RUSH: I checked the email during the break and there’s a bunch of them in there obviously. One of them stood out. “Why are you saying, Mr. Limbaugh, the Republicans are the choke point?” You ever heard of Obamacare repeal, folks? What do you keep hearing on Obamacare repeal? What’s the latest news on Obamacare repeal? That Republicans are having trouble figuring out a way to do it. Do you realize that there was a “secret recording”? The Republicans had a little retreat in Philadelphia last week, and from this retreat a secret recording emerged that detailed Republicans struggling with coming up with ways to repeal and replace Obamacare.
And I said, “Wait a minute. A secret recording?”
Pennsylvania happens to be one of the states where you need people’s permission to record their conversation. So here comes a “secret recording” that comes from the Republican retreat made to look like the Republicans got shafted by a rogue interloper? And that may be the case; I don’t know. But tax cuts were a huge, huge deal in the Trump campaign. I don’t see anything on those. And on Obamacare the only news we’re seeing is how (sobbing), “What can we do? (sniffles) We have a plan! (wailing) It’s… it’s really harder than we thought (sniffle) ’cause we have to maintain the 26-year coverage and we gotta maintain preexisting conditions! (wails) Oh, I don’t know if…”
And it’s clear… Well, no, it is not clear. It appears there isn’t a whole lot of energy for this. I mean, Trump won. They won. They have all three branches now. What are they waiting on? What are they waiting on? Well, these protests in part are designed to paralyze Republicans, and if they paralyze Trump, well, that’s icing on the cake and an added bonus. But that’s not gonna happen. Trump just doubles down on ’em, and they don’t know what hit ’em. They think they have the momentum right now. This is the great thing, too.
They think with all these protests that they have taken the momentum from Trump. They haven’t taken the momentum from Trump. Trump can regain the momentum (if he ever loses it) any time he wants, and he’s done that with the announcement of his Supreme Court nomination tomorrow night and another executive order today on small business regulations. Major, major executive order there. So he can reclaim the momentum any time he wants to. They still don’t understand what they’re up against, folks.
They’re trying to take Trump out the way they’ve succeeded in taking out any Republican they’ve ever wanted to take out, because it always works or for the most part always works whenever they want to take out a Republican. This stuff, all of these protests — which are not tied specifically to this executive order. You’ve got to believe that. You must understand this. It’s crucial going forward to be able to keep in perspective what they show you on TV and not fall for the narrative. This is as much about paralyzing Republicans as it is Trump, because if they can paralyze Republicans, they can stop the Trump agenda.
They can stop anything Trump wants to try to implement via legislation. That’s who these people are really aiming at. And they’ll go to the Republicans, “How can you be on the side of a man who wants to deny civil rights to simple refugees who are fleeing war-torn strife in their native lands?” It’s that kind of approach, and in the past it’s the kind of thing Republicans have reacted to it the way the protesters want them to. I’ve always thought that the GOP was gonna be the potential choke point for Trump when it came time to implement his agenda, and you see it here with Obamacare.
How many years did they campaign promising, assuring us? How many years have they held (even if they call ’em symbolic) votes on repealing? Now they’ve got the whole shooting match. They’ve got the whole ball of wax. And however it’s happening, the news is leaking that it’s getting really hard! (sniffles) “We don’t know what to do! We’re working really hard. It’s proving much more difficult than we thought!” Then the old argument which I’ve prepped you for before the end of last year. Repeal and replace or repeal and replace in two years or repeal and replace in three years or just repeal.
And the thinking is, “Well, we can’t repeal it ’til we have something to replace it with, and we don’t know what that is yet and we’re not sure the time frame. When would be best to do the replacement?” Just repeal it! “Well, we can’t do that because that would turn it loose on the insurance industry.” Yeah, the private sector. Don’t trust the private sector, right? Don’t trust the private sector! The private sector? You leave it alone in the private sector and everybody’s gonna get screwed, right? That’s the way the Democrats think!
At any rate, folks, I was telling people over the weekend who are alarmed at how often and how large these protests seem to be, how often they materialize, and I told everybody that asked me about it to calm down, that it is the strategy. This is the official policy of Trump opposition to simply resist everything because that’s all they can do. They can’t stop it unless the Republicans cave and join them. If the Republicans stay unified, House and Senate, and in support of the Trump agenda then there’s nothing the Democrats can do.
Hence all these protests and all of these people. You know, the Drive-Bys are experts at making the things they believe seem like they represent the vast majority of thinking in the country. They’re very good at making it appear that everybody agrees with the take on all this that the Drive-Bys have. “The Drive-Bys are outraged but this. Civil libertarians are outraged! People cannot believe that Trump would be so inhumane and so callous.” And they report this in a way that makes you think everybody in America thinks the same thing!
And I’m telling you, they don’t.
Not even close.
But that’s what the narrative becomes, and then the real threat that Trump faces is from traditional Republicans afraid and scared of this kind of thing ’cause they fall for the trick that this represents a majority of thinking. The Republicans have been in the minority for so long it’s hard to stop thinking of themselves that way. I have an analogy. It’s like people who have been overweight all their lives and go on a diet, and they lose the weight but they don’t start thinking thin. They’ve been overweight all their lives and that’s their self-image.
So they stop at every pane of glass and every mirror and gaze at themselves, looking for any evidence that the weight’s coming back on. One of the problems with permanent weight loss is that people don’t have a corresponding mental adjustment that there’s a new them. It’s the same thing here. Republicans have been on the losing end, and they’re constantly on the losing end as far as the media’s concerned. They’ve been in minority — well, if you go back the last 60 years — so often that that became the mind-set, and it’s tough to start acting confident and knowledgeably that you’re in the majority and that you have the power and wield it.
If you constantly think you’re in the minority and if all of this news coverage makes it look like you are, which is its purpose, then we have a problem. See, I look at this a different way. See, I look at this as everybody in Washington — and I would include many Republicans in this, but certainly the Democrats and the media — still not understanding Trump. They think momentum has shifted and that they have regained it. The moment is theirs now. They’re in control.
They’re defining things. They are in charge of the narrative. The thing about that is, it isn’t true. Donald Trump can reclaim the momentum, the narrative any time he wants to, often by just doubling down on the thing that made ’em mad in the first place, or changing direction and announcing something brand-new that leaves everybody in the dust on what they’re protesting. Which is what the SCOTUS nomination announcement for tomorrow night was and the small-business regulation reduction executive order.
Now these people are out still protesting what happened at the airports and so forth, but the bottom line is that all the travelers who were detained have now been released. So the story’s over. But it isn’t over because the story is actually resistance to Trump, not the specifics involved here. And one of the things that they’re still operating under, folks, is that Trump is going to implode and destroy himself. They have believed that since the day Trump descended the escalators at Trump Tower. They thought that his announcement speech was an implosion and that he was finished.
Somebody has put together a video, and it takes 15 or 20 minutes to watch it, of everybody they could think of assuring everybody that Trump would never win. Every comedian you can think of, Hollywood actors, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, virtually everybody laughing about the possibility Trump becoming president, every one of them to a man or woman saying not possible. I mean, Bob Beckel, they’re all there and they’ve all got egg on their face, they were all proven wrong.
But the reason that they all believed that, they believe Trump’s gonna implode or there’s some magic bullet out there that’s gonna take him out like the Access Hollywood video with Billy Bush and Trump saying he can grab anything he wants because he’s a famous guy. All these things they thought were gonna destroy Trump, and they think that Trump himself is gonna destroy himself, and they believed it from the get-go. And they’re still waiting for it to happen.
They thought this executive order was it. They thought this was the Trump implosion, and assembling all these protests was to be the exclamation point. I mean, I saw two stories that said Trump’s presidency has already hit the iceberg, it’s taking on water. It was this weekend and this executive order story that prompted those two stories I’ve seen, and it’s all rooted in the fact that they think Trump is going to implode and destroy himself.
They believed it, and the Republicans have, too, since the day Trump came down the escalators. The Democrats’ time-tested techniques for destroying Republicans personally and politically do not work on Trump, but they haven’t figured it out yet, because they don’t know any other way to go at him. They have had so much success being able to take out and destroy any Republican they want that they have never developed an alternative corresponding strategy based on a different kind of Republican, which Trump is.
The media has proven inept at destroying Trump, and all this has caused to happen is the media to gin it up even further and try harder, but using the same techniques they’ve always tried. They’re beating their heads against the wall. Do not doubt me. The objective is to destroy Donald Trump. The objective is to impeach him. The objective is to destroy his reputation and presidency, even if he remains in office, this in the minds of the American people.
You can look at the media as the military wing of the Democrat Party. And they’re firing blanks. They don’t think so. They don’t realize it. But they’re hoping that Trump will continue to implode, or will implode at some point. But to me — and I say this frankly and clearly and honestly — to me this is fun to watch.
How many times the past 18 months have we been right where we are? How many times the past 18 months have we been right where we were this past weekend? How many times during the campaign did you even think, “Ah, that’s it, Trump’s finished now”?
Even on election night, as late as nine p.m. Hillary Rodham Rodham thought she was still gonna win in a landslide. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight, nine p.m. was starting to think, uh-oh. They haven’t gotten over it and they’re still trying what they’ve always used in the past that succeeds in destroying Republicans, but it doesn’t do anything but glance off of Donald Trump. They just don’t understand, haven’t been able to figure Trump out. It’s not that hard. He’s devoted to winning, it’s the driving force behind Trump.
They are gonna continue this kind of thing and it’s going to intensify with each instance it doesn’t work. So buckle up, folks. This is what it was always gonna look like. You don’t take on the Washington establishment and have them just bow down and get out of the way. They’re not gonna give it up. It was always gonna be like this. If you voted for Trump, you should have known — probably did — this is what it’s gonna look like every day.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’ve just run across a piece here. Apparently the Wall Street Journal has a — well, it’s a story about another Gang of Eight-style amnesty comprehensive immigration bill in the Senate that is being brought to us by a Republican Senator from North Carolina, Thom Tillis, exactly what I was talking about, Republicans are gonna be Trump’s biggest obstacle, not these protesters, not these leftists.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: The website LifeZette has an exclusive that says Steve Wynn — casino mogul Steve Wynn — is to become the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. Don’t you just love that? That’s exclusive to LifeZette. This is gonna be out there for a while; people will be tracing it down. Steve Wynn to be the finance… Not the chairman, but the finance chairman of the Republican National Committee. The guy knows casino odds. The guy knows money.
Anyway, what I was beginning to tell you and realized I didn’t have time before the break, is along the lines here that Trump’s biggest obstacle in my opinion is not the left, because they’re predictable. And all of these protests… Look, I know it causes anxiety, folks. It used to with me. I still get ticked off about it. I get ticked off like you can’t believe at the scam that it is. And I don’t deny… Look, they’re well organized. I mean, the British House of Commons today, the Labor Party was going nuts. These people are all organized, and there’s a central figure for all of this organization, and it is George Soros.
George Soros is the central organizing figure, and in much of this, he’s the financier. Not that these people need to be told to oppose. I mean, they do oppose. There is a sizable number of leftists and liberals out there, but the actual motions of paying them to show up and organizing them to show up and giving them the right things to say, telling them what they’re protesting? This is not organic. It’s being made to look like the whole country is outraged, that civil rights and civil right liberties are being denied by the nation that’s supposed uphold them, and something horrible and rotten is happening in America.
I get ticked off at the lie that all of these protests represent. I get ticked off at the trick, ticked off at the fact the media that joins this. But it doesn’t concern me in terms of Trump because Trump has shown that he’s not afraid of these people. He doesn’t react to them, other than to double down. But the Republicans are another ball of wax. They have not demonstrated the willingness to double down and stay committed. They have demonstrated in the past that they cave to this kind of stuff, and we’ve talked about it for I don’t know how long.
They cave because they fall for the ruse. You know, all of this is a variation on a time-honored trick. You remember this. Whenever there was any criticism of the popular Democrat of the day — it could be Obama, it could be some Democrat that’s proposed legislation that they all love, it could be first lady, it could be anybody. Whenever there is opposition to a Democrat, what was the warning that came from the media? “You better be careful! You better not be critical! You better not criticize our first black president.
“You better not criticize Ted Kennedy. You better not! Because all it’s gonna do is anger the independents, and they’re gonna just run right straight to the Democrat Party.” And the Republicans fell for that (and continued to) and it ended up paralyzing them. They began to believe that any opposition… Because the umbrella under which all this happened was that we all must be bipartisan. “We all must show that we can work together. We must all show that we can cooperate. We must be bipartisan. We must cross the aisle,” and the Republicans have lost their voice saying that that’s what they’re capable of.
How many Republican campaigns do you remember where the Republican running for office pledged to be the guy that could cross the aisle, reach across the aisle, work with Democrats? The Democrats don’t want to work with us. They want to cream us, they want to get rid of us, they want us not to exist — and we help them. So that trick about the independents… Now, who wins the independents every election? Us. We do. And it’s the same thing where they’re trying to say that Trump’s executive orders is gonna create more terrorism.
“You better not! You better not! You better not limit immigration from any of these countries! It’s gonna make terrorists made.” How sophomoric is that? The United States does not create terrorists. Islam creates terrorism. Islam, however it’s interpreted by these people, creates terrorism. We don’t, other than we’re infidels by virtue of our existence. But Trump’s executive order… I get so sick and tired of the same lame logic and talking points being put out. Bush’s Abu Ghraib photo? “Oh, man, what a recruiting tool!” Club Gitmo, Guantanamo Bay, what a recruiting tool!
They don’t need any recruiting tools. They’ve got mosques where that happens. So now Trump’s executive order is gonna massively create new terrorists. It’s just plain BS. Just like criticizing Democrats is going to create anger among independents and they’re gonna leave the Republicans ’cause they don’t want the argument; they don’t want the confrontation. Independents don’t like it. They want us to get along. Well, Wall Street Journal: “Republican Senator Lays Ground Work for Broad Immigration Overhaul.” We’re back here to Thom Tillis from North Carolina.
He has a plan that would put together changes sought by Democrats with changes sought by Republicans. Here is a Republican in the era of Trump proposing comprehensive immigration reform that would grant amnesty for 11 million illegal aliens living in the United States. We’re back to the Gang of Eight. We’re back to this whole comprehensive immigration reform. This has just been introduced, or soon will be. So it is things like this that make me want to warn you or advise you that the biggest threat I think Trump faces for his legislation and for the successful implementation of his agenda is the Republicans.
‘Cause, yeah, the Republicans have the majority, but they have to stay unified. And we know how they have had a tendency to cave. And we know how they have a tendency to… If Trump is reported as having said something or behaved in such a way, you can make a bet that there will be some condemnation coming. And the reason the Republicans do this is really the frustrating thing. It’s rooted in the belief that they’re the minority and that the only way that they’re gonna ever succeed is to somehow make Democrats and liberals like them, and therefore listen to them and want to help them with their agenda.
We just got through an election where they won! The Republicans won huge, and they owe it to Trump. They don’t have to curry favor with liberal Democrats. They don’t have to curry favor with people who hate them. They don’t have to reach out. And this illustrates the thing that I think is missing from Republican politics and has been for a while, and that is the objective where liberals are concerned politically, is defeat. They have to be defeated. And instead we get sidetracked by this desire to be bipartisan and to work together, to show that Washington works.
And all that means? “Washington works” is defined by liberals getting their way. That’s what “Washington working” means. So even in a massive Trump victory, even with a corresponding massive Republican victory, we still have a Republican-sponsored comprehensive immigration bill that features amnesty, which was not part of the campaign, certainly not part of Trump’s.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Phone call time! Mary in Dayton, Ohio. Need to get back to the phones. How are you doing, Mary? I’m glad you waited. Great to have you here on the program.
CALLER: Well, thank you. My husband and I have loved you for 20 some years and we’ve always listened to you. I’ve never had a call answered before, but I do want to encourage you and tell you that we saw… The internet is full of interviews of Senator Rob Portman. He’s our Republican senator, and we voted for him. (sigh) He ran for reelection this November. We are very disappointed that he would go on CNN and criticize Trump’s immigration ban, because we are a hundred percent for it. We also have four children in their twenties to 32. They all voted for Trump and they all think immigration ban — and doing it without warning or without giving advance notice — was really the only smart way to go. So I wish I… I did call Senator Rob Portman’s office and let him know that we’re disappointed and we’d like him to support Trump. So thank you for standing up for Trump. We’re trying to do our part here. I wish I could do more. Do you know how I can do more? (chuckling) We’ve been Republicans here for years and —
RUSH: You know, that’s the thing: Everybody wants to do more, and you and people like you are all Trump has. He doesn’t have the media. I’m watching Spicer doing this press briefing. It’s still going on, and I just observed to Mr. Snerdley… Mr. Snerdley is a close personal friend with Mr. Spicer. And I said, “You tell Spicer he’s wasting his time. You tell him I said that.” And Snerdley said, “Why?” “‘Cause they’re never gonna report stuff the way he reports it here.” He’s up there, he’s giving the daily White House press briefing, and when the camera switches to the media in there, you can see the ice.
You can see the disgust. You can see the fact they resent the fact that Spicer is there because Trump is there, and they’re never gonna report on what he says the way he says it. I mean, I know he’s got to do it. I wish they would follow through on their original ideas. You know, change this up. Do it once a week. Kick ’em out of the White House so they can go over to the OEO. Put 500 people in there. Turn the press briefing into a rally every day or some such thing. Do whatever it is. I wish they would shake it up, because Spicer is giving it everything he’s got! He’s taking the job seriously.
He’s trying to answer every one of these questions as honestly and as forthrightly as he can, and he’s knocking questions out of the park. He’s hitting home runs with every trick question he’s getting, and they’re not gonna report that. They’re trying to constantly misrepresent what this administration is. You mentioned Senator Portman. I know Senator Portman. I’ve liked him for a long time. But I’m telling you, the choke point for Trump is Republicans. This is made to order. This is why these protests happen. These protests are aimed at undermining Trump, but not to make Trump change his mind.
They’re aimed at undermining other people who support Trump. The greatest objective, the primary objective these protesters have on the left (now joined by Obama) is to have the Republican Party abandon Trump. That’s the only hope the Democrats have of stopping Trump, is if the Republicans do it. And the media knows how to scare Republicans. And the left knows how to scare Republicans. All you have to do to scare Republicans is make it look like they support racism, bigotry, violation of human rights, and all of the so-called grievances that are tied up into this executive order, which are zero.
But it’s being portrayed as an executive order replete with hate, and the Republicans just… They don’t even want to go to the trouble of defending it. They don’t want to go to the trouble of standing with it. They don’t think it’s a win-win, because they do not have it in their minds that they won. Trump did. (sigh) It’s a… I don’t know. It’s kind of a fraught, taut situation in a sense. I mean by “taut,” tight, because the Republicans have become so accustomed to being the minority party that it becomes a way of life and a mind-set.
And all of a sudden you win, and you become the majority party, and it requires a new set of balls, more confidence, when you used to not have any because you were the perennial loser or minority. And it’s just… It’s hard. And especially when not all of them up there are crazy about Trump anyway and were part of the establishment hoping Trump would implode all during the campaign, which is why I say: All Trump has backing him up are his supporters.
I’ll tell you what you can do, and just off the top of my head, if you ever get polled, if it’s true and you are remaining a full-fledged supporter of Trump, you let the pollster know. Don’t be afraid of the pollster, don’t be afraid of what you think the pollster is gonna think of you. I’m wont to tell people to call Washington and I’ve never done that, but where is the Obamacare repeal, hmm? And where is all the action here on tax cuts? I mean, this is all part of the campaign. It’s all part of the recipe that resulted in a Republican victory.
Now we got Thom Tillis from North Carolina, Republican, proposing a bipartisan comprehensive immigration bill with the Democrats to grant amnesty to 11 million illegals. It’s like the election never happened! It’s like the campaign never took place!