RUSH: I just want to go back. What the president did is he signed the deal and then declared a national emergency. I predicted last Wednesday, a couple days ago, that this today is what would happen…

RUSH ARCHIVE: El Trumpo is gonna sign this bill whenever it’s presented to him, and he’s gonna declare a national emergency. The $1.375 billion will take us through the end of this fiscal year, through the end of September. It will be used to complete current under-construction projects. Declare a national emergency, go use this other $23 billion. The Democrats will go to court, shut it down, bring it to a screeching halt.

They will claim Trump doesn’t have the constitutional authority, that this is not a national emergency like a hurricane would be or an earthquake or some such thing. He’ll declare the national emergency and let it wind its way through the courts through the balance of this year, probably find its way through by the end of the fiscal year and, bammo, then get a favorable ruling on it, which he will ultimately at the Supreme Court if it goes that far. And, bammo, here comes the other $23 billion and then the next two years Trump is building the wall in the run-up to the 2020 presidential campaign. That, my friends, is what I see.

RUSH: It was based on reading a couple news stories and having an understanding that there probably wasn’t gonna be a shutdown because there’s no leverage for the president in doing that. Now, also, I made mention earlier that this legislation is actually more a political weapon aimed at Trump. It’s designed to make you conclude that supporting Trump is a waste of time ’cause he’s never gonna be able to get anything done because Washington doesn’t want to work with him. I’m gonna give you some evidence of this by the details of what’s in this bill in the next half hour.

Now, one more bite. Kelly O’Donnell of NBC, the White House correspondent, actually stood up and said (impression), “Mr. President, can you tell us to what degree some of the outside conservative voices helped to shape your views on the national emergency?” Now, his answer… He started off with Hannity, and he said (summarized), “Look, Hannity’s a friend of mine for 20 years. I love Sean Hannity, he’s a good friend, but let me tell you something.

“If I weren’t holding the positions I hold, Hannity wouldn’t be supporting me. He’s not supporting me. He’s supporting my issues,” and that’s true! These people have got it in their heads — and it’s all part of the effort to make you think that Trump is so underqualified, has no business doing this, it’s all part of this ongoing coup that is being waged on many fronts. And, of course, they mention my name in the question with all these other conservative commentators. And when it came time to mention me, this is what he said…

THE PRESIDENT: Rush Limbaugh, I think he’s a great guy. Here’s a guy who can speak for three hours without a phone call. Try doing that sometime. For three hours he speaks! He’s got one of the biggest audiences in the history of the world. I mean, this guy is unbelievable. Try speaking for three hours without taking calls. Taking calls is easy. “Okay, I’ll answer this one, I’ll answer that one.” He goes for three hours, and he’s got an audience that’s fantastic.

O’DONNELL: (unintelligible) Do they decide policy?

THE PRESIDENT: They don’t decide policy.

RUSH: “They don’t decide policy.” I have been pointing this out ever since this whole narrative began that Trump was ready to sign the CR (back in, I guess, December) until I raised hell here on the radio. Somebody ran in (pleading), “Don’t do it, Mr. President! Limbaugh! You’re losing Limbaugh!” It didn’t happen. But since December 19th, the media has been running with that — and it’s bogus. They know it’s bogus. If they really thought… I’m just gonna tell you one more time.

If they really thought that I and others were responsible for what Trump’s doing, they would be chasing us down. They’d be calling us. They’d be wanting interviews. They’d be doing profiles. They know this is bogus! They’re carrying forth a fake, phony narrative, and they know full well it isn’t true. I was stunned that she actually asked the question today. But she did, and Trump… He mentioned Laura Ingraham. He mentioned he hasn’t spoken to Ann Coulter in a year; he doesn’t know what her problem is.

He went on and on, and ended up saying, “They don’t decide policy.” To have to tell these people that — and actually, he was telling the audience that and the American people that. But there’s so much fake. There’s so much that just isn’t true that they know isn’t true that they are continuing to report, and it’s all under this gigantic umbrella objective still of overturning the election results from 2016. They’re trying as hard as they can to get Trump’s numbers down. If they could get ’em down to 30, that’s when you’d see ’em celebrating, doing cartwheels and all of that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ve got a bunch of them from the press conference today, which to me illustrate Trump’s effectiveness here and demonstrates yet again why they just revile him. There are members of Congress running around today saying the only national emergency is the Trump presidency. They… (sigh) Their hatred for him has not evaporated or it hasn’t even abated. They hate him more and more as he survives every day, and it’s gonna continue, and it’s… I don’t know, folks. It’s kind of fascinating to watch as these people literally lose control of themselves.

It’s just Trump — the very fact that he’s alive — offends their sensibilities, and then that he ran for the presidency and got elected as an outsider, having never done what they do! It has just discombobulated people from both parties. I want to start, however, by replaying perhaps the most important part of the president’s press conference today. Kelly O’Donnell stood up from NBC News and said, “Mr. President, could you tell us to what degree some of the outside conservative voices helped to shape your views on the national emergency?”

THE PRESIDENT: Rush Limbaugh, I think he’s a great guy. Here’s a guy who can speak for three hours without a phone call. Try doing that sometime. For three hours he speaks! He’s got one of the biggest audiences in the history of the world. I mean, this guy is unbelievable. Try speaking for three hours without taking calls. Taking calls is easy. “Okay, I’ll answer this one, I’ll answer that one.” He goes for three hours, and he’s got an audience that’s fantastic.

O’DONNELL: (unintelligible) Do they decide policy?

THE PRESIDENT: They don’t decide policy.

RUSH: “They don’t decide policy.” I just saw a segment on CNN. Little Brian Stelter, their media analyst, doing an entire segment on how Trump says that Limbaugh and Coulter don’t decide policy. I didn’t have a chance to listen to it. It was on while I was hosting the program. But he started out talking about Hannity, and he said (summarized), “Look, Hannity… I’ve known Hannity for 20 years. He’s a good friend of mine. But Hannity supports what I’m doing.

“He supports my issues. If I changed my opinion on things and they didn’t, Sean is not supporting me. He’s supporting what I believe,” and he went on to tout Laura Ingraham a bit, and also reacting to Ann Coulter. (pause) I just got a couple messages I got to look at here. (pause) Okay, I’ll get to sound bite 24 here in just a minute. If I keep interrupting where I’m going, I’ll never get to what I want to do. Up next is Trump actually declaring the national emergency.

THE PRESIDENT: We’re going to be signing today — and registering — national emergency. And it’s a great thing to do, ’cause we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people. And it’s unacceptable. And by signing the national emergency, something signed many times by other presidents — many, many times. President Obama… In fact, we may be using one of the national emergencies that he signed having to do with cartels, criminal cartels. It’s a very good emergency that he signed and we’re gonna use parts of it in our dealings on cartels.

RUSH: Man, is that gonna tick ’em off! Citing Obama and using one of Obama’s own declarations of national emergency will really get to them. Because Obama, in their world, never did this — or, if he did, it really, really mattered. Now for Trump to be piggybacking on Obama! He didn’t have any business even being in the same IQ with Obama. He doesn’t have any business being in the same room. He doesn’t have any business being in the same country as Obama, these people believe. Grab sound bite 24. It’s Brian Stelter. He was talking about Trump’s conservative media support on CNN. I haven’t… I just read the transcript. I haven’t actually heard this. So we will listen to it, analyze it together.

STELTER: A lot of the president’s other, uh, allies or right-wing voices — uh, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, et cetera — are very much in his corner, continuing to support him throughout this. Rush Limbaugh’s been on the radio the past few minutes saying that all of this, the Democrats, Republicans, the compromise, the spending deal… All of it is designed to get Trump supporters demoralized, to believe he can never accomplish anything. So when in doubt, they always come back to President Trump.

RUSH: When did we ever leave? What do you mean, “So when in doubt, they always come back to President Trump?” Did you guys ever abandon Obama? You know, it’s such a one-way street with these guys. They have no idea how they are perceived to be in the tank for the Democrat Party, and in the tank in opposition (and in some cases hatred) for Donald Trump. Yet anybody else in the media who might support the policies of Trump and his presidency, somehow that needs to be called out. Somehow there needs to be a degree or air of suspicion about that.

So what if I’ve been “on the radio the past few minutes saying that all of this, the Democrats, Republicans, the compromise, the spending deal… All of it is designed to get Trump supporters demoralized, to believe he can never accomplish anything”? You know why he mentioned that? Of all of the things I said, why did he mention that? Why did he catch that? (interruption) No, not so we would play it. Because it’s accurate! It’s because it’s right! Wow. ‘Cause he was talking about not just me in this bite, but we didn’t give the bite where he’s talking about other people. This is just me. But he focused on that aspect of what I said, which is my primary point, because there’s no question that it’s true.

Here is… Trump had in the audience today some Angel Moms. These are women who have lost family members to criminals, illegal immigrants.

THE PRESIDENT: We have some of the greatest people I know. They’ve been with me from the beginning of my campaign — almost from the first week — the Angel Moms. Unfortunately, we have new Angel Moms. One incredible woman just showed me her daughter who we were talking about was killed in the year of ’18. I said, “I haven’t seen you before.” She said, “No, I’m new.” I said, “That’s too bad. It’s too bad. It’s so sad.” Stand up just for a second. Show how beautiful your girl was. Thank you. I have such respect for these people.

RUSH: Isn’t it amazing how that just gets shrugged off, an American citizen murdered in cold blood in a sanctuary city by an illegal immigrant. “Oh, we can’t be critical of the immigrant! Oh, we can’t!” I mean, no compassion whatsoever for the murdered American. You almost get the same thing here. These people say, “Well, Trump is just using them as props. He’s just exploiting them!” He’s trying to call attention to it, trying to call attention to it. The Drive-By Media’s doing everything it can to ignore a full 50% of this story and only report it from one side or one direction.

Trump says he’s gonna win in court because not having a border is itself an emergency.

THE PRESIDENT: The courts will determine that. I think that we will be very successful in court. I think it’s clear. And the people that say we create precedent? Well, what do you have, 56 or a lot of times? Well, that’s creating precedent. And many of those are far less important than having a border. You don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. You know, we fight… Before I got here, we fight all over the world to create borders for countries, but we don’t create a border for our own country.

RUSH: Well, that’s a good analogy. Grab sound bites 22 and 23. These next two bites are what I was talking about in the first hour. This is Trump’s natural ability, I think, to just relate to people and, you know, go off prompter and explain to people what’s actually going on, to go over the heads of the media. In the first bite, he’s telling everybody he knows what’s gonna happen, he knows what the Democrats are gonna do because it’s all happened before.

THE PRESIDENT: The order is signed and I’ll sign the final papers as soon as I get into the Oval Office. And we will have a national emergency. And we will then be sued. And they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it should be there. And we will possibly get a bad ruling. And then we’ll get another bad ruling. And then we’ll end up in the Supreme Court. And hopefully we’ll get a fair shake. And we’ll win at the Supreme Court, just like the ban. They sued us in the Ninth Circuit and we lost and then we lost in the appellate division, and then we went to the Supreme Court, and we won.

RUSH: Talking about the travel ban. So he’s basically mocking what the Democrats are gonna do, how they’ve always tried to stop him and how they end up winning after going through this motion. That, by the way, is gonna take about nine months. That will take us through the end of the fiscal year, which is September 30th. That’s where the spending of the $1.375 billion comes in on existing wall, adding 55 miles to existing wall, basically Rio Grande border.

In another bite, this is… The president here is talking about the fact that the Department of Homeland Security have been given something like $23 billion or $24 billion in this budget. There are provisos that say he cannot use any of it for the border. But it’s just the way he explains this to people watching on TV and the way it sounds.

THE PRESIDENT: In the bill, by the way, they didn’t even fight us on most of this stuff. Ports of entry? We have so much money, we don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with all the money they’re giving us! It’s crazy. The only place they don’t want to give us much money… One billion and 370 million sounds like a lot, but it’s not so much, although we’re putting it to much better use than it used to be.

RUSH: Let’s take a brief time-out.