RUSH:  We’ll go back to the archives, just a couple of sound bites of me from this program.  First, on the day Trump announced, we’re gonna go back to June 16th, 2015, this is the day that will live forever.  Donald Trump and the wife, Melania, traveling down the escalator at Trump Tower to deliver a speech announcing his candidacy that everybody in the media laughed at.  What did I say?

RUSH ARCHIVE:  This is gonna resonate with a lot of people, I guarantee you, and the Drive-Bys are gonna pooh-pooh it. They’re gonna relegate it to the carnival characteristics of the campaign and so forth, but it’s gonna resonate.

RUSH:  Right.  And it did.  And now May 4th of this year.  And I must say, for those of you new to the program, I spent much time in the campaign explaining to people who didn’t understand it, why Trump had such support.  I explained the people who supported Trump.  I explained the reasons those people supported Trump.  I defined why that connection was so deep and solid. 

I pointed out to anybody who would listen how they were not going to be able to talk people out of supporting Trump. That they were not gonna be able to use the techniques as usual in politics, coming up with dirt about somebody’s past and blabbing it out over the media and causing them to resign.  That’s not going to happen.  The only person that can damage Trump is Trump, I said.  I gave detailed explanations of the performer’s ego that Trump has, how he established a connection for all the braggadocio. That there were at least 30 seconds in every appearance where Donald Trump told his supporters he loved them and he was honored by them and he appreciated them and they heard him. 

They knew he was genuine. They knew he was being honest with them, and they were loyal in return.  I practically lost my voice telling people.  During all this period of time, I’m being reamed for betraying conservatism.  I’m being raked across the coals for betraying conservatism.  The objective of this program has been to defeat the left.  I mean, aside from the broadcast requirements I have for success, you know, maintaining an audience, holding it, growing it, charge confiscatory advertising rates, all that. 

But the substance and the content portion of the program has always been about defeating the left.  I’ve always thought conservatism is the best way to do it.  But what do you do when there isn’t conservatism?  And there wasn’t.  Conservatism didn’t win the primary, so what do we do?  I was accused of betraying conservatism, even though I endorsed no one. 

So I spent all this time trying to explain to people who Trump was and trying to help them, the Drive-Bys, anywhere else, trying to figure it out. You’re missing this if you think you can take Trump out like you take out your average Republican, you’re not gonna be able to do it.  Finally on May 4th when Trump won the nomination, I made a little prediction, May 4th of this year.

RUSH ARCHIVE:  My instinctive feeling right now is that Trump is gonna win, beat Hillary badly, that it could be landslide proportions. I still don’t think people understand why Trump won this.  I don’t think they understand at all the reason people support Trump.  And the deeper people are entrenched in politics, and the more they are accustomed to the templates and the handbooks and the theories and the playbooks, the less they’re gonna understand it.  

The more they try to plug Donald Trump and his campaign and his personality into the professional politician candidate playbook that they use, the farther and farther from the truth they are going to get.  I’ve tried to help. During the course of this entire campaign, I’ve gone to great lengths to try to explain to people what it is about Trump, why he has his supporters, why they support him, and what you have to do to separate them from Trump.  Basically, you can’t.  That’s the bottom line.

RUSH:  And they tried.  The Never Trumpers tried for a while.  The media didn’t give up trying.  The Democrats tried.  Obama tried. (imitating Obama) “Hey, you know what? He’s an official candidate of the KKK.”  They threw everything they had.  They didn’t know what to do with somebody who was not a professional politician.  Their formulas, their systems, their playbooks don’t accommodate for somebody that does not have a political resume, has not lived their lives as a phony politician trying to hide their real lives from everybody.  Trump lived his real life, didn’t hide it from anybody.  It was refreshing.  Just one of the many reasons why he has this legion of support.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s Jim, Morgantown, West Virginia.  Glad you waited, sir.  How are you doing?

CALLER:  Yes.  How are you, right?  Dittos from the Mountain State. We understand the power of centralized government up here via the EPA.  Let me get to my point.  Donald Trump didn’t beat Hillary Clinton last night.  Donald Trump beat the media.  What I’m saying to you is, he beat political correctness. He beat the thought police. He beat this idea that Trump was something he wasn’t, that he’s a racist, he’s a bigot, he’s a xenophobe.  Trump smashed through all that stuff last night and proved the media is wrong.

RUSH:  Well, there’s a lot there.  You’re right about something. It makes me want to make another observation, to again share with you just how bewildered and angry and frustrated anti-Trump people and forces are today.  In the realm of traditional party politics, one of the fastest ways the Democrats have found to get rid of a Republican political opponent is to find some evidence of oddball behavior or curious speech in the person’s past that targets them as sexist or a racist or whatever — and it’s easy. 

They have been able to get rid of any number of Republican opponents simply by alleging things, like making up the fact that Mitt Romney hasn’t paid taxes in ten years, making up the fact that Mitt Romney hated dogs because he put his own dog on the roof of the station wagon when the family left on vacation, or worst things than that.  And it’s become accepted in establishment politics that Republicans can be ruined and dispatched with simply an allegation.  You don’t even have to have the evidence. 

And it’s a go-to technique the Democrats have perfected in coordination with their brethren at the Drive-By Media.  Now, let’s just put Donald Trump into this.  Let’s plug him in.  Something I maintained from the beginning that was going to backfired on these people that they ignored me again.  They tried to treat Trump as your standard, ordinary, everyday lifetime Republican politician when Trump was a lifetime nothing politician.  He had never been in it.  He had not lived his life as a politician.  By that I mean lived a phony public life. 

You know, all these politicians… For example the tax returns are a great illustration.  They all release their tax returns.  Every one of them, running for the office of president, governor, senators, they all reach their tax returns some.  Why?  Because they have structured their tax returns to be released publicly.  They have lived their lives in their entirety for eventual public consumption to pass the public examination test, and in the process they’re phony. 

You don’t know who they really are.  This is a key point, folks.  You really don’t know who they are.  And then if we ever do find out who they are — if we find they’re tapping shoes in a stall in a bathroom at a truck stop — it’s shock.  Donald Trump, on the other hand, has lived his life publicly, unashamedly, unabashedly.  There are things Donald Trump has done that all of this have done that would prevent us from going into politics.  People have said to me, “Why don’t you run?” I say, “I don’t have a chance. I’m the guy that invented the word ‘feminazi,'” or I cite any number of other things.

I couldn’t get past the first round of political commercials aligned to destroy me, because I’ve not lived a life designed to deceive people in order to get their votes.  Trump? Same thing, but Trump decided, “To hell with it. I’m gonna run anyway,” and they thought that they would be able to get rid of Trump with that Access Hollywood video or any number of women. A constant tactic of the Democrats is to bring up people from a candidate’s past with allegations the candidate manhandled them, fired them, their wife died of cancer and they didn’t care.

Whatever it is, and they figured, “Well, we got an arsenal this kind of stuff for Trump.  We’ll take Trump out whenever we want.”  And none of it worked.  Why?  To this day, they don’t know. They can’t understand it.  It always has worked.  But Trump has not lived his life as a phony.  There are things Trump has done that if he knew he was gonna run for president someday, he wouldn’t have done some of these things, like all the rest who have grand political ambitions.  So Trump can’t hide the blemishes and the bruises and the failures and all of that. 

Why didn’t the usually successful Democrat efforts to take him out work this time?  The answers are easy and they are many and varied.  But at the top of the list is that what Trump represented and the opportunity he gave people supporting him was so great and so important, they weren’t going to let him be taken out, because this movement existed before Donald Trump came along — and this is not a put-down.  He came along and captured it and capitalized on it and gave it an identity and a name and a face and energy. 

And the people supporting him were not gonna let the usual political dirty tricks take him out.  It also helped he was real.  He wasn’t phony, when most of the political world is perceived as being just that.  And it was… I don’t know if you’d go so far as to say it was refreshing for people, but it just wasn’t a negative.  He was just like one of them with a little more money.  He was just a real guy.  There wasn’t anything phony about Trump, and so the efforts… I guarantee you that political consultants and everybody else in politics are scratching their heads in total bewilderment today how Donald Trump survived — not just survived, how he won — despite everything they unleashed on him. 

They are, I guarantee you, going insane trying to understand.