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Listener Says It’s Time for the GOP to Dump Trump and Unite

by Rush Limbaugh - Jan 18,2021

RUSH: This is Manny in Kansas City, Missouri. Manny, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Good morning, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: You bet.

CALLER: Rush, the point I wanted to make was, you know, as conservatives, we need to recognize that we lost this election and we have really a buffoon in the White House because of selfish and really stupid actions of one man. And that’s Donald Trump, what he did in the past 12 months. We need to detach ourselves from him, stop supporting him, and just really concentrate on the tsunami of the leftist crap that is coming our way. You know? If you haven’t noticed, you know, Bernie Sanders is going to be making decisions on our taxes, and we already have amnesty lined up second day after inauguration.

RUSH: Wait a minute, now. You think this is Trump’s fault —

CALLER: Absolutely.

RUSH: — and so fixing this requires the abandonment of Trump?

CALLER: Absolutely. You know, I do not for the life of me understand (crosstalk).

RUSH: Wait a minute. I want to carry this forward. So how would that happen? How do we denounce Trump, and then what are the Democrats gonna do when we do? If we find a way to do this, what will the Democrats’ reaction to it be?

CALLER: I’m not concerned about the Democrats. But this inside fighting that we have in the Democrat — Republican Party right now, at each other’s throats — who supported him, who didn’t supported him — is not helpful. We need to unify so when they put a legislation up there —

RUSH: Well, Joe Biden said that that’s what his objective was, but he quickly denounced his own objective by talking about putting certain people in jail because of what they said or believed, and if they were Trump supporters they were going to be dealt with rather harshly and so forth. So the idea of promoting unity, they’ve blown that up one themselves.

CALLER: Well, the unity on our part is more important than what he says. We need to, you know, just form a line, and then when there is legislation comes up, everybody’s backing everybody else. You know, we are going to the battle as a unified Republican Party and make sure, you know, we defend the filibuster and all of that. And that is the line of defense that we have. Because of Trump, we lost the Senate as well, and there’s nothing that (unintelligible) amnesty and high taxes, then maybe, you know, Joe Manchin or Jon Tester. We need to show them that, listen, the past is past. We recognize the fact that we lost the election, and I want it to be in the front row.

RUSH: Wait, wait. We…? Wait. We need to show who —

CALLER: Ourselves, and —

RUSH: — that we recognize the fact we lost the election? We need to show who?

CALLER: First of all, ourselves first. We need to accept it, and then when we do that, you know, we just —

RUSH: All right. I don’t doubt your sincerity in all this. I’m not gonna challenge your sincerity, but I have to tell you that you have about — I don’t know – 100% of Never Trumpers who believe exactly what you’re saying, that all of this is Trump’s fault and that we owe the nation a gigantic apology, and if we would just do that, then we might be able to stop all this infighting. But it’s gonna be up to us. And we gotta come up with a legitimate way of saying we blew it by supporting Trump.

The first thing you have to tell you, Manny, is that’s not going to happen. There are 70 plus million people who voted for Trump who are not going to accept the premise that they are responsible for any of this. Not after four years of what was the single biggest attempt to destroy a human being in the American political system that I’ve ever witnessed. I have never seen it motivated. I’ve never seen it mobilized.

The American political system was mobilized for four years to destroy a single human being and his family and to send a message to anybody else who might have an idea of trying what he tried, “Don’t think about it.” I’ve never seen anything like this. So if we came up with a way to apologize, if we came up with a way to denounce Trump, there is no way we’re gonna be welcomed into the fold. And who would want to be anyway?

Who wants to be given a tacit pat on the back approval from people like Pelosi and Chuck Schumer? Why in the world should we aspire to that? Aspiring to that requires us to accept the notion that we somehow are responsible for this. All we did was vote for a guy because of what he believed in. Because he wanted to make America great again. We voted for the guy, and then we saw what they tried to do to destroy him and we mobilized to do everything we could to defend him.

That got us in even bigger trouble. My only point — and again I say, I don’t doubt your sincerity, but doing this along the lines of the way you’re suggesting would just make us laughingstocks. It would not stop the Democrats and their efforts to destroy us. It would not slow down their efforts to render us meaningless and powerless. They are not going to stop until we do not present an opposing threat.

They’re not gonna stop. They don’t believe in opposition. They don’t believe they should have to win a battle of hearts and minds. That’s beneath them. They don’t believe that they should have to engage in the arena of ideas and win and persuade people. That’s not the way they roll. What is, is what they say. What happens is what they order and mandate. And if you don’t go along with it, too bad.

They’re not gonna lose sleep over it. There’s nothing you can do. They don’t care whether you’re with them or not. The idea that somehow we can stop this disunity and the strife and all this by taking the blame on our own shoulders, acknowledging it and then apologizing for it would be to make the mistake that Washington Republicans have been making my whole life. There’s a whole bunch of them, Manny, that have been trying to do exactly what you suggest. And has it gotten them any more respect? Has it gotten them any more approval? Has his has a it done anything other than make them losers with honor? No. It hasn’t.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It’s interesting, we had the last call, Manny from Kansas City who says it’s up to us to understand that Donald Trump manifestly was a disaster, particularly the last 12 months, it was an utter disaster. We gotta denounce Trump as soon as we can and only then will we be prepared to meet the other side in a phase of unity. And of course I responded accordingly.

But I have here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers a piece from the American Greatness website by Ned Ryun, R-y-u-n if you’re going to try to find it, and its title is, “A Time to Fight — A party is what people say it is and the people who say what it is run and win primaries, show up at conventions, and run for precinct chair. No more whining. Time for work.”

This is kind of a throwback piece. I mean, it’s patently obvious what the purpose of parties is, but he very systematically says it’s time to restate what the purpose all of party is and the time to whine and complain is over. Let me share with you some pull quotes.

“But a word to the America First base,” the MAGA bunch. “It’s one thing to air your grievances. That time has passed. You had better get to work. A party is what people say it is and the people who say what it is run and win primaries, show up at conventions, and run for precinct chair. Stop bemoaning how the GOP has abused and abandoned you. Stop talking and get to work. No more rallies. No more moaning and groaning. Time to fight.”

Now, a lot of people think that’s exactly what they’ve been doing, by going to rallies, by making them huge. A lot of people think that they have been fighting. They’re gonna be surprised to learn that Mr. Ryun doesn’t think they have. Another pull quote.

“Part of the justification for the latest abuse of the impeachment process was the talk of Trump being like Osama bin Laden and that his supporters are ‘domestic terrorists.’ This should have made it very clear that the Democrats’ idea of unity is submission and conformity to their radical ideas, not compromise or a return to sanity and reason. They want nothing to do with unity, and you’d better get that memo straight in your head: there will be no dissent..”

You do not get to dissent to the Democrats. You do not get to disagree with them. You do not — Manny, I’m saying this for you as much as anybody else. It was “Once the highest form of patriotism, dissent is now terrorism. If you disagree with the Democrats, you are a domestic terrorist, and you don’t deserve any respect, you don’t deserve any compromise, you don’t deserve any patience, you don’t deserve anything. You need to be destroyed because you are a terrorist. You are dissenting against the popular Democrat Party. And, as such, you get no respect at all.

They stand there, shaking their heads, telling us like little children that we have to move on and accept reality–that we have to accept the results of the election when, of course, it was they who made a farce of our election system to win it. They neglect to mention that they still have not accepted the results of the fairly decided election of 2016, which of course, is also what the multiple impeachments were about.

“Their hypocrisy knows no bounds. In fact, spare me the hypocrisy on a whole host of fronts. They are mumbling on about supposed ‘sedition.’ You really want to talk about sedition? Democrats, the Left, and the media … lied about the 2016 election and Russiagate,” for four years. “So spare me their theatrics and pretensions to decency.”