RUSH: We have Tom in Spring, Texas.  You’re up first, sir.  Great to have you.  Hi.

CALLER:  Good to be here.  It’s wonderful to talk to you today, sir.

RUSH:  Thank you, sir.

CALLER:  To me this election is not about what Donald Trump may or may not say or about what he may or may not do when he’s elected president.  It’s about what Hillary Clinton has said she is going to and intends to do if she is elected president.  The money and the ideology that drives the liberal agenda in today’s Democrat Party is just plain dangerous.  They’re attacking the standard, traditional, time-honored American traditions, the ones that we hold dear to our hearts that have made this country the greatest country in the world. 

We see it happening every day.  Donald Trump is the only candidate that can defeat Hillary Clinton in November, and to abandon him is to abandon this country.  Abraham Lincoln said in the closing of his Gettysburg address, it is for us, the living, to be highly resolved that these dead shall not have died in vain. And a government of the people, by the people shall not perish from this earth.  We must defeat Hillary Clinton in November.  It’s just that simple.

RUSH:  Folks, I gotta tell you something.  That is what I have been trying to convey to everybody who’s questioning every motivation of mine or every decision that I’ve had made.  I don’t think there’s anything worse than four more years of the past eight, because of what it means, because of what will be added to these four years, not just the Supreme Court, but what’s going to happen immigration-wise. We’re going to lose our culture, we’re gonna lose our national identity, by design and on purpose. 

You know, all of these Republicans and conservatives who are saying that they just can’t, in good conscience, support Trump because they don’t want to undercut conservatism or the conservative movement, to me it’s not about that.  This is about the country and stopping Hillary Clinton. 

During the Republican primaries, you know, I never endorse during primaries.  I never have, for a whole host of reasons.  It didn’t matter who won the Republican primaries at the end of the day.  I don’t control that.  I never have controlled that, despite what some people think.  My resolution was whoever gets the Republican nomination, even if it was Kasich, I was gonna support ’em.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  Let me tell you how to win this election, folks.  I think I know how to win this election.  The key to winning this election is not with us.  We already know who we are. We know what we think. We know how we’re going to vote. Most of us.  I realize some of you in this audience don’t like Trump and you might try to find somebody else. You don’t want to vote Hillary, so you might go third-party, you might try to find somebody else you can vote for.  Mistake. 

Anything you do that does not vote for the only person that can beat her, and that’s the Republican nominee, if you don’t vote for the Republican nominee, you’re voting for Hillary Clinton, pure and simple.  And as far as I’m concerned, that’s what this has always been about since before the Republican primaries began.  I’m among the few who knew before the Democrat primaries began that nobody but Hillary was gonna win it, the game was fixed, and that Bernie Sanders was in there to make it look like she could handle a fight, that she could overcome opposition. 

That was fixed and set up for Bernie to lose from the get-go.  And, by the way, folks, I’m not convinced that he wasn’t in on it himself.  I’m not prepared to allege that he was, but they just paid him off with his third home.  Here’s a guy that’s never had a job until he was 40 years of age, who has no income other than his Senate income and he just bought a $600,000 home on a lake in Vermont, a dacha.  This is his third residence.  They’re celebrating Bernie has gone off to the lake now. Bernie, after giving it a valiant effort, blah, blah, blah.

What they’ve done is basically gotten Bernie out of the way. “Bernie, there’s your little home here on the lake, 600,000 grand. This is what capitalism got you, Bernie, don’t mistake socialism for this. Now, stay there.”  And that’s where he is.  But for me this has always been about stopping what started eight years ago.  And I admit that there’s some stuff that started prior to that.  The establishment is the establishment made up of both parties. 

But I knew the Republican Party, the way it was currently structured, was not going to stop Obama.  They said so.  They announced they weren’t gonna impeach.  They announced they were not even gonna disagree with him on policy in this year.  Last December, the budget for this fiscal year, they gave Obama even more than he asked for.  The Republicans, who control the spending in the House, gave him even more so they didn’t get any criticism whatsoever.  To me, there hasn’t been anybody trying to stop Obama in these eight years in Washington, where Obama must be stopped. 

We better stop her.  She’s the nominee.  The country as you and I know — I firmly believe this.  I think this is an example of truth sounding so radical because it’s the kind of truth you’re not supposed to say. It’s the kind of truth that’s been buried and covered up with political correctness, politeness and whatever is deemed to be appropriate.  But clearly our country is in a massive transformation brought on by specific policies, brought on by specific intent. 

The people in charge of the transformation of this country have never liked this country the way it was founded.  They have never appreciated it.  They have resented it.  They believe odd things about America.  They believe it’s the hotbed of racism and bigotry and homophobia, that America is the problem in the world.  These are the people shaping this country.  They are destroying every institution and tradition they can and remaking it.  They have taken aim at our pop culture and our general culture and society at large, and they’re having tremendous success in making right wrong and wrong right and turning everything upside down. 

They have done a great job in convincing as many people as possible to believe there should be no limits on any kind of behavior and if you want to place limits you are the bigot.  They have erased morality.  They have erased the whole concept of moral authority.  Nobody is allowed to have moral authority.  Nobody is allowed to define right and wrong because such concepts cannot possibly be universal in their world. 

Morality is individual choice now.  You define it however you want to and what your definition is is what is for you.  And nobody has the right to come along and tell you otherwise.  Well, this has led, it is leading to mass confusion.  It is leading to the ripping up of roots and destroying the foundation of the greatest country that’s ever been. 

And that’s why I say this election is gonna be won or lost with whatever you want to call ’em, the great unwashed, the low-information voter, however you define people that don’t pay much attention to politics, other than a couple of weeks, maybe a month before the election.  It’s about defeating the Democrat Party and what they stand for.  Because, as I sit here, I don’t care, you take any of the 16 or 17 people that sought the Republican nomination, and there’s not a one of them I would not have voted for over Hillary Clinton, if it came down to it. 

That’s what this has always been about to me.  It’s greater than my personal preferences over ideology and so forth.  It’s bigger to me than party.  The country’s always been bigger than party, to me.  We have 70% of the American people admitting, in a lot of polls, they think the country’s going in the wrong direction.  Well, we can build on that.  The problem is that many in that 70% have no idea why.  They’re chalking it up to things that do not blame the people actually responsible for it.  The case is easily made that Democrat Party policies implemented in the last eight years have led to 94 million Americans not working, have led to the lowest home ownership in 51 years, have led to the student loan system becoming an absolute albatross around students’ necks. 

The reason more Millennials can’t find careers and are living at home, you can trace that to policies that have been implemented in Washington and in states run by Democrats.  Look at this.  Hillary Clinton is in Michigan right now.  She’s giving her answer to Trump’s speech at the Economic Club of Detroit.  This is a state and a city, Detroit, that has been run for how many decades by the Democrats?  And everybody sees the problems that they have. Everybody witnesses and lives among them.  Here comes the highest representative of the destructive policies that have created Detroit and made it what it is, telling them what they need to do in order to improve. 

She hadn’t the slightest idea.  The things that she wants to implement are nothing more than the continuation of current policy made even worse.  The challenge is to convince people who don’t understand this for whatever reason.  And that’s the real challenge.  It’s not enough to assemble your base, who understands all this, and turn out your base.  I wish it were.  I wish we already knew that we outnumbered them.  But the 70% of the people who think we’re headed in the wrong direction — and, by the way, a vast majority of people in this country, whether they can tell you why or not, know, because of their sensory perception, this just isn’t the way good times feel. 

This is not the way a roaring economy feels.  There isn’t any optimism.  Instead, there’s fear.  People are frightened of the future.  I’m not talking about billionaires. I’m not talking about the super-rich.  I’m talking about people who are paycheck to paycheck or don’t have much savings, they’re scared.  They’re afraid their job could be eliminated, either by a robot or by somebody who will come along from outside the country who will do it for less.  They’re worried they’re gonna have to tap into their savings, if they have any. 

They also still want to send their kids to school but they know they can’t afford that, they can’t afford health care, they can’t get anywhere near affording health care now.  The health care system after supposedly being made better and after everybody being promised their premiums are gonna come down by $2,500, after being promised you could keep your doctor, keep your insurance plan, all of that out the window. The health care industry is no more reachable by middle-class people.  It’s a distant place that you better have insurance and you better have insurance willing to pay off and you better be able to afford it, but there’s no guarantees. 

Now, there never are, but we are living under false promises of the Democrat Party.  Democrat Party that all this was not gonna be the case.  This is not George W. Bush’s fault.  This is not Ronald Reagan’s fault.  This is not trickle-down economics’ fault.  

The reason the health care industry is upside down, the reason jobs are down, the reason the labor force has an all-time high number of people not in it is directly traceable to policies implemented by Barack Obama and agreed to by Hillary Clinton and those policies she is advocating be re-implemented and even doubled down on.  To me, there’s a whole lot of people who know — they sense, they feel — that things aren’t right. 

All this immigration? They can see the virtual takeover of Europe.  They look around and they see massive racial unrest in Chicago. They see cops being shot.  This is just not the stuff of a country that’s well-oiled and functioning with a happy and upbeat population that’s optimistic about the future.  These are just not the things that happen there.  Well, if you don’t like the fact that cops are being shot, if you don’t like the fact that crime seems to be out of control — whether it is or not, it seems to be — I can convince anybody that it’s Democrat Party policies that have made all this possible and are the reason these things are happening. 

I think I could even convince people who don’t even think this way.  I actually think I could convince people who are prepared to oppose me every day on this if I had a chance to actually get to them.  But regardless, I think that’s where this election is going to be won or lost, and I think the Democrats know this, which is why they are so focused on only one thing: Scaring everybody that Donald Trump is unfit, is unsuited, is mentally deranged, is maybe insane, is maybe out of control. 

The only thing they’ve got is to scare people even more than they are already scared.  It is of special noteworthy interest to me that the Democrat Party never uses optimism, never tries to rally people on the basis of optimism. They talk about hope, but what’s the hope?  To be delivered from misery? Because to listen to the Democrats describe life in America, it’s one misery after another. It’s one discrimination after another. It’s one forced pregnancy after another. It’s one dismal life lived after another. 

The picture they paint of this country is one of constant suffering that you have to endure.  And if you vote Democrat, we’ll make it easier for you to get through this misery.  But they never promise optimism.  They never tell people how good they can be.  They never tell people that they’re capable of much more than they even know, because they don’t want people realizing that.  Because the more people exceed their own expectations, the less need there is for a command-and-control central government-run by Democrats.