RUSH: I am holding here (shuffling paper) in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers, I am holding a column written by the USA Today columnist Jason Williams. He is from Gallipolis, Ohio, and his headline says it all: “I Went Back Home to Ohio’s Trump Country. In Appalachia, Honest People Have Hope Again.”

This column, this guy says it’s the hardest column he has ever written. He went back and he could not believe how the people from his hometown in Ohio love Trump. Let me just give you a couple of pull quotes. “These folks already get made fun of…” You’re gonna think you’ve heard this before from me, and you have. What this guy, Jason Williams, is actually doing is amplifying things I’ve already told you about the people the Democrat Party routinely makes fun of each and every day.

Everybody in flyover country — everybody who’s pro-life, everybody who’s pro-gun, everybody who lives south of the Mason-Dixon Line — this is how Democrats see them, and they know it. Gallipolis, Ohio. This is in Gallia County (or Gallia, I’m not sure how it’s pronounced). “These folks already get made fun of enough for being from Appalachia. They’re good, respectful people who are focused on taking care of their families.

“They want to be left alone. They don’t care about stupid Twitter wars, and I don’t want to be responsible for thrusting them into the vicious rhetorical crossfire between leftist activists and Trump sycophants.” This guy’s not gonna name anybody so left-wing Democrat trolls can’t go after ’em. He’s a journalist. What does that make him?

It makes him a left-wing Democrat. And then he says, “Democrats aren’t reaching out.” Democrats don’t care about these people. “No one votes to be despised. If Democrats don’t change their pitch, I may switch to Trump.” Democrats are not reaching out. They’re not! They want the elite vote, and that’s it. They don’t want any of these other schlubs. Oh, they’ll run debates for ’em, and they’ll make the schlubs think they are care about ’em.

But the Democrats are making it clear, they don’t care about the schlubs, they don’t care about the little guy, they don’t care about prescription drug prices, they don’t care about health care, they don’t care about any of this. Notice when they tried to talk about it last night how impossible their plans are! Health care, Medicare for All, take 150 people off their private insurance that they like, $30 trillion for Medicare for All alone.

There isn’t the money for it! These people don’t know what they’re talking about! The most natural reaction that any thinking human being could have had watching this debate last night is something along the lines of, what do any of these people know about health care? Why should I listen to anything they say? None of them are in the health care business! They’re nothing but a bunch of politicians and lawyers. How do they know what they’re talking about? And that would be the most brilliant reaction any viewer could have had.

But you go up and down that line, 12 candidates last night, from Kamala Harris to Mayor Pete, Tulsi Gabbard, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, what does any of them know about any of the so-called plans that they have proposed and/or devised? They don’t know anything. Their plans are devised to appeal to a bunch of people who have been led to believe they can’t do anything for themselves.

I wouldn’t even want to be in a party like that. I wouldn’t want to lead a party, I wouldn’t want to be a candidate, I wouldn’t want to be a talk show host if my party depended on catering to a bunch of people who have been convinced they can’t do anything on their own because the deck is stacked against ’em! And the only chance they have in life is some political party that comes along and punishes them, gets even with the rich, gets even with Republicans.

Well, that’s what the Democrats are created. That’s what they have fostered. Here’s another pull quote from Jason Williams, USA Today: “I quickly came to the realization that this was going to be a challenge soon after arriving for my 2½-day stay in early September. I found that a lot of folks didn’t want to talk about Trump. They didn’t want to put themselves out there for fear of being verbally bludgeoned on Facebook and Twitter or in the grocery store or even at church.

“And those who did want to talk, well, they seemed to speak for those who wanted to remain silent: They’re tired of certain cable news networks and the leftist political class stereotyping them as a bunch of toothless, racist, backwoods rubes. ‘I don’t want to talk about it because you can’t have an opinion unless it’s their opinion,’ an African American Trump supporter said about the left. ‘Either you believe the way they believe, or you’re a racist or a homophobe. The reason I’m working is because of what Trump’s done. I just want to put my hard hat on and go to work every day.’”

And here’s another pull quote. “But the residents have optimism like I haven’t seen in a long time. Gallia County’s unemployment rate is 5.6%, the lowest its been since 1979. Most of the storefronts in Gallipolis again have businesses. Some residents attribute that to Trump, though the economy was showing signs of rebounding before he was elected.

“Trump doesn’t deserve all the credit. I’ve always felt like he played places like Gallipolis and Ohio’s other blue-collar areas on the economy. Things are better, yes, but it doesn’t mean happy days are here again. Gallia County’s workforce is a staggering 20% smaller than it was in the early 1970s, and the current unemployment rate is still higher than the U.S. (3.8%) and Ohio (4.2%).”

And yet everybody in this country is for Donald Trump, but they don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to be abused. They don’t want to tell a reporter. They don’t want to give their names. The reporter is not gonna give their names.

“I’ve been a journalist for 21 years. I’ve never struggled to write something as much as I have this column. The assignment: Go back to the place where I grew up, here in the middle of Ohio’s Appalachian region across the river from West Virginia, talk to family and friends and my hometown people and offer a perspective on the heart of Trump country that few others in the media can.”

Well, you know who else can? Salena Zito can. Salena Zito wrote the book on these people! So finally here’s somebody in mainstream journalism that sends somebody out to Trump country to find out who the hell these people are, even though they don’t have to, just read Salena Zito’s book. And she continues to update it.

So all of these little out of the way — I don’t know how many of you read USA Today. You know what? I would venture to say that less than 10% of you do unless you run into it in the airport. But these little signs are all over the place. The illusion that the media is painting of Trump in trouble on the verge of being impeached and thrown out of office is just that. It’s just an illusion.