He just concluded a freewheeling, no-holds-barred, no-controls-on-the-media, “Whatever you want to ask me, ask me,” press conference the day after the supposedly biggest event yet in the Democrat National Convention. He just totally hijacked it, and he was brilliant.  He was on his game.  This was the Trump from last fall.  He was confident, he was hilarious, he was taking no BS from anyone in the media. He was challenging Hillary to do the same thing and calling her out, saying she hasn’t done a press conference in over a year.

And she can’t do what Trump did today.  Hillary Clinton intellectually, personality-wise, is not capable. She’s not capable of doing what Donald Trump did today.  I have never seen a Republican presidential nominee even get involved in the Democrat convention.  My experience is that the playbook in the professional, insider world of politics is that when one party is having its convention, the other party goes silent.

They don’t run any ads, they don’t do any press conferences, they don’t do any appearances — or very few.  It’s a courtesy.  It’s a courtesy and tradition, I guess, that’s been extended.  There have been violations, of course, here and there over the years. But, for the most part, it is a time-honored tradition that has been honored.  Now, during the Republican convention, yeah, the Democrats have daily reaction to it; that always happens.

But what Trump did today, I have never seen in my lifetime: A Republican presidential nominee go out and do a 10-minute, 30-minute, much less one-hour press conference and just refuting everything he’s heard at the Democrat convention to date. He just blew it up.  And, in addition to that, he answered questions about this email business and the hack and the Russians and so forth.

It just has the media outraged.  They can’t believe that Trump said some of the things that he said when he was commenting before he took questions on the speech by Bill Clinton last night — which we’re gonna get into, of course.  Hang in there.  Trump said — and this is classic. This is a classic demonstration that he has a performer’s ego and understands how to deploy it. He said, “I kept waiting.

“There was a chapter in that story I recall and I wanted to hear about it. I kept waiting for it and waiting for it; I never heard that chapter.”  He was waiting for the media to ask, “What chapter, Mr. Trump? What chapter?”  And he wasn’t gonna answer the question ever.  That was the point.  But he teased ’em. He titillated ’em.  “I kept waiting to hear the one chapter. The speech was actually kind of boring,” Trump said of Clinton’s speech.  “It was actually kind of boring.

“I was waiting for the one chapter that could have jazzed it up, but I didn’t hear that chapter.”  Well, everybody knows what he’s referring to.  The thing… And there were a couple of them today. We are working on rolling off the audio right now, so I’m just giving you snippets from my extensive memory, and I’m paraphrasing things that Trump said. But this one, this one… I mean, the media everywhere on both sides of the aisle is just about to have a cow over this one.

“Mr. Trump! Mr. Trump! Do you have a relationship with the Russians?  Do you have any relationship to the hack?  Are you…? Are you…? Are you having any relationship with Russians?”  Trump said, “I don’t have any investments in Russia. I sold a guy a house. I sold a Russian oligarch a house in Palm Beach. I bought the place for $40 million and I flipped it for $100 million. It was a great deal, but I don’t have any investments.” But then he said, “I really hope the Russians can find Hillary’s emails.”

And you should have seen the explosion in the aftermath on cable networks of the roundtable discussions, particularly on CNN. They could barely keep everybody on camera.  They were jumping out of their seats like they were jacks-in-the-box.  “I can’t believe what he just said!  He just said that he hopes the Russians intercede in the presidential election!  That’s unbelievable!  I can’t believe what I just saw!”  One Clintonista, one Clintonista…

One girl that was supporting Clinton just went absolutely bonkers over that.  They don’t know how to deal with this.  They’ve never… The Democrats and the media, they’ve never had to deal with anything like this.  And I have to tell you something, folks.  When I got here — all night last night and when I’m working on prepping the show this morning — I am under the impression that the first thing I’m gonna talking about is Bill Clinton’s speech last night.

I’m saying to myself, “What is there besides that? There isn’t anything else.  That’s the news.  That’s the story.”  And I know (because I know you) that you’re dying to hear my take on that speech, and you will hear it in due course.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I am in awe here.  This just has not been done.  This is a literally hijacking.  Like I was saying, I expected the first thing out of my mouth today and for awhile was gonna be the Bill Clinton speech last night.  And I heard that Trump was gonna do a presser from Miami, and I said, “Okay, cool.” But it wasn’t until halfway through, maybe not even halfway through it that I realized the first thing I’m gonna do talking about today is Donald Trump, not Bill Clinton.

The first thing I’m gonna be talking about is Trump and this press conference and not Bill Clinton, not because of partisan preference, just because the news is the news.  And the Democrat convention and what happened last night is now old news because of what Donald Trump did today, and there isn’t a Republican — certainly not a Republican presidential nominee — who’s ever done anything like this or who would.

Pick one. George H. W. Bush? No. This would never happen. He would be too disrespectful. “Not prudent.” George W. Bush? Double-down no way.  “Not gonna interfere in the political process. Not gonna sully, not gonna soil, not gonna dirty the process here by interceding in a political fashion. Not gonna do it. Not gonna go there.” Who else?  Reagan? Maybe, but that’s so… Who knows? But the point is, there isn’t a Republican nominee, there isn’t a Republican candidate for nominee who would do it.

And Trump was eating it up, and Trump had them eating out of the palm of his hand.  He got a question, a couple questions about gay marriage, and he finally told the infobabe (paraphrased), “Be quiet. I’ve answered that question a zillion times and I’m not answering it anymore. Next question.”  This… I’m telling you this the Trump of late last summer, last fall dealing with these people.  The Trump today… Not that he vanished, but the Trump today is the Trump that got all that support, that had all that excited people, that had all that momentum behind him.

It was fun to watch, and it was right on.  He was clever, he was informed, and he was not stumped on a single question.  And he knew how to push their buttons.  He was measured. He was funny, not… I mean, you watch it. It was masterful when you see it.  And I know that some of you are not Trump people, and you might have a bit of resentment for this assessment.  I’m just telling you, as a performance, as a political event, it was primo.

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RUSH: What Trump said during his press conference… He said, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 Hillary emails that were missing.”

The media is beside itself.

The New York Times has already tweeted the following:  “Donald called on Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email.”  The thing about it is Trump is putting ’em all on. He’s laughing silently with all of this stuff, and they’re buying it! They have no sense of humor, particularly when you’re laughing at them, when you’re mocking. They can’t… They have no tolerance. The party of tolerance and compassion, the party of Jon Stewart and all these mean-spirited media people, they can’t take one-tenth of it tossed back to ’em.

And so here’s Trump basically mocking them.  It’s the media that doesn’t care about Hillary’s emails.  It’s the FBI that didn’t care about Hillary’s emails.  And Trump knows that everybody knows that.  Trump knows that everybody thinks that Hillary’s getting away with committing a crime that nobody else could get away with.  So Trump is saying, “Russia, I hope you can find these missing emails.”

It’s like an appeal; they’re the last people we can go to for justice here. And it just ticks ’em off. “I can’t believe what I just heard! Trump is actually suggesting that the Russians hack the Democrat Party and Hillary Clinton.”  They do not have the slightest idea what he’s doing.  I do.  I know it backwards and forwards.  And it’s… Folks, it is so much fun to watch this knowing full well what’s going on here and how it’s impacting these people.

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RUSH:  As we speak, Mr. Snerdley, get this.  I just… I have my methods.  Just checked Twitter.  Conservatives on Twitter — I don’t know how many, and I don’t know how widespread it is. But there’s a conservative meltdown going on on Twitter over what Trump did today.  “This is not my GOP!  This is not my party!  This is not my country! Oh, no!  Oh, no!  Republicans need to condemn this now.  Republicans need to…” You know, it’s…

And Obama’s out apparently… Obama granted an interview — get this — to Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight or TMZ, some entertainment channel. Obama’s out there saying, “Hey, Trump’s not a candidate. He’s a performer. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  He doesn’t know anything.  He just a performer.  He’s fooling people by being a performer.” There isn’t a Republican that I know who could do what Trump did today.

One hour, and he took it to the Clintons.  He took it to the opponents.  This is what has been missing.  He took it to the Democrats. He took it to the opponents.  He chided them for no American flags.  He chided them for not mentioning ISIS and terrorism.  He chided them for their apparent association with the criminal element in American culture.  By the way, the story is that they “forgot” to put American flags up.  They didn’t forget out to put American flags.

Folks, Harvard University… I’m gonna remind you of this. Harvard University had a study — I think this is two years ago now — and it was composed two basic things.  Fourth of July parades are not good because it creates interest for the Republican Party.  And the second thing in the survey from Harvard was the American flag is not good to be used by Democrats because the American flag makes people support Republicans.

But I don’t care.  Whether they forgot it or whether they purposely didn’t put any American flags out, it’s still the same result.  Either they didn’t care enough — it doesn’t occur to them during a nationally televised, four-day convention to put a couple American flags out — or they purposely didn’t.  Either way, it does not redound well to them.  So Trump is hitting the Democrats. He’s hitting their convention. He’s hitting Bill Clinton. He hit Hillary.

He challenged Hillary to do what he was doing.  She can’t.  I guess she’s not a “performer.”  She couldn’t do what Trump did for five minutes. — and that is not an exaggeration.  And Trump’s performance today was substantive.  It was not cast off.  It was not flippant.  And he didn’t not answer questions.  He took ever question that was thrown at him.  Now, the media might not like the answers.  Like, “Gee, I hope the Russians can find Hillary’s email.”  (laughing)

To watch them react to that, ’cause they don’t get what Trump is doing.  They think he’s actually calling for Russian hackery.  What Trump is doing is reminding everybody that those emails are being purposefully hidden from us.  I actually think it’s quite clever to ask the Russians to do it since none of the traditional American institutions we rely on for this stuff are coming through.  See, I know, folks. I know exactly what Trump is doing.

I know what his methodology is doing.  I know what his instincts are.  And it’s, therefore, easy to predict the reaction.  By the way, speaking of hacks, do you know how we know that the mankind global warming hoax is a hoax?  (interruption) Exactly right.  Hacked information from the University of East Anglia.  There was somebody that was working on the staff at the University of East Anglia  –which is in Britain. It’s the UK.

It was somebody working on this who realized what was going on with this hoax, and they were making up numbers. They were falsifying fossil records, all kinds of things to prove their point, and there were emails of all the noted global warming experts — guys at Penn State, the guys at NASA — and this guy leaked all of these emails.  He had to hack in there and he leaked all the emails. And there has been hell to pay ever since.

But that was an instance where an entity hacked some American computers and the computers at the University of East Anglia to expose the manmade global warming fraud, ’cause the climate’s constantly changing.  It’s never stable.  Oh, the hoax is that we in America are causing it.  Now to the Clinton speech.  Oh, one more thing about Trump.  Trump said something today that was brilliant on student loans, and I say it’s brilliant because he’s repeating what I’ve said.

I guess he got a question on student loans, because the Democrats are making a big deal about it, and he’s exactly right. Democrats throughout this convention are complaining and whining about student loans.  They run the program!  The student loan program was taken over by Obama.  Banks have nothing to do with it.  They might be the place you go to get the loan.  The government provides the money, the government sets the terms, the government is running the student loan program.

Barack Hussein O is running it, and yet here are the Democrats whining and moaning about the burden that students carry with them after graduation.  And it’s like everything else they’re complaining and complaining about this week. Everything they’re whining and complaining about, they did, they created as a result of policy, both Obama and pre-Obama.  But they’re not being called on it.  They’re not being held accountable.

The Limbaugh Theorem is in play, and that’s what Trump called ’em on. He said (paraphrased exchange), “The student loan program is a pass-through, and the students are the conduits.” “What do you mean, Mr. Trump! What do you mean?” “Well,” he said, “look. Do you see tuition coming down?  No.  You see tuition increasing.  Tuition is getting more expensive.  And you can’t go to college without getting a lot of money in loans.  Who in charge of the loan program?  The government.

“So the government is sending money to where?  The colleges.”  He says, “It’s a secret program to get money to the colleges, government money to the universities and to use the students as the conduits via the student loan program.” He’s exactly right, and that’s why tuitions don’t come down is because liberals own the universities. The people that work there need to be paid and paid handsomely.  It’s like the Democrat Party’s arrangement with labor unions is a money-laundering operation of sorts.

It’s a way to get money from the government and Democrats to the unions and then back to Democrat campaign coffers, which I’ve explained on previous broadcasts.  So I will not distract anybody by getting into that again right now.  But he’s exactly right on the student loan program.  Students are conduits.  Federal money… Everybody wants federal money, folks. Today, everybody just wants their hand in the till.

Everybody wants their hand in the Treasury, all of these trillions — even trillions we don’t have — are in there, and they want to grab whatever they can get.  And the universities and the Democrats and the establishment — not just the Democrats, the establishment politicians — have seen to it that the universities have a never-ending flow of taxpayer money via the student loan program.  That’s why interest rates are never gonna be marginally, seriously adjusted.

It’s why tuition isn’t gonna come down.  Federal money guarantees it doesn’t have to.  Once again, when we talk about universities and tuition and lodging, there is no relationship between market experience and costs.  In other words, there’s no relationship to what people can afford and what it costs.  Attending a major university is above — way beyond — most people’s ability to pay.  “No matter.  No problem.  Here comes a student loan program.”

The federal government is funneling money to the universities that otherwise they wouldn’t get because people can’t afford it.  This is how you afford it: You send ’em into hock for 50 to $200,000 after they graduate.  It’s a scheme, and it’s a very, very clever scheme.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  They’re still going nuts at CNN.  Now it’s Donna Brazile’s turn to go nuts on Trump.  And all he’s doing is goosing the media here.  You know, these people, I keep thinking that I understand their lack of sense of humor and their total block to anything funny, particularly when it’s at their expense. But it’s worse than I even thought, and they have no sense of humor.  Not only that, they don’t even understand when you’re telling a joke about ’em.

Half the things they think I am — vicious, mean-spirited or whatever — are ’cause I’m just telling jokes about ’em, and they don’t come anywhere near getting it.  They think I’m actually making serious political analyst comments that are so “beyond the pale,” and I’m just cracking jokes about them.  They just don’t get it.  But, boy, you know, when they get their little Johnny Stewart or Colbert or get these people run around, they can tell all the jokes they want.

They can be as vicious and dirty and filled with lies, and they think it’s great entertainment, great art, what have you.  But you turn it around on them, and you’re running into Mr. and Mrs. Freeze.  Here again, play 33.  This is what has ’em all in a tither.  Even some conservatives are melting down over this, ’cause people don’t know how to hear Trump.  The left is just wound so tight on this.  If you listen to the very end here, you’ll find out what Trump is actually doing with this.

TRUMP:  I will tell you this: Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.  I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.  Let’s see if that happens.

RUSH: He’s telling everybody the media’s covering it up as we speak.  The last thing anybody’s gonna be rewarded for in the media is finding these emails.  ‘Cause everybody knows they’re in the process of being covered up.  They’re in the process of being hidden.  We’re in the middle of a giant hack.  The DNC server, the cyber experts are telling us that the Russians did it.  The Russians are denying it.  But everybody’s being led to believe that it was the Russians and nobody else; so that’s what everybody thinks.

But there’s 30,000 emails that Hillary deleted we haven’t seen, and everybody’s wondering what’s on them. There doesn’t seem to be any interest to hold her accountable, no serious interest. So Trump is saying, “Hey, maybe the Russians can find them. Since they hacked the DNC, maybe they can find Hillary’s emails.”  It’s exactly the kind of thing you would hear in any real place in real America, what real people are saying.  And then he closes it out by saying, “I think you’ll probably be rewarded mightily by the media.  Let’s see if that happens.”  Here’s more from the Trump press conference.

I don’t have nearly enough time to get all the bites in here, but just to give you a flavor…

TRUMP:  It’s been 235 days since Crooked Hillary Clinton has had a press conference.  And I’ll tell you why.  Because, despite the nice platitudes, she’s been a mess.  Look at what’s happened with ISIS, which isn’t even mentioned.  You look at what’s happening with law and order. They don’t even mention our police.  They mentioned everybody but our police.  They don’t have an American flag on the dais until we started complaining, and then they ran up with two very small, little flags. One that we see.  So, you know, I put myself through your news conferences often — not that it’s fun — 235 days, no news conference for Hillary Clinton.

RUSH:  Undeniably true.  It just bugs them that he points this out.  They’re not supposed to… Nobody’s supposed to point out that she doesn’t do press conferences.  Nobody’s supposed to point out the stuff about the flags. Nobody’s supposed to talk about that.  And then.  And then he ripped her on her flip-flop on the Trans-Pacific Partnership — and, of course, claimed credit for her flip-flop.

TRUMP:  She lied about TPP.  She was for TPP. She saw me on television knocking the hell out of it, because it’s a horror show; it’s gonna kill all our jobs.  She heard it and she said, “Wow!” She can’t win that subject in a debate, so all of a sudden she goes and she goes against TPP.  Her vice president is one of the biggest proponents of TPP, and now he’s going against it.  And Bernie Sanders was right.  He was against it.  They will go for TPP and vote it in very shortly after the election if she wins — which, for the sake of our country, we all hope and I hope that she doesn’t.

RUSH:  We all hope she doesn’t — except the media. They can’t wait to coronate her.  And finally, a story on Saturday Night Live and the Russian hacked emails.

TRUMP:  It’s just a total deflection.  This whole thing with Russia.  In fact, I saw her campaign manager — I don’t know his title — Mook. He said, “We think it was Russia that hacked.”  And then he said, “Uhhhh, could be Trump.  Yeah, yeah, Trump! Trump!  Oh, yeah, Trump.”  He reminded me of Jon Lovitz for Saturday Night Live in The Liar where he’d go, “Yeah, yeah. I went to Harvard. Harvard. Yeah, yeah!” This is the guy.  You have to see him.  “Yeah, could be Trump. Yeah, yeah.” So it is so farfetched, it is so ridiculous.

RUSH:  So he’s listening to them accuse him of hacking, and that’s added context to his appeal to the Russians (laughing) to finish the job.

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RUSH:  Next audio sound bite may be number five.  I’m gonna lift a ban on MSNBC for that.  You know the IRS is the most powerful collection… Speaking of that, maybe we could ask Trump to ask the Russians to get Lois Lerner’s emails and find out what she was doing vis-a-vis the Tea Party, since he’s asked the Russians to find Hillary’s.  By the way, why is everybody so concerned?

Hillary told us that those 30,000 emails that she withheld from the State Department from her server, there’s nothing on there. They’re just private stuff, like XXXL yoga pants and emails about Chelsea’s wedding and engagement party and reception and registration and all. That’s all the kind of stuff that’s on there, Pilates routines and all. What’s the big deal if we find those emails?  Nothing’s on ’em, right?

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I want you to listen to this David Gregory sound bite one more time, because there’s a slip here. He refers to the Democrat Party as “our major” political party, and then corrects himself. It’s about halfway through this.  Listen carefully.

GREGORY: You know, I’ve run out of words to express my shock in how, uh, completely beyond the pale that Donald Trump is as a potential leader of the Free World, the commander-in-chief of our country. This was truly beyond the pale. I mean, he is encouraging Russia which, by all accounts, was behind a leak of our major — uh, one of our major political parties —

RUSH: You hear that?  Stop the tape!  “Behind the leak of our major — uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh! One of our major political parties.”  And therein lies the real rub. (paraphrased) “He’s asking the Russians to get the goods on the Democrats — our major political party.”  He was actually telling a joke that they still don’t get.