RUSH: Interesting story in the Washington Times: “If there’s one pundit responsible for President-elect Donald Trump’s stunning Electoral College victory, a new poll indicates it’s Rush Limbaugh.” Me.
“Christians Most Influenced by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity,” according to this poll. “A survey by the American Culture & Faith Institute measures which political commentator held the most sway among … spiritually active, governance engaged conservatives this election cycle.” It says here, “Mr. Limbaugh finishes first in the poll, with 19%,” followed by Sean Hannity at 17%, and Ted Baxter of Fox News — that’s an affectionate name for Bill O’Reilly — with 14%, Laura Ingraham at 12%. So got us to thinking, which we’ll share the results when we get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So the Washington Times has a story today reporting the results of a poll by the American Culture and Faith Institute, and the poll measures which political commentator held the most sway among spiritually active, governance engaged conservatives in this election cycle. And the Washington Times says that the poll produced me as number one in the poll followed by Sean Hannity in second place, then Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham. Tony Perkins is number five here in the list of the Family Research Council. They go on to basically describe how it was a non-endorsement endorsement and so forth.
Anyway, they try to buttress the claim in the poll that I more than anyone explained Trump to spiritually active, governance engaged conservatives. Well, when I saw this, I start thinking back to the fall campaign and some of the things that I focused on here. And I guess one of the major things I focused on was explaining Trump to people, particularly the media and Democrats and leftists, and even establishment Republicans who professed total ignorance, not understanding how Trump could survive any of these statements he was making that would have killed off any other politician.
The media could not drive them away.
The Democrats couldn’t drive ’em away.
The Republicans couldn’t drive them away.
No news story, no Access Hollywood tape, nothing could drive them away.
Only Trump could.
So we went back to the archives and Cookie found an audio sound bite of me from July, even before the fall campaign ginned up. This is July 21st. This is about five weeks after Trump announced on June the 16th. And what was going on at this time, Trump had just insulted McCain. He was refusing to apologize. He had said he doesn’t admire military people that get captured. This is after he had described Mexican immigrants, illegal immigrants, the way he did and said a number of things that as you recall back then, everybody in conventional politics was apoplectic. Well, they were laughing, too. They thought Trump was destined to implode, and it was gonna happen soon.
They’d never seen anything like it and they didn’t think it could survive. And they started talking, “Trump doesn’t even want to win. It’s obvious. A guy that wants to win doesn’t do what Trump’s doing, doesn’t say the things Trump’s saying.” And so they wrote him off and wrote him off and they continued to rely on what they thought they knew about establishment politics and how Trump didn’t fit in and his support at this early stage was just a fad and it had no legs to it.
So Cookie found a sound bite that gets close to illustrating this. July 21st. So what would that be now? Almost a year-and-a-half ago. It’s a couple of minutes of me explaining why conservative Christians who stayed home for Romney would come out and vote for Trump and stick with him.
RUSH ARCHIVE: The Drive-Bys, the media, the establishment in Washington are all trying to figure out why is Trump getting so much support. Why is he getting it? I’ll tell you why. On my left hand here, I’ve got the Planned Parenthood story, where we are murdering babies in the womb and selling body parts for profit. Planned Parenthood is doing it, bragging about it, setting prices, woman saying she wants to get a Lamborghini. Over here we’ve got Trump saying words about McCain. And in those two circumstances what’s everybody upset about? Trump.
There’s a sordid lack of proportion in this country, and my contention to you is that the American people are far more fed up with what they learned about Planned Parenthood. A vast majority of Americans are livid and scared and shocked and repulsed by what they’ve learned about Planned Parenthood, to the point that makes Trump’s comments about McCain pale in importance and comparison. And yet over here we have the establishment and the media, and they haven’t said a word about Planned Parenthood, but they’re beside themselves with anger and shock and dismay over what Donald Trump is saying. I mean, you talk about disconnect.
People in Washington, DC, at all levels of the political class — being media, elected officials, people that work at lobbying firms, fundraisers, the whole mess, the bureaucracy, I don’t think they have the slightest idea what it is that’s on the minds of your average American citizen these days. So, the average American does everything he or she can to get their attention. In the case of Republicans, sit home and not vote and let Barack Obama be elected.
No doubt in my mind that the four million or so Republicans that sat home in 2008 didn’t vote for Romney, or in 2012, didn’t vote for Romney, did that as the only way they could get a message to the Republican establishment. They were disgusted, they were fed up, asked for money, and never being listened to. So, to me, this is evidence of just how sick our whole political structure, and maybe culture at large, is right now.
RUSH: I should add that Trump was talking about Planned Parenthood at the time and expressing his disgust with it, and Planned Parenthood had its defenders, and they were coming out. They were denying all this and saying it wasn’t true, but it was despicable, it remains despicable. By the way, one of the first things that the Republican Congress is expected to do now is to defund Planned Parenthood. It is high on the agenda list and it looks like that’ll happen. And that’s gonna be an earthquake.
That’s gonna be an earthquake, and there’s gonna be a tsunami. And whatever it is that they are exercised about now, they will forget. I’m talking about the establishment, the left, the Democrats, they are going to go bonkers when that happens. Mr. Snerdley, you know who the black actor and entertainer Nick Cannon is? Have you heard what Nick Cannon said over the Thanksgiving weekend? Nick Cannon said that Planned Parenthood is planned genocide of African-Americans. He called it eugenics. He described it exactly as it is. He’s a black entertainer.
Nick Cannon. Help me out here. Did he used to have a relationship with Mariah Carey? He was married to Mariah Carey. Yeah, for a minute. Right. So that’s who he is. And, of course, then he took a relative amount of heat, and he reaffirmed what he had said. I have the story here but not in front of me so I’ve gotta paraphrase. But he said, African-Americans, you have to learn something. This system wasn’t set up for us. He’s talking about the founding of the country, and at the time of the founding, he would have been right. The days when, in order to get the Southern states to join Union, the framers had to make all kinds of concessions, which they made to allow slavery to continue, but they made sure to write in the Constitution the tools necessary to abolish it down the road, which also happened. You know, we are one of the only countries to abolish slavery, and yet the civil rights coalitions run around acting like it’s still the order of the day. But he went to point out, he said, look, you people celebrating Planned Parenthood have got to get a grip. They are committing genocide again.
And who are they? Well, it’s a bunch of white liberal plantation owner types that run and fund and pay for Planned Parenthood. He nailed it. And because it was over the Thanksgiving weekend it did not get a lot of attention. That would have been another earthquake and another tsunami had that happened during a normal news cycle.
So, anyway, there are a lot of other examples that I could have gone back to for the archives to explain Trump, or how I explain Trump to people. It’s safe to say that nobody listened in the establishment. I know the Democrats didn’t and I know the media didn’t, but I don’t think anybody did a better job of deconstructing who Trump is and why his base was glued to it, why they were inseparable. Only he could have done something to blow it up, but it would have taken a lot.
And the secret is the movement existed before Trump did, and the movement didn’t have a leader. People in the movement were hoping the Republican Party was going to be the vehicle, but the Republican Party wanted no part of it. They signed on with the rest of the Washington establishment. Trump came along and immediately tapped into a movement. This is not a put-down of Trump. I’m just giving you the timeline and the chronology.
He tapped into this movement and once people of this mind-set had a leader, they were not gonna let anything happen to the guy. They were not gonna let the usual attacks take him out, like the Access Hollywood video. They were not going to let the establishment destroy another person they believed in with the usual tactics. And they just ended up befuddling everybody. In fact, people to this day, the establishment to this day still can’t get their arms around the fact that Donald Trump got a greater percentage of the evangelical vote than any Republican since Reagan.
Because they look at Trump and they see the three marriages and the jokes, Alicia Machado, all the stuff in the media. They’ve never understand what the so-called moral majority is or who they are or what they’re about. They’ve never understood the Christian right. All they’ve ever done is disparage it. All they’ve ever done is impugn it because it’s Christian, because it’s religious, ah, ah, ah, ah, bad, can’t have that, kook, extremist, pro-life, ooh, bad, that’s all they know. They’ve never, ever taken the time to really understand that group, just like they haven’t taken the time to understand most of the people who live in this country.
So they have a confused, convoluted impression of who conservative Christians are, and the fact that they supported Trump in droves, they still can’t figure it out. We’ve got sound bites coming up, Doris Kearns Goodwin and David Axelrod, they still are struggling, how in the world did somebody as qualified and as brilliant and as prepared as Hillary Clinton lose to this buffoon? They are slowly going insane. They’ve already lost their minds. And now we’re witnessing them going insane.