RUSH: Here is Vinny, formally from Queens, now in Wilmington, North Carolina. Vinny, welcome back, sir. Great to have you here.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Mega prayers and mega dittos to you and your family. Rush, in my opinion this is about — in the long run — the economy. Wall Street is down over 10% now, and now manufacturers are saying that since they are possibly having to drastically slow production or outright shut down production for foreseeable future, this will now affect consumers in a real negative way and in numerous ways as well as the obvious 401(k)s and 457s.

I mean, how many trillions of dollars have been lost in the last three days because of this hyperactivity by the media? The Democrats will run on a failing or faulty economy under Trump. This is my prediction. Carville was right in ’92 when he said, “It’s the economy, Stupid,” and so it is now. The economy has been the number-one issue for Americans in regards to Trump’s reelection, and it is this that the Democrats know that they have to defeat.

RUSH: Vinny?

CALLER: Yes?

RUSH: Let me interrupt and ask you a question here: Do you think American businesses are panicking and responding to the media prematurely, that there’s no reason for this stock sell-off, there’s no reason for these people to slow down manufacturing? Why are they doing it?

CALLER: Yeah, I think they’re panicking, because what I’ve always been told is the number-one thing that the markets fear is uncertainty, and there’s a lot of uncertainty. And this sell-off, yeah, it is going to be some of it, of course, but it’s incredible. We have 60 cases in the United States — 60, okay — and we’ve lost trillions upon trillions of dollars in the stock market — I don’t know — over 60 cases. I know there are other things going on, but, yeah, I do think there’s a lot of panic. I do.

RUSH: All right. I understand. But let me give you one example, Vinny. I’m gonna use Apple since I know a lot about it. Apple has been responsible for much of the uptick in the market. Apple has gone through the roof. Apple is way beyond where any analyst expected their stock price to be — and they have plummeted. The reason they have plummeted is because everything they make is in China. Everything is assembled in China, and it’s not gonna be assembled. They’re gonna… They may not have any products this year.

These are the stories.

“If they do have product, it may be way delayed, and it may be very little in quantity and number.” So the results that the market’s having with Apple are somewhat genuine because whereas we only have 60 cases here, there are almost 50,000 in China right in the center of the manufacturing regions where all of the factories that manufacture and assemble Apple products are, and they’re not running anywhere near full capacity. So that’s one instance where it has nothing to do with what’s happening in America. It has to with what’s happening on the ground in China. So then you have to start asking questions.

“Okay, well (chuckles), how did this start in China?”

“What’s the real reason behind it?”

“Why don’t they get to the bottom of it?”

It’s unending, unanswerable questions.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, I don’t want to be guilty of what I’m accusing others of. I want to go through this Apple business a little bit more deliberately than I did. I had a minute and a half to make the point. I want to take a little bit more time on it, because Apple’s trying to find ways around the circumstances that they’re dealing with. But the reason I want to do it is our previous caller — a well-known guy, Vinny from Queens, now in Wilmington, North Carolina, escaping taxes — said that he believed that American businesses and investors are panicking.

Based on there’s only 60 cases of coronavirus known right now in America, that there’s no reason for this massive sell-off and that there’s no reason for the economy slowing down as it might other than panic. And the panic, he says, is derived from the way the media’s reporting. Now, folks, there is no question that this is politicized. The left politicizes everything. The left wants to get rid of Trump like they’d want to get rid of any Republican president, but they hate Trump with a purple passion beyond the hatred they harbor for Republicans in general.

So anything that comes up that may hurt Trump, they’re going to hype, they’re going to weaponize, they’re going to expand — and they are doing it. To them, if the market loses 10 or 15% in a correction? Fine! Fine! Trump shouldn’t have had it up this high in the first place. If the economy falls off? Fine! If that’s what it takes to get Democrats elected? Fine! Because that’s all the media is the adjunct to the Democrat Party. So while… (sigh) Look, panic is panic, and people are gonna react the way they do. Not all of it is.

So that’s why I cited the example of Apple for him. Now, Apple’s an American corporation, and they have been going great gangbusters in the stock market and everywhere else. They are the best-run company in the world right now, according to Warren Buffett. Their stock price has gone through the roof like every other aspect of their business has. Their stock price was trading way above where most analysts predicted that it would be. Then the coronavirus hits Wuhan, China. Now, most of Apple’s products are assembled in China.

Some are assembled in Taiwan, some are assembled in Brazil, and some are assembled in Vietnam, some in India. But the vast majority of Apple’s products — the iPhone and iPads, all the computers — are assembled in China. The factories are… (sigh) As far as the Chinese geography is concerned, the factories are within ground zero of the coronavirus. Those factories were closed for the Chinese New Year, and then after the Chinese New Year, the Chinese government kept them closed because of the effort to contain the spread of the virus.

The bottom line is that these factories are just now beginning to open, but they’re nowhere near full capacity. Not even half full. Foxconn, the primary owner of these factories, has been offering all kinds of incentives to get workers to return. But people are afraid. They’re afraid to go back in massive public areas because of this disease. So they’re having trouble. So Apple has issued new guidance. Apple issued guidance telling investors, “Hey, look, our second quarter here…” The first calendar quarter of 2010 is their second fiscal calendar quarter.

It’s gonna be way, way down. They’ve had to revise earnings and profits way down because there is a stoppage on the manufacture of current products — and, you know, the new iPhone comes out in September. But it is now that Apple engineers… Do you know that Apple spends $150 million a year flying employees to and from China? Every day… Every day, there are 50 Apple employees going to or from China. Every day! (interruption) Nope. They spend it on United and then they spend it on some of the airlines.

Now, that travel is not happening.

What the travel is for is Apple’s engineers at this time of year are heading over to China — the factories — to get them tooled up and to run test manufacturing on the new iPhone, which will not be released until September. They can’t do that yet. It may well be that there’s not any travel going on to China right now, because who can be sure that they’ll be safe if they go there? Now, Apple is trying to accommodate this by moving some production out of China to Taiwan, to Vietnam, and they’re gonna do everything they can.

My only point in bringing this up is they’ll find a way to deal with it, and whatever is due to hit the market in September, it will hit the market. It may be in low volume. You may have trouble finding it, but they’ll get it released on time. The point is: Apple isn’t panicking. Now, the American stock market being down, Apple’s a big part of it. Apple’s got real problems, as does any other tech firm that has its products assembled in China. There isn’t much going on over there. They’re doing everything they can to get people back to work and get these factories up and running.

But nobody thinks the coronavirus in China has peaked. Some think it has. Some think the number of cases is now on the low end. But you know what they’ve discovered? They’ve discovered that people that had the virus and recovered from it are getting it again. Some people in as many as 14 days — in China — are getting it again after having supposedly recovered from it. If that’s true, that’s kind of, you know, a new thing for people to be worried about. Now, my only point in bringing this up is not to create any further panic about Apple.

I want to do something. They’re working as best they can to overcome these obstacles. But the fact is that it’s not panic that is causing the Apple stock price to drop. Apple themselves have told investors that their production is way down, and they’re not gonna make what their estimates were for the quarter, and it’s because of the virus. So there’s no panic there. Now, there may be some panic. I’m sure there is in some quarters. Doesn’t matter. It is what it is.

The market is down almost 10%. That’s correction period, and it doesn’t look like there’s any end in sight to it. But there will be. At some point, it’s gonna bottom out — and a year from now people are gonna be shooting themselves for not buying stocks at the prices they’re available at today. It’s the nature of things. The nature of things is change and cycle. Nothing is ever the end. There’s no ultimate doom here. There’s just…

We human beings have to adapt.

We are unique in our ability to adapt to all circumstances that we encounter.

At any stage of human existence on this planet, from Adam and Eve on, humans have had to adapt to environmental changes that they couldn’t control, to enemies that they didn’t know they had ’til they showed up. Humans had to learn how to adapt to drought and they had to learn how to adapt to flood, especially in the early days when they couldn’t be predicted. But, even now, when we have so much more knowledge and so much more ability to predict upcoming calamities, still, nobody saw this. So we’re in a massive period of adapting to it.

How we adapt is going to be challenging because there are people attempting to promote a panic. There are people attempting to say that the government in charge doesn’t know what it’s doing. They want you to get scared. I think the way I would look at that, if I were you, is look at what this administration has fixed and done inside of just three years. You want an administration that didn’t know what it was doing when it came to matters of the economy, when it came to matters of prosperity? Take a look at the eight years of Obama.

Now, Obama was romanticized ’cause the media loved him. Everybody thinks Obama appointed an Ebola czar. You know, ladies and gentlemen, czars are something you find in totalitarian regimes. Czars have oligarchal or authoritative control over things. We don’t have czars in the United States. The Russians, the Soviets had czars, but we don’t. Now, Obama did, and everybody made a big deal out of the fact that Obama had an Ebola czar. He didn’t have an Ebola czar! The guy he appointed to deal with Ebola was not a medical person.

He was a lawyer. He was a lawyer for Al Gore. His name was Ron Klain. He had no health care experience whatsoever. Everybody’s saying, “Obama had a health czar. Obama had an Ebola czar. Obama was far more competent than Trump.” Try this. Mike Pence just announced the appointment of a lead researcher, the AIDS expert at the State Department, a woman, is joining Pence and Trump’s association of medical people to deal with this.

Let me tell you what I saw today during my show prep. You know, I read my tech blogs all the time, and there’s a bunch of tech blogs that are populated by mostly gay people. They hate Pence. They despise Pence ’cause they think Pence was anti-gay people and didn’t work hard enough to fix HIV and AIDS-related health cases when he was governor of Indiana. They hate him. They hate him. They think he’s anti-gay.

They think this is the worst thing that can happen, Mike Pence doesn’t know what’s going on. He hates gay people, say these tech blogs. Just literally insane stuff. So Pence goes out today and his first big hire, other than those that we saw yesterday at the press conference, the AIDS expert at the State Department.

And the reason for that is we needed to act fast. You know, HIV, nobody had seen it before. Brand-new, popped out of nowhere. Tried to get a handle on it quickly. You remember, if you were alive then, Reagan didn’t care. That’s why AIDS spread, HIV, because Reagan didn’t care. It was absurd.

They tried to say the same thing about Pence. So now he’s gone out and hired the number one AIDS researcher and expert at the State Department to join the team, which is a really responsible and smart hire because some people think there’s some similarities in the behavior of the coronavirus and AIDS. And it may be, we don’t know. But I think you ought to have a lot of confidence in the people that are look at this now and not believe the media trying to tell you that the people in charge here don’t know what they’re doing.

The people in charge have fixed so much already that was wrong with this country after eight years of Obama. We had people that did not believe, folks, in the growth of the U.S. economy. You’ve forgotten maybe. but the Obama administration was telling everybody there’s a new era of decline and they were the ones to manage it, that the days of America’s economy continually growing were over. Obama told us this.

He’d go out to New Hampshire, go out to Michigan, Indiana, tell people their jobs weren’t coming back. During the 2016 campaign Trump would say they are coming back. Obama’d go out and say, what’s he gonna do? Wave a magic wand? How’s he gonna bring ’em back? Trump bought ’em back. It can be done. The U.S. economy is growing and expanding. It may have enough strength to withstand what it’s gonna get hit with the coronavirus, is how strong it is.

Here’s how it’s gonna be hurt. It’s gonna be hurt by people — let’s say that your family had intended to travel to San Francisco this summer on a vacation, but now you’re not gonna go because of coronavirus. The economy is gonna lose your trip to San Francisco. And you’re not gonna go twice to make up for the one you lost. You may not go at all now. But if you do go, you’re not gonna go twice to make up for the trip that’s not gonna happen.

So the economy’s gonna lose your trip to San Francisco. The economy’s gonna lose things like this where people are not going to do what they had planned to do that they’re not gonna do two times or more, so the loss will not be made up. That’s how the economy’s gonna be hurt, in the tourism area, and maybe even purchases. We just don’t know.

But we have to adapt to it. And the best way to adapt to it is without any panic and to try to keep all the politics out of this, which the Democrats, because it’s an election year, and the media are attempting to make everything political, and they love the panic. And they’re stoking it. And it’s just like I always say, if there’s gonna be a recession just make up your mind not to participate in it. You don’t have to.

You don’t have to be a conformist. You don’t have to go along with the crowd if you don’t want to. Be an individual. Be industrious. Be creative. Find ways to not have to participate in this if it’s gonna be bad. You can do it. People do it all the time. In a downward economy, you’ll note not everybody goes down, not everybody suffers. Some people prosper in a down economy. How is that? They find how to do it and work it and do it.

It’s all about how much do you want to conform versus how much do you want to be an individual, stand up for yourself, and just not automatically follow the herd. You follow the herd, you’re gonna get lost. When there’s a herd of anything going on you can’t spot the individuals in it. And you certainly aren’t in control of anything if you’re in the middle of a herd.

So try to maintain control of as much as you can of your life, be skeptical about this panic-driven stuff that you are hearing. Ask yourself a question, “Okay. Of the 60 people that have the coronavirus in America, how many are in the hospital?” How many have died? What’s the first thing you’re gonna do if you come down with the disease? If you get the flu, what do you do? If you get a cold or any kind of a respiratory virus, what do you do?

Well, if you don’t think you’re gonna die the first thing you do is not go to the hospital. You go somewhere, you try to get treated, you don’t go to work, you stay home, you keep yourself sequestered from others so you don’t infect them. The same thing that happens with this. But what you see on TV, pictures out of China, the only pictures you see are people in hazmat suits treating patients lying in hospital beds, and so you think that’s what happens to everybody that comes down with the disease.

They’re not telling you — let me check something real quick here before I have to go to the break. Come on. Come on. Of the 82 and a half thousand cases, there are 33,000 people that have recovered from it. And they’re not telling you how many people have recovered. They’re making it look like, they’re making it sound like nobody recovers. You get this, you’re dead. You’re not.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And we are back. Speaking of which, folks, Tim Cook from Apple, we have a sound bite here. He was on the Fox Business Network, an interview with Cavuto: Coast to Coast that they’re gonna air tomorrow, but they got one clip they’re using to promote it. And here’s Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, talking about Apple’s factories and the coronavirus.

COOK: It feels to me that China is getting the coronavirus under control. I mean, you look at the numbers, they’re coming down day by day by day, and so I’m very optimistic there. On the supplier side, we have suppliers, you know, the iPhone is built everywhere in the world. We have key components coming from the United States. We have key parts that are in China, and so on and so forth. When you look at the parts that are done in China, we have reopened factories, so the factories were able to work through conditions to reopen. They’re reopening. They’re also in ramp. And so I think this is sort of the third face of getting back to normal, and we’re in phase three of the ramp mode.

RUSH: What he means by ramp, means ramping up to full production, ramping up to full employment at these factories. So you see, Cook isn’t panicking. And even if he is, he’s not going to sound like he is when he’s interviewed in public. But they are going back to work. The factories are opening. The people that run the factories are offering all kinds of incentives to get people out of their homes and back to work.

I mean, these factories employ 500,000 people. You know how many people it takes to churn out enough iPhones every day for Apple to sell nearly 250 million of them a year? It takes a lot of people, a lot of different places, and it doesn’t sound like he’s worried much at all about Apple being able to meet its product release dates this year in quantity. So that’s good news.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s John, Palisades Park, New Jersey, we got Trump audio sound bites in just a second. Hey, John, how are you doing?

CALLER: Good, Rush, how are you doing?

RUSH: I’m fine, sir.

CALLER: That’s good. You sound great. Thank you for taking my call —

RUSH: You bet, sir.

CALLER: — and my prayers to you and everybody there at EIB.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: There’s no doubt that the Democrats are using this virus to weaponize — as a weapon against Trump, and I believe it’s gonna backfire just like everything else does and has. And I’ll tell you why. Because what it’s doing is it’s pointing out how vulnerable our economy is to things that are out of our control. And what’s it gonna do, it’s gonna cause people to take steps to correct that, and it’s gonna bring more jobs, gonna take jobs out of China, people are gonna start bringing their business back here to the United States.

RUSH: This is actually a good point. What he’s saying is — because I just told a story about how vulnerable Apple is to this because most of their assembly — you know, Cook, and he’s a very smart guy, he can talk about the fact that iPhones are made all over the world. The parts are, but they are assembled in China. Now, there’s some assembly in India, and they’re trying to move some to Taiwan, but the mass production of iPhones and iPads and Mac computers is in China.

And John’s point here, as people learn this and learn how vulnerable the U.S. economy is to China and other parts of this world, the American people are gonna end up being more supportive of Trump’s efforts at trade deals with the Chinese that are fair to America and so forth, and that’s, I think, a good point. It’s actually a very good point that people are gonna realize, maybe even more than they do.

Like I wonder, how many people actually know — they may see “assembled in China” but don’t stop to think about what all is involved in actually making, creating, and assembling an iPhone and how much the Chinese economy is a part of that. I’ll betcha most people don’t. They just go to the Apple store and buy it or go to the carrier store and buy the phone and they use it, and that’s that. Where it came from, who cares? As long as I get it when I want it, I don’t care where it came from.

But I do think you’re right. I think this is all gonna backfire on these people ’cause they’re lying about things.