Spacey news, Harvey Weinstein, I mean, it is dire.

Now we’re learning that it may involve Leonardo DiCaprio. Hell, it involves everybody. What is it about the left and mistreatment of women? What is it about the left and racism? You look at every place they run, every town, every institution they run is a cesspool.

If you know how to look at it, if you know how to look for it, and if you can look past the daily soap opera or narrative the media hits you with, you’ll realize that we’re making more progress in defeating them and reestablishing the concepts and principles of America than we’ve made in the last 20 years. But you’re never gonna have the satisfaction of having the media on your side and therefore the media is never gonna reflect any of this. Just the exact opposite will be their mission.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: What did I just spend 20 minutes say? Pat Buchanan has a really synthesized, boil it all down to its simplest elements of the two-pronged effort to get rid of Trump, and his point is Fusion GPS and the Trump dossier before the Democrats hired ’em, the Republicans hired ’em! The Washington Free Beacon, Bill Kristol and his son-in-law and whoever Paul Singer, they were trying to get rid of Trump during the Republican primaries. And both parties hired Fusion GPS to do it.

Now, when Trump won the primary, Fusion GPS and the deal with the Washington Free Beacon ended, mission over, mission failed. But the Democrats, Hillary and the DNC picked it back up and came up with a new way with the dossier. I’m not under any illusion here at all of how serious this is. I’m trying to keep everybody focused in a productive frame of mind about it.