RUSH:  So I checked the email, and I get this question a lot. “Rush, do you have any input in the Trump campaign?” or, “Rush, is there anybody you can call?” or, “Rush, do you talk to Trump?”  The answer is no to all those three.  I’ve not reached out to anyone. I do everything I do here, right here behind the Golden EIB Microphone.  It hasn’t happened.  Look, it’s simple what needs to happen here, folks.  I mean, I don’t care how you answer the Hemmer question.  I mean, some people would answer the Bill Hemmer question.

Is politics upside down and are we looking at this all wrong, and are people who are supporting Trump not bothered by this at all? Who knows?  I do think politics has been turned upside down, and I do think a lot of the traditional way of analyzing and looking at things is outmoded in this campaign, ’cause you can’t plug Trump into any of these formulas and blueprints that people use to analyze politics and to succeed in the politics business. 

But I think — and, again, this is advice that’s worth exactly what it’s costing Trump, which is nothing.  But I do believe that he’s taking way too much of this personally.  And I think the reason he’s taking it personally is because, A, it’s his nature.  His whole life has been built on not accepting attacks, not ignoring them.  He answers them.  Somebody goes after him — if anybody tries to take him out, somebody tries to damage him or his business or his family — he doesn’t just look the other way and bide his time and come back for ’em later.

He hits ’em at that moment.  It’s his nature.  Now he’s in presidential politics.  His nature is triumphant and dominant, and that’s the way he’s doing it.  But what he doesn’t get is that throwing Khizr Khan and his wife on stage at the Democrat National Convention and any of these other attacks are not personal.  They really aren’t.  Donald Trump is how old, 70-some-odd years, 60? I don’t know. In his whole life, nobody ever called him a racist; nobody ever thought he was.  But now that he’s running for president opposite a Democrat, guess what he is? 

He’s a racist.  But I believe the reason that he takes everything so personally beyond his nature is (and I think I said this Monday) he doesn’t have an ideological grounding.  It’s just not how he looks at the world or people.  And so when the Democrats trot out people like Khizr Khan and his wife and they go after Trump, Trump takes it personally and wants to go out and destroy Khizr Khan and so forth — and it’s Hillary.  Khizr Khan is there as part of a left-wing liberal strategy that has to be beaten back, not the guy personally.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Alicia in Lawrence, New Jersey.  You’re first in this hour.  It’s great to have you.  Hi.

CALLER:  Thank you.  I’m about to be late for my lunch break just so I can disagree with you.

RUSH:  Oh.

CALLER:  (laughing)

RUSH:  I’m sorry.  I would have gotten to you earlier had I known you were on a budget of time.

CALLER:  It’s okay.  No problem.  Okay, don’t take this the wrong way, but you said that Trump was taking things personally.  That was your analysis.  And I understand what you’re saying, but I totally disagree.  And the reason I disagree — and I don’t think you’re intending to be condescending, but I think that the other people who are on TV are being condescending when they say he takes it personally and he’s not doing the right thing.  They are being a little condescending.  This man is a businessman.  He’s actually quite brilliant.  And he thinks with a different mentality. 

I think that you, with all due respect, definitely the political establishment, the media, they’re in a bubble, okay?  They don’t understand that what Donald Trump is doing, he’s not taking it personally.  He’s defending us.  He’s not letting somebody run over us, which they’re not used to a Republican doing.  Nobody’s used to it.  When Mr. Khan, with all due respect, from my heart I feel for his loss, but when he pointed his finger and said, “Read the Constitution,” and pulled out the Constitution, he was saying that — I felt personally insulted, and I guarantee you that Trump supporters and a lot of other people felt personally insulted.  My two friends, my two girlfriends who are Democrats who switched over in the New Jersey primary to vote for Trump —

RUSH:  Wait.  You just said you took it personally.

CALLER:  — and they’re offended.  Absolutely.  He didn’t take it personally, but he’s defending us.  And we have had Republicans — I remember I became politically aware after 9/11.  I had no idea.  My father told me to listen to you.  I started listening to you.  I didn’t know politics or anything.  And I became politically aware, and I would always say, “Why does George Bush not defend what they’re saying about Republicans?”  They’re saying the most vile and horrible things, and he just sits there with a smile on his face.

RUSH:  I know.  Look, amen on that.  Look, look, look, look, I got a hard break here.  I can’t move it.  I hope you can hold on and delay your lunch break, but if you can’t, I understand.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Well, Alicia, New Jersey, couldn’t hold on. She had to get back at work. But there’s hardcore.  There’s somebody who hung on hold, stayed on hold during her lunch hour — even beyond her allotted time — just to get on the program.  Trump supporters, they’re committed.  And had I known she was on a lunch break and didn’t have much time, I would have gotten to her call sooner, but we didn’t know ’til she happened to mention that.  Now, I think she might misunderstand me when I say that Trump takes things personally.

It’s not an insult.  It’s who he is.  He has got his whole life.  You attack him — you attack his business, his family — he’s gonna hit you back, and he does take it personally.  He thinks that attacks on him are attacks on him.  When I say he’s taking personally — to explain this — it’s all rooted, folks, in the fact that he doesn’t see people for their ideological identity.  He doesn’t see liberals.  He doesn’t see conservatives.  He would have trouble, I think, explaining beyond, “Yeah, I know liberals. They believe in Big Government and Santa Claus and all that.”

Their tactics and their politics of personal destruction and the fact that they can’t be honest about what they believe, they have to constantly lie to people about who they are and that the way they really advance is to destroy the character and integrity and reputations of their opponents? He doesn’t see them that way.  He knows liberals. He has lived in New York all his life and he’d had to get along with them. So he doesn’t see them as a bunch of lying, conniving, sniveling, small-time pranksters who are out actually unable to be honest about what they believe. 

Now, in New York, they can, when they’re talking amongst themselves. Not when they got win a national election.  He just doesn’t see that, and I think if he did, he would have reacted to the whole Khizr Khan thing differently.  He would have realized it’s from the Democrat playbook.  He would have realized that that man being on stage was not even about Khizr Khan.  It was about the Democrats realizing they had an opportunity to destroy what they think is a myth that hurts them.  They have made a decision to sidle up to illegal immigrants. 

They have made a decision to sidle up to members of a religion who have people trying to destroy this country.  Democrats have decided, for some reason, that they want to get close to that religion, and they do not want to be in any way thought of as that religion being the home of terrorism. So they’ve made a big point of saying that there is no terrorism in Islam, that these militant Islamists, ISIS, Al-Qaeda — Obama on down will tell you — “No, no, no! That’s not Islam! Islam is the religion of peace.”  So guess what Mr. Khan does? 

He gives them a living, breathing, one-time example that what you and what Republicans and conservatives and what people who fear Islam think is wrong.  Now, Khan baited Trump by waving his Constitution out there, but it was Khan that didn’t know the Constitution.  It was Khan who doesn’t know that the Constitution doesn’t say a word about religious tests for regimens and immigrants.  It was Khan trying to imply that Trump doesn’t understand liberty and freedom and therefore the Constitution’s at risk. 

But it’s Mr. Khan, apparently, who doesn’t understand that the Constitution does provide ample opportunity to determine who and who doesn’t get into this country.  The Constitution does not say, “Anybody who wants in, gets in, because that’s what liberty and freedom is.”  Look, it’s not a big point.  I just think that if you have an ideological underpinning, it’d be much easier to understand the real aim of these attacks.  Now, the real aim is Trump. I mean, they’re trying to take him out.

They’re trying to dissuade people from supporting him and so forth. But it would create a different response to it if there were an ideological understanding.  So when I say he takes things personally, I don’t mean he’s got a thin skin.  I don’t mean that he’s a crybaby.  I don’t mean that he’s not capable of taking it.  That’s not what I mean.  I’m saying he misses the truly destructive nature of the attack.  But Alicia nailed something, and it’s something that the inside-the-Beltway people are not getting, and they never will.

She related it brilliantly to the same way we all felt when Bush let all of those attacks on him go by and never answered a’one of them.  They were also attacks on us, and so she’s saying, “Look, we’re Trump supporters. We’re watching this happen in the Democrat convention, and Mr. Khan’s waving his little Constitution in his pocket. He’s insulting all of us, not just Trump.”  So when Trump responds to it when other Republicans don’t, they applaud. 

Other Republicans just let it all go, never say a word about it, pretend it didn’t happen, or hope people forget it.  Trump doesn’t.  Whatever he does it or however he does it, he responds to it, and his supporters think that he’s defending them, too.  And he gets lots of credit for it, and that was the point that she was making, and I think it’s a good point.