RUSH: Beverly in Corpus Christi, Texas. Great to have you with us on the EIB Network. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. I’m a first-time caller, longtime conservative listener and the reason I’m calling, I’m asking you to communicate these views to Trump because I think he has your ear and he respects you. Millions of us Americans, we’ve lost so much money in our retirement plan due to this China trade deal, because I think the market priced on the idea there would be a win-win. We would get a really good trade deal and it would really make these tech things go up because everything’s tech.

You know, 5G and everything President Trump’s for. You know, we bought into that, we put a lot of money in our requirement, and I’ve worked, what, 40-something years of my life. So, to me, this is big. Right now it looks like he’s gonna burn dawn the barn if we get a good trade deal that we can live with and China can agree to because, you know, he’s burning down the barn, get rid of the rats, but we’re being burned down at the same time. (crosstalk)

RUSH: Well, what do you want me to tell the president?

CALLER: (silence)

RUSH: Hello, anybody there? Testing, one, two, three?

CALLER: I’m sorry. What did you say?

RUSH: What do you want me to tell the president?

CALLER: Well, just that we need a win-win trade deal out of this. And the way it’s going it seemed like every minute they keep saying, “Well, it will be another month, another month,” and it’s just dragged on so many months, I’m getting very worried that all the voters are saying, “I’m not voting for him. He’s ruining our economy and our retirement,” and that’s what they look at.

RUSH: Wait a minute. Now, Beverly, Trump’s approval numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, particularly on the economy. Now, there hasn’t been any polling data since this latest ChiCom trade stuff blew up. But there aren’t millions of voters who are afraid Trump is destroying their jobs and so forth. That’s just… Where are you getting that?

CALLER: Because I’m looking at Facebook, my church, the people I work with, all the other people —

RUSH: Facebook!

CALLER: — are all like people that say, “Well, we never vote in these surveys but now we would change our mind.” Before they were all pro-Trump —

RUSH: Let me ask you, do you think…? You voted for Trump. Am I correct in that presumption?

CALLER: Yes. I’m conservative my whole life.

RUSH: Okay. Well, that doesn’t mean anything. Trump was not —

CALLER: I voted for Trump.

RUSH: Okay. So do you…? What has made you think, all of a sudden, that Trump wants you to be harmed economically?

CALLER: I think maybe he either didn’t foresee how bad China would kick back on this for it to be dragged out so many months. And, I mean, I kind of thought if he just tactfully said a little bit he could have got a little bit and then we could have pushed for more but he pushed for a lot and I guess China is kind of like in a contest with him, and they don’t want to be (crosstalk).

RUSH: But that’s just it. He’s not pushing for a lot. He’s pushing to get even close to a level playing field. We’re not… He’s not pushing for a U.S. advantage. What he’s pushing for lessens the ChiCom advantage, and he is going at this in stages.

CALLER: That’s good to hear. I think what I’m concerned about, though, is if China feels they’re not gaining a win out of it they’re like, “Well, we’re not gonna go for that, if it’s not in our favor.” And (crosstalk)…

RUSH: Beverly, let me… Beverly, let me try to comfort you with one thing. The ChiComs have never been dealt with like this before by anybody in the United States. Look, I can’t say never, but I don’t think anybody has ever attacked the existing trade relationship with the ChiComs the way Trump is. They don’t have any experience with it. I’m not saying that they’re not competent negotiators; don’t misunderstand. I’m just saying they’re seeing something like so many around the world. They’re seeing an American president behave in ways that are very atypical and untypical.

But the ChiComs cannot maintain their growth and maintain their economic status without the United States market. Everybody talks about the ChiComs. “They’re getting so mad, they might sell Treasuries!” They can’t. They’re in the same position Trump put himself in with the banks. We are too big to fail. The ChiComs cannot afford to cause us to fail by yanking all of their Treasuries out and cashing them in. Just like the banks could not foreclose on Trump without destroying themselves. That’s how extended to Trump they were.

By the way, Trump wrote all about this in the opening to The Art of the Comeback. There’s none of it that’s a mystery. But, at any rate, the Chinese need this market. Look at the iPhones alone! Do you know how many people are employed in China assembling iPhones? It’s over a million. George W. Bush told me once — and he was talking to the former Chinese premier, Hu Jintao. He told me one day that he was in a conversation with Hu Jintao.

He says, “Hu, what is the biggest challenge you have when you get up every day?” and he said the Chinese premier told him that he had to create 25 million jobs a year, and he had to keep those jobs in the countryside, outside of the Chinese cities, which were overrun, were polluted. He had to keep those people out, and produce 25 million jobs a year just to keep people at peace.

Well, guess where Apple’s factories are? They’re out in the boondocks, and they employ over a million people, and their supply chain. The ChiComs cannot afford for Apple to pick up and move their manufacturing assembly process somewhere else. They’ll huff and puff about it all day. They’ll make it look like… That’s what negotiating is. But they can’t risk exposure to the U.S. market. No nation can.

There isn’t a nation on earth that can maintain its own economic position, whatever it is in the world, without access to the U.S. consumer. We were the world’s superpower. We are the world’s superpower economy. We’re the world’s superpower military. There isn’t a free nation on earth that can get along without access to you, meaning their products on the shelves or in the showrooms purchasable by you. The ChiComs are — and they’ve got same problems any country does.

They’ve gotta keep their population at peace. They can’t put ’em all in jail. They can’t put ’em all in reeducation camps. But, yeah, the negotiations are gonna be what they are, and the media is gonna be telling you every day, Beverly, that Trump has forsaken you, that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing and Trump doesn’t care. You’ve gotta fight through it ’cause one thing I can tell you for sure: He is not trying to make your life worse. It’s the exact opposite.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I was thinking about this call we got here from Beverly down in Corpus Christi, Texas. She’s very upset here about Trump, these protracted negotiations with the ChiComs doing great damage to her investments. The stock market’s down. She’s obviously got investments in a 401(k) and so forth. She’s very concerned about it and she thinks basically that Trump’s trying to do too much. He’s trying to do too much. Beverly and all the rest, Trump is not the problem. I’m gonna tell you what the problem is.

The ChiComs are emboldened to a certain extent because of all this gunk that the Democrats have been trying for the past three years. This phony investigation about phony collusion, and now the Democrats threatening to impeach Trump and they’ve been talking about getting rid of Trump for 2-1/2 years, overturning the election results. “The election was unfair. Trump is unjust. Trump should not be the president. He’s not legitimate.” Are you telling me the ChiComs don’t hear all of this? The Democrats…

Beverly, your problem right now and everybody else is should be exclusively with the Democrat Party and the FBI-DOJ the leadership of the Obama intelligence apparatus who are responsible for purposely trying to destroy the Trump agenda with all of this. This is where they’ve been successful. They did not prove collusion; there never was any. They haven’t done it, but they have paralyzed the Trump agenda. (Well, I don’t know “paralyzed.”) They’ve stalled it, slowed it down. And they have for three years now, 2-1/2 years been creating the impression that Trump’s not gonna be president very much longer.

So if you’re Xi Jinping and you’re the ChiCom leader you’re saying, “If these Democrats are telling me what’s right, why should I make a deal with this guy? He’s not gonna be there any time longer, much longer,” which is I think they know. Xi Jinping, the ChiComs know that Trump isn’t going anywhere. But he is fully able to take advantage of what he might think would be a weakened Trump position. He’s perfectly willing to take advantage of the circumstances our beloved Democrat Party have presented.

All of this talk about Trump’s illegitimate, Trump’s not gonna last, Trump should be impeached, 20 Democrat investigations after the Mueller report (which is bogus anyway) exonerates him and cleared him, even though they’re saying that it didn’t now. It explains why a lot of foreign powers may feel as though they are able to take an emboldened position in negotiations on anything with the United States. I want to just tell you, folks, there is no way to calculate the damage that the Democrat Party has done, either in negotiations with the ChiComs or with the course of illegal immigration.

The travel ban, trying to build the wall, anything — repealing and replacing Obamacare. Tthe damage that they have done, this never-ending harangue on impeachment, the effort to get rid of Trump, has to make hammering out a deal with the ChiComs harder. You want Trump to dial it back and not try to do as much, that would be caving to the Democrat pressure that they’re trying to bring, and he’s not going to do that. You gotta remember: The ChiComs are the ChiCOMS. They are still a communist nation, and they’re fully running reeducation camps.

Try being a Muslim in China. You know where you’ll end up? You’ll end up in reeducation camp. Do you know what a reeducation camp is? It’s where you go in and you have to have everything you believe erased from your mind and you have to become a total puppet of the ChiCom regime or at least convince them that you have become one, and then you might get out of the reeducation camp. The ChiComs cannot the compete with a free-market economy. They need the United States economy. They are not going to destroy it.

“But, Rush! But, Rush! I hear so many people say that China is the enemy.” Well, in a sense they are, because the Chi-Coms are communists. They want world domination. Did they destroy Hong Kong? When the Brits gave Hong Kong up, did the ChiComs destroy it? No. It’s still sitting there as it always was. But guess who owns it and runs it and collects everything from it? Beijing, the descendants of Mao Tse-tung (or Mao Zedong, depending on your preference).

They’re not gonna destroy the United States economy. They would love the United States to go communist. But see, you can’t have the U.S. economy and communism. It’s not compatible. Free market, free anything is not compatible with communism. The bottom line is nobody can compete with a free market, and we have been at a total disadvantage with the ChiComs. We have a closed mark. Ours is open. We’ve been welcoming whatever they make.

Whatever American consumers want, you’ve been able to buy it. You’ve had a chance at buying it. If you can afford it, you can buy it. Made in China? Doesn’t matter. That’s not the case with ChiCom citizens. They do not have access to American goods. They’ve got access to a very tiny amount, and the tariffs the Chinese government attaches make those goods cost prohibitive. You wonder why Apple can’t sell iPhones in China? Apple is having an iPhone problem in China! It’s not that they can’t sell them.

It’s that Samsung, Huawei, OPPO, some of the other native Chinese firms are able to undercut Apple by 50%. Now, Apple right now is not subjected to tariffs either way, but Beijing is holding that out as something they might do. They might start putting tariffs on Apple, and Trump has got his own position on that as well. But an American company simply cannot compete in the Chinese market with domestic Chinese manufacturing. They can compete in our market because we permit it, because we’re free and open about it.

But it has been an unfair arrangement for decades, and is in the process of being fixed, and that’s what the tariff trade war is all about. We got people saying, “The stock market, Rush, is down 500 points! The stock market!” There are 15 nations in Europe… This is gonna shock you. There are 15 nations in Europe… I’ll print the list out here in a minute, ’cause it would be good for me to tell you what they are. Do you know what negative interest rates are? It’s where you pay the bank to keep your money. There are 15 nations in Europe.

Interest rates are so screwed up that depositors pay the bank a fee to keep their money. Some of these nations, it’s very high. I’m gonna give you boilerplate number. (interruption) Hang on. Somebody’s calling me here. It’s a wrong number. Get all that spam out there. (interruption) How do I know it’s a wrong number? ‘Cause I know the two or three people that call me. Anyway, if you have $100,000 in the bank in one of these companies, it will cost you $2,500 a month for them to keep it.

(interruption) Well, look what happens to people this country when they go to the Caymans, when they bank offshore. What happens to people here? (interruption) Yeah, it used to be safe, but now even Swiss banks report on you. Swiss banks will tell everybody who you are. Now, the reason I bring this up is because everybody’s saying that the Federal Reserve needs to do something… Federal Reserve interest rates are not gonna fix the trade war. Interest rates have nothing to do… Interest rates have to do with economic activity.

The chairman of the Federal Reserve does not does not need to be raising rates right now because of a so-called overheating economy. He needs to be lowering rates. The way to look at this is — and you’re on the right track here, Snerdley. If in 15 of the countries in Europe, it costs you money to have a bank hold your money, why not sell the United States as a place for deposits? “We got fair interest rates here.

“You can actually earn some money by putting your money in a United States bank or investment portfolio or what have you.” But look, I don’t want to get away from my main point. My main point here is that for all of you angry with Trump out there, I’m begging you: Re-channel your anger. Your anger should be at the Democrat Party and the American left doing everything to invalidate this presidency and to thwart every aspect of this president’s agenda.

And all of this is political. None of it is legal. The Steele report, Steele dossier was political. The Mueller report is a political document. The DOJ investigation into Trump was nothing more than Democrat Party opposition research. It was not an intelligence investigation, counterintelligence or otherwise. It was not a criminal investigation. It was made to look like it.

It was nothing more than politicized oppo research, which means that the Department of Justice and the FBI and the Obama-led CIA were politicized and used to politically harm the opposing party presidential candidate and then president, Donald Trump. When you start corrupting the system of justice this way, and you… This is why… Barr has spoken of this. Barr is serious. The reason he’s serious about these investigations is he is livid, as everybody ought to be.

He’s livid over the political weaponization of the criminal justice system.

I cannot say it enough. There has never been any evidence that Trump colluded with Russia. There has never been any evidence that the Russians had anything to do with the outcome of the 2016 election. Zip, zero, nada. Yet 40% of the American people believe that they did because of this never-ending, incessant media coverage. This has been never anything about legality. It’s not been about intelligence or counterintel. This has been about, for the first time, the Department of Justice being converted into a political weapon against a presidential candidate and then sitting president.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to close the loop on the issue of the trade issues, the tariff war that we’re in with the ChiComs. I failed to give you the status quo. Where we are right now — and if you’ve read any Trump tweets, he’s referenced this. But unless you’ve been following it day to day, some of these tweets where it anybody will appear to be out of context. The Chinese right now are trying to renege on a deal that they already agreed to. That’s why Trump is saying, “Don’t do this. Come back to the table. You agreed to the deal. It’s a good deal.”

But this is a tactic. The ChiComs have as a tactic to renege on things that they’ve already agreed to. They always do it. They agree to whatever’s on the table, and then they just refuse to abide by it, like all their environmental agreements. They sign all kinds of environmental agreements. Paris accords, you name it. They sign ’em. They never do diddly-squat. They sign it for the signing session PR, but they don’t do anything on it, and nobody pressures them because they’re communists. They’re mean guys.

Well, the trouble is that past presidents, Democrat and Republican, have let them get away with it, just like we let Kim Jong-un get away with his tricks and his dad before him. And so the ChiComs have been rewarded for this behavior. If they make a deal and renege on it and pay no price for it, then they’re gonna keep on reneging on deals. It’s a tactic, and they do it. Letting them into the World Trade Organization in 2000? That’s one of the biggest bugaboos Trump has, it was the biggest mistake.

The WTO, anyway, he thinks is a mistake, but letting the ChiComs in? Okay. If you’re gonna let ’em in, they gotta be held accountable. Here’s the problem, folks. The trade deficit we have with China is not sustainable. This $500 billion a year, it’s not sustainable. At some point, it has to be dealt with. Now, the good news — and I’m asking you to trust me on this, because this is as much… Well, it’s opinion, but the opinion is rooted in economic reality. The Chinese are simply in no position to win a trade war right now.

Their economy is suffering. There’s a reason why not just Apple, but all top-tier smartphones and tablets, top-tier tech devices are suffering out the wazoo in China is because their economy is way, way down while ours is booming. The Chinese need our cash more than we need their cheap products. So that’s why it’s been judged to be the perfect time to put an end to this trade imbalance once and for all. That’s why the Federal Reserve running around monkeying with rates is problematic. But this is the ideal time to do this, when their economy is not tanking, but it’s way, way down.

Ours is booming, and they need our cash much more than we need the products that they’re manufacturing.