RUSH: I want to go back to the tax story here. I want to play two montages to show you that the Democrats now and the media have actually begun to recycle things that they tried before that didn’t work.
This massive story in the New York Times: Trump didn’t pay any taxes after losing $1.7 billion, worst businessman in the history of America, lost more money than anybody has ever lost, Trump sucks, Trump’s this. They tried this in October of 2016. They got three pages of Trump’s 1995 tax returns. Remember Rachel Maddow promoting all day long that they had Trump’s tax returns from 1995, remember everyone going nuts.
And then her show happened, and she only had three pages with nothing significant, and everybody was livid because she had built everybody up to believe they were gonna run Trump out of the campaign that night. They were gonna prove Trump was in bed with the Russians, it was gonna happen right there on MSNBC, and all she had was three pages. It’s all they ever had.
And there was a montage of the media reporting all this that we put together. And it’s the same thing that’s happened now with this version of the tax story. So let’s go back, October 2nd and 3rd, 2016. This is the montage that we put together when they tried to take Trump out of the campaign with this tax story at that time.
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Here’s a guy who’s running on being a brilliant businessman who took a loss of almost a billion dollars in one year. A guy whose selling point is: “I’m going to run the government the way I run my business.”
JOHN HEILEMANN: He lost nearly a billion dollars.
CHARLIE ROSE: What kind of bad business decisions cause you to lose $916 million?
JOHN HEILEMANN: He’s not really a great businessman at all. Look at all the money he lost.
JULIE PACE: Someone who is running on his business record, but suffered a billion-dollar loss.
JONATHAN KARL: A business failure, $900-plus million loss.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: Three casinos went bankrupt in 1995, his airline went away.
CHRIS CUOMO: Plaza Hotel.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: The Plaza Hotel. How is this genius business acumen?
RUSH: You want the names here? Savannah Guthrie, John Heilemann, Charlie Rose, Julie Pace, Jon Karl, and Alisyn Camerota and Fredo Cuomo. Now, this illustrates a point that I made. There’s not a single journalist, and maybe not even an elected Democrat, who understands capitalism, respects capitalism enough, is educated, is informed enough to have any idea how to analyze Trump’s business organization, Trump’s tax returns.
They see Trump reporting a $916 million loss. “Oh, what an idiot. Oh, my God. How can anybody be said to be running a great business? Look at this guy –” He doesn’t pay any taxes on it, gang. “Oh, that’s even worse. That means he’s not doing his public duty.” These people are so uninformed and uneducated. Yet they sit in a position of condescending arrogance.
There’s not a one of them that could do one smidgen of what Donald Trump has done in his life, and yet they sit there on their supposed perch of loftiness above everybody, casting judgment, casting aspersions when they wouldn’t have the slightest idea. You put them in the CEO chair of the Trump Organization tomorrow and tell them to keep running it, they would be clueless.
But just remember, let me remind you, Savannah Guthrie, “Here’s a guy running on being a brilliant businessman, took a loss of almost a billion dollars, the guy’s selling point is: ‘I’m gonna run the government the way I run my business.’” John Heilemann: “He lost nearly a billion dollars.” Charlie Rose: “What kind of bad business –” remember that? Here is the montage we put together last night and this morning. And listen to how almost identical it is.
LLOYD DOGGETT: He’s a loser and not just any loser, he’s the biggest loser.
RICHARD BLUMENTHAL: The biggest loser is certainly a contrast to his boasts.
DAVID AXELROD: He was the biggest loser among all taxpayers in the country.
ANDERSON COOPER: He was actually the biggest loser.
ERIN BURNETT: So, he’s literally the biggest loser.
DAVE BRIGGS: The former Apprentice host, the biggest loser.
JOE SCARBOROUGH: Biggest loser.
MIKA BRZEZINSKI: Yeah. No one has lost as much money, right?
RACHEL MADDOW: Losing $100 million-plus on average a year for ten straight years is a remarkable feat.
CHRIS HAYES: He lost twice as much money as any other person in the United States.
KRISTEN WELKER: Lost more money than nearly any other individual American taxpayer.
JOHN BERMAN: The president lost more money than almost anyone else in America.
LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: How do you lose all that money? Like, how do you lose it?
ILYA MARRITZ: I can’t fathom how you could lose that much money in a year.
DON LEMON: Casinos losing money? The house always wins? Well, (laughing) not always. Not if it’s a Trump casino.
RUSH: All right. That’s just last night and yesterday. Actually, last night and this morning. Play number 14 again, so you can have quick memory. This is what happened, the same story came out in 2016. Listen to cut 14 again.
SAVANNAH GUTHRIE: Here’s a guy who’s running on being a brilliant businessman who took a loss of almost a billion dollars in one year. A guy whose selling point is: “I’m going to run the government the way I run my business.”
JOHN HEILEMANN: He lost nearly a billion dollars.
CHARLIE ROSE: What kind of bad business decisions cause you to lose $916 million?
JOHN HEILEMANN: He’s not really a great businessman at all. Look at all the money he lost.
JULIE PACE: Someone who is running on his business record, but suffered a billion-dollar loss.
JONATHAN KARL: A business failure, $900-plus million loss.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: Three casinos went bankrupt in 1995, his airline went away.
CHRIS CUOMO: Plaza Hotel.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: The Plaza Hotel. How is this genius business acumen?
RUSH: They’re recycling it now, folks. This is old news. It’s old news. Nobody cared about it in 2016. This did not run Trump out of the campaign. It was after the NBC Access Hollywood video, by the way. It’s after all the other October Surprises. This was gonna be it. “Trump didn’t pay his taxes! Trump lost big! Trump’s incompetent.” It even came up in a debate. Here’s the same story recycled. They didn’t care about it then. They’re not gonna care about it now.
Let’s go back to this program. This is me, October 3rd, 2016…
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RUSH: Back in 1995 the New York Times called Donald Trump “the Comeback King,” and it’s one of the reasons why he wrote The Art of the Comeback. I’m not making it up. The New York Times, which has broken the law to publish three pages of his 1995 tax return, back in ’95 called Trump “the Comeback Kid.” … I remember all of that. Do you know one of the ways in which Trump was claimed to be a genius back then? It’s not just the way he negotiated with the banks. Trump had — I don’t even know quite what the terminology is here, so forgive me if I state this in less than precise terms.
But what Trump had done was arrange his loans from banks so that if they foreclosed on him, they would go down, too. Trump was the original too big to fail, in other words. And if they called his loans or if they foreclosed and took everything he had, which was then worthless because of the bubble and the financial real estate crisis, the banks would have gone with him. And so that actually led to the banks and another round of debt or underwriting, and Trump came back. So he was the original too big to fail.
Now, that phrase holds negative connotations today in terms of bailout of banks. Trump was not bailed out the by the government. Trump wasn’t bailed out like banks in 2008 were. Trump had arranged his finances with the banks so they couldn’t close him out without closing themselves down. There was a lot of criticism of Trump for that back then. I remember a lot of people were seething. They were jealous that he had been able to pull that off and tie his fortunes so exclusively to the people who had lent him money.
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RUSH: Now, he had borrowed a lot, and he borrowed a lot on the strength of his good name, and he borrowed a lot on his personality and the fact that he was building and presiding over an ever-growing real estate empire. So it didn’t take any chicanery for the banks to lend him a lot of money. They thought it was a wise business decision — and then here came the real estate crash and some things happened in ’95, and they were so extended to Trump, they couldn’t foreclose on him. Now, back then, too-big-to-fail was a huge compliment, and the New York Times wrote that big story praising Trump’s business acumen.
The same bunch — well, it’s a totally different bunch of people now. But it’s the same paper today writing, “What a buffoon he is, what an idiot, what a cheapskate, what an idiot business titan he was! He lost all that money, and he didn’t pay any taxes.” Now they’re even recycling that. I would say, folks, they’ve run out of material if they’re having to recycle all of this. They can’t let go of the Mueller report. They can’t let go of Trump colluding with Russia, even though it has been shown conclusively it didn’t happen. This is the slow descent to insanity that all too many of us have seen in real life with friends and family.
We’re watching it happen now to a political party.