RUSH: Now, grab audio sound bites 17 and 18. Jim Acosta, I was telling you before the break, or when I had diarrhea of the mouth and blew right through the concluding format conclusion time, Jim Acosta takes it very seriously, what he does very seriously. I mean, these people think they’re going to war every day. That’s how they take themselves. They really do. And when they survive a day at the White House, it’s like they deserve a medal. Like they’ve gone to war and they’ve lived to tell about it.

But it’s not that. It’s that they are going to war to save something. The country, the Democrat Party, what have you. Confronting Donald Trump or Sarah Sanders is the equivalent of confronting the Vietcong, the Waffen-SS, ISIS, Al-Qaeda. That’s how they look at it. So Trump had a rally last night where he was in South Carolina. He was at a rally for Governor Henry McMaster, who has been a very vocal supporter of Trump’s.

These rallies, when the president first started doing these, this is actually very cheap of me to mention this, but I have to. The reason, folks, that I had a gut feeling that Trump was going to go a long way and probably even win was because of those rallies.

At the rallies you saw how people were bonded to him, you could see how they reacted, you could just see it. The Democrats did, too, but they lived in denial. They relied on the old adage that crowds at a political rally do not mean anything in terms of who will vote and how in an election. And that is a rule of thumb. It’s not just exclusive to this past presidential election and Trump. It’s pretty much a standard operating rule of thumb, that crowds and excitement, crowd size doesn’t translate to votes. You can’t interpret anything from it.

Well, I think in Trump’s case, like so much else, that theory was blown out of the water. And the reason is I had done something like that myself. When this program was new way back August 1st, 1988, nobody wanted to carry this program. We had to convince radio stations to carry it because back then it was believed that all programming on a radio station had to be local. If it wasn’t, people wouldn’t listen. They didn’t care what was going on outside where they lived.

And of course we had a different view. That a good program is a good program no matter where it’s coming from and people don’t care, ’cause television had already proved that. I mean, the Donahue show and Oprah, nobody cared that they came out of Chicago or wherever they were. So we wanted to establish this. And as we would get affiliates, I would go out and do a personal appearance, like a stage show, like Trump does, and we called it the Rush to Excellence Tour.

And for the first two years, every weekend, 48 weekends a year for the first two years I went out and did those things. And they were just stream of consciousness, hour and a half sometimes went two hours about things I cared about in the news. And that’s when I became confident that this was gonna work, when you see the audience showing up and the reaction.

We did places that held 2,000 people, 5,000, 15,000 in some places. And charged a minimum amount just to cover the expenses of getting the arena. The radio stations got to keep whatever and they either kept it or it went to charity or what have you. The primary purpose was not revenue generation. It was to establish a relationship with affiliates, to show them, A, gratitude for taking the show and to show them the value of taking the show.

And when Trump’s rallies started, I felt like I was watching the Rush to Excellence Tour all over. I’m not comparing myself to Trump; I’m talking about the format and how it worked. I went out with no notes and no podium, just went out with a microphone, we even videotaped a couple of them. But the point is these rallies that Trump does, they’re unlike anything anybody else in politics can do.

There isn’t anybody in politics right now who could do one of those the way Trump does. And I think with certain things he puts on a prompter just to remind him that there are things he wants to talk about, but I’ll bet they’re bullet points and not scripts. There might be a few that are scripted, but for the most part, this is all straight improve.

I’m telling you, the Democrats and the media will never admit to you how dazzled they are by it and how intimated they are by it. They don’t have anybody that can do it. Their comedians can’t do what Trump is doing. Their stand-up comedians cannot go out and draw clouds like Trump is, and they certainly don’t bond with their lawns like Trump. Liberal stand-up comedians have to go to places where they sell booze, where people end up laughing, you know, little comedy clubs with 250, 500 people.

Jay Leno could do it back in his day. But most would never even try. And here’s Trump, and Trump covers every base. He gets serious. He is hysterically funny. He is informative. He’s teaching more people about trade than they’ve ever known and how it affects them. There hasn’t been anybody else that can do this.

He’s able to take these subjects that made him want to run for president — trade, American greatness, reviving it, making sure America’s treated fairly, immigration, the border, and he can tell people why he’s doing what he’s doing. He can do it in a way they understand it and support it and agree with.

He mixes it in with humor, and every second of it is real. There isn’t an ounce of phoniness from the beginning to end of any Trump rally. And it always — and as I pointed out during the campaign, there is always — it may be 30 seconds, it may be five seconds, he may spend two minutes doing it; but at every rally Donald Trump lets everybody there know how much he loves the fact that they’re there, how much he loves them, how much he appreciates their support, and he reminds them that he’s doing this because he really cares about these things that he thinks need to be done to improve America and thus improve life for everybody else.

It’s not about him. He doesn’t need this. Donald Trump had a perfectly fine, livable, enjoyable life without all this grief, without the character assassination, without the threats to his family, he didn’t need any of this, which argues for the legitimacy of his policy positions and of his purpose here.

And I’m telling you, the things I’ve just shared with you are things that I think everybody in the media knows, and they hate it, and they resent the hell out of it. That a guy who is outside the circle of elites, outside the approved definitions of proper and sophisticated. The fact that Trump actually relates to and is loved by the majority of people in this country also is something they resent.

The people that hate Trump wouldn’t even care to go to where he goes. They wouldn’t care if people there like them or not. They wouldn’t care if people there supported them or not because it doesn’t matter to what they do. What happens where they live in the establishment, deep state, what the people think doesn’t really matter, except at election time.

But Trump has assembled this massive army that is not abandoning him, much as they’re trying to drive a wedge, they can’t, they will fail every time they try. They don’t understand the bond that Trump has developed with his supporters. But they see it, and they resent the heck out of it. And in truth they’re jealous of it. And many of them, like CNN, you know, they’re star-crossed. They love the attention CNN gets when he calls ’em out and whatever ratings bump. But at the same time they hate it.

I think these rallies are a great little microcosm of why Donald Trump is triumphing and why his supporters are solidly with him and why that number of people is growing. And I cannot overestimate the importance of Trump taking the time to educate these people, to inform them. I don’t mean in a talking-down-to-people way. He’s trying to do serious things in trade that on the surface make it look like it’s a disaster — tariffs and prices going up and taxes.

He walks people through this in ways nobody else in politics can or would even take the time. Because it’s clear he wants them to understand what it’s about and why. And it’s always about America winning. And it’s always about America being treated fairly. Because when that happens, only good things result for the people in his audience and the crowd, his supporters and so forth.

And there just isn’t anybody else that can do this. There isn’t anybody else that would take the time. If anybody else tried it, you’d get a dry, wonkish think tank type presentation that would be difficult enough to plow through reading it, much less listen to it.

So it’s a unique talent that Trump has, and it’s born totally of confidence. You can’t do what Donald Trump does if you’re not confident. You cannot fake it. Now, the reason I say that to you is because the way Trump is at these rallies and when he lets cameras in before cabinet meetings, he is in total control. He is utterly, purely confident, which means that none of these attacks and assaults are phasing him, which people supporting Trump, I think, need to know.

He’s in it for the long haul, and he’s in it for the right reasons. And it has not changed who he is. You can’t go out and do 90 minutes, two hours randomly with basically doing improvisation and just state of consciousness, you can’t do that if you’re not confident. You can’t do that if you don’t really love it. You can’t do it and pull it off. To keep people at rapt attention for 90 minutes, with no visual aids?

He doesn’t play any videos, he doesn’t have any still shots, there’s no graphics and charts. It’s just him. They don’t even fancy up the backdrop. There isn’t anybody in politics who could do it, and notice nobody else is trying to. And so the media shows up at these things, and they’re hoping to take Trump off his game, they’re hoping Trump slips up, they’re hoping to find people in the audience that hate Trump that they can exploit.

And that brings us back to our old buddy Jim Acosta who looks at this as going to war every day trying to defeat the great enemy, Donald Trump. So Acosta shows up last night at Trump’s rally, and Trump’s supporters, “Go home, Jim!” They started laughing at him. They started mocking him, which Acosta thinks is the equivalent of being shot at.

So he’s even being more valorous and brave by hanging in there against these mean words. He’s showing other journalists how to do it. He’s showing ’em how to be brave and how to hang in. Here’s a live shot of Acosta during Trump’s little rally last night. We’ll start here with audio sound bite 17.

ACOSTA: President Trump will be here later on tonight campaigning for the man who wants to be the governor of South Carolina for another four years. That is Henry McMaster. And as you can hear behind me, Wolf, the crowd is very fired up. We have about a couple thousand people in this room so far. They are letting the press corps here know exactly how they feel about what we’re doing here, Wolf.

RUSH: They’re very fired up here, Wolf, very fired, let the press corps know exactly how they feel about what we’re doing here, Wolf. “Go home, Jim, go home.” Totally innocent, totally innocent, not like being thrown out of a restaurant. They’re laughing. They’re having a good time. Jim Acosta doesn’t scare them. Mr. Media Bias trying to take out Trump doesn’t scare them. They, too, are confident. Trump’s supporters, the attendees are confident.

So after Jim has gone to war and the event is over and he survived all of those mean words, it’s time to go back to Wolf Blitzer, time to go back to the mother ship, time to go back home and to report what a great, valorous effort Jim Acosta had just engaged in here with Wolf Blitzer.

ACOSTA: I did have an elderly woman come up to me just a short while ago. We have some video we can show you, where she came up to me and said that we at CNN should get the F out of this auditorium, at this high school in West Columbia. She then turned to the crowd and whipped them up into a frenzy, calling on us to leave this auditorium before President Trump arrives, Wolf, but of course, as you know, we are here to do our jobs and report the news and report on this rally, and we’re not going anywhere.

RUSH: (laughing) “We’re brave, Wolf, we’re not going anywhere. We’re here, we’re here to report the news.” No, you’re not. That’s the thing, Acosta. You guys aren’t there to report any news. You’re waiting for some screw up or you’re waiting to manufacture one. And then Wolf says, “And you’ll always be there, Jim, and we have the greatest appreciation, Jim, for you hanging in there, because, as you know, journalists are at risk worldwide. Jim Acosta, ladies and gentlemen, CNN.” Meanwhile, you can still hear, “Go home, Jim, go home, Jim,” in the background.