RUSH: Coronado, California. Bob, I’m glad you called, sir. Great to have you here. Hi.

CALLER: Oh, thanks. Elections-have-consequences dittos, Rush. Here’s my comment. You mentioned that following the Brexit vote, if anything bad happens financially or whatever, it will be attributed to be due to the Brexit vote. And I thought you were gonna say something somewhat different, but I think it’s just taking it one step farther. If there is turmoil in the financial markets that’s ongoing and there’s perceived to be just bad outcomes, I think you’ll see people start to say, “This is what we’ll have with Donald Trump. Xenophobic, anti-Muslim, so forth.” Perhaps in the way that Britain implemented theirs, they’re gonna say, “See? We don’t want this to happen with Trump.” I was just curious to see what your thoughts are.

RUSH: Well, I think they’re gonna blame as much as they can on Trump anyway. I think you’re right. My point was not to exclude Trump. But I was speaking within the confines of this specific event, the Brexit vote. The opponents are gonna blame everything that happens on the vote, and they’re gonna have the media with them for the most part. It’s gonna be a great thing to watch, lesson-wise.

I’ve tried to make the point here that winning an election is not gonna change it. The ideas that accompany that victory, the ideas and the policies that are related to those ideas that are implemented after you win the election. And then it’s not just one election; you have to keep winning elections. You have to keep defeating liberals, and it’s the same thing here in the Brexit vote.

This is one vote, but they’ve got two years now, and a lot can happen in these two years. The elites can do a lot to gum up the works these next two years and then have it all blamed on the vote, all blamed on the attitude to separate from the European Union. Now, since immigration is central in this, there’s no question that Democrats here are gonna try to blame similar things on Trump.

But Trump is a different ball of wax. I’ve been trying to say for I don’t know how many months now that the traditional political playbook in destroying and attacking a political opponent is not gonna work on Trump, because Trump’s connection with his supporters or his audience is far deeper and far greater than most voters’ connection with a candidate that’s very popular. Reagan had the connection.

But take some of the most popular presidents we’ve had in recent memory. Kennedy. JFK had the connection. LBJ didn’t, even though he won a massive landslide. And I’m talking about with his… Clinton had it for a host of reason. Hillary doesn’t. Hillary Clinton, no matter what… Do you know what she did yesterday? She was reading her response to Trump on the teleprompter, and the teleprompter had the word (sigh) in parentheses meaning she was supposed to sigh. She read the word! She read the word, not realizing it!

Obviously, she didn’t even rehearse it. But she read the word. It was in parentheses, and it was meant to tell her, “Sigh after this line.” She read the word. She does not have this connection. So these people that think that they can take something — even Trump today, with what happened. Trump happened to be in Scotland on the very day, the morning after the Brexit vote. He’s there to open his golf course in Turnberry, and, lo and behold, the first thing he talked about was not the Brexit vote.

He talked about his golf course and how damn good it is. He pointed to the lighthouse behind and said, “You know what? I’ve even built suites in the lighthouse. Nobody else has suites in lighthouses, but I have suites in the lighthouse.” And the media says, “How in the world can you do this? You’re here, you’re in Great Britain, you’re in the UK, and they just had the Brexit vote, and you’re talking about your golf course?” Trump says, “Yeah, and you know what? The falling pound is even gonna help my business here.”

And they said, “You can’t do that! You can’t, in the midst of calamity, talk about how it all benefits you!”

Trump says, “Why not? It will. It’s not just gonna benefit me; it’s gonna benefit other businesses here in the UK. It’s gonna help tourism, it’s gonna help exports,” and then he got on to what it means. He supported the people taking their country back, exactly what he’s talking about doing here. But they try to attach these standard political theories and playbook procedures to him and it just does not… (interruption) Well, yeah, the polling data was all wrong. The polling data had the “leave” people losing. This is another thing that’s got ’em out of whack over there today.

I mean, all these institutions they think they control, the elites, they seem less and less solid, less and less dependable.

There’s a lot of head scratching going on.

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RUSH: Why do I think the polls were wrong? People were relying on the pollsters. There was “the Brexit Effect.” I think there’s a Trump Effect, too. I think people are lying to the pollsters about Trump. There isn’t any question about it.

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RUSH: Here’s Scott in Greeley, Colorado. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Praise the Lord Rush Limbaugh’s on. I’ve been with you from the beginning, Rush.

RUSH: Yes. Thank you. Thank you so much.

CALLER: What a great day. As a lifelong conservative and Trump supporter, I finally have something in common with most of the UK voters.

RUSH: It is wonderful to be in solidarity with another big group of people, isn’t it?

CALLER: Well, you know, conservatives like me for years and years have been too stupid to understand the experts, and we keep voting the wrong way. I just feel great to have more people in my camp as stupid as I am.

RUSH: Yeah, you feel like you’re on the winning side here. I understand that. (laughing)

CALLER: (laughing) So hopefully I have enough sense to keep on being stupid.

RUSH: Whatever works, man.

CALLER: Well, thanks again, Rush.

RUSH: Is that it?

CALLER: I just wanted to point out how not listening to the experts might change the country.

RUSH: I see. So you wanted to revel in your stupidity and marvel at how it’s triumphing?

CALLER: Yeah. I didn’t let education interfere with my learning.

RUSH: There you go. All right. Well, I appreciate the call. Thanks much, Scott.

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RUSH: A couple of days, maybe three days ago on this program (the days run together; I forget exactly when), we were discussing campaigns and expenditures, buying commercials and so forth. And it was around the time that Hillary had started running a million-dollar ad campaign trying to define Trump as temperamentally unfit for the office and intellectually unfit. No experience. It’s dangerous to let Trump anywhere near the nuclear codes and the push button and so forth.

And it became obvious that Trump was not responding to any of it ’cause he didn’t have any money. He didn’t have much in the bank at all, to the tune of three-point-some-odd million dollars, whereas Hillary has something like (I don’t know; I forget the number), $35 million or $40 million that she can legally spend now president the point was made that the Democrats did the same thing to Mitt Romney back in 2012 before Romney could spend the money that he had raised.

The money that he raised was only spendable post-convention, so that’s when they running all these ads that are characterizing Romney as a rich, insensitive, out of touch, aloof nerd who loved having his dog on the roof of the station wagon, who didn’t care when the wife of an employee dies with cancer. And so the media theme was, “June is when you win the presidency,” because that’s what they thought Hillary was doing. Hillary was running ads condemning Trump, characterizing Trump, marginalizing Trump.

Trump was not responding to it, didn’t have the money to respond to it, and so they’re think, “It’s over. It’s over.” They’re doing it again. They’re just doing to Hillary — and Hillary’s doing to Trump — what they did to Trump, and they thought it was over. They’re ecstatic. And there were some Trump people to whom all of this came as a surprise. They think Trump has endless money; he’s self-funding his campaign. He has not spent a lot of time fundraising.

But he has begun to do some joint fundraising efforts with the RNC, which is its own subject. I’m not gonna touch on that now. Here’s the point. I had people saying, “Is this gonna hurt Trump? Is it gonna hurt? He’s gotta run commercials! He’s gotta run commercials! He’s not running commercials! Hillary’s out running commercials!” I said, “It may, but in this campaign…” I may be falling back on it too much, folks, I’ll admit.

But I still maintain that you cannot treat Trump, analyze Trump, destroy Trump the way politics says you destroy people that are running for office. I don’t think the standard, ordinary operating procedures work. And the reason they don’t… (interruption) Why did it work on Romany? Why would they run ads? For crying out loud, stop and think about this for a second. Here’s a guy, Mitt Romney, who may be the nicest gentleman in the entire political realm in 2012, just as a man.

In terms of character, in terms of how you define nice, how you define polite, how you define respectful, there’s no better example of any of that than Mitt Romney. So you ask the question, “Well, why does that stuff work, then, and on whom does it work?” So you run an ad claiming that Romney is an absolute unfeeling, mean-spirited animal hater because in the example they gave he put his dog on the roof of the station wagon during the family vacation. Why does it work? Why did it stick?

And there is an answer.

And then why, when they ran the ads about guy’s wife dying with cancer…? Remember this? This was a serious series of ads, and it was deadly effective. They had this guy angry who used to work for Romney, talking about how his wife got cancer. His wife died, and this guy supposedly went to Romney and Romney didn’t care. And that just fit the Democrat mold all of Republican conservative to a T. “They’re rich and they don’t care about the little guy.”

Well, why did it stick?

Why does any of that stuff stick? And I maintain that it stuck because Romney did not have and never did have a large group of supporters that were personally attached, connected, and loyal to him. What he had was a bunch of people voting Republican who were also opposed to Hillary or Obama or anybody with a D next to their name. But he didn’t have this deep, connected, huge band of supporters who were never going to abandon him no matter what anybody said about him.

And the more outlandish things he said, the deeper the connection. Well, Trump has that. That’s why I don’t think they can destroy Trump the way that they’re trying to destroy Trump over this thing in Scotland today. This is a perfect example. Trump, whether he designed it or not, happens to be the first thing in the news on UK soil the day after the Brexit vote. He just happened to be there. Did he design this or is this just the fate of luck?

Well it doesn’t matter the answer; he’s there.

He’s in Scotland, and he’s doing a big deal. He long planned to tout his new golf course in Turnberry opening up. And because Trump sticks to his script and was there to open his golf course, that’s what he first began talking about. He didn’t open with a statement on the Brexit vote. And so here comes the media — right on cue — and any allies they have, once again lashing out at Trump as incompetent, unaware, insensitive.

“He didn’t even have the presence of mind to realize that he’s right there after the Brexit! The first words out of his mouth should have been about that instead of about his project,” and then they’re saying, “The next thing you don’t do… Boy, what a big mistake! The next thing you don’t do is you don’t applaud economic calamity in the country where you happen to be because it’ll benefit you,” which Trump did by saying, “Hey, you know what? The falling pound is gonna help my business.”

Any other candidate, that stuff might work.

It’s not gonna cause a single Trump supporter to abandon him.

Not a single Trump supporter.

There may be some who wish that he would have taken the occasion to first comment on the Brexit vote, but they’re not going to abandon him. They’re not gonna let the media do it. Romney people? The media could separate his supporters from him, but they can’t from Trump. They don’t understand this yet. They think one of these times when they do a trick like this it’s gonna work and they’re gonna be able to really harm Trump.

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Okay, let me close the loop on this money business, because in talking about how the political professionals think they’re gonna take Trump out. They’re gonna use the usual playbook stuff to take Trump out like they took Romney out. They were only able to take Romney out because Romney — this not a criticism of Romney; please don’t anybody call him up and say I’m ripping him.  I’m not.  I’m simply telling you that the connection Trump has with his supporters, slash, audience, is unique.  Not everybody politician has it, and certainly not every public figure has such a connection with their audience.  

But Trump does.  It’s deep, it’s loyal, and it is resilient.  And the only guy that can ruin it is Trump.  The media cannot come separate Trump from his supporters.  Only Trump can do that.  They’re trying, they’re gonna keep trying because they think they can.  They did it with Bush.  They did it with Romney.  They did it with McCain.  They did it with Bob Dole.  They’re able to do it with practically every Republican that comes down the pike.  All it takes is Harry Reid saying a friend told him Romney hadn’t paid his taxes in ten years and it’s over.  But these kinds of things aren’t gonna work on Trump. 

Now, the reason I’m going here is because those of you who told me last week, “He’s gotta run commercials, he’s gotta run commercials, he’s gotta be able to have enough money to run commercials to respond to Hillary.”  There’s a part of me that says, yeah, obviously, but I wish it wasn’t necessary.  As I say, folks, I’m old enough now that I’ve been around and I’ve seen a lot more things than I had seen when I started this program 27 years.  I have seen presidents in action.  I have been to the White House a number of times.  I have been to fundraisers.  I have been seen what happens at fundraisers.  I’ve seen how elected officials treat fundraisers and donors and, believe me, the world revolves around them.  

It’s the most amazing thing.  I know people who have donated big to presidents.  I know people who have raised money big for presidents.  And they are treated like kings by the politician and his organization.  They are constantly invited to parties, seminars, private gatherings where the candidate or the president will explain policy, but only to them.  And they brag about it.  Which is fine.  That doesn’t bother me.  You know, they’ll come back from one of these things and they’ll ask me, “Have you ever been to one?” knowing I haven’t ’cause I’m not a donor.  “No, I wasn’t able to make the trip to big sandy.  No, I wasn’t able to go hunting with the president.  What happened?”  “Oh, let me tell you,” and they start telling me all he told them about policy and the secret stuff that he doesn’t tell anybody else.  

What it made clear to me was, we’ve all known that money is the mother’s milk of politics, but it really, really, really is.  The people that raise it and the people that give it are the first people that get any elected officials attention.  Now, you know this.  I’m not telling you anything that you don’t know.  But I’ve seen it up close, and it is obvious the potential for corruption that exists here.  Back in the early nineties, mid-nineties, a friend of mine — I’ll just tell you, it was Bill Bennett.  Bill Bennett was coming off the success of his book called The Book of Virtues.  

He’d been education secretary for Ronaldus Magnus and he was actually toying with the idea of running for president. So he convened a meeting in a private banquet room downstairs at the Four Seasons hotel in Georgetown.  And I was invited there, and it was an exploratory meeting for one purpose, to see if it were possible. To ask a bunch of experts if it were possible to be elected president without having a major fundraising effort because Bill didn’t want to do that.  

I wouldn’t want to do it.  I wouldn’t want to spend every waking hour asking people for money.  A, I can’t do it, it’s just not my nature.  Secondly, you gotta pay ’em back.  Nobody gives you money for nothing, and that’s the lesson with the Clintons.  Nobody gives you money because they like you.  We’re talking tens of thousands, millions, nobody gives you that kind of money without an expectation for it.  It has to be paid back somehow.  You pay it back with policy. You pay it book with an ambassadorship. You pay it back by continually inviting to dinners at the White House. You pay ’em back with whatever.  

Bill wasn’t interested.  And to a man in this meeting, everybody said it’s not possible.  There were some consultants there and of course they would say it isn’t possible, because if anybody gets elected president not spending money, they don’t get paid.  And ever since then I was refocused here with this situation with Trump.  Okay, Hillary’s out there running her besmirch-and-impugn campaign.  Trump doesn’t have a whole lot of money in the bank to respond to it right now so he’s not.  And people are telling me how bad this is, and I say, “You know, it may not be.”  I said, “You’re falling into the trap of believing everything that’s in the political handbook, and at the top of the list it says you can’t do anything without money.  Trump has.”  

Now, admittedly it was primary election, but Trump hasn’t spent a lot of money.  Not compared to — I mean, Jeb Bush had a $115 million super PAC, and he has six delegates.  It’s not a dream, but it’s something I do think about.  Wouldn’t it be just great if somebody could actually get elected without having to spend all that time raising money?  Wouldn’t it be great if somebody could get elected president without having to pay all the donors back?  Wouldn’t it be fabulous if somebody could get elected president without this giant due bill?  

Now, don’t misunderstand.  Some of the donors are — many of them are good people and they’re donating because their ideas are those embodied by the candidate and that’s really what they’re doing, they’re promoting the ideas.  But many of them are desirous of things in addition to that.  So when I see Trump not respond ’cause he can’t spend the money, I’m secretly hoping it isn’t gonna hurt him.  

I would love for Hillary’s massive ad campaign to be pointless and worthless.  I would love for it to bomb out.  And you know what?  If you look at the position data, it isn’t hurting Trump.  Whatever ad campaign she ran last week or is still running, if you look, if you pay attention to the Drive-By Media, they are shocked that Trump has not been destroyed already.  They can’t believe that Trump is still leading her in two battleground states.  They can’t believe that he’s within, what is it, five or six points, they can’t believe it.  Because Hillary’s been running all these ads. Hillary’s been doing a good job of portraying Trump as unqualified, not the right temperament. And Trump hasn’t reacted to it. And Trump’s been making boneheaded statements out there like going after the judge for being a Mexican.  

They can’t believe it.  They simply can’t believe.  It’s like David “Rodham” Gergen the other day, after Trump’s speech that just eviscerated Hillary, and that didn’t cost him any money.  And that speech, folks, that was a grand slam of a speech.  It upset the media, it upset Hillary, and there still hasn’t been anybody come out yet and say that none of it was true.  David “Rodham” Gergen tried, if you recall.  David “Rodham” Gergen goes on CNN and says (imitating Gergen), “You know, you can’t quote, you can’t slander, you can’t lie about people like that, quoting from that discredited book by Peter Schweizer.”  

It’s not discredited.  Peter Schweizer’s book, Clinton Cash, is not discredited.  It has been quoted on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post.  A bunch of Drive-By Media fact-checkers, there’s a story about how CNN ended up with big egg on their face and were profoundly embarrassed.  They had a couple of fact-checkers and they put ’em up on camera, they were gonna just destroy this book, and they couldn’t, because they can’t find anything wrong in it.  And they made a cardinal error.  Same thing like you never grant immunity if you’re a lawyer, you don’t grant immunity to a witness not knowing what he’s gonna say.  

Well, they’re out there all saying that this book has been discredited. “None of it’s true. The Clinton Foundation does nothing but donate to charities.” They can’t find any evidence that what Schweizer has written about the Clintons and their foundation and the fund-raising and the getting paid for speeches is wrong. They can’t find anything where he’s wrong.  The book has not been “discredited.”  So Trump delivers this massive speech.  It hit home run after home run after home run.  

It hit Hillary Clinton in ways the Republican Party has never, ever gone after her before. It was successful.  It didn’t cost him a dime. It cost him the time of whatever staging it was at his own hotel down there in SoHo, and then the benefit was the media’s out there following it up by saying it’s filled with innuendo and lies — maybe even libel, slander in there and the Schweizer book! (And… Zip.) So I was telling these people, “I think it’d be great, I think it would be fabulous if somebody had whatever it takes to overcome this need for money.”  

Remember, the conventional wisdom is, “Yeah, you can do this like Trump has done it during the primaries, buuuut once you get to the general, it’s not about national votes.  It’s about states!  It’s about swing states.  It’s about battleground states.  And you’ve gotta have targeted expenditures, great ads running against your opponent in those swing states.” Trump doesn’t have any of this, and he’s leading in two of the three swing states.  

Wouldn’t you love it if all of this could be accomplished without having to raise a billion dollars or a hundred million, even, or whatever?  Believe me, it is a limiting factor.  I know it’s one of these necessities for 99% of the people that get into politics.  But I am one of these people that think not having to pay it back and not owing anybody for it because you didn’t take it, would be one of the most liberating aspects of any candidate I’ve seen in my life.

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They’re still watching Fox right now.  They’re ripping Trump for promoting his golf course with the first words out of his mouth in Scotland today.  Why not?  He’s got the world tuning in to him, and he’s got his brand-new golf course ready to go, including suites in the lighthouse.  He knows he’s gonna eventually get them to Brexit result, but why not promote his business?  That’s who he is! He’s being who he is.  He’s genuine.  Isn’t this what people have said they want?  

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RUSH: Eric in New Ulm, Minnesota. It’s great to have you here on the EIB Network.  Hi. 

CALLER:  I can’t tell you how excited I am for this.  I’ve been listening to you since I was probably six years old.  My dad got me into it, you know, right from the beginning.  I’m 33 now. 

RUSH:  Well, you’re a Rush Baby. 

CALLER:  Pretty much, yeah. (chuckles) 

RUSH:  A real live Rush Baby.  Cool. 

CALLER:  Never thought I’d get the chance to talk to you, so it’s a pretty big honor for me. 

RUSH:  I appreciate it.  Thank you very much.  Same for me.  I’m glad you got through. 

CALLER:  It’s exciting.  Anyway, just today I have a revelation about stuff that I heard you talk about as far back as… Maybe 1992, I think, was the first time I heard you mention it.  It referred to an unseen silent majority that the media doesn’t talk about and Uncle Sam doesn’t talk about, and everybody points the other way. There’s this group of people that sort of under the radar.  And when it really gets awful, you know, that’s the group of people that steps up and stands out and says eventually, “Look, you know, we’re tired of what’s going on, and we just want to tell you what we want.”  And when I was investigating this Brexit business, I began to think — ’cause I heard polls as early as yesterday morning, saying it was done. I think it was a 75% chance of staying in. 

RUSH:  Right. 

CALLER:  And, you know, as if we believe polls anymore. 

RUSH:  Polling data was all wrong on this from the get-go, too. 

CALLER:  Well, yeah, ’cause I was thinking, “Yeah, they’re probably gonna stay. They’re probably gonna stay,” because like everybody else — even though I don’t want to believe a lot of things that they say — there’s so much doom-and-gloom, I absorb it. 

RUSH:  It’s seductive.  I know it takes a conscious effort every day to stay vigilant and not fall prey to the traps the media leave.  It’s hard to do, even for somebody as accomplished at it as I.  And never forget this when you’re reading polling data, Eric.  People that do polls today use them for shaping public opinion as well as reflecting public opinion.  They use polls to make news, which ought not be the case.  The silent majority, that’s actually an invention of Richard Nixon’s.  But I’m glad you called.  It’s great that you got through. 

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