RUSH: This is Steve in Tallahassee, Florida. Great to have you on the program, sir. How are you doing?

CALLER: Great, Rush. A real honor.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: I’ll get right to it. No one asked the question, why would Putin want or not want Trump as president versus want or not want Hillary? And I kind of know the answers, but I’m thinking Putin was celebrating at nine o’clock Eastern time thinking Hillary had won.

RUSH: Yeah, I saw that. Let me answer this. It’s a great question. That’s why I took your call first. Brilliant question, opportunity to make the host look good, and you did a great job and I really appreciate it, Steve in Tallahassee. Can I ask you a question before I answer this? Why does it matter what Putin wants? Why in the hell should we be tailoring the outcome of our elections on the basis of what Vladimir Putin wants? What, we want Hillary to win because Putin doesn’t like her? We want Trump to win because Putin — what does it matter what Putin wants?

Let’s find out who Castro wants to win and try to engineer that. That’s another one of these crazy narratives that the media and the whole Democrat-media complex has come up with here that has as its purpose impugning Trump. Now, the Democrat Party has loved the Russians all my life. The Democrat Party has envied the Soviets. The Democrat Party backed ’em up, protected ’em, defended ’em. Ted Kennedy worked with the Russians back in ’84 to help defeat Ronald Reagan.

Now all of a sudden we’re to believe the Democrats don’t like the Russians. It’s absurd. Obama loved Putin. Obama was de-arming our nuclear arsenal, was reducing it, for Putin. But yet a narrative was birthed, and that narrative is that Trump is such an idiot, that Trump is such a bumbling fool, that Vladimir Putin can’t wait to have him in the Oval Office because that will make Putin the effective president of this country.

Why? Well, because we know that Trump has done business with the Russians, and that’s why he won’t release his tax returns. That’s what he’s trying to hide. And so what it means is that if Trump’s elected, it means Putin is running the country. That’s been the Democrat fearmongering line, one of many, during the campaign.

But let’s unpack this. When you get right down to brass tacks, the Russians and our old buddy shirtless Vladimir had every reason to want Hillary to win, because Hillary Clinton would continue Obama’s feckless, damaging, dangerous policies which have benefited the Russians hugely, like the Iran deal.

Do you know how beneficiary the Iran deal was for the Russians just in terms of economics and commerce alone? Trump is not going to let the Iran deal stand, and he said he was not going to. But the CIA, now, that’s a different story. Some in the CIA might think Hillary Clinton would cut them along with the military. Some in the CIA might really be ticked off at Hillary Clinton over Benghazi. You ever stop and think of that?

Some CIA people were killed in Benghazi, and then Hillary and Obama were running around lying about it. There are people in the CIA that cut both ways here. We’re being told the CIA is unified in its hatred and opposition to Trump. Don’t believe it. There are many great people at CIA, FBI, who think of Hillary the same way you and I do, and they just might not want her having anything to do with the Oval Office. But we know that she let CIA officers die in Benghazi and then blamed some video that had nothing to do with it.

We also know that Julian Assange at WikiLeaks has said over and over again the Russians were not the source for all of the stuff he had of Podesta’s emails. I don’t know what you think of Assange or care, but he’s not on record as being a proven liar. People may think he’s a reprobate. They may not like him ’cause he sounds and looks effeminate, that’s somebody else’s problem. The Russian evidence in all this is laughable.

You know, one of the hackers used the name of the KGB’s most famous hacker spy and they typed stuff in Cyrillic. They left fingerprints in the hack of the DNC and Podesta’s emails. They left fingerprints that said, “Hey, we are the Russkies, and we were here.” Exactly. The Russians are gonna leave evidence they were there? No professional would do that.

So the idea that Putin wanted Trump doesn’t pass the common-sense test. He would much prefer somebody that is gonna continue the policies of Obama, which did nothing but strengthen Iran and strengthen Russia and weaken the United States. Why would he want somebody that’s gonna bring all that to a screeching halt, who would be Trump?