RUSH: The Democrats caved. They’ve now caved twice on this whole DACA government shutdown over the budget business. Oh, yeah, it’s the second time. Schumer… You heard me yesterday.
Schumer got all huffy and puffy, you know, after his house was protested. His apartment in Brooklyn. A bunch of leftists showed up, and now they think Chuck’s gotta go. There is a movement on the left to get rid of Chuck Schumer as the leader of the Democrats in the Senate because he’s a wuss, because he let Trump outsmart him. So Schumer in response to this said, “Okay. I’m removing all funding of the wall from the next negotiations! I’m taking it down.”
(clapping) “Yay! Chuck getting a spine again.” But there has been further movement on this. The further movement is that the Democrats have taken all talk of the DACA kids and the DREAMers off the table for the next round of budget talks in, now, 2-1/2 weeks to prevent a government shutdown. So not only did Schumer remove the $25 billion he was gonna offer Trump for the wall, they’re removing all of their demands for the DREAMers. It’s a total backtrack.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Okay. So you don’t believe me on this? I can understand. If you haven’t heard it yourself and you hear me say that the Democrats have even pulled their demands for the DREAMers off the table for the next round of budget negotiations, you might think, “I haven’t heard that. That’s crazy.” Well, my source for this is Politico, and The Politico says that the DREAMers are no longer part of any negotiations on the budget at all. Schumer and Dick Durbin have totally caved.
They have decided to split negotiations on DACA and immigration away from the budget talks. Why? Because they got creamed, folks! They got creamed, they got rolled, and everybody knows it. Schumer got destroyed in that deal! Trump refused to talk to him over the weekend. Schumer’s not used to Republicans not chatting. He’s not used to Republicans not caving. So they’ve pulled it.
I suspect what this means is that a deal involving the DREAMers and DACA has already been made. I know it’s hard to believe. I know it’s hard to grasp, maybe to get your arms around it, but the Democrats really are irrelevant here. It just doesn’t appear so because the media reports on the Democrats as though they still run the show and that they’re still really preferred by a majority of Americans. I mean, that’s the narrative.
“Trump’s a charlatan. Trump’s a cheater. Trump colluded. Trump this and that. Americans hate Trump!” I mean, you know drill, and so that’s what you see if you expose yourself to mainstream media at all. But on the ground, in the real world, the Democrats had everything they wanted stricken, handed to ’em in a hat, and they had to walk away with their tail between their legs. They got nothing, and now they have decided that they can’t win.
Lindsey Graham and Durbin’s decided they can’t win what they want or even a portion of it with Trump and the Republicans if they continue to couple their demands on the DREAMers and the DACA kids with the budget. Now, there is a caveat. The House Democrats may not go along with this. The House Democrats are probably going to be very livid that Schumer and Durbin have made this decision. But again, according to the Politico, Schumer and Durbin have totally removed anything about DACA from the upcoming president negotiations.
You remember the deal that kept the government running was a three-week deal. It’s coming up again in 2-1/2 weeks (let’s just say two weeks) and the Democrats have decided to take whatever their demands are for DACA and the DREAMers off the table and just do the budget. But the House Democrats have not agreed to that, and the budget deal must, of course, be passed in both houses.
So there could be a strategy here with Schumer trying in a certain way to look like a certain image, present a certain image, and let the Democrats in the House take the heat. We’ll see. But it still doesn’t deny that the Democrat leadership in the Senate has decided they cannot get anything they want in a budget deal with Trump regarding DREAMers and DACA and amnesty.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: To the phones we go back to, Greg in Sloatsburg, New York. I’m glad you waited, Greg. It’s your turn here. Make your big showbiz break worth it. How you doing?
CALLER: Thank you, Rush. It’s an honor. I want to ask you a question. There’s something I don’t understand I hope you can explain. “Why is it that the Democratic leadership is negotiating from such an idiotic position of asking for everything that they want and not conceding anything?” Like Dianne Feinstein at the White House saying, “Why don’t you give us a clean DACA bill?”
RUSH: Well, let me tell you. You know, this actually is a multifaceted answer. But the umbrella answer, the broad answer to your question — which is I think is, “Why do the Democrats offer these outlandish things that they know Trump is not gonna accept?” Is that basically what you’re asking?
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: Because they think Trump is stupid!
CALLER: (chucking)
RUSH: No, no. I know it sounds like something to laugh at. “No, it can’t possibly be.” You have to ask yourself: What media does Dianne Feinstein watch and read? Dick Durbin, ditto? What do they…? What is their source for news and knowledge every day? I guarantee you it’s the New York Times, Washington Post. Maybe DiFi reads the San Francisco Chronicle. (Six of one, half dozen the other.) They watch CNN, and what do they see? They see Donald Trump reported upon as a blithering idiot, as a thief, as somebody who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
His staff has to run the show for him ’cause he’s not even aware. I mean, the news on Trump is, “He doesn’t even know what legislation says. He doesn’t care. He can’t read! He didn’t really even want to be there.” I mean, if that’s what they see every day… If that kind of news about Trump is what they see, and especially if they walk in — even before they watch any news. If their own personal bias is that Trump is a buffoon and then they see it confirmed on TV, then that’s what they think he is. I will guarantee you that in that meeting, there were a lot of Democrats shocked and stunned.
They believed the Wolff book, I’m sure. They believed they were walking in there ready to see somebody slobbering and drooling with Alzheimer’s, maybe even Parkinson’s, and certainly dementia. They believe this stuff in their news media. They expected to encounter somebody that wouldn’t remember what he had said five minutes ago, and they thought they were gonna go in there and slam-dunk the guy. They think Trump has to be shielded and protected because otherwise he’ll do damage to what he wants and believes in because he’s so stupid and dumb.
That’s the umbrella answer.
Now, the more nuanced answer: In any negotiation, ask for more than you expect to get. Give yourself room to give away things. Give yourself some room to compromise. It’s called “going in with throwaways.” You have to go in with some things you’re willing to throw away so that you can appear to be compromising and being flexible. So it could be… I mean, giving her the benefit of the doubt, it could be that that’s what she was doing. But, see, I don’t think Dianne Feinstein is the Wizard of Smart that everybody in the media thinks.
I think Trump, in a street sense, outsmarts everybody in that room. In addition to everybody in that room not having street smarts, they think they are 20 times smarter than Trump. The arrogance factor and the braggadocio quotient in that room among the Democrats was probably off the charts. So that would be my two-pronged answer to why they thought they could get away with it. I also think that Lindsey Graham is a factor. Remember, Lindsey Graham had partnered with Durbin on basically the DACA deal and the wall and no funding.
Durbin and Lindsey Graham, after that open meeting that was televised, thought that they were being summoned by Trump to finish a deal that had been proposed in that meeting. And they were shocked and stunned when they got there to find that there were Republicans also in the meeting who opposed what they were gonna do. And I think Graham and Durbin thought that they were going to have basically a meeting with Trump where he agreed to what they wanted. And, of course, when they saw Republicans…
When they saw Stephen Miller in there, it was like showing Dracula the cross. It ruined their day. And we should hope Stephen Miller is in every one of these meetings going forward, by the way. So there are a lot of factors here. Arrogance, maybe, is one. Stupidity. Ignorance. There could be a whole lot of things to explain why the Democrats would expect Trump to go with that — and don’t forget, I must honestly remind you that Trump told these people, “I can’t do this without you people in this room!
“You send me whatever you can, and I’ll sign it. I will take the heat.”
You know, at that point saliva started drooling down their mouths. And then when they did that, Trump said, “I never said I was gonna sign this!” “You said you’d sign anything!” “I never said I’d sign this.” It’s a classic negotiating ploy. Which is what this was. But they went in thinking Trump’s an idiot. I think they went in thinking they could roll Trump. I think, actually, that they couldn’t believe the cameras weren’t kicked out. There’s a lot of factors in that little meetings and session that I think probably had a role in the way individuals behave.