RUSH: Trump’s got an impromptu gathering with the press going on right now. Our microphones are there. I think most of this is over and the primary news of it is over, but let’s JIP it anyway and find out what is being discussed.

THE PRESIDENT: — nobody even knows, although the halls of Congress know her very well. For years she’s walked around all over Congress. She came in, and she left supposedly GPS Fusion goes and meets for a short period of time with my son and some other people. They talked about a subject as very well, you know, advertised and put out. Nothing. It was a nothing meeting. In fact, Jared left. He said, “Get me out of this meeting. It’s a waste of time.”

She then went back to GPS Fusion. They were the ones that wrote the phony dossier. Why was she going to GPS Fusion, why did she go back? Then I heard that Don for a year made three phone calls with an unmarked number. They called it unmarked. And this was a tremendous event because they all knew the fake news. They all — you were fair on that, John. But they all knew that these phone calls, these tremendous phone calls before the meeting and after the meeting — there were I believe three, right?

RUSH: Talking about the Trump Tower meeting with the Russian honeypot here.

THE PRESIDENT: So he reported about the meeting and then reported what happened at the meeting. Except after looking and spending a tremendous amount of time and money, they’re able to go back years and find out who made the calls. One was a local real estate developer. The other was a great person from NASCAR. Two of them and a friend of Don’s. This went on for a year and a half. John, you heard all about the phone calls to obviously the father where I knew — I never knew about the meeting. But the phone calls to the father turned out not to be the phone calls.

My son is a good person. My son testified for hours and hours. My son was totally exonerated by Mueller, who, frankly, does not like Donald Trump, me, this Donald Trump. And, frankly, for my son, after being exonerated, to now get a subpoena to go again and speak again after close to 20 hours of telling everybody that would listen about a nothing meeting? Yeah, I’m pretty surprised.

REPORTER: Should he fight that subpoena?

THE PRESIDENT: We’ll see what happens. I’m just very surprised, I really am by it.

REPORTER: What did Iran do to prompt you to send an aircraft carrier to the region?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, they were threatening.

REPORTER: (crosstalk interrupting the president)

THE PRESIDENT: And we have information — we have information that you don’t want to know about. They were very threatening and we just want to have — we have to have great security for this country and for a lot of other places.

REPORTER: Is there a risk of military confrontation, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: I guess you could say that always, right? Isn’t there? Always. I don’t want to say no. But hopefully that won’t happen. We have one of the most powerful ships in the world that’s loaded up, and we don’t want to have to do anything.

RUSH: This is an impromptu Trump press conference that we’re joining for a bit here, folks, just to fill you in.

THE PRESIDENT: John Kerry speaks to ‘em a lot. John Kerry tells them not to call. That’s a violation of the Logan Act. And, frankly, he should be prosecuted on that. But my people don’t want to do anything that’s — only the Democrats do that kind of stuff, you know? If it were the opposite way they’d prosecute him under the Logan Act. But John Kerry violated the Logan Act. He’s talking to Iran and has been, has many meetings and many phone calls, and he’s telling them what to do.

That is a total violation of the Logan Act because what they should be doing is their economy is a mess ever since I took away the Iran deal. They have inflation that’s the highest number I’ve ever heard. They’re having riots every weekend and during the week, even. And what they should be doing is calling me up, sitting down, we can make a deal, a fair deal. We just don’t want ’em to have nuclear weapons. Not too much to ask. And we would help put them back into great shape. They’re in bad shape right now.

I look forward to the day where we can actually help Iran. We’re not looking to hurt Iran. I want them to be strong and great and have a great economy, but they’re listening to John Kerry, who’s violated a very important element of what he’s supposed to be doing. He violated the Logan Act, plain and simply, shouldn’t be doing that.

But they should call, if they do, we’re open to talk to ’em. We have no secrets. And they can be very, very strong financially. They have great potential. Very much like North Korea. North Korea has tremendous potential economically. And I don’t think he’s gonna blow that. I don’t think so.

REPORTER: (crosstalk) Is it still possible to get a trade deal with the Chinese this week?

THE PRESIDENT: It’s possible — they’re all here. Look. The vice premier, one of the most respected men, one of the highest officials in China is coming. You know, you heard he wasn’t coming. He’s coming. I will say this. Once the tariffs went on they upped the meeting. It was supposed to take place originally on Thursday. Then about five weeks ago they said how about Friday, how about next week inspect? I said what’s this all about? And I said that’s okay, don’t worry about it. Let’s take in a hundred billion a year and we put the tariffs on, we made the statement, and then they upped the meeting. How about let’s go back to Thursday.

So I have no idea what’s gonna happen. I did get last night a very beautiful letter from president Xi, let’s work together, let’s see if we can get something done. But they renegotiated the deal. I mean, they took — whether it’s intellectual property theft, they took many, many parts of that deal, and they renegotiated. You can’t do that.

RUSH: The ChiComs are waiting on Biden to be president. That’s what this is all about.

THE PRESIDENT: I happen to think that tariffs for our —

RUSH: Not a mystery here.

THE PRESIDENT: — country are very powerful. You know, we’re the piggy bank that everybody steals from, including China. We’ve been paying China $500 billion a year for many, many years. China rebuilt their country because of us. They couldn’t have done what they’re doing. They’re building a ship every three weeks. They’re building aircraft like you’ve never seen, fighter jets. I respect it. I don’t blame them. I blame our past leadership for allowing this to happen. What I’m doing now with China should have had happened many years ago, not just Obama, long before Obama. I always say, you know, if you look, NAFTA is one of the worst deals ever made, trade deal. But the worst trade deal ever made is the WTO because China was flatlining for many, many decades, many, many — it was flat right here. The WTO came along, we allowed China into the WTO and they became a rocket ship.

RUSH: He’s right about this, folks.

THE PRESIDENT: You ought to take a look at a chart sometime. Do it, it will be very interesting. An economic chart. They’re here and it went up like a rocket ship. Well, they did it with our money, and others, and they did it because they’re very smart, and they’re good people, and I like the president a lot. He’s a friend of mine. But I’m representing the USA, and he’s representing China. And we’re not gonna be taken advantage of anymore. We’re not gonna pay China $500 billion a year. So we put very heavy tariffs —

RUSH: That’s the trade deficit he’s talking about. (crosstalk)

THE PRESIDENT: — and we put ’em on also eight months ago. And when people look at the economic numbers, they were shocked, when they looked at the import, export numbers, they were shocked. They said, “Wow. How did they get to this point?” This was very good, that was a very good report, they’ve never seen that for many years. I said, try looking at all of the tariffs that China’s been paying us for the last eight months. Billions and billions of dollars and that’s only because I gave them a break. Because we were negotiating — goodwill, we were negotiating, I gave them a break and I said let’s keep it at 10% instead of 25%.

So now what we’re doing is we’re raising it to 25% on Friday so it will be $250 billion at 25%, and it will be $325 billion at 25%, and we’re starting that paperwork today. So we’ll see. But, you know what? As president of our country, I had to do something about it, and as president of our great country, we’re gonna be taking in more money than we’ve ever taken in. And all of these countries, many of them are taking advantage of us, including our allies, they’ve taken advantage of us on trade, they’ve taken advantage of us on military, we defend all these countries for nothing or for a tiny fraction of what it costs.

We take care of NATO — I’m all for NATO. I’m all for NATO. And I think it’s just wonderful. But it’s different than it was 25 years ago and 40 years ago. And I got NATO to put up an extra hundred billion dollars. Ask Secretary General Stoltenberg. He’s like Donald Trump’s biggest fan. Because spending was going down, the contributions that the 28 countries were making, it was heading like a slope down, like a very steep mountain. And then I came and it went up, like China, went up like a rocket ship, okay?

But I don’t like seeing people take advantage. We pay for anywhere from 70 to a hundred percent of NATO. So we protect NATO, we protect European countries, and we protect them, and protect them beautifully. We’re the power. We’re the most powerful nation, especially since we’ve redone our military, redoing and done all of the nuclear — never want to use it, but you have to have it. But we’ve spent — and I thank Congress for this — $700 billion and then 717, 16 billion dollars on our military.

Our military when I came to office was totally depleted. We now have by far the strongest military in the world. But we defend countries. When you look at our budget — so we’re at $716 billion, and Russia’s at $68 billion. How do you figure that? Because Russia doesn’t go around defending every country in the world and not getting paid for it. And you know what? I don’t mind not getting paid. If there’s a country that’s been horribly treated and lots of bad things are happening and they’re not a rich country. But when we defend the richest countries in the world and they don’t pay us for what we do, and, frankly, they go back into closed meetings and they laugh at the stupidity of the United States for doing it.

These are countries with nothing but cash. They could very easily — I told the story last night — I picked up $500 million with one phone call to a country. And that’s just the beginning. And I’ve done it with many other countries anyway, but just over the last very short period of time. One phone call that lasted for a period of I would say five minutes, I picked up $500 million because I said, “You’re not taking care of us. We’re taking care of you, but you’re not taking care — it’s not fair.”

So really the word is not fair. NATO doesn’t treat us fairly, at all. But now they’re starting to pay. And if you look at Mr. Stoltenberg, he will tell you he’s never seen anything like it, a hundred billion dollars — and that’s a low number — they’re paying a hundred billion dollars more. But how do you feel about this? Germany. They’re supposed to be paying 2%. Germany is paying 1%. They say 1.3 but call it 1% because it really is closer to 1%. Germany pays to Russia billions of dollars a month for the pipeline. And yet we’re supposed to be defending Germany from Russia.

So Germany is giving the so-called enemy — I don’t call it an enemy. I want to get along with Russia and I want to get along with China because I’m smart. Stupid people don’t want to get along. Because I’m smart. This witch hunt hurt us in our relationships with a lot of countries. It was a very expensive, horrible thing for our country. And, by the way, it should never, ever happen again to a president. Two years I’ve been going through this nonsense and now we have a good report and now guys like Jerry Nadler, who I fought for many years — successfully, I might add — back in New York in Manhattan — he was a Manhattan congressman — I beat him all the time. And I come to Washington, and now I have to beat him again, over nothing, over nothing, over a hoax.

And they know it’s a hoax. They’re smart. Nadler is a smart guy. Schiff is a smart guy. When Schiff goes to the microphone, he’s conning this whole country. And he knows that. And he goes back into a room and he talks to his friends and he laughs because that’s the way life is. But our country is doing great. We’re gonna find out about China tonight. And I think in the end you’re gonna be very impressed with the kind of things we’re doing. And the reason they were so surprised with the numbers two, three weeks ago — not the 3.2 GDP which everybody was surprised at, but maybe more importantly, export numbers, import numbers, because we have billions of dollars coming to our country that our country never would have seen with a regular president. This should have been done many years ago, and I told President Xi of China —

RUSH: Regular president. I like that.

THE PRESIDENT: — and I tell Abe, who is a good friend of mine, prime minister of Japan, doing a great job, I tell him, I tell everybody, I say, “I don’t blame you. I blame the people that ran the United States and I blame their trade representatives and frankly I blame our presidents because this should have never happened. We’ve been losing for years close to $800 billion. Not million, $800 million is a lot. But we’ve been losing $800 billion on trade.

RUSH: He needs to tell people why.

THE PRESIDENT: $800 billion. We’re gonna stop that. And we’ve already started.

RUSH: Why were these previous presidents doing this? He needs to tell people why. I will tell you in a minute. But he needs to tell them.

THE PRESIDENT: Thank you all very much.

RUSH: All right, so there you have it. The president, impromptu press gathering there. And I’ll tell you, the overall impression, despite all of this chaos that is whirling around him, he’s demonstrating here that he’s being president, that he’s focusing on things that matter to the American people and to the country, doing his job. He doesn’t appear in any way out of sorts about any of this, more saddened by it and perplexed by it. It’s over, and yet they keep going. Son’s a good person.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So the president was originally scheduled — it was actually a spontaneous little press conference to discuss drug pricing. And when it was over, when he had finished discussing that, he moved right into discussing the subpoena of his son by the Senate Intelligence Committee, Chairman Richard Burr, Republican, North Carolina.

And, you know, the interesting thing, Donald Trump Jr. has testified before the committee, a bunch of different committees in Congress over 27 hours total about a 25-minute meeting. And what Trump was explaining about this meeting was that it was a hoax, it was all part of the hoax that is this entire investigation. He kept referring to Fusion GPS and the woman.

Now, the woman in this case is the Russian honeypot, the Russian honey trap. Her name is Veselnitskaya. The meeting was originally pitched by some people calling the Trump campaign and saying, “Hey, we got some dirt on Hillary Clinton. Are you interested?” And supposedly Donald Trump Jr. said, “Hell, yeah, we’d love to hear this, whatever you got.”

The meeting happens, and it turns out that the whole thing was a setup by Glenn Simpson at Fusion GPS. Fusion GPS is the company that the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton actually paid to have the dossier by Christopher Steele written. Now, the original payment for that that was like $150,000. A total of $10 million was transacted to cover the cost of the dossier. Fusion GPS, Glenn Simpson, a former writer, former journalist from the Wall Street Journal had set up this private company that became consultancy and advocacy. And it was responsible for this Trump Tower meeting.

Veselnitskaya, the Russian honeypot, had a phone call with Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS before the Trump Tower meeting, and immediately after the Trump Tower meeting she called him to report what had happened. This is what Trump was telling the assembled media there as a means of illustrating what a setup it was. This was the meeting where there wasn’t any dirt on Hillary Clinton ultimately presented because there never was any. The Russians never had any.

This was a meeting actually about something called the Magnitsky Act which deals with adoptions and Russians. It’s really esoteric. But the point is, it was a setup. It was designed to be able to use by investigators to show that the Trump campaign was indeed digging up dirt and trying to get dirt on Hillary Clinton from the Russians!

But it is known how the meeting happened. It is known who the people were that brokered it and set it up. It is known that the Trump campaign had nothing to do with setting it up, nothing to do with originating it, all they did was answer a phone call, and it was a trap. It was every bit the kind of trap that they tried to spring on George Papadopoulos.

There never was any collusion between Trump and Russia. They tried to create it. They tried to get people hired in the Trump campaign who would then have called contacts they knew in Russia and create it that way, Stefan Halper. You know all this backwards and forwards.

Trump brought this all up today to express how surprised he was that his son would be subpoenaed. The report’s out; there’s no collusion; there’s no obstruction; and he doesn’t understand what’s going on. What more could his son have to tell them? His son’s a good guy, his son’s a good person, he’s testified for 20 hours about a 25-minute meeting.

Through it all Trump remained calm and unruffled. And I guarantee you that this rattled the Drive-By Media and the Democrats. What they want to see is Trump unraveling. They want to see Trump going bonkers. They want to see Trump losing his mind. They want to see Trump betraying anger, showing all kinds of emotion. And he didn’t. He was as calm and collected, and it was obvious to anybody watching that he is doing his job. And he was answering these questions, doesn’t appear like he was affected by any of it.

When it comes to Mueller testifying before Congress about his report, Trump said, “I’ll leave that up to the attorney general. If the attorney general says it’s okay, if the attorney general has no problem with Mueller testifying, I certainly don’t.” As far as Trump was concerned, he doesn’t have a care in the world.

And he’s kind of curious about why his son would even be called up to testify. A little sad by it, doesn’t quite understand it, but there was no anger, there was no outrage, there wasn’t any criticism, there wasn’t any caustic attacks on anybody, just perplexation. “Don’t really understand. My son’s told ’em everything; he’s a good person; I can’t possibly understand what more they could do. The report’s out, it was actually well done.”

As the press conference went on, the president talked about the trade deals with the ChiComs, and he was sounding themes that were prominent during the Republican primary in 2016 and then during his presidential campaign. And he has never backed off the notion that we have been treated unfairly, we’ve been mistreated by supposed allies in the area of trade.

When he says that Chinese owe us $500 billion or this or that, he’s talking about the trade deficit that we have with China and how unfair it is. And he made the point that this latest round of tariff increases is because the Chinese still won’t get serious and until they get serious and until they come here and seriously talk about this, I’m not gonna relax any of this.

And the Chinese tried to go outside of the parameters of the meeting this week. Trump tweeted properly that they just want to make it appear like they think Trump is history. They’ll sit around and wait for Biden or the next Democrat and Trump, by making that public, blew their operation in a sense, and they are coming back to the table, and they’re sending their number one negotiator to Washington to talk about this.

I think the ChiComs test every president. They test everybody to find out if they say what they mean, mean what they say. I think they’ve decided that Trump means what he says. If he’s gonna attach these gigantic tariffs, he’s gonna do it. And it will not be beneficial to them. It will be very harmful. So I think they realize they’re dealing with a different breed even though it may have taken two years or so for this to take hold.

So these trade talks are going to continue. This is gonna have a positive impact on the stock market, by the way. This was all good today, including the president reminding everybody about how unfairly we are treated by our allies. Oh. I promised to explain this to you. He’s dead right when he says that we have a $500 billion trade deficit with the Chinese. We’re shouldering much more of the defense burden for our allies, NATO and so forth.