RUSH: We’re gonna start in Kent, Ohio. It’s Darrell. Great to have you, sir. Welcome.

CALLER: Hi, Rush.

RUSH: Hey.

CALLER: I’d like to thank you for your career, being an author and the philanthropy you do.

RUSH: Well, thank you, sir. I appreciate that very much. I am a well-known philanthropist — well, no. I’m not a well-known philanthropist, but I am one. I appreciate that, sir.

CALLER: Anyway, my point is — and I’ve been waiting for someone else to make the point — is about the behavior of Americans and Donald Trump’s popularity. I’m your age, no college, made a lot of money, and growing up — and this is something incrementally that the Baby Boomers saw — was you just had to keep your eyes open, and by me in Cleveland it was steel mills, car plants, residential, commercial construction, working on the freeways. In other words, it’s all jobs, Rush. And people had that sink into them, like the Baby Boomers as they grew up, and their families felt it. It’s all jobs. I think the people understand that. And that’s my point, is that the people grew up and slowly you don’t see it, you don’t see the car plants, you don’t see the new construction, and jobs are so important, it would reduce crime, it would reduce this epidemic depression and the drug problem. It all revolves around jobs.

RUSH: Right. I know exactly what you’re talking about. Let me put it this way, folks. Since he’s my age and important he did not go to college but he has always done well, made a lot of money. What he’s talking about, he had all these job opportunities. There were car factories, there was construction, all kinds of work to support development going on. There were careers. If you wanted to educate yourself, you can go in that direction, and he’s grown up, and he participated in that, he saw that, that economy supported him.

Now, he’s old enough to be able to look at it now, and those kind of things are not there for people. People that were his age when he first left home, became an adult, those jobs are not there now. While that’s the reality, what do people today hear? They hear the current president hailing this economy. In his most recent State of the Union speech Obama was out there bragging about what a great economy this is. And the Democrat Party’s routinely taking credit for it, talking about all this unemployment that we fixed. Why, it’s only 5%, we got job creation left and right. And the reality on the ground is none of that’s true. It doesn’t match what people’s lives are.

The reality that people are living doesn’t match what they’re hearing from Washington, DC., from the Democrat side of the establishment or the Republican side. And so there is this — either it’s a conscious awareness or a subconscious fear that things aren’t right. Now, it’s not that things shouldn’t change. I mean, things constantly change. Everything’s changing. The nature of work changes. Things modernize. Plants, factories use more robotic technology for manufacturing. Certain jobs leave the country and go overseas where it’s cheaper to manufacture something, which matters for consumer prices here.

But even considering all of that slow evolutionary change, this is a dramatically different landscape today that young people, Millennials, are graduating from college or high school and entering. The New York Times, on the Drudge, a story that actually acknowledges America’s best days are behind us. Now, it’s not an anti-Obama. Don’t misunderstand. I clicked on it, only read the first paragraph. It cleared during the radio program, so I haven’t had time to dig deep into it.

But that’s not a story that I would have seen growing up. It might have been an edge fear. It might have been a far flung possibility, but we never lived it. I mean, we had opportunity out the wazoo, couldn’t wait to leave home to strike out. I mean, not strike out and bottom out, but strike out and start living our dream. And today there’s abject fear in that. You’ve got people still living at home for as long as they can.

So it is dramatically different. And nowhere in Washington is it acknowledged. The opposition party doesn’t talk about changing it, the opposition party doesn’t talk about improving it, or if they do it’s with oddball policy wonk phraseology. “We must energize and activate the free market so that the upside, downside, make sure it permeates the auto sectors, the fourth quintile.” “What are you talking about? I just want a freaking job.” But there’s no criticism of this economy, there’s no acknowledgment that it’s bad. Instead it’s just a bunch of lies about how good it is.

Enter Donald Trump, who, whether by accident or by design, happens to be saying things that reflect the very anger, fear, beliefs, whatever else that people like Darrell here are noticing. It’s his way of trying to explain the Trump phenomenon. You know, Obama’s still out there blaming ATMs for job losses. He really is blaming ATMs, symbolic modernization, technological modernization, as one of the reasons for significant job loss.

Look at Flint, Michigan. Look at what we’re learning about Flint, Michigan, and before that Detroit. All of these places run by the Democrat Party for all of these years with no counterpunch. And people live it. They can’t escape it, and they can’t be told that what they’re feeling and living isn’t true. So, anyway, that’s his attempt to explain the Trump phenomenon. I don’t think it’s as complicated as many people are trying to make it out to be.

Ah, there’s the ear-splitting tone. Well, we’ll get back to the phones when we get back, so hang tough.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Let me give you another example. I talked about this earlier this week. It happened yesterday. The establishment of both parties, I guess, just assume that people are not paying attention, that most are not capable of understanding. But it’s the exact opposite. Now, what is one of the things that’s foremost on people’s minds right now? The open borders nature of our country. But it’s not just that the borders are open. It’s that we’re making no effort to stop it and that those who are arriving are uneducated or ill-educated.

Many do not even speak the language.

They are poor.

They are not qualified for most work.

As such, they will not find any because we already have 94 million Americans not working. So what’s gonna happen here, is they’re gonna end up in what’s called the American hammock. That’s what I call it. It’s called a safety net, but it’s become a hammock. They’re gonna end up on the public services rolls, and that is paid for by the people who are working. And the people who are working are beginning to get fed up with this arrangement, because at its very essence it’s not fair. And you can pooh-pooh it all you want, but people are big believers in fairness.

The Democrats have learned how to make big political hay out of the whole concept of unfairness and the people that are still working and playing by the rules — but fearing they’re going to lose their jobs, fearing that they lose their jobs and they’ll eat up their savings staying alive — do not think about getting in this hammock. They don’t think about joining the welfare state. They don’t want to get in the hammock or join the welfare state, and they don’t see anybody that seems in any way interested in their plight.

It’s everybody else that the government and both parties seem to have bending over backwards to please, to satisfy, to welcome. And they’ve about had it. And it’s not only illegal immigration. Now it has to be with these refugees that are pouring into the country from parts of the world where mass terrorism is taking place. And once again, the United States government doesn’t seem to care, is not at all concerned with who might be entering the country and what they might end up doing after they’re here. And so it is a continued dilution of the essence of this country’s greatness.

It is an attack on the institutions and traditions which define this country and the people who make this country work, and it’s been going on for years. There have been two recent elections, in 2010 and 2014, where the voters clearly stated what they wanted. They voted and elected people who had promised them they were going to work hard to stop this, and nothing has changed. If anything, it’s getting worse. More people are pouring across the border. Fewer people are being deported. More people are joining the welfare state.

And at the unspoken end of this, there’s a great awareness that many of them are magically going to become registered Democrats before too long. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were some push-back. It wouldn’t be so bad if there were some effort to stop this. But there isn’t. The Republican Party, which is the natural institution you would suspect would stand up and try to stop this, seems to be hell-bent on joining it. And if not joining it, they certainly aren’t making any efforts to stop it. What we get are shows of intent, such as meaningless votes to repeal Obamacare so that they say, “Hey, hey, we’re trying to repeal it, man, but we can’t.

“You know what? We didn’t have the Senate for the longest time, and Obama’s still up there in the White House. He’s gonna veto it. I mean, there’s nothing we can do. We can’t do it ’til we get the White House.” Before that it’s, “We can’t do it ’til we get the Senate.” Before that, “We can’t do it before we get the House.” And with each new achievement, new accomplishment, the winners have continually said, “Sorry, we still don’t have enough to do what you want us to do.” And during it all they make no effort to stop it.

Well, guess what?

“On Wednesday, Senate Democrats successfully and predictably blocked what many conservatives described as Speaker Paul Ryan’s ‘Show Vote’ on refugee admissions. It has been called a show vote because the Ryan plan, even if the president signed it, would still allow the president to bring in an unlimited number of refugees from an unlimited number of countries. Democrats’ filibuster on the motion to proceed to Ryan’s show vote comes one month after Speaker Ryan sent President Obama a blank check to fund visa issuances to nearly 300,000 (temporary and permanent) Muslim migrants in the next 12 months alone.

“Ryan’s decision to fully-fund Obama’s immigration agenda arguably ceded any leverage he may otherwise have had over Democrats and ensured the large-scale migration into America would continue and grow. Ryan’s bill, known as the American SAFE Act, was blocked by 55-43.” NewsBusters: “On Wednesday night, the major broadcast networks failed to cover” any of this. The Drive-By Media “failed to cover the move by Senate Democrats earlier in the day to filibuster the bipartisan Syrian refugee legislation that had passed the House in November with the help of 47 Democrats that would have tightened restrictions to more thoroughly vet refugees from the war-torn region seeking to enter the US overall.

“The vote failed to hit the 60 votes needed to overcome the fatal blow by Senate Democrats as the final tally was only 55 to 43.” So the bottom line was everybody is upset that Obama wants to bring in all of these refugees from Syria and elsewhere, and there aren’t any women and there aren’t any kids. They’re just military aged, able-bodied young men. And with everything going on the southern border and all the acts of terror taking place — San Bernardino, you name it, all the war going on in the Middle East — why in the world are we bringing in these refugees, knowing full well what’s happening in Europe because of this?

The American people have spoken, and Donald Trump is speaking for the people on this. We need a moratorium on this to figure out what’s happening and what’s going on. He was pooh-poohed. But we can’t vet them anyway because many of them are not known. They are not in possession of public records at the county courthouse in Damascus, for example. There’s no way to find out who they really are! It’s a continued attack. It’s viewed by the people who make this country work, as an invasion of the United States of America.

And there’s literally no sensitivity to this by elected officials in Washington, and instead what they come up with, is they tell us, “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this! We’re gonna write piece of legislation makes it not possible for this to happen,” and it turns out the legislation is just for show. And the American people are aware of all of this. They’re perfectly aware. This is the kind of stuff — and this is not isolated. It’s just one in a long line of such events that is putting people at their wits’ end, because it doesn’t make any sense.

It doesn’t make any logical common sense.

None of what’s happening, when it comes to immigration policy or refugee policy or anything else, makes any common sense. But it’s helping somebody. Clearly there are people benefiting from this. But it isn’t the rank-and-file population of the United States of America. Hence, they’re angry about it — and the anger is justified. It’s justifiable. It’s warranted. And then we have to listen to people inside the Beltway tell us they don’t understand, and it’s silly for people to be thinking the way they’re thinking. If the Republicans had been serious about stopping this, there’s one thing to do: Just defund it!

If they were serious about stopping Obama’s importation of endless refugees, just defund it. They have the power of the purse. But they won’t do that because if they even made one move in that direction, you know what would happen next: The allegations and accusations of shutting the government.