RUSH: Perhaps the greatest example of Trump derangement syndrome today and what, in a sane world, would be a profoundly embarrassing piece of journalism, which is saying a lot given everything that’s happened during the Trump administration. The Washington Post is beside itself. And, if you happen to receive the Washington Post daily email blast that is supposed to tell you what’s hot and what’s interesting and what’s leading the day in Washington Post news coverage, this story is at the top of all the news out there. This story is what the Washington Post apparently is the most proud of today.

The headline: “President Trump’s Extravagant, $3,000, 300-Sandwich Celebration of Clemson University.” You look at the resources the Washington Post spent analyzing the fast food dinner at the White House that the president personally purchased for the Clemson football team because of the government shutdown. The White House kitchen staff has been furloughed. The Clemson football team, previously invited, Trump could not stand to have them up there with nothing to eat, so they went out to Mickey D’s, they went to Burger King, they went to Wendy’s, they went to pizza places, they got some fries, $3,000 worth of food college students love!

College students eat every day. Trump went out — I think it’s fabulous! They had the candelabra. They had every accouterment that you would associate with an eight-course meal except it’s all fast food burgers in their original boxes. It was classic, it was classic Trump. The Washington Post is beside itself. The Washington Post thinks this is the greatest affront to civilization and proper comportment and behavior in the White House that there has ever been, so much so that this story is their number-one story.

They even had their art department do a graphic of the table setting showing where every Big Mac, every Quarter Pounder, every… What’s the burger? The Burger King big deal, whatever it is. They had the Whopper and then Wendy’s over there. It’s like a real estate person’s floor plan for if they’re trying to sell a house, is what this thing looks like. They calculate the calories, the orders of french fries, the types of hamburgers that Trump provided — and then they did a fact check!

Trump’s out there having fun with this, and he’s telling people that they had hamburgers stacked “a mile high,” and the Washington Post fact checked that! They fact checked Trump’s statements that hamburgers were piled a mile high. I mean, it is a figure of speech! It is a joke! It is a way of expressing yourself to say you had a lotta hamburgers in there. But the Washington Post writes, “FACT CHECK: At two inches each, a thousand burgers would not reach one mile high.” This is the number-one story they have put at the top their email blast.

This is the one they want everybody to read. This is the one they’re most proud of today. Now, imagine how many resources were put into this. Fact-checkers, arts and graphics people doing a diagram of where every burger was — wherever the Big Macs on the table, wherever the Burger King Whoppers and whatever the Wendy’s whatevers were. Imagine if all of those resources had been spent on looking into the corruption at the FBI, or the corruption at the DOJ, or how about the lobbyist-paid trip to Puerto Rico by Democrat members of Congress?

I mean, this is just… It is absurd, and it’s a great illustration of how they’ve lost their minds. And they’re not the only ones that are raising hell over this. This serving of fast food burgers at the White House to Clemson football team is being presented as yet another bit of evidence of how uncivilized, how ill-prepared, how unfit Donald Trump is to be president of the United States, that this is just… It’s embarrassing; it’s appalling.

Fast food in the White House with all of the fat and all of the salt and all of the calories and all the heart disease, not to mention all of the damage to climate. It’s by one of their prominent reporters, some guy named Bump, Philip Bump. “In an administration overstuffed with bizarre moments and unusual events, Monday night’s celebration of the Clemson University Tigers at the White House nonetheless made a mark. The Tigers, who won the national college football championship after not having to play … Ohio State…”

This guy went to Ohio State, so he’s really ripping Clemson. They’re not the real national champs ’cause they didn’t play this guy’s team. “The Tigers, who…” Now, we don’t think he’s joking because these people don’t have a sense of humor. This is the kind of thing that somebody would say to get a laugh. This guy, these people have no sense of humor. If you’re gonna fact check somebody saying, “Yeah, we had hamburgers piled a mile high,” and you bring in a fact-checker and you talk about how many hamburgers you would actually have to have stacked on top of each other to get to a mile?

Anyway, they “had the traditional meeting with the president,” the football team did, “enjoying remarks from South Carolina’s senators after retiring to the State Dining Room for a meal.” That’s what bugs them too. They did all this fast food in the state dining room. You know, you’re only supposed to bring out the five-star china, the best of the best. You’re not supposed to put poison fast food in there. Who does that? This is another demeaning day at the White House brought to us by Donald Trump.

Sarah Sanders with a press secretary statement: “Because the Democrats refuse to negotiate on border security, much of the residence staff at the White House is furloughed — so the president is personally paying for the event to be catered with some of everyone’s favorite fast foods.” They go on to analyze it from top to bottom, graphic charts of layout of the food, questioning how much Trump actually spent out of his own pocket. Is it just another Trump administration lie? Who really paid the $3,000 to buy all of this fast food?

And they have a picture here of the spread. You probably have seen the photo of the spread on the gigantic table in the state dining room, and there is a sound bite. Let me see. Trump made a joke about this, and the Drive-By Media is… Oh. Oh. Oh. Here it is. Here it is. Grab… Let’s see. Grab sound bite Nos. 9 and 10. This is just… It fits perfectly. Up first is the president himself last night after welcoming the Clemson football team to the White House, a portion of his welcoming remarks…

THE PRESIDENT: So I had a choice. Do we have no food for you, ’cause we have a shutdown, or do we give you some little quick salad that the first lady will make along with… along with the second lady? They’ll make some salads — and I said, “You guys aren’t into salads.”

CHAMPIONS: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: Or do I go out? Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, do I go out and send out for about 1,000 hamburgers, Big Macs?

TEAM: (laughing) Yeah!

THE PRESIDENT: So we actually did it.

RUSH: Bill Clinton had Big Macs in the Oval Office; they didn’t think a thing about it. They worried that it wasn’t healthy for him, but they didn’t make a big joke about it. Saturday Night Live did, but not the fact that he was demeaning the Oval Office or anything. Trump happens to like Big Macs. I happen to know on the campaign trail, Trump is flying around on his own Boeing 757. There are number of galleys, meaning kitchens, on a Boeing 757. I understand that practically every trip was McDonald’s.

He loves McDonald’s and other fast food, and he also thinks it’s safe. He sends somebody else to buy it. Nobody knows it’s for him; therefore, it’s not poison. It’s a security thing to go out and get fast food. He loves it. So this is something that he enjoyed doing too. But in this sound bite, do you know that there was something? The president said something so offensive that upon hearing it a cable news infobabe nearly lost her cookies. Do you remember the sound bite? It was only a few seconds. Do you know what he might have said that just sent somebody into orbit? (interruption) Right! That the first lady would be making salads!

Here we go with Erin Burnett on CNN…

ERIN BURNETT: How in the world do you not perceive that as sexist —

SCOTT JENNINGS: Uh…

ERIN BURNETT: — to say the assumption that his wife’s gonna go make salads for the bunch of football players? (snickering)

SCOTT JENNINGS Uh, I —

ERIN BURNETT: What is she, like, the cook?

SCOTT JENNINGS: I think you — you might be overreading this one.

ERIN BURNETT: I’m not overreading it! He made a joke that was sexist about women. (stammering) I guess what we’re agreeing with is whether it’s funny and whether humor is something that’s serious. I feel pretty strongly it’s a sexist thing to say.

RUSH: A sexist thing to say. The first lady could have whipped up some salads and the second lady. They didn’t want to leave out Ivanka. She apparently makes great salads. That’s why he had to put her name in there. Apparently Ivanka’s salads are to die for, so he couldn’t leave her out. And here’s Erin Burnett (impression), “I don’t think it’s funny. Comedy isn’t supposed to be funny, is it? We’re not supposed to laugh at comedy. (sputtering) Well, I’m not overreading it. He made a joke. Sexist. We’re disagreeing with whether it’s funny, whether humorous is serious. It’s humor something seer? I don’t know. Just really feel strongly it’s sexist. Sexist! First lady making salads?”

What do they do at dinnertime in her house, I wonder?

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RUSH: I’ve been informed that I erred in identifying the second lady. I thought that Trump was referring to Ivanka. But I’m told the second lady is Mrs. Pence, Karen Pence, the wife of the vice president, Mike Pence. Apparently, she has a great reputation for making salads, which is why this would be on Trump’s mind. The fact that it was sexist? See? A woman in the kitchen? First lady, second lady, third lady, bag lady, trailer park lady, it doesn’t matter. In the kitchen is sexist. Portraying women in any kind of historically traditional role is sexist.

Do you remember the shutdown in ’95-96? That was the famous Newt Gingrich-Bill Clinton shutdown and the same circumstances existed, the kitchen staff at the White House was on furlough. Why do you think Monica Lewinsky was in there delivering pizzas and snapping her thong at Bill Clinton? Do you remember the media giving Clinton any grief for having a pizza delivered by an intern whom he was then gonna doink in the nearby bathroom?

Do you remember the Drive-Bys, how they tried to cover all that up. But there certainly wasn’t any, “Oh, my God. What’s happening to the White House? Pizza in the Oval Office.” No, they all would have wished they were invited, particularly the female members of the press corps. “What’s Lewinsky got that I don’t?” Well, that night a thong or that day, whatever it was. Did you see any of the actual celebration in the White House last night between Trump and the football team from Clemson?

It was a celebration of winners. It was replete with references to God and excellence, the purpose of team sports: To build character in boys so they can be productive men. It was a total positive. It was a completely uplifting thing. But it was comprised of values that have always been traditional and are now under assault in America. I’m sure a lot of parents who may have watched that thing last night might like their kids to end up going to Clemson, based on the nature of that celebration last night.

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RUSH: We went back to the archives. You have to hear this. This is actual from at A&E Network’s show called The Clinton Affair. They went back and did a documentary retrospective on it, and during a segment on the 1995 government shutdown, Monica Lewinsky said this about how she met Bill Clinton…

LEWINSKY: I realized that the top inch or two of my… (laughing) My, uh, underwear had — showing my thong underwear. And I thought, “Well, I’ll up the game.” Instead of pulling my trousers up like I would have done in any other instance, I didn’t. It was unnoticeable to anybody else in the room, but he noticed. As I passed George Stephanopoulos’s office, I kind of looked into the open doorway, and Bill happened to be standing there, and he motioned me in. Unbeknownst to me, I was on the precipice of the rabbit hole.

RUSH: So she’s delivering a pizza in there during the government shutdown, and she was popping her thong in there. She saw Stephanopoulos. Now, Stephanopoulos… You know, if she’s in his office, if Stephanopoulos looks up, he sees her waist. He’s a short guy. But she didn’t notice that. She noticed only Clinton looking. So she’s out there… (I chose “waist” on purpose. This is a family show.) But she’s popping her thong and so forth, delivering a pizza. She’s all excited here that Bill Clinton noticed her thong, and she made adjustments with her clothing to make sure he noticed even more — and somehow Donald Trump is the biggest reprobate that has ever occupied the Oval Office.

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RUSH: Let’s get started on the phones. Lake Mary, Florida. This is Paula. It’s great to have you. You’re the first caller today. Big, big job there. You set the tone for every caller to follow. So make it work.

CALLER: All right. Here’s what’s gonna work, Rush. I was so happy this morning when I saw the report of Donald Trump giving hamburgers and french fries and pizzas and what not to Clemson. It occurred to me that this is why we voted for him. We love him. He’s so normal what he’s doing. He’s honoring this team. But even during a shutdown when the Democrats are off doing their thing in Puerto Rico and with their families, he’s honoring a team and doing it with such awesome normalness. And for the press to go, then, and fact check on top of everything else? To me, it screams to the American people, “These elitist, snobby, we’re-better-than-you kind of people are gonna criticize him for doing what all of us would do.” (unintelligible)

RUSH: It is kind of fascinating. I mean, here you have a bunch of people — the left wing, the Democrats, the Drive-By Media — and for eons they have portrayed themselves as the champions of the little guy. And they have operated on the basis the little guy’s getting screwed every day by America, by Republicans. “The little guy has to eat fast food! The little guy has to do this.” The Democrats are out defending it.

Now all of a sudden, we have a president who’s faced with no staff in the White House. There’s no way to actually prep a standard meal for guests arriving like this. So Trump improvises and goes out and gets fast food which every American or the vast majority of Americans have eaten and do eat for all of the obvious reasons. A, it tastes good. B, it’s not that expensive. It’s convenient, it’s fast, whatever. But as you say, I mean, it’s real-guy stuff.

Here come these elitist Democrats now who used to be champions of this kind of stuff, now acting like it’s beneath them and it’s beneath the White House — and it’s not just the Democrats. The Never Trumper conservatives are piling on. They’re also righteously indignant over the quasi-defamation to the White House and presidential standards of decorum that Trump is inflicting on everybody by serving Big Macs. There weren’t any left, by the way. They were all consumed. I watched it, and everybody had a good time there last night. But it’s just another illustration of the abject phoniness of people who claim to be the watchdogs and the standard-bearers for the little guy.

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RUSH: For those of you watching on the Dittocam, I want to show you a screenshot from an actual Web page of the Washington Post back on May 19, 2014. And of course this will end up at RushLimbaugh.com as well. This is not a pitch to sell people a subscription to the Rush Limbaugh 24/7 website. You either have or you haven’t. You know about it. This is just a service for people who have subscribed and you’d be amazed at the millions that watch this program each day right here on the Dittocam. But this is for you.

“President Obama and Cheeseburgers: A Love Story.” And there’s also a story from Politico back on September 13th, 2010. “Michelle Obama: I Love French Fries.” Isn’t that kind of — ahem! Ahem! Slap myself there for those of you not watching on the Dittocam. That was my bad. Anyway, “Michelle Obama: I love French Fries.” Washington Post, which today has this very snarky, cutting story on Donald Trump for serving hamburgers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King to the Clemson football team.

Let me tell you people something. I know football. I know pregame meals. I know all of this stuff. This is what they long to eat. They have to eat training table fare, which is great food, don’t misunderstand. But it’s nutritionally balanced by the nutrition experts at the university. When they are away from the training table, this is what they eat. It’s what every kid eats! And to be able to have this stuff at the White House with the president, I guarantee you, it’s a plus for them. It’s not a negative.

But here’s the Washington Post doing this snarky story on how the president is being sexist by saying he could have had the first lady make salads, but football players don’t eat salads. So he’s expressing his anti-female characteristics with that comment. And then he was telling people proudly that we had hamburgers stacked a mile high, and the Washington Post fact checked that and said that it would take X-numbers of hundreds of thousands hamburgers to stack them a mile high.

So Trump was lying, they said! They reported Trump was lying about how many hamburgers he served. And then they did the requisite damage to the environment and the calories and the cholesterol and all of the rotgut that they usually associate with their contemptuous attitudes on the lives of average, ordinary people. But if you go back to the Washington Post, May 19, 2014, “President Obama and Cheeseburgers: A Love Story.”

Do you know what the root of this was? Michelle Obama ran the training table. And you know what it was? It was watercress vinaigrette. It was kale. It was berries and nuts and weeds picked from her garden with a bunch of vinegar on it as salad dressing and he got tired of it. Like any other henpecked guy, when he had the chance to break away, what did he do? Burgers and fries. And he had this chain restaurant, Five Guys burgers or something that he loved to go to in Virginia. And the Washington Post tagged along and just thought it was wonderful.

“President Obama made yet another trip to a burger joint Friday, taking four employees on a Washington construction project to Shake Shack. Obama and Vice President Biden used the appearance to tout something they traveled the country discussing all week: the need to increase investment in America’s often crumbling infrastructure, a move that would create jobs –” that’s all they did! A bunch of symbolism. They didn’t do anything to create jobs. They destroyed jobs. They didn’t do anything to rebuild infrastructure. They gave it all to unions!

“But the trip underscored something else.” By the way, the reporter here is a woman, Katie Zezima. “The trip underscored something else: Obama really loves cheeseburgers. Despite the White House’s emphasis on healthy eating and Obama’s assertion that his favorite food is broccoli –” does anybody buy that? “Obama has a habit of taking people out for burgers and fries. Often that person is Biden. Just two guys grabbing some burgers, right? Obama suggested that he might have a burger for his 50th birthday in 2011.”

See? It’s so normal that even their beloved Barack Obama went out and had a burger on his 50th, of all the things he could do, he wanted to have a burger. “A blogger apparently nicknamed named him ‘President Obeef’ because of his well-documented penchant for cheeseburgers. Michelle Obama also sometimes ditches the healthy eating and, like the rest of us, splurges on fast food.”

And then they have a bunch of pictures of the various burger joints Obama goes to, as though you ought to make note of them and put ’em on your map and you should visit them too. Let Donald Trump do essentially the same thing — the only difference is Obama left the White House for his burgers because he had to get away from Michelle to enjoy them. The only difference is while Obama left, Trump hangs around and serves them in the State Dining Room.

It’s just one of, folks, countless and endless illustrations of the blatant unfairness and the bias, the mean-spiritedness and the hatred harbored by today’s Washington political class. Pure and simple. No difference whatsoever.

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Richard in Farmington, Minnesota, great to have you, sir. Hi.

RUSH: Hi, Mr. Limbaugh.

RUSH: Hi.

CALLER: It’s an honor to be on your show. Mega nimble navigator dittos to you.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.

CALLER: I just wanted to comment on the Clemson situation.

RUSH: Yes.

CALLER: I just think it’s hilarious that these vanguards of the proletariat are going after something that the average person eats at least once a month in the same week that they fly to Puerto Rico for the lobbyist paid trip.

RUSH: Well, no. That’s a good point. The people who defend the Democrat as having legitimate business in Puerto Rico with lobbyists and donors attack Donald Trump for serving Big Macs and Whoppers and Wendy’s to the Clemson football team in the White House during a government shutdown. That’s the hypocrisy. This is a media hypocrisy — the Democrats, too, but this is a media hypocrisy that’s blatant. Fact-checking Trump on his statement that they had hamburgers piled a mile high. They literally fact checked that. But your point is this is what average, ordinary people do. This is what their families eat frequently and if it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for Trump, right?

CALLER: Exactly. Yeah, and it’s something that I can’t remember ever happening at the White House, so these kids have a unique experience that they can tell forever.

RUSH: Let me tell you something. It does happen at the White House. I’m gonna tell you a little – this is no big deal, but my first time at the White House was in 1992. This is when I was invited there by George H. W. Bush to discuss the Perot phenomenon. It was June of 1992. It was a Wednesday or Thursday night and we pulled up and got to the White House and there was this giant tent, and the tent still had signage on it, KC Masterpiece. I said, “What’s this?” So I asked him.

He said, “Yeah, the guys from Kansas City, Kansas City Masterpiece did a barbecue for the staff here yesterday,” and they still had the tents and stuff up. Now, I was from Kansas City, KC Masterpiece is some of the best barbecue sauce you could have, they had a restaurant and so forth. This is done all the time is the point. You just never hear about it. I mean, there are White House barbecues all the time. Somebody has to do this stuff. There’s a lot more of this that goes on than you would know.

But with Trump it’s never happened before, nobody’s ever been this gauche, nobody’s ever been this pedestrian, nobody’s ever been so sloppy and dirty with the White House as Donald Trump, when this stuff is common! I mean, Monica Lewinsky delivering a pizza in a thong? They do stories on how Barack Obama loved cheeseburgers and what a great guy he was because of it.

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RUSH: We can’t even get a list of the Democrats that went to Puerto Rico. We can’t even get a list of the donors and the lobbyists who were down there buying influence with ’em. Why didn’t you hop on that, Washington Post, instead of tracking down something obvious, that a lot of hamburgers were served in the White House yesterday to a football team.