RUSH: Now to the audio sound bites and when this happened I got a couple of e-mails. And I never turn on the TV when this airs. “Hey, they’re getting ready to savage you on CNN. Fareed Zakaria GPS.” I said, “Don’t worry, it’s fine, I don’t care.” Sunday morning, Fareed Zakaria GPS speaking Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens about the presidential primary race, Republican side. Fareed Zakaria GPS said, “Bret, you wrote a very powerful political column this week in which you said that this is now, the Republican presidential campaign is kind of a conservative gutter, the conservative gutter. The question is, who is to blame, Bret, for the conservative gutter, and how did it happen?”
STEPHENS: I put the — sort of the immediate blame on the failure of people like Rush Limbaugh to call out Trump. A lot of people in the conservative media who sort of made a guy who’s politics aren’t really aligned with much of the Republican Party or the conservative movement, make him seem like a respectable, plausible presidential candidate when I wish back in the summer when he was sort of a soap bubble that they might have popped it.
RUSH: All right, now I could react to this one of two ways. I can be flattered. Hey, they think I could have stopped the guy. Hey, they wish I would have stopped the guy. But I come back at this with, “Well, why haven’t you been able to?” I mean, the Journal has been editorializing against Trump at least twice a week. That’s just the editorial page. They’ve had op-eds, news stories. I thought talk radio was just this little entertaining thing over here, wasn’t anything to take seriously.
Is it my job to take candidates out? If they want a candidate taken out, why is it my job to do what they want? Well, he’s saying if I’m true to myself, if I’m being honest with who I am, Trump should repel me and as such I should do everything I can to get rid of Trump and harm Trump and so forth. You know, this is the difference. I don’t think that my audience is a bunch of brain-dead robot sponges. I don’t think there’s a single one of you out there for Trump that I could talk out of it.
The only guy, the only person that can separate you from Trump is Trump. I mean, nobody else made the connection. You’re not glomming on to Trump ’cause somebody’s telling you how great he is. You’re not supporting Trump because somebody’s told you how wonderful he is. You decided on your own you like what Trump’s doing, you like what he’s saying, and you’re willing to give it a chance because everything else you’ve tried the last 25 years hasn’t worked out, why not try an outsider, why not. I know how the drill goes. But this is why I don’t endorse.
Well, you take out Hillary… Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Be careful. All I’ve done is tried to point out that the nominee over there is not going to be Bernie Sanders. Although I’m not gonna have time to get into it today, but what’s going on with this guy who set up her server and who has been granted immunity? There’s more to that than I think we know. My problem with the Hillary thing is I’ve been telling people… It came up on the golf course yesterday. “Hey, do you think we’re gonna get Hillary this time?”
It never fails, folks. And I always say, “Well, how many times have we thought that since 1992 that we finally got ’em, that they’ve been exposed, and ‘this is it,’ and it’s never happened, has it? So why is this year gonna be different?” “But, Rush! Rush, this is the FBI. This is the Justice Department.” “Yeah, exactly. It’s the Justice Department. Who runs it? Barack Hussein O.” I’ll tell you what I tell ’em. I told a bunch of guys… We had a backlog at number 16 yesterday, a par 3. So bunch of people come up to ask what do I think’s gonna happen to Hillary.
I’ll tell you what I know has already happened, and that is Bill Clinton called Obama and said, “Let’s go play a round of golf,” and they did. And at some point during that round of golf Bill Clinton puts his arm around Obama and says (impression), “Okay, look, bud. Let’s hit this straight down, shall we? You think you got goods on her, right? Well, you think you’re clean and pure as the wind-driven snow, buddy? Let me tell you something. We got more on you — and if you unload on her, you think you’re gonna get away with it?
“How do you think I’ve survived as far as I have? How come I’ve gotten away with everything I’ve gotten away with? You cannot take her out without taking yourself down, Pal, and don’t you ever damn well forget it.” Something like that has happened. Now, whether Obama’s intimidated by it or not, we don’t know. But I guarantee you… I can’t guarantee you, but I mean… By the way, should I have repudiated McCain? Should I have repudiated Romney? Are they close to the ideals that I support in a candidate? Should I have repudiated them? Interesting question. Here’s Jeffrey Lord. Jeffrey Lord on CNN was asked about what Bret Stephens at the Wall Street Journal had said on Anderson Cooper 360 last night.
LORD: It just strikes me, if the people in the establishment had been listening to Rush Limbaugh for the last X-number of years, they would have seen this coming. But they don’t see this coming because, you know, they were too busy writing articles for Newsweek that David Frum wrote there, the former Bush aide. “Enough” and “stop Rush Limbaugh” and “don’t listen” and all this sort of stuff. All they had to do was listen to Rush’s show, listen to what his callers are saying to him, and they would have understood perfectly well long before Donald Trump that they had a real problem on their hands. But they didn’t pay attention.
RUSH: That’s pretty right on the money. He’s simply saying if these guys had listened to you, if they’d been paying attention; that Trump didn’t happen in a vacuum, that it’s been coming and they should have known it. And instead, they send people like Frum out there to write Newsweek cover pieces saying, “Enough of Rush Limbaugh! We gotta get rid of Rush Limbaugh. We gotta stop listening to Rush Limbaugh. Just get rid of Limbaugh! Stop paying attention to him,” instead of listening to what was happening on his program. That was Jeffrey Lord’s point. You gotta say, that’s pretty astute.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The National Review devoted an entire issue to the attempt to take out Trump, and I think all it did was solidify his support.