RUSH: Well, there’s big news to open the program with. CNN just reported that Il Papa, Pope Francis, upon boarding the pope jet for the return to Italy from Mexico, said that Donald Trump is not a Christian. Man, are they pulling out all the stops now. The pope says that Donald Trump is not a Christian because Christians do not build walls. They build bridges. Never mind that the Vatican is surrounded by a wall, and we won’t even talk about who built that wall. But that’s what the pope said. Given the pope’s political leanings, I’m surprised he isn’t on the campaign trail for Bernie Sanders. Maybe Bernie Sanders is too far to the right for the pope.
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RUSH: I just got an e-mail. Somebody said, “Hey, Rush, is this now a problem for Trump with the pope claiming he’s not a Christian?” Ladies and gentlemen, no. If you’re still looking for that straw that’s gonna break the camel’s back, this is not it. That’s not even the question. The real question here is who is the pope working for? What is the pope doing inserting himself — he’s the Vicar of Christ. He is the worldwide leader of the Catholic faith. What is he doing inserting himself into the American political system this way? That to me is the larger question.
People might be able to make a case for it. I’m not saying there’s no answer to it. I’m saying the question is not, “Is this gonna hurt Trump?” It isn’t gonna hurt Trump. Trump for his part’s out there saying it’s outrageous for a religious leader to say that he’s not a Christian. Trump’s out there saying (paraphrasing), “I’m the one guy that’s out there saying the attacks on Christianity are gonna stop when I get elected.” Now, he’s not the only guy saying that, of course, but that’s what he’s saying in response to this. He had a rapid fire response to it.
But, no, no, no, this isn’t gonna hurt Trump. I mean, the question, once this settles, is gonna be aimed at the pope. And the question is gonna be, what is the pope doing? For whom is the pope doing it, if the pope is doing it for anybody? But that’s gonna be what it boils down to: What is the pope doing here? Why? And I’ll tell you this. The more establishment figures — and the pope qualifies as an institutional leader, and therefore the pope would qualify in many people’s eyes as an establishment figure, particularly this pope, who has not hidden his ideological alignment, much less his political alignment.
People that support Trump are gonna circle the wagons around Trump even more so after this. This isn’t gonna cause Catholics or other Christians to say, “Oh, my God, the pope, oh, no, pope says Trump’s not a Christian. I gotta abandon Trump.” No. It isn’t gonna happen that way, I don’t believe. And then all you need to do is show people the picture of the wall surrounding the Vatican. I’ve seen it. That wall’s gotta be 40 feet high, folks. I mean, you’re not climbing over that wall no matter what you do.
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RUSH: So Trump is in Kiawah Island, South Carolina, at a campaign event. He heard that the pope accused him of not being a Christian. So naturally Trump responded. We have the first of two sound bites here.
TRUMP: So the Mexican government fed the pope a tremendous amount of stuff about Trump is not a good person, and the pope just made a statement. Can you imagine? I just got a call. As I’m walkin’ up here, they said, “Mr. Trump, the pope made a statement about you.” I said, “The pope?”
AUDIENCE: (laughter)
TRUMP: “What did the pope say? I like the pope. I mean, was it good or bad?”
AUDIENCE: (laughter)
TRUMP: Because if it’s good, I like the pope. If it’s bad, I don’t like the pope.
AUDIENCE: (laughter and applause)
RUSH: Now, Trump is out there saying that what the pope said is a disgrace. He didn’t specifically call the pope a liar and he didn’t threaten to sue the pope, so maybe he’s moderating. You know, if Ted Cruz had told him he wasn’t a Christian, he’d threaten to sue him and so forth, and… (interruption) No, I’m just teasing. He brought up a good point. Trump brought up a good point. He said, “When has the pope ever questioned the faith of another private citizen?” And, folks… By the way, folks, don’t anybody… Don’t anybody…
I’m just warning you here: Don’t anybody ask about the president’s religion! Don’t even get close to going there. Don’t do it. That is a forbidden area. You cannot even ask about it. The pope can go ahead and claim that Trump is not a Christian, but you can’t go there when we talking about the president of the United States. Trump wants to know, has the pope ever questioned Obama’s faith? Has the pope ever questioned any other private citizen’s faith?
Has he questioned the faith of the Castro brothers? Has the pope questioned the faith of any communist leaders? He spends a lot of time in communist countries. A lot of potential recruits there. I mean to the flock. I’m not… (interruption) No, no. It’s true. The Catholic Church spends a lot of time in very poor countries trying to recruit and spread the Gospel. Let me put it that way: The pope is simply saying…?
Has he ever said that Mao Tse-tung, that Fidel Castro, that Raul Castro, any other communist is not a Christian? Why Donald Trump? ‘Cause Trump wants to build a wall? Have you seen the Vatican wall? I got a picture here I could show you on the Dittocam if I had the time and where it is. It’s over 50-feet high. It’s over 50-feet high. It’s not even the kind of wall Trump’s talking about building. Here’s the second Trump sound bite, by the way.
TRUMP: So I just wrote this out very quickly about the pope. Do you want to hear it? Should I read it to you?
AUDIENCE: Yeah!
TRUMP: He actually said that maybe I’m not a good Christian or something. It’s unbelievable. Which is really not a nice thing to say. So it’s a response from Donald Trump. It says, “If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS…” You know, ISIS, their primary trophy. Very few people know this. I read this about two months ago. Nobody even believed it. Their primary thing… You’ve seen what they’ve done all over the Middle East. Their primary goal is to get to the Vatican. That would be their ultimate trophy. They want to do what they won’t to all of these magnificence artifacts and all of the beautiful museums that they’ve totally destroyed all over the Middle East, right?
RUSH: So what Trump is saying is the pope will pray for Trump as president because Trump is gonna be the only guy trying to stop ISIS, which wants to take out the Vatican. It is. It is quite a curious thing. And Trump said… We don’t have the sound bite right now, but he did ask those questions. He did. Has anybody…? Has the pope questioned the Christianity of the Castro brothers, of any other private citizen? Here is Jim in Balsam, North Carolina, get a phone call in here quickly. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, mega dittos.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much.
CALLER: Hey, I was disturbed and disgusted. I’m a devout Roman Catholic, Notre Dame seminary, the whole nine yards. And the Vicar of Christ is supposed to be on this earth for one thing: To guide people to the Christian faith as Christ spoke it and the Bible reveals it. And that’s his job. I want him to go out and convince populations to turn to the love of Christ and not turn to socialism. I can’t tell you, as a Catholic, how disturbed I am at what this pope, a very liberal pope —
RUSH: You’re not the first. You’re not the first. I’ll tell you what it represents — and people don’t want to hear this. This is… Whatever you want to call it, socialism, liberalism, this is who they are. They corrupt everything. Folks, their targets are the institutions and traditions that have given the world its morality, its virtue. The institutions and traditions which have defined freedom and liberty. That’s what the left attacks. And it’s clear that they have had success in corrupting quite a few of them, because old Jim here is exactly right. What in the world is the Vicar of Christ doing getting down to this level?
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RUSH: Hey, it wasn’t just Trump. The pope once again ripped — I mean, really ripped — capitalism and Americans’ immigration policy at the Mexican border, before he boarded the plane and returned to Italy.
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RUSH: You think the pope is mad that Trump said Two Corinthians instead of “second”? Get this. Pope Francis just said that contraception can be justified now. Now, wait. Don’t jump down — folks, contraception in the Catholic Church is a thing. I’m not getting into — for the pope to cave — what’s next? Will he say that abortion can be justified in certain circumstances? I mean, where does this stuff end?
Greetings, and welcome back. It’s great to have you. El Rushbo. Great to have you here at 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program.
“Pope Francis said the use of contraception could be justified in regions hit by the Zika virus,” which the Wall Street Journal says is, “a stance that could reignite a debate over the church’s prohibition of the use of condoms to stop the spread of the AIDS virus. The pope also criticized Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump as ‘not Christian’ for his immigration stance, and broke with his predecessors by suggesting that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions if they want to.”
Well, you know, I gotta be really, really careful. If I were a Catholic, I’d be asking what’s going on here. I really would. “The pope also broke with his predecessors by suggesting that Catholic lawmakers are free to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions.” Folks, I’m sure you in this audience understand. This is why I have been trying to make the case or state my belief that the fundamental matter of importance is defeating the Democrat Party. And by that I mean liberalism wherever it’s found. Liberalism, socialism, whatever, it is such a corrupting, destructive thing. And I believe it’s the most destructive force in the world today, outside of, you know, militarized weaponry and that kind of thing.
But I’m talking about just as an ongoing, everyday matter of daily life, one of the most destructive things if not the most is radical liberalism, leftism. And it is clear that they are making great strides in corrupting once-great institutions and once-great traditions. And when I say corrupting, I mean taking over and politicizing them for the express purpose of advancing the leftist agenda. And the advancement of the leftist agenda in large part consists of destroying institutions, traditions, people, policies, what have you, that the left considers to be obstacles to their efforts to blow everything up.
The really damaging thing is that the objectives, the goals of the people on the left are not possible. There is no utopia. They want to wipe out competition. They want to eliminate the concept of winners and losers. They want to wipe out the fact that there are any differences, particularly outcome differences, from one person to another. The things that they seek are not possible. The things that they seek are rooted in self-loathing, misery, unhappiness, crankiness, whatever. They are outraged when people are not cranky and not miserable. They want everybody to be, if they are. It isn’t fair that some people should be enjoying life when other people don’t.
This is a hallmark trait of the left. There is never any effort to elevate anybody. Liberalism is all about tearing down. Liberalism is all about lowering. It is all about destroying ’em. This is why my primary objective, my desire would be to see the Democrat Party get shellacked in every election, to never see the Democrats ever win one again, as currently constituted. That may sound unrealistic. It may be unrealistic, but it’s not extreme. In my mind, it’s what has to happen.
You find them everywhere now. They have moved in and corrupted everything, and they’ve done it by intimidating anybody who might oppose them. They succeed in getting away with calling people racists. They benefit from all these people, “I just don’t like the fighting. Could you stop the shouting? All I want to do is just get along.” They’re easily able to bulldoze large groups of people into laying down and letting it happen in the hope that this will be peace, in the hope that there will be no confrontations, in the hope that the shouting will stop.
They are relentless and they do not know any time limits. They do not operate in four-year, you two-year, one-year cycles. It’s whatever it takes and however long it takes, because the actual battle itself is as invigorating as victory, because they’ll never have victory. Even if they were able to get control of every institution they want to destroy, what they want is not possible. The circumstances for life on this planet that they want are not possible to achieve. The closest they can get to it is communism and tyranny where they have to force everybody to live the way they want. 
And that means they have to build walls to keep people in because after a while people want to get the heck out. And that’s the thing.
What they want can never work. Their dreams can never even get close to reality. Their hopes can never, ever be realized. It isn’t humanly possible for liberalism to succeed. It isn’t humanly possible for the things radical leftists want to bring about the desired results that they choose. They claim they want a utopian happiness, and they are further and further away from it the more successful they are. You can use the Obama administration as a recent example. For seven years they’ve been unopposed. The Republican Party’s not trying to stop ’em on a single thing. Much of Obama’s agenda has been a success. He has been able to attack various traditions, institutions, and taken over the health care system in this country. They’ve taken over the student loan, they’ve taken over the education system, and everybody in it is miserable and unhappy.
I’m watching this thing on MSNBC. The Trump counter-town hall that was going on on CNN with the Republicans. They had a bunch of students in the audience standing up and asking questions, both on the Republican side on CNN and Trump’s side over at MSNBC. Yeah, I think it was without fail, every time a student stood up to ask a question it was about student loan debt. One woman was a dental student, it was gonna cost her something like $500,000, she said. She wanted to know if there’s another way. She wanted to know how in the world is that gonna get paid back. It was all that’s on her mind.
Government’s running the student loan program; what in the world could be wrong with it? If the government’s running it, if Obama’s taken it over, and he’s got a lot of compassion, a big heart, loves people, what could possibly be wrong with it? And then the subject of tuition came up, and how come tuition never gets cut? Why does tuition always go up? Guarantee, folks, when you subsidize something, if you run a university and the government’s gonna subsidize parts of your operation, why in the world should you cut anything?
If you don’t have to pay for everything you’re providing, why in the world should you cut the cost of it, when it’s gonna be covered? That’s what’s happened to the health care system. Why cut costs when somebody’s gonna subsidize whatever you charge. But there’s another reason why tuitions are never gonna come down on major American universities, and that’s because they are the training ground of American liberalism and radicalism. And they have to make jobs there attractive to the professors and the teachers who are gonna indoctrinate these young skulls full of mush.
There’s not gonna be any tuition cuts. There aren’t gonna be any drastic reductions in salaries. And in fact when the subject of cuts comes up, the first thing that the opponents of cuts say, “You can’t cut this faculty. You can’t cut the salaries. You wouldn’t save enough money, you can’t go there.” Exactly right, because the professors and the graduate assistants and the teachers assistants or whatever else they are, whatever they’re paid is going to do nothing but go up.
I mean, the education system is where young skulls full of mush are programmed and propagandized into the system. They are highly valuable. That’s why they’re subsidized. You know, universities are approaching the same circumstance we have in health care. What it costs is not related at all to market forces. Meaning what it costs is not related to what people can afford. You get right down to it, how many Americans, how many families can afford 20,000, 30,000, $50,000 a year or semester to send their kids off to college? It has to be subsidized. Okay, so you go get a scholarship. Well, who’s paying for that? Somebody is. “Well, the boosters, Rush, the boosters.” Well, they’re being subsidized, is the point.
There’s no relationship to what people can afford. It makes no sense. It’s the same thing that’s happened in health care. It’s not priced according to market circumstances or market forces, and therefore it’s artificial. So we need insurance. Yes. We need insurance because we can’t hope to pay for it. And rather than genuinely reform it in ways that will, over time, move it closer to market-based, we go just the opposite way.
We continue to subsidize it, we continue to insure it, and we make it even more unaffordable. And the benefit to that, the more unaffordable it is, the more somebody needs government, the more somebody needs some kind of assistance. And that gets translated as the more the people need the Democrat Party. Vicious cycle, vicious circle. But the destruction goes on and on and on.
So today, right before the program starts, we find out that Pope Francis attacks a private citizen of the United States, Donald Trump, as not being a Christian. How many migrants, how many immigrants, how many migrants and refugees fleeing war-torn areas in the Middle East are permitted into the Vatican? I’m not kidding. I think I saw a story where they’re going to take … two. It’s obviously symbolic. They will take two at the Vatican, thereby setting an example and showing how it’s done.
So they take two, and then they demand everybody else basically erase their borders and the laws related to their borders. And now the pope on his overnight flight back to Italy explains how contraception can be justified. This is the pope, the Vicar of Christ, the Catholic Church explaining how contraception could be justified. And then he rips into capitalism and the American immigration policies while at the Mexican border before getting on his plane to go back to Italy.
And then he says that American lawmakers are now free — devout Catholics are now free — to vote for same-sex marriage and civil unions. Well, is it logical to ask how far away are we from the pope explaining that abortion can be justified, “in certain circumstances, in certain regions,” and if it might be related to the evils of American capitalism and our immigration policy? We’re probably not that far away. (interruption) What? “Drive-By Pope”? You want to call him a “Drive-By Pope”? I’ll leave that to you. I’ll stick with the way I’ve described it.
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RUSH: You know, folks, I’ve been around so long, I can remember when it was a rhetorical question to ask, “Is the pope Catholic?” Now it’s a legit question. Here is the pope. This was on the papal plane, which I think is an Alitalia Airlines jet, on the way back to the walled Vatican City from his trip to… By the way, if socialism is so damn hot, why doesn’t the pope ask all Mexicans to return home? If capitalism is such a bad thing, why doesn’t the pope say to every Cuban living in America, “Get the hell back to Cuba”?
Why doesn’t he say to every Mexican living in America, “Go back to Mexico! That’s your home! Socialism is preferable.” Why does he want them to stay? Because they are going to convert this place, folks. That’s what this is all about. If we take the pope at his word and socialism is highly preferable to capitalism and he was really concerned about these people, he would demand they go home. He would demand they return to their homelands wherever they are, if they were socialist.
He would suggest they abandon America, ’cause capitalism holds nothing for them. In fact, he would ask them, “What were you thinking going there in the first place? It’s such a hellhole, after all. It’s capitalist! They’ve got rotten immigration laws — and, of course, their health care stinks. Why in the world would you go to America when you could live in Cuba? Why would you go to America when you could live in Ecuador or San Salvador or everywhere else?”
The pope didn’t do that. The pope is encouraging them to come here. He’s encouraging us to let them come here. He’s encouraging us to stop any efforts whatsoever to prevent them from coming here. Why, if capitalism’s so bad? ‘Cause if he gets what he wants and everybody else along with him, we’re not gonna be capitalists very much long. Here’s what the pope said about Trump.
POPE (via translator): A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be — and not building bridges — is not Christian.
RUSH: Again, Google it: “Vatican walls.” Just Google a picture “Vatican;” take a look at the walls. They’re 50-feet high. Here’s Trump in Kiawah Island, South Carolina, during campaign event. Two more sound bites…
TRUMP: He actually said that maybe I’m not a good Christian or something. It’s unbelievable. Which is really not a nice thing to say. If and when the Vatican is attacked by ISIS — which, as everyone knows, is ISIS’ ultimate trophy — I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president.
RUSH: He kept going.
TRUMP: He’s questioning my faith. I was very surprised to see it. But I am a Christian, and I’m proud of it. Okay? For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful. I’m proud to be a Christian, and as president, I will not allow Christianity to be consistently attacked and weakened, unlike what is happening now.
RUSH: Donald Trump today in Kiawah Island, responding to the pope claiming he is not a Christian. What a gift basket has been given given to Donald Pope… (chuckling) “Donald Pope.” Donald Trump. A faux pas there, folks. A Freudian slip.
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RUSH: You know, that’s true. Donald Trump… That is true. Donald Trump did question Ted Cruz’s evangelical credentials. Remember when Trump said, “How can somebody who lies as much as Ted Cruz lies be an evangelical Christian?” So here comes the pope today saying, “Well, that may be true about Cruz, but you build walls, and we Christians don’t do that. So you’re not a Christian, either.” Sometimes all you can do is chuckle. I mean, you need a break from it some. You just can’t be intense and wadded up all the time here, folks.
You’ve gotta chill now and then. Not so much that you offend people who’re thinking you’re not taken seriously. Never do that. But some of the stuff. (laughing) Like I’ve got the greatest line in the world about the pope coming out in favor of contraception, and I don’t dare use it. I don’t even… I don’t even dare hint getting close because the moment you understand it, I’m in trouble. So it’s something I’ve gotta contain and avoid bursting and so forth, and now you’re frustrated because I’ve teased you with it.
“Come on, Rush! You can say it!”
No, I can’t. You have to trust me, I really can’t. But it’s a great, great line. Oh-ho-ho-ho.