RUSH: No. No. No, no, no, no, no. Let me try it again. I’m happy — I mean, I get frustrated when people don’t understand me when I think I’m crystal clear, but if they don’t it just means I’m gonna have to explain it again. So I’m gonna try explaining it again.

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: What I’m trying to tell you is, that when it comes to health care, when it comes to the Trump budget, we’re making a mistake if we judge how well Trump is doing if we plug him in to the existing failing, worthless, never-gets-anything-done systems in Washington. If instead we look at Trump as blowing all of that up and reforming it and changing it so that he gets done what he wants done, then you see it in a different way. Does that help?

It’s a thing that I have been saying since the campaign. Everybody judges Trump as though he’s your average, ordinary Republican or, for that matter, Democrat politician. They judge his success or failure on those things, and you can’t do that because he’s not that. Even if he wanted to be, he’s not a politician. He’s not of Washington. But they don’t know any other way. And I’m referring largely here to the media, but I’m also talking about the elected officials and all the satellite things, the think tanks, the lobbyists and so forth.

They only know the way we’ve always done it. You’ve heard people say, “We’ve never done it any other way, this is the way we do it,” and that’s how they judge success or failure. So they’ve got this guy Trump, they have yet to properly understand him. They’ve not even tried to understand who Trump is. They simply measure him a failure and a bigot and a bum because he can’t walk through their china shop without upsetting everything on the racks. What the people who elected Trump did was send him there to totally reorient this system and the way things get done because things have not been getting done!

The things that have been getting done have been against the will of the people. There are things that people have not voted on, like Obamacare and what really happened. If Obama had been honest about what he was gonna do with that, he would have never been elected. If Obama had been honest and told people that his objective after eight years was to see to it the Iranians were on the road to a nuclear bomb, he would not have been elected.

So Washington is made up of people who have to practice deceit and deception and distraction, get us looking at things over here while the real dirty work’s getting done where nobody sees it, and the media is right in there helping us, keeping us distracted. That system’s been up and running for decades. And Trump opposes all of it and ran on the premise that he was going to change it, reform it, blow it up, however you want to characterize it.

Donald Trump is not judging himself by how well he is mixing in with the way it happens in Washington. He went there, he wanted to go there to blow it all up. And I use that term synonymous with change it, reform it, improve it. I guarantee you, Trump is gonna judge himself not by the Ryan version of Obamacare, repeal and replace. I don’t think Trump is all of a sudden going to make himself subservient to the system that he ran to reform.

What Donald Trump is doing, if you ask me, is actually plowing straight ahead. It may appear slowly at times, steady, but he’s bucking the system at every turn, and that’s why they hate his guts. And that’s why they’re reacting to him the way they do. And I guarantee you, all of these things about him alleging that Obama wiretapped him, it’s being characterized as Trump’s an idiot, he sees it on TV and he repeats it. By the way, what’s wrong with that? We’re supposed to trust the news, aren’t we? Why can’t Trump say, “You know I saw on TV –”

“What do you mean, you saw it on TV?”

“Well, like everybody else did.”

“Well, you can’t trust it on TV.”

“Why not? Does it mean nobody on TV’s worth being trusted? I saw Bret Baier say this and I saw this –”

“What do you mean you saw Bret Baier? Is that how you learn what’s going on?”

“Are you telling me we shouldn’t learn, by virtue of cable news, what’s going on?”

But this business about Obama wiretapping him and so forth, and he doubles down every time. We’ve had the House and Senate intelligence chair, we’ve had former FBI people, former CIA people, the Russians, the Brits have all come out, “This guy’s a nut. This guy’s a screw loose. We didn’t wiretap him. Nobody’s done this.”

And yet Trump is doubling down on it. He’s not backing away. He’s not acting embarrassed. He sent some people from his administration out to apologize to the Brits over something that Judge Napolitano said that some people quoted. And even I get suckered into this, folks. You can’t avoid it. You have to be really conscious of this at all times.

Let me try this. You know, Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal has a piece that ran I think it was yesterday. Might be today, but I think’s yesterday. Headline of her piece: “The Republicans Relearn Politics – The health-care bill is far from dead, and a contentious debate is a sign of vigor.”

Now, I don’t want to be picking on anybody here. But there’s another Wall Street Journal column today, and I’ve had a lot of people send it to me. And some people think, “This is really good, Rush. You should get behind this.” And other people think, like Peggy Noonan — And the thrust of Peggy — I didn’t read it all, so allow me the opportunity to be somewhat wrong about some of it, but her basic thrust is Washington isn’t working. (imitating Noonan) This is bad, this is bad, and Trump has got to cross the aisle and start working with Democrats. He’s got to, he’s gotta cross. Mr. Trump, please, cross the aisle and bring some Democrats in.”

She also goes after his budget. “Why are we cutting? Why are we cutting? Why can’t we talk about growing? Why can’t we talk about dynamism? Why can’t we talk about expansion and growth?” My reaction to that was, that’s the kind of stuff that has gotten Republicans defeated. I’m sure that Peggy Noonan’s intentions are the best in the world, and I’m sure her desires are as pure as they can be. I don’t think Peggy Noonan is in any way trying to sabotage Donald Trump with this advice. I just think that it’s wrong.

Cutting the budget is damn well needed. We can’t have real growth with this kind of debt and spending to service it. It can’t continue this way. We’re wasting money. We’re giving money away to individuals and groups that are poisoning the culture of this country. It’s got to stop. And Republicans have told us for as long as we’ve been listening that they want a smaller government, that they want to cut the budget and they want to cut it here and cut it there.

How many years have we been told that we’re gonna cut the Department Education, nothing happens? How many have we been told we’re gonna cut the EPA, nothing ever happens? Here comes Trump’s budget and there’s some genuine cuts. In fact, all of CPB gone, corporate broadcasting, public broadcasting, gone. National Endowment Arts. National Endowment Humanities, gone, exactly what we’ve been promised countless times before that nobody’s delivered on.

And Trump wants to take the money saved and add it to the defense of the country, because these are dangerous times. We’re a great nation at risk in a dangerous world. We gotta do this sometime. If we’re actually going to remain a superpower and if we are going to remain a country with legitimate foundational economic growth and expansion, we’ve gotta get rid of some of the redundant, unnecessary, and in some cases poisonous government. And that’s conservatism 101.

And instead what do we get when it looks like things are falling apart, when it looks like things are, oh, my God, Trump’s such a disaster, Mr. President, please go to the Democrats and let them save you? As I say, I’m sure Peggy’s intentions are the most honorable in the world, as is her desire. But I think this is it in a nutshell. That’s exactly what the Republicans have always done, it’s what they’ve been advised to do, and that’s how they always squander advantages even after they win elections.

The Democrats are not interested in the things Republicans want to work. The Democrats are not interested in helping the Republicans make anything better. The Democrats have no desire for Trump to succeed in anything, even if that means that the country is in a better mood every day, the Democrats are not interested in it. And the fact that we still have people — and I don’t just mean Peggy Noonan. The fact that we have people who still don’t recognize the imminent threat posed by the Democrat Party and the American left is stunning to me!

And all you have to do is look at the Ninth Circuit and these judges who are usurping constitutional authority they don’t have simply to stop Donald Trump because they think he’s a pig. That’s what we’re up against. And that’s just one example. And taking it on isn’t going to be pretty. Taking it on is not going to happen while everybody’s happy and smiling.

Taking it on means wresting power away from people who believe that it is theirs simply because they breathe. We are living through an era where the media routinely makes things up and lies and distorts for the express purpose of destroying any opposition to them whatsoever.

For those of you that voted for Trump, you need to be grateful that the guy has a spine and a backbone and is not capitulating to all of this. You need to be thanking him every day that he’s not wavering and that he’s not caving to it, that he’s still calling them the fake news. In his little presser today — well, the availability, when he was talking about all the “no” votes he converted to “yes” votes on the health care reform, half of his comments were on the fake news and the fake media and how they continue to make it up and lie about it.

Now, back for one more comment here from the Kimberley Strassel piece in the Wall Street Journal. Remember her headline: “The Republicans Relearn Politics — The health-care bill is far from dead, and a contentious debate is a sign of vigor. What we are witnessing isn’t a legislative demise, but the rebirth of a long-lost Washington concept: politics.”

This is what it looks like. This is what it looks like when you have adversarial parties vying for power trying to win their version of ideas for the sake of the country. This is what it looks like. People have been educated in conflict resolution to think any disagreement like this is a bad sign, means the country is not working, there’s too many mean people. This is what it looks like.

This is exactly what went on during the founding. And our first caller here today referenced what it was like during the Revolutionary War. We had Americans who were opposed to fighting for independence even back then. We’ve never been unified a hundred percent at any time in this country. It’s always been politics that determines who wins. And that means you’ve got to have the guts and the chutzpah to fight for what you believe in, not caving and reaching across the aisle.

And I think, you know, in terms of the media and Ms. Strassel here, this is unique. I haven’t found anybody else analyzing it like this, and I throw my hat in the ring, the way I am too. Trump said during the campaign he’s gonna show the Republicans how to win. It’s what we’re watching. And we’re also, while he’s showing them how to win, we are seeing how they are programmed to lose. We’re seeing it. We’re seeing how they want to run away from the Republican president. They want to join the Democrats. They want to run away from a fight, and we’re seeing why the Republicans always lose.

Trump is showing them how to win, which is what he said that he was going to do. And I’m gonna tell you this: Trump is the impetus. Trump is the engine. Trump is the reason all of these politics, these negotiations are going on right now. And this is his wheelhouse. He loves it. You look at the news coverage, how can anybody love this? He loves it. He loves it so much he told people in Nashville at his rally, “I can’t wait, we’re gonna get in the room, I don’t care how long it takes, we’re gonna get in the room, we’re gonna talk about it, we’re gonna fix it.” Crowd was going nuts. He’s talking about health care reform.

And all the while these experts and the lifers and the people that have been doing this for years and years and know exactly how it’s done and think that Trump’s the biggest buffoon and bigot they’ve ever seen still don’t really realize what they’re up against. But they’re gonna figure it out at some point. The age of enlightenment is going to happen at some point. And I think they’re mocking Trump when he said he’s gonna win so much, you’re gonna get tired of it and you’re gonna ask him to lose now and then. Trump’s not losing anything, folks. I know the media makes it look like he is, and they’re singing songs of happiness as though he is, but he’s not.

What he’s actually doing is taking Republicans to school and showing them how. Isn’t this what we have always wanted, by the way? It’s what he’s doing. He’s showing them how it’s done. And in the process, he’s demonstrating everything that goes along with it. It’s not pretty. You don’t end up being loved by your enemies. This is how it happens.