RUSH:  Oh, hey, folks, I just remembered.  I meant to do this in the opening half hour of the program.  I left a caller hanging yesterday, again because of the constraints of time.  Remember there was a caller from — my memory is south Florida — and she was very, very worried about Trump’s tweet about flag burners? She was a Trump supporter but this worried her. “Is he really going to do things like strip away their citizenship and put them in jail for a year for burning the flag?” 

And then she told me that all of her people on Facebook are just making fun of her for supporting this guy, and I asked her point-blank, “Do you…? Forget about these people tweeting you and Facebooking you. Forget about these people chatting. Do you really think Donald Trump is going to strip the citizenship of people who burn the flag or put ’em in jail for a year?”  “Uh, no.” “Okay.  Okay.  That’s all you need.”  But then I ended the call and moved on, and I left her hanging, and I left all of you hanging because she also wanted to know what I thought he was really doing. 

I don’t think this is complicated. But, if you are refusing to try to understand Donald Trump as the Never Trumpers are and as the left is, and if you’re not curious, if you really don’t — if you just want to continue to plug Trump into the standard operating political system that you’ve got, you’re gonna forever be in the dark here.  The one thing that people on the left cannot do is laugh, particularly at themselves.  They have no nuance. They have no sense of nuance about humor.  To them, humor is insulting.

It insults minorities or people of some disadvantage here or there, and they are just incapable of laughter.  I plainly will tell you what Donald Trump was doing, and he may not even know it.  This may just be instinctive with him.  Sending out a tweet claiming to strip the citizenship of flag burners and maybe put ’em in jail was to accomplish two things:  He was sending a message of how he thinks about it, what he thinks about people that do that, and, more importantly, how much he loves America and its symbols. 

The second thing he was doing was tweaking them.  He wanted more flag burning.  He wanted ’em to go out there.  He was tweaking them like I tweak the media.  He was taunting them.  He wanted these extremist wacko protesters to get so mad they started burning even more flags because he knows that the more leftists start acting deranged and unhinged, the greater the benefit for him, the more normal he looks, the greater he looks.  He was elected, in large part, because of these people and their behavior. 

And I think he was trying to stoke more of it.  I think he was taunting ’em.  I think he was tweaking ’em.  I think he was daring them to go burn another flag.  I think he wanted them to go out there and create even more scenes like this, because he knows he benefits from it.  He just has this inner understanding.  Now, admittedly, I think this because it’s what I would do.  It’s how I’ve treated the left on this program ever since I’ve been doing it.