RUSH: I want to thank everybody from National Review Institute. I had a secret public appearance yesterday here in Palm Beach. It’s the first time that I have ever spoken, done a personal appearance where I live. I’ve lived here since 1997. It’s the first public appearance I’ve had here.

The National Review institute was something started in honor of Mr. Buckley to keep the flame alive, and I was asked to participate. It was an all-day event yesterday with various panel discussions and seminars. And they asked me to anchor it at 4 o’clock in the afternoon. It was to be a one-hour Q&A with Andy McCarthy moderating, throwing me questions from the audience.

I felt so bad for Andy, he only got three questions in. I just wouldn’t shut up. I mean, every question he asked inspired 10 different answers, you know, answers on 10 different subjects. When it was over, I said, “Man, I’m really sorry.”

He said, “It doesn’t matter, you covered everything I intended to ask you with only three questions. It could have gone for another hour.” There were only one hundred people because it was a fundraiser and it cost a lot to get in there. They filled a room at the Colony Hotel. As I say, I could have gone for two hours on this. (interruption) It was at the Colony, yeah, in a super-secret private room right off the bar at the Colony Hotel. Rich Lowry was there. Well, all the principals of the National Review Institute were there.

It was a great crowd, people from Palm Beach, Boca, came down from Orlando. It was a great time. And I had a spy out in the audience, my brother-in-law was there. He said, “Man, you should have heard what people were saying while you were speaking. You never hear this.”

I said, “No. I just hear the applause.”

He said, “This is better than the radio. There aren’t any commercials. This is just straight from the hip. This is cool!” And it was a blast. It was a great time. It reminded me of the old Rush to Excellence Tour things we used to do way, way, way, way back 28 ago years when the program was new.

But I just wanted to acknowledge basically the people who had shown up, the audience that was there, had a great time, and they were great. They were like great callers. They made me look good. I had some questions that they took during the event, they were writing down on little index cards and brought up to add. And Andy has become a real good friend and is a brilliant guy, and it was fun to do a tandem appearance.

So thanks again to everybody there for the afternoon. I spoke for an hour and then I was in a corner of the room for an hour posing for pictures and signing things. So I looked at my phone when I got home because, you know, I use location services. Two and a half hours at the event.

And the people at the hotel were great too. No, no, no. (interruption) This was a little smaller adjunct room, had its own kitchen, had its own giant room. It’s up the street from the main hotel. It looks architecturally the same, but it’s right beyond the pool, right beyond the outside bar area in the pool area, a little room in there. Well, it’s not a little room.

But there was no makeup. It was just great. All I had to do was get mic’d up. I don’t know if anybody recorded it. I didn’t see any cameras. I mean, I didn’t see any professional cameras, but as prevalent as phones are — I don’t know. No idea if anybody recorded it. I didn’t even think about that, myself. You’re thinking that it would be cool to have it to play excerpts? Yeah, well, I always do a postmortem when I finish these. I go home and I think about it and I rehash it in my mind, like I do the radio show most of the time.

Is there anything that I would have done different? And I only came up with one thing. Andy asked me a question about, not Trump’s tweets per se, he asked me my opinion of Trump punching down, going after people that are insignificant to him on the power pole. I mean, they’re way beneath him. And my original answer to that I don’t think was quite nuanced enough. And the audience ate it up. But it gets the age old question, “Okay, what do you react to? What do you ignore?” And we’ve discussed this many, many, many times here on the program. And with Trump, he responds to all of it. You criticize him, if it shows up anywhere in wide media, he’s gonna react to it. And he does.

I generally spoke in favor of that as part of staying on offense and pushing back and not letting anybody get away with it, particularly if it isn’t true. But there are some individuals that Trump’s pushed back against, I can’t name any right now, but there have been a couple of times I thought it was a waste of time to do it because the person was such small fry and the allegation was so ridiculous.

But then I always come back to the fact that no matter how ridiculous we think things are, there are a lot of liberal Democrats who believe it verbatim. Like that Hillary story yesterday that we had. I found out it’s 75 grand to go to Georgetown. That’s how much parents are paying students to go listen to Hillary Clinton talk about how men are no longer gonna help ’em chop the wood, lead the cattle drives as North America becomes a desert because of climate change.