RUSH: Here is a list that I have now of the major American corporations who are providing bonuses, in some cases raises, as a result of the tax reform package. By the way, let me preface this. We had Paul Ryan here yesterday, and we’ve had I think three or four seminar callers the last two or three days who wanted to pepper me and try to trick me into falling for some question on the invalidity of this business because of the corporate tax rate.

Somehow that made this thing invalid, and they were lying about how people were gonna benefit because all the tax cuts were going to corporations. I asked Speaker Ryan about it yesterday, after of course knocking the answer out of the park myself to each of the callers. And Speaker Ryan said, “We were losing ’em, Rush.”

I said, “What do you mean?”

(paraphrasing) “They’re keeping more of their money offshore. Many of them are moving, many of them planning to move.” I mean, it wasn’t a groundswell, but we weren’t doing anything to help American based corporations reinvest in America. It was a yeoman’s effort to keep jobs here. But if we were gonna succeed in keeping jobs here, keeping manufacturing here, we were gonna have to do something with the corporate tax rate. And so we did.

It’s all about improving America. It’s all about improving life for America. Corporations, you may hate them, you’ve been convinced to hate ’em by the left, but they happen to employ people! They happen to provide health insurance! They happen to provide benefits!

So here are the companies. AT&T was first out of the box. A thousand-dollar bonus to over 200,000 employees. Boeing, $300 million employee-related investments. Fifth Third Bank — does anybody know — I remember driving home one day and I saw this little, tiny building where a McDonald’s used to be, and it was a Fifth Third Bank. And this was maybe ten years ago. So I privately wonder, what is Fifth Third Bank? Who would name anything Fifth Third? There has to be a reason. I still don’t know. All I know is they’ve gotten gigantic out there, and they have now offered their employees thousand-dollar bonuses and $15 minimum wage.

Wells Fargo, another bank, $15 minimum wage, donations of $400 million. Comcast, $1,000 bonus to over 100,000 nonexecutive employees. You know who this includes? That’s right, this includes people that work is NBC and MSNBC, who have spent the past number of weeks trying to destroy the tax cut bill, and now they are going to get a bonus from Comcast.

Now, this is unreal. There are people, including people on our side, folks, who are trying to cast aspersions on this by pointing out that it’s the result of collusion, that this isn’t real, this isn’t really happening, it’s just because Trump somehow colluded with these companies and did something to make them do this so that he would look good.

And it reminded me of David Koch of New York of the famous Koch brothers family who donated $25 million to one of the big hospitals, one of the big cancer hospitals, and the nurse’s union there protested it and demanded the hospital not accept it because David Koch didn’t mean it. He was only giving that $25 million to mask the fact that he’s a racist pig! And so we shouldn’t let him get away with it.

And so now you have leftists saying we shouldn’t let these corporations get away with this. This is just a phony, slimy PR campaign to make themselves look good when we know they aren’t good, when we know they’re rotgut, when we know they’re sleazy and slimy. Let them keep on. Let them continue.

Look, I know they’ve persuaded a larger number of people than should have been about the evils of major American corporations and so forth, but I think there’s no way that in the end they win on this. If they were gonna win on this, they would have succeeded in this being defeated. Look at what happened. Folks, look at the polling data on this tax bill. Twenty-six percent of the people support it, and yet what happened? It passed. Republicans in the House and Senate stayed unified.

There wasn’t a single defection. Well, I don’t know about the House. But in the Senate there wasn’t a single defection. They stayed unified. Look at the magic that happened here. Now all that can happen is those polling numbers improve. Because they’re so low, they really can’t get any lower, and when you add to it that the tax bill has real life benefits to it, it’s gonna result in public opinion on the legislation growing.

But even so, if they were gonna be able to kill this, this would have been the time. They were totally aligned and unified in their opposition, Democrat Party, not a single vote for it. The Drive-By Media is doing everything they could. They’re even mocking Tim Scott, the Senator from South Carolina, who is front and center next to Trump. They’re calling him a token.

They’re getting on him for being used by Trump as a token, he’s a sellout to his race by supporting this tax cut and then daring to stand next to Trump while Trump goes through the public remarks on this.

I’m telling you, they are the single largest hate group in our country. And I continue to rely on a personal belief, and that is that hate is not how you grow a winning movement. You might be able to grow an opposition movement, but you’re not gonna triumph substantively and establish and grow roots for long-term leadership with hate. You can do it with fear for a while, but not hate.

Mr. Snerdley tells me that we’ve had two more seminar callers today with the exact same argument, same phrases that we’ve had in the past two days on the corporate tax rate. And they try to pass themselves off as lifetime listeners, big fans, they’re conservative. Any time any of you call here and tell me you’re conservative, I want you to know I immediately suspect you. If you feel the need to have to admit that, what you’re telling me is that what you’re gonna say isn’t gonna sound like it.

“Hey, Rush, I just want you to know I’m big conservative. That corporate tax rate sucks. The middle class is getting screwed, but I’m a big conservative.” It’s like in other professions, you don’t have to tell anybody what you are. We just negotiate the price. If you have to tell me you are a conservative, then you’re telling me that you aren’t and that you’re not going to sound like one.

Let’s start on the phones. Atlanta. This is Ed. Glad you called. Thank you for your patience, sir. How are you doing?

CALLER: I’m great. How are you, Rush?

RUSH: Good, good, good. Thank you.

CALLER: Yeah. I had a quick comment about Comcast. It’s not just bonuses that they’re giving out. I received $1.50 an hour raise yesterday as well as 10 other folks in my office. So if they’re saying it’s just bonuses, it’s not. I mean, this is fantastic.

RUSH: Are you suspicious of it?

CALLER: Am I suspicious?

RUSH: Let me take you out of the equation. Let me just ask you this. Were there people in your office after the bonuses and raises were announced, were there people in your office who ran around saying, “This isn’t real. They’re just doing this to suck up to Trump. They’re just doing this for PR. They don’t really mean it.” Did you have anybody who reacted to it that way?

CALLER: Not in my office.

RUSH: Really? Really? Good, good. ‘Cause I would guess in your office, based on percentages, there’d be some leftist in there who would want to diminish this and try to cast it as something unreal. I mean, it’s real, but they want to tell you that Comcast really doesn’t mean it, they don’t really mean it, they’re just doing it to please Trump or whatever, you know, capitalize PR-wise.

Let me share this with you. Speaking of conservative intellectuals. I’m not gonna mention a name. It’s not the point. But this is a well-known, previously thought of as dynamic leader of the intellectual conservative so-called movement. Here’s the tweet. “Isn’t there something creepy about corporations giving cash bonuses to employees explicitly because of the passage of certain legislation or because of specific regulatory actions? Doesn’t it have something of a road to corporatist serfdom feel about it?” Do you have any reaction like that? Are you suspicious of this? Do you feel this is creepy?

CALLER: This isn’t creepy at all. It’s why we come to work.

RUSH: Were you surprised by it?

CALLER: Extremely. It was not announced. This is not the cost-of-living annual raise that we receive every year.

RUSH: Let me ask you this. Was there any whispering that this might happen if the tax bill passed? Had Comcast management whispered around and let it be known to you employees that if the tax bill passed, there might be some raises or a bonus?

CALLER: No.

RUSH: None?

CALLER: No whispering. There was nothing said. It was quite a shock yesterday.

RUSH: I’ll tell you why I asked that. I asked that to once again try to dispel the notion that it’s a PR move or that there was something ill-gotten or illegitimate tied to it. Now, let’s turn this around. Thanks for the call, Ed. I appreciate it. Let’s turn this out, look at it from a little bit of a different angle. Were you surprised? Even before the tax bill was signed today — the official signing will be today.

Now, they had the celebration victory party yesterday up at the White House, and that’s when all of these corporate bonuses and wage-per-hour increases were announced. When that happened, how many of you were shocked by it? What did you think when you heard this? The reason I ask is that remember, the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party, for as long as we’ve been alive, have been telling us corporations don’t do this kind of thing ’cause they don’t care.

They don’t care about their customers, and they don’t care about their employees. They only care about profits. They only care about the stock price. But they don’t care about us and they don’t care about you. So this is announced, and it wasn’t just one. You know, AT&T was the first, and then here came four more very quickly.

And how many of you were surprised by it because you thought that corporations had become Democrats, they were all supportive of Obama and you just could not believe that they would sign — Trump is so hated, Trump is so despised, Trump is so unfit. This is the daily theme of the Drive-By Media, and yet, here are corporate CEOs who are not unfit and who are not unqualified and who are not out of place, I mean, they may not be liked, but none of them are said to be unqualified. None of them are said to be in jobs over their heads. And here they are trying to get in on this.

Did that shock any of you, that CEOs would do something to help Trump? When you’ve been told that most everybody in the business community hates Trump and everybody else hates Trump. I’m just curious. I know you all can’t call here and answer it. I’m throwing it out rhetorically. I’m curious what people’s reactions are. I was shocked by it. I didn’t expect it. And I was totally, pleasantly surprised by it.

And then it didn’t take me a minute to then calculate that exactly what’s happened was going to happen, that Democrats and liberals would claim it wasn’t real, that others would claim that it was a collusion between Trump and these CEOs. That he had bought them off, that Trump gave ’em something because they wouldn’t do this on their own. And then we saw the Twitter attempt to start a boycott against AT&T for doing this.

I think so much of what’s going on here is shocking and stunning everybody because the media presents a world, a nation, the media, under the guise of doing the news, paints a picture of this country every day that mirrors themselves. And the centerpiece of it is hatred of Trump. Because Trump is incompetent, because Trump is a pig, because Trump is a barbarian, because Trump is unfit, because Trump cheated, because he colluded with the Russians, all of this.

And yet good, uplifting, positive things continue to happen, and then this thing happened yesterday, and it seemed like everybody that mattered signed on with Trump. It left the left scratching their heads and they’re angry and they’re claiming it isn’t real and they’re claiming the Republicans singing Trump’s praises were a bunch of sycophants.

But yet there is a story from Howard Kurtz. He’s the media analyst at Fox News. Headline: “Hell Freezes Over: Media Start Admitting that Trump’s First Year Isn’t a Flop.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Hey, let me ask you another thing. I just got an email from our old buddy Seton Motley out there. This is a good observation. “I thought Trump was this gigantic populist. You know, how many conservative blogs out there rip into Trump and Trump’s voters for being a bunch of populists? A populist would never have presided over a corporate tax rate reduction of this size.”

Populists, corporations are the problem. They take their jobs overseas. They close down American manufacturing, and a populist president exists to punish ’em and make sure they don’t do it. And Trump was said to be an anti-capitalist because he was such a populist. All during the campaign, during the transition, after Trump was inaugurated, all these so-called wizards of smart and so many conservative blogs kept ragging on Trump as being a populist and his voters being populists.

Now, you can’t get more capitalistic than this tax cut. Right, Snerdley? So many people, so smug for the last year and a half about what they know and about what Trump doesn’t know, about who they are and Trump isn’t. And so much of this learned opinion being stood upside down on its head.

Try this. This is CNBC speculating — I told you, I told you, I make a joke about it, it comes true — a conspiracy between Trump and Big Business to pay out the bonuses.

CRAMER: Boy, it is, as they say in law school, sui generis. I mean, we’ve never seen a tax code change like this, which is, jeez, the money’s right in the pockets of the companies. And I think that they do need to share the wealth. I was listening to people this morning. It seems cynical. I don’t know; a thousand bucks in your pocket is not cynical. It’s good.

FABER: It’s a good thing. Do you think there’s a coordinated effort, that there was some sort of conversation between some of these companies or some sort of coordinating body that said this is something that might be a good thing for you to consider doing? I don’t know. Just curious that — I don’t think anybody was anticipating it until we saw the announcement from AT&T, and then it was so quickly followed by Wells and Fifth Third, our parent company, but obviously there’s so many others that could be doing the same thing.

CRAMER: If it was coordinated then there should —

FABER: A lot more, right?

CRAMER: — have been a lot more than six companies.

RUSH: That’s enough. CNBC, Jim Cramer and his crowd, and they’re speculating there had to be collusion, right? This just couldn’t happen! We weren’t expecting it! But exactly like I just told you. AT&T did it, we were gobsmacked, we were broadsided. They didn’t just do this on their own, did they? No, of course not. You see, nothing can happen out of legitimacy.

Everybody in this town, everybody in media, everybody in the establishment is so damn cynical that nothing, especially goodness, can be real. Goodness, genuineness has to be artificial. Why these corporations, they wouldn’t do this on their own. They’re not that nice. They wouldn’t do this on their own. They don’t think of their employees this way. They had to be told. They had to be cajoled. There had to be some kind of conspiracy, either between themselves or between them and Trump.

You see, the last thing in their world that explains this is reality. The fact that they’re getting a major, major tax break the first time in the history of many of these corporations, that’s not enough to cause this. That can’t be.