RUSH: I just want to remind you of something else, folks, that I have said plenty of times, and I made a big deal out of this during the 2016 campaign and after the 2016 election. How many of you remember me saying that one election is not going to be enough? One election is a great thing. Winning the presidency in 2016 was a great thing, but it’s just the beginning. There are going to be a lot of elections that need to be won.
Now, you may think, “Rush, that goes without saying.” Well, yeah, it does go without saying, but it is something that I still think you need to stop and consider. And this situation we find ourselves in today with the wall funding and the spending bill is a good illustration of what I mean by it and what it means.
Like it or not, we in February of 2019 are already in the 2020 presidential election cycle. Meaning that much of what happens in Washington is happening within the confines of that next event. Candidates are looking for issues on which to campaign. They’re looking to avoid doing things that might end up being negatively portrayed during a campaign.
In 2016 Trump was elected to build a wall and end illegal immigration. Well, here we are two years later and the wall isn’t built, a wall, a full-fledged wall, people, what they thought they were voting for still hasn’t been built. And the Democrats are doing what Democrats do. The Democrats don’t want a wall and so they’re doing everything they can to stand in the way and make sure one doesn’t get built. Because the Democrats do not want illegal immigration stopped.
They’re not just gonna roll over and lay down. They’re gonna have to be defeated, over and over and over again. Just because they lost the election in 2016, they don’t interpret that as meaning, okay, Trump gets what he wants now, he won and we lost. They don’t look at it that way at all. Republicans sometimes do when they lose elections, but that’s not how the Democrats look at things.
Now, the Democrats have as their primary objective destroying Donald Trump. And they’ve thrown everything at the book. They’ve got the Mueller hearing, the congressional hearings, Russian collusion. None of it’s gonna pan out. That’s gonna devastate them. Already there are meltdowns today over at MSNBC over the Senate Intelligence Committee admitting today that after two years they have found not a scintilla of evidence of Russian collusion. These people on the left really believed it!
They believe all of this cockamamie, crazy stuff that they say. They really believed that there was collusion and they really believed that it was widespread and it was there to be found. They have been lied to by their media and they have soaked it all up. They have absorbed every bit of it as gospel truth. They remain focused and hell-bent not just on beating Donald Trump, but destroying him. In that circumstance it makes perfect logical sense that they would not help Donald Trump accomplish one thing of his promised agenda in 2016.
That is a reality that has to be dealt with. That is why they are going to continue to need to be defeated. And it’s why the Democrats winning the House last November was so maddening and troubling to me, for me, what have you. But, again, that is a reality that has to be dealt with. But Trump, his part remains committed to fulfilling that promise. But not because it’s fulfilling a promise. Trump remains committed to it because he remains committed to making America great again. But he has a unified opposition like few presidents have been up against, in our lifetimes, anyway.
Democrat Party, Democrat think tanks, the media, all of these people are lined up against him. So Trump did everything he could to force the issue in the last government shutdown. Many of you were upset when he decided to end the shutdown after having gained nothing out of it. Now we’re at this deal where the Democrats have moved off their demand for no money to $1.735 billion which is chump change. It’s an insignificant amount of money, except measured against zero. When you measure it against Democrat intransigence, it’s movement, I think it’s related to the Trump approval numbers being 52%.
Look. The point I’m making is that it was very unrealistic to think that everything Trump wanted to accomplish as part of his campaign in 2016 was gonna be accomplished in two years. It’s why I said winning the first election’s crucially important. Without it, you can’t do anything. But it’s not by any means the end of anything. It’s got to just be the first of many elections that are won, and that means the first of many elections where the American people are educated and vote properly based on being properly informed and hopefully on the right side of things.
So it remains an ongoing process. It’s a hard thing to accept this incrementalism, particularly when the Republicans owned the House and Senate the first two years of Trump’s presidency and nothing was done on this. But let me refresh your memory on that. The first nine months of the first year, the first nine months of 2017 the Republicans in the House of Representatives thought Trump had colluded with Russia. Let’s not forget this. They were buying hook, line, and sinker all of this rotgut the media was reporting. They believed it too!
They thought Trump wasn’t gonna last. That’s why they weren’t helping Trump with his agenda. He wants to repeal and replace Obamacare. They think he’s gonna be gone, out of office by the end of the year. They believed that garbage! It was maddening! And then half of ’em didn’t even like him and half of ’em were mad that he won. They never expected to win. The Republicans in the House never thought they were gonna have lead anybody. Never thought they were gonna have to govern.
Over in the Senate, they don’t look at anything other than we’re here to slow things down and stop things from happening, make sure that we let the coffee cool after it slops out of the cup into the saucer. If I heard that analogy once, I’ve heard it a lifetime. And even now, even now Donald Trump is faced with a significant number of Republicans in both houses who still don’t like him and don’t want to help him. There are Never Trumpers everywhere.
So he remains up against a deeply motivated, if immoral and incorrect, opposition. And they are there. And they have to be dealt with. And how they’re dealt with is what this is all about and where we are. Does Trump shut the government? You just heard him say he doesn’t think there’s gonna be another shutdown, but if there is, it’s gonna be on the Democrats. As he said about the last government shutdown.
Trump’s mind-set is that despite all of this, whether there’s $1.375 billion or $5.7 billion, in his mind he’s gonna get this wall built however and whenever he can. Whether he gets assistance from Congress or not, it’s gonna happen. That’s his message. That was his message today in the cabinet meeting that was televised, a brief part of it was.
The chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, has already said publicly a number of times that they’ve found money in other areas of the federal budget to get them even more than the $5.7 billion that they want. Remember the original request was $20 billion, I mean, going back two years, $20 billion for the wall. So it’s gonna take winning. Trump’s gotta get reelected or all the rest of this is academic, folks.
And so if Trump has to get reelected in 2020 then you go, “Okay, what does he have to do to get reelected?” And that opens up so many — not possibilities. That presents so many variables. There is a campaign to strategize. There is a campaign for and a campaign you run against whoever the Democrats nominate. You start collecting data on both of those right now. ‘Cause I guarantee you that’s all the Democrats are thinking.
The Democrats are thinking right now… I can tell you what they’re thinking. They think they are already guaranteed to win the White House, just like they were guaranteed to win it with Hillary. It’s an entitlement to them. They think everybody hates Trump like they do. They look at that 52% approval, and it’s Rasmussen, and they don’t believe it. They think it’s trumped up. They think it’s a biased poll by a bunch of conservatives. It isn’t, but that’s what they think.
They tell themselves the American people don’t like Trump just like they don’t like Trump. The bottom line for that is that means there is no assistance they’re gonna offer. They’re not gonna help Trump in one way accomplish any of his agenda which would then help his reelection effort. Despite that, they somehow moved off zero and came up with $1.375 billion, which is paltry and puny and irrelevant. But compared to zero, it’s movement.
But don’t expect any more. Don’t expect… I mean, they’re circling the wagons now. They’re so confident they’re gonna win, that every Democrat that wants to be president is running. And that’s something to take advantage of, this overconfidence, this arrogance, this refusal to admit reality. Let ’em keep writing Green New Deals. Let ’em keep proposing that we ban planes in 10 years and cow farting in 10 years. Now we got Cory Booker out there today saying he is serious: The government must control the amount of meat people eat.
Every time these people open their mouths and announce a policy, it is how they want to control everybody. It is an ongoing educational opportunity for people who are going to mount campaigns against them. The bolder they are and the more confident they are they’re gonna win, the more un-camouflaged they will be. And you have to look down the road. You have to look at 2020. You have to look at doing things now that facilitate winning the next election.
What if you were to be told that a sizable percentage of the American people really like compromise, they really like the parties getting along and coming to agreement on deals? And something like this spending bill, many people would see as a positive, even for Trump. Even though it’s not what you want. Even though it’s not what you think you were promised. But if it might help Trump gather even more voters for reelection in 2020, do you oppose that?
Do you think that’s not necessary? Is it all or nothing now? While all this is going on, don’t forget Trump is going to upgrade and modernize the wall — it’s not like he’s sitting there and not doing anything — and he’s talking about it. But there is opposition, the Democrat Party, and they control one of the houses of Congress. So they have to be dealt with. I mean, there’s no way that you can get the Democrat majority to lay down in significant numbers that Trump’s agenda just sail through.
It isn’t gonna happen.