RUSH: This is Alexandria, Virginia. Will, it’s great to have you with us, sir. Glad you waited. Hello.

CALLER: Happy Monday, Rush. Thank you.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.

CALLER: Yeah, thank you for all you do. So I’m gonna go on the record and I’m gonna make a prediction, and I would love to get your reaction to this.

RUSH: Hmm! All right.

CALLER: All right. I predict that in the 2020 presidential election, what’s gonna happen is President Trump is going to win. He’s going to win by an Electoral College landslide, and he’s also gonna win the popular vote. The reason I say this is, presidential elections are not nuanced. They are a very basic, binary choice.

RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah.

CALLER: What we’re looking at right now —

RUSH: Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. Big word. For those of you in Rio Linda, “binary” means two options, two things, two choices, two circuits, two numbers, two whatever. Okay. So you think the election is about one of two things, two big issues?

CALLER: I think it’s about, yes, two issues. It’s either about socialism or capitalism. Pure and simple. The Democrat Party represents socialism or maybe even communism, and if Joe Biden is the best version of what they have to put forward and he’s considered moderate, this is already over.

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: Nobody wants to mess with this.

RUSH: Look, don’t get… Folks… Now, hang on here. Don’t hang up, Will —

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: — and don’t anybody get mad at him. Joe Biden is not a communist.

CALLER: No, no.

RUSH: If Joe Biden is the nominee, they’re gonna have to teach him how to be a communist and socialist. He’s a moderate leftist. He is a liberal. There’s no question he’s a liberal. But he’s not a Cortez, and he’s not anything like these young Millennial socialists or college professor socialists and communists that you find. So he would have to be told how to do it, which is what his campaign has been up to now. (impression) “Joe, you — you — you gotta come out against the Hyde Amendment!” “Well, I’ve been for it for 40 years.” “I don’t care, Joe. As the nominee, you gotta be against the Hyde Amendment.”

So Joe comes out against the Hyde Amendment, but he can’t tell anybody why. Joe copies people — he’s a plagiarist — because he doesn’t have the ability to originate things on his own. Look, I don’t think Biden’s gonna be the nominee, gang. I think I… Did I say this last week? Did I go public? I don’t think Biden’s gonna be the nominee, but that’s neither here nor there. Your main point is that elections are not complicated.

The political consultants trying to make them all about nuance and this and that, what the Rust Belt wants versus the southern states versus the elites on both coasts. But really what it comes down to is something simple: Santa Claus or pay for it. Capitalism or socialism. Wall or no wall. Things like that. So you think that Trump’s gonna win in both a public vote landslide and Electoral College landslide. So you must be saying that you think that there aren’t nearly enough voters who are actually socialist or pro-socialist to elect a Democrat in 2020?

CALLER: That’s what I would surmise, yes.

RUSH: Okay. Can you tell me why? Because everything we see involving reporting on the left, their own commentary, everything would tend to believe that particularly young people are a rising tide of socialist-preferring people, who may not even know what it is, but it doesn’t matter. They see the word and they like it. They think it’s equality. They think it’s fairness. They think it’s sameness. They think it’s “no hurt feelings.” They think “no losers.” That’s what they think socialism is, and they’re all for it — and Democrats are banking on the fact that it’s a winner. That’s where they’re headed.

CALLER: Yeah. Well, when I look at it, I can only view from my limited perspective, my limited view of things. Certainly, there’s a swath of people — and maybe they’re young; maybe they’re older — who take that socialistic view. But from my perspective, things are becoming more and more polar and you have to make a choice. And maybe that young segment will pick that. But I suspect most of the country, apart from the yellow dog Democrat voters, are going to ask the question, “Do I really want to go the way that this stuff is going?”

You look at where the Democrat Party is; it is greatest gift to the Republican Party right now, because all it is is spewing darkness, vileness, hatred, and anger toward one person. And all of those who voted for Trump, they’re saying to you, “You’re a horrible person, too. You are just as dark, because you would vote for a criminal.” Most of those people are probably quietly sitting and waiting for their opportunity to say, “I’m not a criminal, I’m a patriot, and I’m gonna vote for the guy who’s a patriot for this country.”

RUSH: Well, there —

CALLER: That’s what’s gonna happen.

RUSH: I’ll have to concede that there is logic in your approach here, and you can find nonscientific… (sigh) Well, I don’t know if it is nonscientific. It’s not just anecdotal. I mean, MSNBC and CNN are hemorrhaging audience. Now, what do you make of that? Does that mean less enthusiasm for Democrat issues, or does it mean that those two networks really screwed up by promising their audience Trump was going to jail, and now Trump’s not only not going to jail, he’s still running? Now that Mueller didn’t find any collusion, the Democrats… Pelosi doesn’t want to impeach, and so those people got nothing to listen to anymore. There’s nothing to watch.

I mean, they tuned in simply to be reassured that Trump was gonna be executed politically, sent off to Siberia or wherever. We were gonna be rid of him and Hillary was gonna be put in the Oval Office. When it became obvious that wasn’t gonna happen, they said, “I don’t need these networks anymore.” But does it mean that they don’t want to vote for Crazy Bernie or Biden or any of the others? I think my gut perception of things now… The last time I was on Fox, I got a question similar to yours. It was about cultural attitudes.

I don’t remember the specific instance, but it was about decay and rot in our culture, and I answered, “There are so many more people that are repulsed by this and they can’t wait to vote against it and so forth,” and the person on Fox said, “Wait a minute. Haven’t we already lost this? Haven’t we already lost the culture war? Isn’t that what this…?” I said, “No way!” I said exactly what you just said. “There are invisible people out there left and right who are repulsed by what’s going on, and they’re never talked to. They’re never reached.

“The media’s not interested in who they are — and if they are ever found, if they do ever speak up, they’re mocked and ridiculed and made fun of as a bunch of Victorian prisses, and so they just remain silent and so forth.” So you’re essentially saying that there are a lot of people out there that are just fit to be tied over the way Trump is being treated here, and they’ve got no outlet for it other than an election. Your point about elections being binary is a good one too. They’re not as nuanced as we would like to think. I’ll never forget the 2002 midterms. The elections in 2002, the midterms, they upended everything.

They stood every bit of conventional wisdom on its head. That’s why I never forget it. The first thing that happened in those elections, those are the first elections after George W. Bush was elected in 2000. And you know the drill now. The party that holds the White House traditionally loses lots of seats in the House of Representatives in the first midterm election after a presidential election.

Nobody knows exactly why. The conventional wisdom is that voters realized the mistake they made voting for the president and they take it out against his party. I’ve always thought that was caca. But absent anything else, we’ll go with it. In that election, the 2002 election, the Republicans gained seats, and it came after the Wellstone memorial, which was a condensed version of what the Democrat Party has been since election night 2016.

The Wellstone memorial was an absolute disaster for the Democrat Party. It was ostensibly a memorial service quasi-funeral for Paul Wellstone that they turned into one of the most mean-spirited, caustic, anti-American political rallies. Republican senators, friends of Wellstone were booed out of the place, some violently threatened, and they had to leave.

The second thing about those elections that stunned me, the number one issue in exit polls was values. Values is a nationwide issue. These are congressional races. The midterms are always House of Representatives, election Senate, you know, one-third of the Senate is up. But the number one issue that got people out was values.

Nobody was really talking about values. It was in the after 9/11 period when this happened, and I should mention the Democrats were highlighted in exit polls as being very weak on traditional values. And I’ll never forget for two weeks the Democrats are running around promising everybody they’re gonna look at this, we’re gonna get this right.

Everybody was stunned that values — you remember this? — that values was the number one issue in the exit polls that got people out to vote and determined their vote. And nobody could remember values being part of the campaign. So elections contain shock, surprises often. That one stands itself upside down in how it violated conventional wisdom.

And there are microcosms in that year that the Democrats have been portraying and fulfilling for two and a half years now. I mean, if you look at things in the normal confines of decency and normalcy where we all think we have manners and that we all are relatively polite and we’re respectful, and we try to do the right thing.

Look, I know there are exceptions to all this, nobody’s perfect, but there is nothing, folks, there isn’t a single thing about the Democrat media-industrial complex behavior since election night 2016 that is in any way normal. It is rooted in hatred daily, compounded hatred. It looks like hysteria. It looks like arrogance. There’s nothing redeeming about it. It’s not the kind of behavior that is magnetic and attracts people to it.

There’s nothing about the way the media and the Democrats, just in the daily treatment of Donald Trump and the people that work for him. And it is rooted in a personal hatred for Trump because he had the audacity to win and because he is such an abnormal outsider that they still can’t accept it, they still can’t come to grips with it, and it’s causing them to behave in ways — like George Will said the other day that if your kid behaved like Donald Trump you’d send him to bed without supper, proving that George Will knows how to starve children.

But in truth, who is actually behaving badly here? The Democrats, the media are out of control to people who watch. Now, you have to understand that a certain significant percentage of America is eating it up. They’re loving it, they behave the same way. You see ’em on Twitter. You see ’em out there in other social media.

Question is, how big is that number? Are we approaching 50-50 status, half the country is this mean, this irrational, this jaundiced? We don’t know. We assume not. But we don’t know. That’s why we have elections. Sometimes elections don’t answer these questions specifically. They answer other questions. But I appreciate the call. It was good.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I’ve been thinking about this caller that we had 20 minutes ago who wanted to know the “binary” suggestion, that the 2020 campaign will be a binary election. It will be socialism versus capitalism, capitalism versus communism-socialism, what have you. Our caller believes that if that indeed is the question, that Trump wins in a landslide. “He wins, in a landslide, the popular vote; he wins in a landslide in the Electoral College,” and he wanted my opinion on that. I hem-hawed around, circled around the question.

By the time time ran out, I had never gotten there. So this is the benefit of having the next hour. I can circle back to it, and I can get my two cents on this. I think the caller’s on to something. There’s part of me… I’ll be honest with you, folks — and I probably shouldn’t say is this. (chuckles) But that binary choice scares me because I’m not sure. I would hate to lose an election where it is obvious that what’s on the ballot is socialism/communism versus capitalism. Whew! (interruption) Well, because we don’t know.

We can do our best. We can use common sense to try to analyze where the country is and where it’s going and who wants it to go in directions other than those it’s going. Culturally, there’s no question. Culturally and socially, there’s no question that we’re trending away from what we would all call decency and normalcy. But has that reach majority status or not? Economically, when you start talking capitalism and socialism, we’re all prisoners to what we see in media, and we — “we,” people like us — have to constantly remind ourselves that we’re watching fake news.

I mean, every story, you have to remind yourself that we’re watching fake news. ‘Cause I’m telling you, folks, in the Drive-By Media, capitalism is pass. Capitalism is mean, capitalism is defunct, capitalism’s been proven to be unfair. It’s causing climate change, all this horrible, rotten stuff! The only people you see on Drive-By Media are people who think like that. That’s easy to convey, which is one of the media’s tricks is trying to convey that they represent the majority — “reflect,” I should better say, the majority — of the thinking in the country.

But I don’t think so, and I actually think that this argument, capitalism versus socialism… Despite my fears about it, I think it’s the campaign we needed to have. I think it needs to happen. I really do. We all do, because why? We have the quintessential capitalist in office. We don’t have to elect the quintessential capitalist. We’ve already, fortunately, done that. There isn’t anybody better out there we could have as the quintessential capitalist. Now, I realize a lot of people are gonna hear me say this…

“Rush, this guy is doing more damage to whatever it is he believes in than you can possibly imagine.” I reject that. I think it’s media caca. I think it’s Democrat Party caca. I reject that totally. Now, the quintessential socialist. Who would be the quintessential socialist? Who’s the best representative of pure, undiluted socialism? Right now, it’s Crazy Bernie, who is plummeting in the polls. It would have been Bernie in 2016 if Hillary hadn’t rigged the deck against him using foreign meddling. (interruption) Well, Elizabeth Warren’s a close second. Elizabeth Warren… (interruption) I don’t know if she’s gonna survive.

Elizabeth Warren would be a good stand-in for Bernie as the quintessential socialist, because what’s her nom de plume? “You didn’t build that! You didn’t make that happen. You don’t own that. You didn’t do diddly-squat. You fed off all of us. If we hadn’t built the roads and the sewers, you wouldn’t have built the factory. So screw you!” So there you have a great socialist in Fauxcahontas, which is a fake Indian, which Trump will have fun with. But the point, the argument has to happen. We’re building to it.

It has to happen. It has to happen. There have to vote on this. Now, one vote’s not gonna end it. I mean, if the 2020 election is, without question, socialism versus capitalism and socialism loses, they’re not just gonna pack up and go home and say, “Okay. Well, I guess we have to become capitalists, then.” They’re gonna become even more enraged than they are now, more destructive, more destructive than they are now. But I think it’s the argument that’s going on in the country right now anyway.

It’s just not called that, but that’s what the argument in the country is. What kind of country we want is the argument taking place now. So we may as well just say what it is and look at it as there are two visions for this country. I thought it would have made a great theme for Trump’s State of the Union show back in January. It turned out, he did a great one anyway. But I think that it’s made to order for this, and the quintessential capitalist has evidence out the wazoo.

Read the Victor Davis Hanson column that I skimmed for you today or just chalk up what you already know about the United States, in less than three years, becoming an exporter of natural gas and oil. Solving our manager problems, no longer dependent, while bringing down the price to the consumer at the same time. Look at capitalist policies and what they do for minority employment, minority standards of living versus 50 years of socialist promises versus…? Fifty years. They’re from-the-beginning-of-time promises!

Socialists have promised from the beginning of time. Oh, and on the Democrat campaign stage will be none other than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez making the case and defending Venezuela and defending Cuba and trashing Walmart. Uh, Amazon. Six of one, half dozen of the other. But because I think that it’s the argument taking place right now… It may be buried briefly or just slightly underneath the surface, but it is the argument that’s taking place, especially on matters economic.

The primary reason why I think I could shed my fears over this and just go pedal-to-the-metal with it is we couldn’t have a better champion for capitalism running this election than Trump, who we’ve got now. I mean… (laughing) I mean, you want to put Romney in there as the capitalist champ? He could do it, but would he stand up for it? John Kasich? (interruption) No, don’t think so. (interruption) Do I think what? (interruption) That what? (interruption) Socialism…? (interruption) Oh, the question I’m being asked is, “Does socialism have an appeal beyond the urban populated centers of the great cities — New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles?” Feces capitals. Are Millennials outside of…? (interruption) Yeah.

Socialism is appealing greatly to Millennials who don’t know what it is! They think it’s fairness and equality. They put the word “democratic” in front of it to water it down. The people selling socialism to Millennials don’t call it that. They call it democratic socialism. “Ooh, democratic meaning we vote for it, yeah, it’s fair and it’s equal and there’s no losers and nobody laughs at anybody and there’s no punishment. And, yeah, cool, man,” or whatever.

I don’t know what percentage of Millennials are trending toward socialism. I suspect it’s not any greater than young generations in the past always trending toward this faux fairness, faux no pain politics, no suffering, no embarrassment, nobody gets laughed at, nobody loses, everybody wins. Young generations are filled with people who think like that. (interruption) Okay. Well, there’s always been student debt. You’re claiming it’s never been as high as it is now. Okay.

Well, Elizabeth Warren’s got a solution to that. Forgive it. And that will be attractive. “You mean I just have to vote for the fake Indian and my student loans are gone?” You got it, dude. That’s it. Vote fake Indian, and your student loans are wiped out. “Hey, man, like sign me up.”

But then you say, “But if you vote for the fake Indian, you don’t even need to go to school because you’re gonna get a free job. You don’t need an education, and you don’t need a job because you’re gonna get a guaranteed annual wage.”

“How much, man?” Six grand a year to start. I mean, she’s gonna make it easy to campaign against socialism. Because they’re gonna make the mistake, they’re gonna assume that everybody already is there. I don’t think those people are actually gonna try to sell it much, as though their attitude is gonna just be to confirm that we’re already there and get on board. And they’re making a mistake. Because it does need to be sold. There’s more people in this country than you can shake a stick at that want no part of it.