RUSH: Austin, Texas. This is Vickie. Vickie, great to have you. I’m glad you waited. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. And I’m a lifer with you so it pains me to say that I’m so upset with you that I just almost cannot breathe.

RUSH: What? Why? What did I do?

CALLER: Because, Rush, I have waited all weekend, I have been so upset all weekend because of Trump canceling the illegal roundup. And I thought, “Okay, I’m gonna wait ’til Monday morning and I’m gonna listen to Rush. He’s gonna talk me down so I can be calm again.” I’ve driven my husband crazy all weekend because I’m so mad about this, and you’re not talking about it, Rush?

RUSH: You know what, you’re right. And when I got started in the first segment of the first hour today, I intended to. That’s the whole thing of canceling the raids when Pelosi said that she called Trump and said he was scaring the kids, it got me on that HBO story, and I forgot to get back to this.

CALLER: Oh, no, this — I can’t be the only one who is just — the disappointment, Rush, is, I’m telling you I almost can’t stand this one. This is a biggie. This is what people have been waiting for. And then Pelosi, of all people, talks him into stopping it? Pelosi, who can’t say anything decent?

RUSH: Well, now, wait, wait. Wait a minute, now. I agree with you, and I think that — I said this last week, and I think the week before, I think whoever in the White House, including Trump, is misjudging the importance of this issue. Immigration is what got him elected.

CALLER: Has he forgotten that, Rush?

RUSH: No, no.

CALLER: Has he forgotten that?

RUSH: What I was gonna say, we don’t know — Pelosi is saying that she told him he’s scaring the kids and that’s why he stopped. We don’t know that that’s actually what happened. She’s just out saying that. Now, it hasn’t been refuted yet. But the bottom line is he did pull back on the raids and he’s given ’em two weeks in Congress to do something about this or he’s going to do it at that point.

CALLER: But, Rush, do you know how much damage that they can do in that two weeks? I mean, seriously, they’re putting out calls to have people hide illegals in their home.

RUSH: I know. And there already are stories today about the squalid conditions in the detention centers and how rotten — I read something last night that takes for granted that we’re still separating families and separating children from their parents. No, you’re right about that.

CALLER: I just don’t know how much disappointment we have to take with this man. I’ve supported him, my family has supported him, and this to me is just a big one. This is one that he should have never backed down from, because now I’m thinking, oh, my gosh. Is he just a blowhard? Because he was gonna close the borders and then all of a sudden, “Well, no, I can’t do that.” Well, this was a big one. There’s no reason that he couldn’t have pulled through on this. And of all people — and I know, maybe, you know, Pelosi — but she’s the one who was meeting with him, him and Schumer, I mean her and Schumer. And that’s when he changed his mind? Rush, I need help, because I’m telling you, I —

RUSH: Okay, let me cheat here for a second.

CALLER: I’m just so disappointed.

RUSH: Let me cheat. What were you — and be honest here — what were you expecting to hear me say about this today? What were you hoping to hear me say?

CALLER: I was expecting you to say, “I just can’t come up with an excuse for him on this one.” You normally can talk me down, and I listen to you. You know the man. So you normally can give your perspective. “Well, this is what he’s doing, because this is the kind of guy he is.” So your not talking about it today just led me to believe, you know what? Not even Maha Rushie can come up with an excuse —

RUSH: No. I’m gonna tell you — no, no, no. Let me tell you what I think is going on here. And it’s one of the reasons I did not make a big deal about it. I’m gonna shoot you straight. I wasn’t surprised by this because I do believe that this is a tactic. The key is when he delays the raids to give Congress a chance to fix immigration loopholes is what this is about. That involves asylum and the way people are able to skirt the issues. I think the threats to do ICE raids was to actually not scare the kids, but to scare and irritate Pelosi and Schumer. I do think he’s going to do this, but I think he’s going to do it after appearing to want to include them in it and to have them play a role in it and they refuse to, they’re not gonna help. Pelosi and Schumer are not gonna help here at all.

CALLER: No, they won’t. No.

RUSH: And so he’s giving them a chance to be bipartisan, he’s giving them a chance to be helpful, he’s giving them a chance to help enforce existing law. That’s all this would have been, enforcing existing law, something that should be done every day. We should be rounding up illegals and deporting them every day. We shouldn’t have to be waiting and doing it with big operations, finding 1,500 there, 2,000 there.

And my guess would be — and I have not spoken to anybody at the White House about this, and nobody has spoken to me, meaning they haven’t called me. I think that this was more or less a tactic and he was trying to draw them out and did. I don’t doubt that he’s going to —

CALLER: Rush, can I ask you a question?

RUSH: Sure. Fire away.

CALLER: Do you honestly think for one minute that they are going to work on making this better?

RUSH: No! No.

CALLER: Because they say that they’re only there for one more week and then they go off on their Fourth of July break.

RUSH: No.

CALLER: What the heck are they gonna get done in five days?

RUSH: No, they’re not. No. No, no. It’s not about actually getting their assistance. It’s about demonstrating that they are opposed. Remember, we’re in an election season now. We’re in a campaign. This is a fundamental Trump issue. He wants to own it even more than he does by demonstrating that they are not only not willing to help, but that they want to sabotage it is something —

CALLER: Then why, then why, Rush — excuse me for interrupting.

RUSH: No, go ahead.

CALLER: But why, then, why does he say, “I’m gonna give them two weeks to try to work on it.” Why? He knows what the outcome is gonna be. Why give them two weeks? Why not support the people that supported him to get this job done?

RUSH: You’re not —

CALLER: To heck with them.

RUSH: You’re not hearing me. He’s giving them two weeks knowing they’re not gonna help so that when he does it, he can say he got no help, they didn’t want to join, they didn’t want to cooperate, they’ve done nothing but try to stop this. It’s positioning them on the completely opposite side of the issue from him as we head into the Democrat debates in the 2020 campaign. That’s my guess as to what this is. I don’t want to think it’s anything else.

CALLER: I’m right there with you, Rush, but I just think the amount of damage that —

RUSH: I know where you’re coming from. This is Donald Trump. He campaigned on he’s gonna deport these people, he’s gonna fix the wall, he’s gonna fix the border, build the wall and all that stuff, he’s not gonna care. In fact, he was elected to not listen to these people. He was elected to go over their heads if he had to. It’s why he was made president. You want to see that kind of action. I totally understand that and agree with you. You have to give it time, a little bit more.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The latest Gallup poll says that more Americans than ever before now say that immigration is the number one issue or problem in America. Now, for our last caller and the rest of you, here’s the thing about this that I don’t understand.

I don’t understand, especially when Trump has made such a big deal out of not telling the media what our military plans are in advance, “I’m not gonna tell you where we’re going, Obama made that mistake, telegraphing, I’m not gonna –” why announce these raids in the first place? Why make ’em public in the first place? Nothing good can come from that.

This is the first thing that I was scratching my head over. Why announce this? Especially when we’ve got mayors of these sanctuary cities who happily brag about hiding illegals and making a point of teaching them how to avoid ICE agents. Why announce this? You think you’re gonna get political points announcing it and then not following through on it? There’s nothing good that can come from announcing this if you don’t do it!

And this comes on the heels of saying we’re gonna hit the Iranians after they take out our drone and then backing out of that, the idea, “Well, I was told by the generals 150 people may die if we do that, that’s not a proportionate response.” Well, I’m saying, I would think that’s the first thing the generals tell you is the casualty assessment. That’s not something you gotta ask for.

In other words, the generals come in and say: “Here’s what’s gonna happen, Mr. President, we’re gonna launch our retaliatory strike, it’s gonna hit this base where they launched the hit on the drone and this is gonna be the damage that’s caused.”

“By the way,” Trump calls ’em a few hours later, “How many people are gonna die?”

“Oh, okay we’ll get back to you on that.” Another couple of minutes go by, generals call the president, “150 people, Mr. President.” The casualty assessment is part of the original assessment, in my experience. So announcing these raids and making them public was telegraphing them and permitting everybody opposed to it to get ready for ’em, to sabotage them, to undermine them.

And then it gives, of course, Pelosi time to run to the cameras and start wailing and moaning about scaring the kids and so forth. If you’re gonna do it, why not have the raids happen in the middle of the night as a surprise? Instead you announce these kinds of things in public, you give people time to organize their communities and attorneys and advisers and Democrat politicians, everybody who wants to protect these people.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I heard her frustration. And I can understand her taking it out on me. I can understand her threatening to never listen here again. Wait. She didn’t do that. But I wouldn’t have been surprised if she had. Because every time she or we turn on the TV, what do we see? We see constantly holes in the border with people in droves just coming across, coming in. We see all this.

(interruption) What? The Official Program Observer here has a question. What is the question? (interruption) All right. Okay. Now. The Official Program Observer — and, by the way, there is one of those because this program is a legacy. There is an observer here so that there can be no question about what happens here. And I permit the observer to now and then ask questions. The observer just said, “What happens if there is a deal? What happens if there is a deal changing asylum rules as a result of this?”

You see, the observer is thinking that I am on to something here. The observer has no specific particular political antenna, folks, don’t misunderstand. The observer is just the observer. He’s kind of like somebody who chronicles things, makes note of noteworthy, momentous things, for posterity. But it’s a good question. What if this was a tactical attempt to once again expose for people who the Democrats are on this.

We have a Gallup poll out there. I just referenced it. More people than ever before rate immigration as the number one issue. Look, if I’m Donald Trump, on a lot of things, I’m really frustrated by the media and what people don’t know, how they’ve been lied to believing the fake news and so forth. And I might want to do things in such a way that would illustrate exactly who the Democrats are.

So you announce the raids — really, that has to have been purposeful and for a specific intent other than pulling them off, because if you’re gonna do this, do it. Like any marketing plan, you don’t tell people how you are going to separate them from their money. You just do it! If you tell ’em how you’re gonna do it, they can prepare for not being separated from their money. Every professional marketer knows this. You never talk about the plan. You execute it. Same thing here.

So the fact that it was announced. Now, we got two weeks, but again they’re leaving, their Fourth of July recess is coming up, so you got less than two weeks to make a deal here, changing some of the loopholes. I do believe Trump is serious about that. And if they don’t cooperate, if there’s no movement on this, then he has that in the quiver with some of the other arrows that he can aim at them.

But I totally understand her frustration. It has been four years since Trump came down the escalator, four years this month, 2015. It’s been two and a half years since Trump was elected for the primary reason of fixing this. So I totally, 100, 1,000 percent understand the frustration.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Curtis in… (chuckles) That can’t be. (pause) “Bump-iss.” Bumpass, Virginia. All right. It’s not spelled that way up here; that’s why I paused. What’s going on, Curtis?

CALLER: Well, you know, the previous lady before the last lady, I felt the same way she did.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: And this is what my concern is about the border. I want to see that wall closed — I mean, built. I want to see the border closed, and I’ll tell you why. The leftists, the liberals, communists, whatever you want to call ’em, do not care about the American culture. By 2050, white people will be in the minority, and I don’t want to see that. For a black guy who says this, he can see the danger of the fact that the white people — you know, the working people, the ones who love the country, who loves the Constitution, who love the American way — they will be in a minority. And the people coming over here, they don’t give a crap about the culture as it is now. They don’t care about that! All they want come up here and do is get free stuff, and bring that —

RUSH: I —

CALLER: — stuff from their own world to our world.

RUSH: You do not want to see the white majority become minority? Did I hear you right, sir?

CALLER: That’s correct, sir. I do not want to see the white folks become minorities, beause what’s left is those who will tear the country down. Now, I know that… I don’t hate my race, okay? I don’t hate myself. But I can see how things change when people from other worlds come here and try to make their world in our world. You see what I’m saying?

RUSH: Yeah, I do. It’s interesting too. It’s fascinating.

CALLER: And then —

RUSH: In fact, Robbie, I’m out of time here. In fact, I have actually blown through the programming format and a requirement here to talk to you, and I’m still not through with you. Could we get your number and call you back at a time that’s convenient? I want to continue this with you when there’s not a time-crunch pressure to finish this. If that’s okay, give our program observer phone number we’ll call you back.

Speaking about that, I was watching another TV show last night — and just another real quick little thing here, guy was telling someone, “There’s no deep state! There’s no deep state! It’s just a bunch of old white guys trying to preserve and hold on to their” whatever, their lives and so forth. So the point being, “There’s no deep state! It’s just a bunch of old white supremacists trying to hold on to what they’ve got.” So the pressure here is never ending on this.