RUSH: So President Trump just concluded a little warmup for the media prior to a cabinet meeting beginning, which is happening right now. And in this little impromptu, no note-cards explanation to these blockheads in the media, Trump told ’em (paraphrasing), “And when we get all this stuff done, our country is gonna be so much better off. We’re gonna get some of this stuff done in a couple days. We’re gonna see these trade deals get done and this country is gonna be in better shape than it’s been in a long time.
“I’m doing stuff that should have been done five years ago, ten years ago, 20 years ago, but previous presidents didn’t want to do it. I’m going to do it and when we finish this it’s gonna be such a great country, you’re gonna see.” And it is the Donald Trump of the campaign trail just blathering on here as though he’s fazed by some of this stuff, but he’s not frightened by it, not intimidated by it. He said, Syria, major answers in the next day or two as to what to do about this situation. Once again saying, look, this is something I inherited. How many red lines did previous presidents draw, that Syria was allowed to cross?
And so we got the Russians, we got a lot of things to fix here, but we’re gonna fix them. We’re gonna get it done. America is gonna be better off than it’s ever been once we finish this stuff and we’re gonna finish it. And, by the way, he said the markets are up today ’cause everybody likes what we’re talking about here on trade. Farmers like it, everybody’s liking it, just sit back and watch.
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RUSH: Here’s Trump during a pre-meeting with his cabinet telling the media when all of this trade dealing is done, we finish with this Syria stuff, everything is gonna be better, we’re gonna be much, much stronger.
THE PRESIDENT: The market’s up today very substantially. No, not at all. Don’t forget, our country is gonna be much stronger when this is all finished, just so you understand. You know, these trade deals are horrible. Our country is gonna be much stronger when this is finished, okay?
RUSH: That reminds me during the campaign trail when Trump said of his cabinet, “We’re gonna be working so hard for you.” And I believed that. And I think that it is being demonstrated each and every day how hard everybody in this administration is in fact working to advance and implement the Trump agenda.
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RUSH: To Syria for a bit here. The president said yesterday there will be a “big price to pay” after medical aid groups reported dozens of people were killed by poison gas in a besieged rebel-held town in Syria. Now, wait a minute. There isn’t supposed to be any poison gas in Syria because Obama told us that he had forced Assad to get rid of all of it. And John Kerry did the same thing. They said it’s all gone. And this was back in 2014.
Hang on for that just a second. “The Syrian state denied government forces had launched any chemical assault.” Russia called the reports fake. President Bashar al-Assad’s most powerful ally is Russia, by the way. Next thing you know we’ll find that some Facebook data is being stored in servers in Syria because the Russians ran out of room in Moscow.
You know, Russia and Syria may have a point here because Obama and Kerry assured us that Assad got rid of all of his chemical Russians by handing them over to Russia. Do you remember this? And Obama and Kerry told us that Russia and Syria could be trusted to be telling the truth. So this news of a chemical attack has to be fake news, just like Assad’s chemical attack last year must have been fake news. If you don’t remember, here we go to the audio sound bites. Meet the Press, June 20, 2014, then-secretary of state John Kerry.
KERRY: With respect to Syria, we struck a deal where we got a hundred percent of the chemical weapons out. With respect to Iran, this president has taken the risk of putting together a negotiation for the first time in 10 years, the Iranian nuclear program is actually being rolled backwards.
RUSH: Well, there’s at least two lies in that statement. And if you don’t like the word “lie,” maybe two statements of misinformation, or you could call it disinformation. But regardless, here’s John Kerry, secretary of state for Obama, after Hillary left, “We struck a deal, we got a hundred percent of the chemical weapons out.” Supposedly they went to Russia, big ally, Syria, president Bashar al-Assad.
“And then for the first time in 10 years, the Iranian nuclear program’s being rolled backwards”? Sorry. It isn’t. The Iranian nuclear program is advancing, and the Iranians are bragging about it and threatening to advance it even more. Here’s Obama, just for good measure, back on 2012. This is now six years ago. This was during a press conference and a question.
OBAMA: We have been very clear to the Assad regime, but also to other players on the ground that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized. That would change my calculus. That would change my equation.
RUSH: Yeah, I guess this is all now inoperative. So here you have two of the smartest men ever to have lived and worked in Washington, according to leftists media, and they’re lying through their teeth. These guys didn’t have the umpha to force Syria to get rid of it. The great myth about Obama is that he was so widely respected on the world stage. This guy was considered to be a putz. He was a UI, a useful idiot.
And, folks, I’m not trying to be provocative or offend anybody here. I’m just telling you, Obama was not this strong spine, huge backbone that our enemies were afraid of. They knew that he was like them, eager and willing to be critical of the United States. In Obama’s world, the United States had a lot to answer for. And in Obama’s world, the United States didn’t have the power to tell Syria what to do, and we didn’t have the power to tell the Iranians not to get a nuclear weapon.
Who are we? We didn’t have that moral authority. We didn’t have any moral authority in Obama’s world because of our sins dating back to our nation’s founding and other sins committed after that. I mean, even when the subject of Iranian nukes came up, Obama had said a couple of times effectively, “Well, nobody told us we couldn’t do it, so who are we to tell any other nation what they can and can’t do?”
See, there was no recognition of the United States as the good guys. There was no understanding, recognition, or even willingness to use the power of the United States a force for good ’cause Obama and other leftists, not just Obama, don’t believe in the moral authority of the U.S., they don’t have any. So that’s just one of many red lines that he had drawn for Assad and Assad continually crossed them and we didn’t do anything about it.
I think one of the reasons that the media is so concerned about all this is that the status quo way of dealing with anything in foreign policy has been ultimately to prolong and sustain whatever problem or disagreement there is, rather than solve anything. If you solve something, if you resolve an issue, it ends, you don’t need people working on it anymore. That’s not good. I’m not being facetious here. So you go back, why do you think in Korea, no matter how many administrations we’ve had, Republican and Democrat, why was nothing ever really done about it?
The Clinton administration made moves that appeared in public that they were being tough, and they talked a tough game, but in effect we enabled North Korea. We gave them materiel and money that they could use to upgrade their electric grid and go nuclear if they wanted to. We did it on the guise that they would agree not to go nuclear if we helped them out financially. And so you’ve got Clinton and Madam Albright running around praising themselves for great diplomacy.
In the meantime, Kim Jong-un, his father before him, continue to grow and expand the weapons arsenal and the testing that North Korea has. Before them previous administrations, same thing, nothing ever got resolved, nothing even was taken on, nothing really was taken on, heads on. Same thing with Russia. Same thing with Putin. Same thing with Syria, the Middle East. Nothing ever happened.
No matter what administration, no matter what president. There were always a lot of talks, there were always a lot of meetings, there were always a lot of headlines, always a lot of teases, “Something might be getting done here, Bill Clinton has proposed an idea that’s right up the alley of Yasser Arafat. Sadly, Arafat turned it down.” Of course he didn’t want a solution, either. He needed his soapbox. He needed a platform. That’s how he got rich. That’s how he got powerful. Solving something? No.
Well, what’s different is that we have a president who doesn’t know the time-honored, traditional, diplomatic way of not solving anything. Not solving things is not in Trump’s DNA. It’s the exact opposite. Solving things, fixing things, particularly getting rid of bad things and making good things better, that’s what Trump’s idea of progress is. It’s most people’s, by the way.
The American people have lived under the illusion that all of these administrations previous have been working really hard on making sure the North Koreans don’t get nukes, and we’ve been working really hard on making sure that the Middle East crisis contains itself to the Middle East and doesn’t branch out any further. But nothing ever changes!
Nothing has ever really changed. The arguments and the players all remain the same. And even the people at the statement, they come and go and they change, but the policy never changed. It remains the same where nothing got done, but there’s a lot of noise and a lot of the photos to make it look like we’re really working hard to get things done, but in the end, nothing ever changes.
Well, this is what trying to seriously change things looks like. Really trying to solve things, this is what it looks like. Because it was never gonna be easy. Now, the Kim Jong-uns of the world and his father have grown accustomed to a bunch of heavy breathing, huffing and puffing, verbal threats all of a sudden American media from American administrations, but in the end all they’ve known is increased aid and promises, but they have never known any real hardship.
We’ve never followed through on any of the threats. Well, like any other pet or animal or human being, you get used and accustomed to certain behavior, and you expect more of it, particularly if you behave consistently as to receive it. Well, now we got a whole new game in town, and everybody’s turned upside down by this, including the people inside the Washington establishment who do not like how upset this — to them, this is utter chaos.
Now you’ve got McCain about to blow his gasket. The New York Times has a story that McCain is blaming Trump for the Syrian gas attack! It’s Trump! Trump’s upsetting the world order. Trump’s upsetting the order that we established after emerging victorious in World War II. Trump’s panicking everybody. And that’s exactly the reaction I would expect from somebody who is a lifelong establishmentarian who understands that ultimately nothing ever really gets resolved. It just is made to look as though the effort’s being made.
Well, now we’ve got somebody to whom solving it is the common sense thing, that’s what you do, it’s why he ran, it’s why he was elected. He’s actually gonna fix NAFTA. He’s not gonna sit there and talk about how bad it is and claim it’s probably the best we can do and try to talk people into understanding. He’s gonna fix it! Scares the heck out of a lot of people. Same thing with immigration, whatever issue you’ve got.
This leads to story after story of chaos in the White House and people in uproars over not understanding what’s going. I don’t think there’s any chaos in the White House, not any more than usual. What’s going on in the White House is there’s somebody there that careerists in Washington don’t have any idea how to get along with, how to behave with, how to react to, and how to understand. And that’s the chaos.
Anyway, let me take a break. Because I must. I wish I didn’t have to. When I’m on a roll, I’m on a roll and like you, I’d like it to continue.
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RUSH: There’s another element here in this Syria and gas removal business. You heard John Kerry say in 2014 that they had gotten rid of all the gas, the nerve gas in Syria, that it had been given to the Russians and the Russians got it out of there. How did we know this? Because the Obama administration, Obama himself believed the Russians when they claimed that they had removed all of Syria’s chemical weapons! Obama believed the Russians! And why wouldn’t he? He considered them an ally! (imitating Obama) “Have Dmitry Medvedev tell Putin to be patient, after the 2012 reelection I’ll have a lot more flexibility,” he told Putin’s aide to tell Putin.
Reset button. They considered Russia an ally. Now look at the 180. But it’s not just Obama. Susan Rice, in an archived tweet that has been dug up, June 24th, 2014, “Important achievement: Removal of the last 8% of declared chemical weapons precursors from Syria.” So John Kerry, Susan Rice, Obama, all telling us that all the nerve gas had been removed, all the chemical weapons had been removed. The Russians did it, Russians took it out to make the region safer. Obama believed them, and yet there are gas attacks in Syria even now. Here’s what Trump said about it this afternoon right before his cabinet meeting.
THE PRESIDENT: It was an atrocious attack. It was horrible. You don’t see things like that. As bad as the news is around the world, you just don’t see those images. We are studying that situation extremely closely. We are meeting with our military and everybody else, and we’ll be making some major decisions over the next 24 to 48 hours. We are very concerned. When a thing like that can happen, this is about humanity. We’re talking about humanity, and it can’t be allowed to happen.
RUSH: Well, but it did happen. And if you can’t allow it to happen and somebody’s gonna pay a price, are they not? Just like the ChiComs are gonna have to pay a prize. You know what the ChiComs have been doing in these trade deals? The ChiComs, in addition to having favorable trade balance, the ChiComs have been demanding technological information from American companies doing business there. I’ll give you an example of that in the next hour.
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RUSH: Just to conclude a couple of things here. Going along with the theme established in the previous half hour that what Washington thinks is chaos is simply a president finally doing something rather than sustaining the status quo, which is what previous administrations have all done in the area of foreign policy. Now, look. There are exceptions to this, I understand. We kicked Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, then we kicked Saddam out of Iraq. We have taken on ISIS.
All these things are of extreme value. But even after those events take place, the foundational events guiding U.S. foreign policy don’t seem to change. North Korea still North Korea. Kim Jong-un, Kim Jong-il, doesn’t matter which Kim, still building up nuclear weapons, we send people over there to talk to ’em, tell ’em not to do it, treat ’em nicely, give them more money, they keep doing it.
Middle East peace, nothing changes. The words, players, the end of the day, the end of the every year, the end of every administration, the status quo is the status quo, meaning no solution.
Now, Obama did make a difference in one area because the way he threw foreign policy upside down was to, for example, let Iran proceed on building a nuclear weapon under the belief that we have no right to tell ’em they can’t. Who are we? Nobody told us we couldn’t. Who are we to tell anybody else? It’s all part of there is no such thing as American exceptionalism because I’m sure in Iran they think they’re exceptional, Obama said, and I’m sure in Finland they think they’re exceptional, Obama said. Clearly demonstrating he has no idea what the term even means.
Well, the Iranian nuke deal was a bad deal, horrible deal, but everybody went along with it, including the Republican Senate, because it was a foreign policy achievement. I mean, it dealt with something. It didn’t fix anything. Unless you believe that the Iranians having nukes somehow quiets things down. And do not doubt that there are eggheads who probably believe that.
But what’s Trump do? Trump comes in, starts running for president: This is the stupidest deal I’ve ever seen. Who in the world in their right mind would give the state sponsor of terrorism whatever they need to develop nuclear weapons, even if it is 10 years down the road? Who would do this? It doesn’t make any sense. So Trump says, I’m gonna roll that back. I’m gonna change it.
The foreign policy apparatus erupts, claiming Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, Trump’s gonna start a war, Trump’s gonna get us all killed, Trump’s gonna make everybody mad at us. They already think the world’s mad at us. After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush State Department convened a seminar on why do they hate us so much. What did we do to make them want to blow up the World Trade Center?
The State Department has its own agenda independent of whichever president is in office at the time. There are careerists there. They are largely leftists, largely people who believe the United States is the problem in the world, not the solution. And therefore a U.S. solution is the status quo. They believe that we’re so big and so powerful, it’s unfair for us to exert our share of influence. It’s not fair to the little guys. It’s not fair to the Irans and the Iraqs and the Yemens and whatever. And so we, acting supposedly with great humility, stand aside while these little terrorist nations have their way, because it’s unbecoming. A gigantic superpower to squash bugs like this, it’s kind of not even fair.
So we let them proceed under the guise that we’re watching and we’re studying and we’re spying and we’re keeping close tabs. But they still get to do what they’ve always been doing. Here comes Trump saying, “No, none of this makes any sense to me. So we’re gonna turn it back.” And he’s going to line out the Iranian nuclear deal. And so what’s Iran’s response? Iran tells Trump he would regret dropping the nuclear deal. Donald Trump will regret it if he pulls out of the nuclear deal with Iran, said the supposed moderate president, Hassan Rouhani.
There are no moderate Iranians, just like there are no longer any moderate Democrats. There aren’t any. They’re all radical leftists. I mean, the ones that you would deal with. Just like there are no moderate the Iranians. That was in fact a trick created and promulgated by the State Department to justify the Iran deal. “Hey, we’ve got a new kind of leadership there. These are moderates, and we can deal with these guys. They’re not the wacko mullahs.” Ha. The mullahs run the presidents.
Ask yourself where Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is. What happened to poor little Mahmoud? He fell upon disfavor with the mullahs and now he’s probably sweeping the floors at the airport. President Hassan Rouhani said Monday, he warned Trump that Tehran’s response would be stronger than he thinks. Now, what are the Iranians used to? The Iranians are used to the American president flying millions of dollars of cash on pallets aboard an American Air Force plane and landing at Tehran airport and turning the cash over to Iran in exchange as ransom payment for some American hostages.
The Iranians are used to the United States president caving. The Iranians are used to the president of the United States acceding to their demands. Trump says (imitating Trump), “Screw any of this. This deal’s a bad deal. It’s a bad deal for America, bad deal for the American people. I’m gonna tear it up.” Iran says this will not go down well.
U.S. sanctions that were lifted under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action 2015 will resume unless Trump waives them again on May 12th. Trump’s effectively set that as a deadline for European powers to fix the terrible flaws of the deal. And if they don’t, if the original negotiating team doesn’t go in there and fix this, then Trump is going to take further action.
Reuters is not happy about this. You can read it in the tone of their writing. “France, Britain and Germany are struggling to persuade their EU partners to support new sanctions on Iran,” as a way to persuade Trump to stick with the nuclear deal. Everybody’s afraid. The Iranians, and of course bullies and terrorists count on that. Trump is not afraid. France, Britain, Germany seeking to persuade others in the European Union to back some new sanctions on Iran as a way to persuade Trump to stick with the nuclear deal.
“Those sanctions would not involve measures that were lifted under the nuclear deal but would target individual Iranians that the EU believes are behind Iran’s ballistic weapons program.” Let’s not forget that the Iranians also backed North Korea’s nuclear weapons research, and they do trade scientists.
Washington Free Beacon: “Iran Threatens to Restart Nuke Enrichment Program in Matter of Days — Threats ‘confirm that the Iranian regime never gave up on its atomic weapon ambitions.'” Well, Obama said they did! And John Kerry said they did! They said we cut back and this is not nuclear at all. But now Iran is threatening to restart the nuclear enrichment program. Those programs just can’t be restarted by flipping a switch. They never shut them down, is the point. Trump knows it. This is why there’s chaos.
North Korea is telling the U.S. that Kim Jong-un is ready to discuss nukes. Now, it’s way too soon to know what this little guy is doing. He may be too stupid to be threatened. He may be too stupid to know that he doesn’t stand a chance. But then again he has to also deal with the ChiComs. But on the surface it looks like Kim Jong-un doesn’t like being called rocket man. And on the surface, it looks like Kim Jong-un doesn’t know how to deal with somebody who is threatening to retaliate.
We haven’t had U.S. presidents respond the way Trump has when they have tested and launched test missiles and threatened to blow us up. We’ve either ignored Kim Jong-un or tried to talk to him as we would a child because remember, these people in government think everybody else is their children.