RUSH: So let’s see. Let’s put it all in context here. ISIS destroyed. Trump has recognized the Golan Heights as part of Israel. The Democrat Party is coming out against Israel and not going to the AIPAC. Trump signed an historic free speech executive order and promised to tackle student loan debt — and all the media can talk about is McCain!

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: Now, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking it’s Trump’s own fault. If he wouldn’t hit the dead guy so much, the media wouldn’t have a chance to distract. And there may be something to that.

But I remember we had Trump on this program during the campaign. He was down in Miami. He had to use two cell phones because his Android version wasn’t working well, and I asked him point-blank, “Why do you respond to every bit of this nattering nabob criticism?”

He said, “Because any time somebody hits me, I hit them back.” And what the Drive-Bys are conveniently forgetting is that Donald Trump is livid at the role John McCain had in spreading this fake, phony dossier that got this two years of hell going. He was at the very beginning of it, and it irritates Trump to no end.

He’s even said — I’m gonna have to paraphrase today — but he said something like, “We can never allow this to happen again, to essentially set up an unelected lawyer, special counsel to act as a fourth branch of government to sit there on a daily basis and examine the president and the executive branch and determine whether or not he’s fit.” And Trump came out and said it. He said, “You know, there aren’t very many people could put up with this.” And he’s right about this.

I guarantee you there isn’t a single person in the Democrat field seeking their party’s nomination that could put up with one day of the traitorous allegations and the rest of it that Trump has put up with here for two years. They wouldn’t tolerate it. They wouldn’t know how. Their media never gives them anal exams. They haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like to be a Republican or conservative.

And when they get a taste of it, like Cortez — I’m sorry — Ocasio-Cortez, Ocasio-Cortez is complaining about her loss of privacy, after she appears on the cover of TIME magazine. She’s out there seeking notoriety. She’s out there seeking fame. Now she’s whining about the attention. She’s blaming Fox News for her plummeting opinion polls or her approval polls. These people cannot take it.

Anyway, Trump is right about this. I have been concerned that there has been a citywide, Washington-wide acceptance of the concept that we can appoint somebody that is not elected to anything, never has been, and have him sit there in some underground bunker with no windows and a concrete block, go out and hire a bunch of lawyers that hate the president and then sit there day in and day out throughout his presidential term passing judgment, doing investigations, trying to find evidence of criminality so that we can impeach him.

This is not the way this country was intended to be run, set up, to be able to appoint somebody that nobody can do anything about other than the president and fire him. That’s Mueller in this case.

So it’s arguable, did McCain that know the dossier was fake or not? It may well be. I’m gonna give McCain the benefit of the doubt. I’m gonna suggest it might be possible that Senator McCain had that dossier and believed it. A lot of other people did. Now, you and I, when I first saw this thing, I said, “Are you kidding me?” All I needed to see was the golden showers story. “Are you kidding me? Hiring prostitutes to urinate on a bed?” And then it all went downhill from there.

Now, some of these people obviously believe it. This is the strange thing, folks. At the beginning of this, the early stages, there were a lot of people who believed it. That is a problem in and of itself. But there has been even more news produced on all of this today, if you can believe it, and it involves how more deeply corrupt the FBI was in this investigation than we have even been led to believe. And I’ll have the details of that coming up in mere moments.

The fact remains that Trump is doing a gang-up job on many areas of his presidency. We’re still being overrun — by the way, the media is now — it’s amazing — the AP and Reuters, because there’s some Democrats now saying so, are admitting that there’s a crisis at the border. The media has for the past six months, the past month, have been insisting there’s no crisis at the border, there’s nothing unusual going on there, Trump’s nuts, Trump’s crazy. Now they’re all of a sudden admitting, everybody’s admitting there is a crisis at the border. That’s the one area, that’s the one area in Trump’s agenda — and it’s a big agenda item that people are still waiting for some decisive action on.

Anyway, so McCain gets the dossier. We’re gonna give him the benefit of the doubt that he might have been alarmed, he might have believed it. And then he spearheaded — he wasn’t the only one — he spearheaded an effort to get that dossier into as many hands and eyeballs as he could inside the Washington Beltway.

And Trump is livid about it. Trump is understandably angry about this. And then after it became obvious that none of the dossier was true, people still continued to act as though every word of it was true.

I mean, you put yourself in Donald Trump’s position and have this kind of thing happen to you, when none of it is true, but you have the entire United States administrative state aligned against you running a fake, fraudulent, phony investigation designed to kick you out of office after you have legitimately won the presidency, he’s right when he says there aren’t very many people that could put up with this, and we need to take steps to make sure this never happens again.

Now, the reason this has become front-page news today is because it’s another Friday, and so Washington is abuzz with the idea, the possibility that the Mueller report will be released today. We have yet another of the conspirators in this whole thing, James Clapper, the former Director of National Intelligence for Barack Hussein O, The One, on CNN said, “Well, you know, I don’t really think that there’s gonna be much jeopardy from the Mueller report. I really think,” Clapper said, “that Trump’s biggest jeopardy will be before the Southern District of New York.”

So here is yet another of the conspirators laying it out there that the Mueller report isn’t gonna have anything in it that’s gonna satisfy anybody. And if it doesn’t, the sale of anti-depressants inside Washington this weekend or whenever this report comes out will probably set records.

People are still talking about how we need to keep investigating the Russian collusion, dossier 2.0, despite all of these other things that are being accomplished that are monumental, many of them problems created by and bequeathed to us by Barack Obama.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Thousand Oaks, California — a place that I have visited frequently — and Rachel. It’s great to have you. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush! It’s so great to speak to you again. How are you?

RUSH: I’m super duper. Thank you very much for calling.

CHILD: Hi, Daddy!

CALLER: My 2-year-old thinks I’m on the phone with her dad. Anyway, I was calling to say that these latest episodes with the dossier —

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait just a second.

CALLER: Yeah?

RUSH: Now, let’s not leave any confusion here. I am no one’s daddy.

CALLER: Oh, I know that.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: But every time I get on the phone, my 2-year-old —

RUSH: You never know with Media Matters out there.

CALLER: (laughing)

RUSH: We have to take extreme caution.

CALLER: I didn’t mean to —

RUSH: That’s all right. It’s not your fault. It’s where we are in the country today. Anyway, please start again. “Hi, Daddy.” (laughing)

CALLER: (laughing) These episodes with the dossier and the national emergency declaration vote in the Senate, I think are demonstrating for me that we kind of dodged some bullets with not having McCain and Romney as our presidents, because they think that they’re more interested in their reputations and their establishment bona fides and their good names, and they’re more interested in getting revenges against people who beat them being able to become president than they are in the interests of their own constituents.

RUSH: Now, wait, wait, wait. I have to focus you here because this is fascinating.

CALLER: Mmm-hmm?

RUSH: What you’re saying is you’re seeing the bullets we dodged because McCain and Romney lost.

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: What is it that you’ve seen now that make you glad those two guys lost their race for the presidency?

CALLER: Because conservatism can’t afford to fail in the same ways that liberalism can. I’m no fan of Obama’s policies, and I’m glad that we’re seeing so much of it getting — you know, that Trump is doing so much to undo those damages. But I think that McCain and Romney are more interested in working across the aisle, kind of the same ways that Arnold Schwarzenegger was when he was the governor of California.

RUSH: Yes! Yes! I was waiting for the analogy, and there you just gave it to us. We have, in the election of Donald Trump, somebody that literally pushes back on everything the left does. He doesn’t give them a break. With McCain and Romney, we would have had attempted cooperation. We would have watered down what we believe in for the sake of “getting along” and “showing that Washington works” and that we can “cross the aisle,” and all of that garbage. Now because of Trump being elected and actually doing what you’ve thought Republican presidents would be doing every time you elected one, you realize, “Maybe it’s better those two guys didn’t win, because we would have been so far down, we would have had much more ground to recover than we had with Trump.”

CALLER: Right, and it would have all had this air of legitimacy because a Republican did it. Well, you know, like, when Roberts upheld Obamacare. The liberals said, “Well, John Roberts upheld it in the court.” You know, now, with Trump, we don’t have that. With McCain and Romney, we would have those kinds of instances. “Well, McCain and Romney were for this.”

RUSH: You know what?

CALLER: Hmm?

RUSH: I tell you something. Rachel, I’m not gonna be able to get to it in the next 10 minutes, but because of your call I’m gonna move it up in the Stack. I have a column today written by former lead speechwriter for George W. Bush, Michael Gerson, and to me, I do not know how a conservative man of the cloth who was a great speechwriter for Bush… I simply do not see life and the world the way he does, and he is a McCain or Romney. And this piece, it’s nothing new for him. He’s always been a Never Trumper, and he’s always thought that Trump is destroying our nation’s morality and that that’s why we’ve gotta get rid of him. But wait ’til you hear some of the specifics here. It will make the point that you’re making here. So I’ll move it up in the Stack as we get to the next hour. I thank you for calling.

We move on to Kurt in Bowling Brook, Illinois. You’re next on Open Line Friday. Hi.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. It’s an honor. I’ll get to this quick. I’m wondering how the McCain family would react if the shoe was on the other foot, that Trump had run out when McCain was running for president up in London, got some fake dossier on him because he didn’t like him and didn’t want him to be president. They just seem very… They don’t seem to get why he’s mad.

RUSH: This is an interesting scenario. Okay, let’s work at constructing this.

CALLER: All right.

RUSH: So we have McCain running for president — and in a reversal of fortunes, he wins.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Now, Trump was not running. We gotta be consistent in the scenario.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Trump was not running. He’s just ruling the world from Trump Tower. All right?

CALLER: Mmm-hmm.

RUSH: He’s got his own reality show going and so forth, and he doesn’t like McCain, and he’s mad McCain got elected. So he hears about this dossier that Hillary Clinton put together, claiming that McCain hired prostitutes to urinate on a bed in Moscow because he didn’t like that Obama slept on it. So Trump hears about this and dispatches Hope Hicks to the U.K. to pick up the dossier, gets it in his hands, and starts passing it around all over Washington, D.C., and the New York media. And there it is at Page Six and the New York Times: “John McCain paid prostitutes to urinate on a bed in Moscow!” That’s your scenario; right?

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: Now you’re wondering how would the McCains have reacted had Trump done that?

CALLER: Right. Exactly. They’d be out of their minds. They don’t seem to get why he’s mad.

RUSH: Well, in their world… I say, “their world.” In the Washington establishment world, their reputations are sacrosanct and golden. But they look at Trump as a guy doesn’t even care about his reputation, otherwise he wouldn’t be the reprobate that he is.

CALLER: Right. Right.

RUSH: So, yeah, this would be very, very devastating — and then let’s just add this to it. The media believed it because McCain’s a Republican. That’s unacceptable. So the media believes it. W We’ve e got a special counsel. We’ve got a special counsel investigating whether or not John McCain, American patriot, actually colluded with the Russians to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. How would the McCain family have reacted to that?

CALLER: Correct, and we both know they’d be out-of-their-minds crazy mad right now if that was true. But they don’t get why Trump’s mad.

RUSH: No. Nobody does! Everybody’s ignoring… You know, even Maria Bartiromo interviewing Trump today (impression), “Why are you being so mean to John McCain? Why are you being mean?” “Uh, look, the guy tried to destroy my presidency. He was at the lead of this effort with the dossier.” But if it wasn’t true, why…?” Everybody’s overlooking that aspect of the Trump McCain feud. But your story, your angle on this is quite interesting. I’m glad you called, allowing me to frame it as I did for the audience, once again showing the value of the host.