RUSH: It has been documented in a bunch of media sites like NewsBusters, Brent Bozell’s bunch, 95 to 99% of the news coverage of Donald Trump has been negative for four years. Four solid years. The Republican convention last week was the first time in four years where a large swath of people heard anything positive about Donald Trump in four years. I saw people get mad at Trump’s acceptance speech. He went 70 minutes. He wasn’t energetic enough. Trump seemed to be phoning it in.

Let me explain what I think was going on there. In the first place, if Donald Trump wants to take 70 minutes to try to explain to people who he is, to people who’ve been lied to every day for four years and counting, then take the 70 minutes. It didn’t bother me. The thing that worried me about it was that it ran so late that people might have been turning it off to go to sleep. But the length of it didn’t bother me.

“What about the fact that it was really toned down, Rush?” I think no matter what Trump had done, no matter which attitude, no matter how much energy level, whatever Trump had done, it would have come under severe criticism. “He wasn’t being presidential.” If he had done a rally-type acceptance speech, “It wasn’t presidential. Trump is just a buffoon.” So now they go after, “It was flat, the president maybe just phoned it in. I don’t know what was wrong with him.”

I, frankly, thought it was fascinating. I thought he melded the use of the teleprompter and ad-libs pretty well. And he was himself. But again it was all about — remember what I said in the last broadcast hour — it was all about not being goaded into returning the hate that the Democrats fired at him with all their barrels all the week prior and even last week as well. They were doing their best to goad him into returning hate to match their hate. That’s what they were counting on, and it didn’t happen.

So Trump delivers an acceptance speech that has no hate. Even though it’s highly critical of the Democrats, there was no hate. Yeah, there were some greatest-hits lines, but, again, this is a guy who has been lied about and misrepresented, impugned, lied about, slandered for four solid years. It makes you think where we would be now if we had any semblance of a fair media.
But, you know, it’s also comforting and it’s a stark reminder that despite all this negative press, Trump has hung in there. Hung in there for you. Hung in there for himself.

He’s finally started saying he doesn’t need this. He didn’t need this. He didn’t need to do any of this. And he doesn’t need to put up with it now. But they have failed. They’ve tried to run him out of town. I think Trump is getting stronger. I think the media is getting weaker. I think Trump is just now hitting his stride. And we will see this manifest itself in the coming weeks. I’m actually feeling pretty enthused about this.

Now, there’s also the interesting thing that is the new makeup of the Republican Party. Whose is it now? Where were all those lions of the Republican Party that you and I donated to, we supported, we defended, where were they last week? They were nowhere. No, some of them were at the Democrat convention. Some of them were out there making a big deal about voting for Democrats.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Try this, ladies and gentlemen. Polling data. I got polling data. Here it is. “Trump’s approval rating among black voters jumped nine points during the Republican convention.” This is the Washington Examiner. “President Trump’s approval rating from black and Hispanic voters rose amid the Republican National Convention. Twenty-four percent of registered black voters approve of the job Trump is doing, a rise of 9 percentage points from a poll taken earlier in August.” It’s a Hill-HarrisX poll. It’s not some outlier, oddball, weirdo bunch. “The poll also showed positive movement for the president’s approval rating among Hispanic voters, 32% of whom approve of the job Trump is doing as president, a rise of 2 percentage points.”

It’s more indication that we are in the era of the new Trump Republican Party. You know, in front of every election in my lifetime the Republican talking heads have lamented that there was no way that Republicans could appeal in any way to the 20% of the population that was black. Enterprise zones, any number of things, but they just didn’t work, eventually stopped trying. They gave it lip service, but they stopped trying. Oh, they talked about conservative values, and they talked about the capital gains rate, and they talked about this and that. But it didn’t really connect.

Now, Trump, who I think really cares about everybody — I think Trump cares about people much more than — take your pick of any Democrat you want — and, remember, I know this guy. I may be the most knowledgeable person about who Donald Trump is of everybody in the media, even though I’m not his closest friend. I think I understand him as well as anybody for a host of reasons I shall not divulge here. But I think he really cares about black people. I think he really cares about Hispanics.

I think he cares about what we call the average American, the people who make this country work. He’s not an elitist. He really cares about the people who get this country moving and shaking every day. And it appears to be paying off. I think one of the reasons the left is now out with their full-blown declaration that Trump is responsible for all this is why there are riots.

The riots have torpedoed the huge polling lead that Biden had. The riots were supposed to keep the blacks on the racist left plantation. The riots were supposed to serve as a mechanism whereby the Democrats could say, “See? Trump doesn’t care about you. He doesn’t care if you get hurt. He doesn’t care if you get killed. Doesn’t care if you die. He’s not doing anything to stop it. In fact, Trump wants you to die.”

Oh, there’s Plugs. Plugs came out of the basement, making a speech now. Our tape is rolling. I’m not gonna interrupt this program for Plugs. Anything newsworthy, we will, of course, have it for you. Do you know of anybody else that could have made these kinds of gains in the Republican Party besides Donald Trump? I don’t. And, as such, folks, there has been a seismic shift now in politics. We have been feeling the rumbles for four years. But these past two weeks with these two virtual conventions, the ground shook and the Republican Party of my life and your life fell into a chasm.

The Republican Party — and I find this so ironic — the Republican Party that we donated to, the Republican Party that we voted for, the Republican Party and individual Republicans that we loved and swore allegiance to, that we did everything we could to help, even after they said one thing in the campaign trail, then if they got elected they rarely attempted to enact what they told us they were gonna do, we still hung in there because the Democrats were still the Democrats, the left was still the left, and they had to be defeated.

But the people that we gave everything to – in some of your cases money. But I’m just talking about loyalty, support, effort, manning phone banks, getting out there and planting yard signs, whatever it was. People did it. Now the Romneys and the Paul Ryans, the John McCains, the Koch brothers, McConnell, John Bolton, all these people, where are they? They weren’t even a part of the Republican convention. George W. Bush was nowhere to be seen. I doubt that he wanted to be.

Now, what emerged was the new Trump Republican Party. And it’s a fascinating change. It’s the party of the little guy. It’s the party of working America, not politicians, not elitist think tank denizens. It is literally the party of working Americans in the energy sector, in the health care sector, in the tech sector in some cases. The Republican Party under Trump is the party that strives to make government work for people, not the government work for the elites.

It’s a party that is devoted to a strong military at the same time equally devoted to being against war. Meaning, we want a big military that serves as a deterrent so that we don’t have to use it. The old Republican Party that we remember supporting was filled with neocons who wanted to be at war in a number of different places because it was a great way to create and generate wealth.

The Republican Party now is a party of and for individuals. It’s also a party that solves problems. That’s what Donald Trump does. He solves problems, something that bureaucrats just don’t do. By definition, bureaucrats don’t solve problems. If you solve a problem, there may be any need for you. This is one of the big little secrets of bureaucracies. And big ones, too, like the State Department, never really solves anything, always appear to be trying really hard but never really solve it, under the pretext that nobody can solve it, we’re the best and brightest, get as close we can.

Trump solves problems. Trump shows what can be done. In three years he showed. This is not a good example that the elites in either party want people to see. No problem’s too small if it affects one American negatively is Trump’s attitude. You know the old concept of conservatism might have gone into the chasm, too, ’cause it’s time to maybe rethink how conservatism’s existence is going to evolve and how conservatives mature into whatever this new party is.