RUSH: The AP, ladies and gentlemen, has a story here that… I referenced this in the first hour of the program. It’s insulting; it’s demeaning. It treats Trump as a seven- or eight-year-old who is in his Romper Room sandbox every day and really doesn’t like leaving it. The story is written by Julie Pace. She’s one of the writers, White House correspondent. The headline of this story: “Worldwide Effort Set to Keep Trump Happy on First Trip Abroad.” What does that headline tell you — in context — if you put that headline in context with all the other Drive-By coverage of Trump the past year?
Normally a headline like that would convey that worldwide efforts are underway to accommodate President Trump because of the high level of respect and integrity that he has and the desires of his hosts to treat him well because he’s coming from the United States. But that’s not what they mean. “Worldwide Effort Set to Keep Trump Happy on First Trip Abroad” means he’s an insolent, immature little child, and the world is having to go to great lengths to keep him from having little temper tantrums and taking his ball and going home.
“When President Donald Trump sits down for dinner in Saudi Arabia…” This is the lede of the story from the AP. “When President Donald Trump sits down for dinner in Saudi Arabia, caterers have ensured that his favorite meal — steak with a side of ketchup — will be offered alongside the traditional local cuisine.” Now, those of you in the audience are probably aware of this, but the Drive-Bys and people of uber-elite sophistication think that it is an outrage to have ketchup with a steak. It just isn’t done.
Not in public. Not in polite society. In movies, chefs have been portrayed as resisting the preparation of a steak for a customer if it’s going to be served with ketchup. The chefs are portrayed as unwilling to have their great culinary creation ruined with such an accompaniment as ketchup. So throwing ketchup in here is also designed to illustrate that Trump is a child and he’s unconventional and he’s unsophisticated. Doesn’t he know nobody eats steak with ketchup!
Next paragraph: “At NATO and the Group of 7 summits, foreign delegations have gotten word that the new U.S. president prefers short presentations and lots of visual aids.” (chuckles) Yeah, the guy’s such a child, you can’t hold his attention for longer than five minutes unless you’ve got some pictures. Unless you got some “visual aids,” you’re not gonna hold his attention. So make sure you’ve got some visual aids. You might want to throw in some beauty pageant photos, anything to keep this child’s attention on what you want him to pay attention to.
“At all of Trump’s five stops on his first overseas trip, his team has spent weeks trying to build daily downtime into his otherwise jam-packed schedule.” Ladies and gentlemen, Donald Trump is running rings around everybody around him energy-wise. Donald Trump does not need downtime built into his schedule. He doesn’t do downtime. Donald Trump is up at 3:30 or four every morning. He doesn’t go to bed much before midnight. He is a person that literally doesn’t need a lot of sleep.
I think needing a lot of sleep is psychological, myself. I mean, if you spend your life believing you need eight, you need seven, whatever it is, you’re not gonna be ready to go unless you get what you think you need. I know all kinds of people who sleep four hours a night. No hassle, no problem. They don’t feel sleep deprived, either. People who expect seven or eight a night and only get four are gonna wake up feeling sleep deprived and it’s gonna… So much is psychological.
But the point is that it’s everybody else who’s gonna need downtime, not Trump. This is a smear job here. This is an effort to portray him as a child, as an immature kid with no attention span. He doesn’t like words ’cause he doesn’t like to read. You need to show him pictures. And, by the way, he can’t work very hard. You know, he needs a lot of time to go to the playground, get in the swing set up, ride the merry-go-round or whatever. You better build that in, NATO!
You better build that in, Group of 7, or you’re gonna lose him. Next paragraph: “Even before Trump’s trip morphed from a quick jaunt to Europe into a nine-day behemoth, White House aides were on edge about how the president would take to grueling pressures of foreign travel: the time zone changes, the unfamiliar hotels, the local delicacies. Two officials said they feared that a difficult trip might even lead the president to hand off future traveling duties to Vice President Mike Pence.”
Now, I want to ask you: Have you ever seen a story on a Democrat president or secretary of state and the grueling rigors of the travel schedule? You haven’t. You haven’t. There’s no sympathy extended for grueling travel schedules. But now the White House is on edge! The White House is nervous. The White House is deeply concerned that the president might not be able to handle the grueling pressures, which are “time zone changes, unfamiliar hotels, local food.” You see the picture? This guy is unsophisticated. He hasn’t traveled!
He likes steak and ketchup. He can’t pay attention for five or six minutes. Make sure you show him some pictures and then make sure he’s got time to go to the playground and the swing set — and be he careful ’cause all those time zone changes could really, really affect his mood. He may not be able to handle this. And these unfamiliar hotels…? He builds them, for crying out loud! He builds hotels around the world. He has golf courses around the world. He has traveled all over the place — and he’s traveling on Air Force One, the most sophisticated, luxuriously equipped airplane in…
Well, I take it back. Some of these potentates in the Middle East have some flying castles. Their Airbus 380s. I mean, Air Force One is no slouch in the luxury department. “Trump’s final itinerary hardly eases him into the delicate world of international diplomacy on foreign soil. After departing Friday on an overnight flight on Air Force One, Trump will hopscotch from Saudi Arabia to Israel to the Vatican. He’ll close his trip with a pair of summits in Brussels…” Get this.
This a quote from Julianne Smith, “who served as a foreign policy adviser to [Biden] and is now a senior fellow at the Center for New American Security.” Ready? Quote: “The chance of something going wrong — you insult the hosts, you get sick, your boss gets sick, you miscommunicate with your hosts, you make a scheduling error, you need to change the schedule just hours before a meeting, the motorcade get stuck in traffic, or the plane is stranded due to bad weather — is extremely high. Personally, I think they should cut it back now before they regret it,” because she doesn’t think the president is up to this kind of extensive travel.
There aren’t motorcades that get stuck in traffic! When’s the last time you saw a motorcade stuck in traffic? It doesn’t happen. They clear everybody out of the way. A plane stranded by bad weather? You know what will happen in that case? The plane will take off and fly around the weather! The plane’s not gonna sit on the ground and the president’s not gonna sit on the ground as a target. This is absurd. But the chances of something — and, of course, what if any of these things go wrong. Trump’s gonna blow his stack, of course.
Trump’s gonna lose his temper, may fire people right on the spot. If his motorcade gets hung up, if weather grounds Air Force One, if something goes wrong with the schedule… “The trip marks the first time since taking office that Trump has spent a night away from the White House at a property that does not bear his name.” (Gasp!) The horror! I hadn’t thought of that. Donald Trump’s gonna be spending the night someplace he doesn’t own! I don’t know about you, folks, I never do that. I never stay anywhere I don’t own. I couldn’t handle the pressure.
If I had to go to someplace… If I go to Los Angeles, I never stay someplace I don’t own. Of course, this is… This is absurd! Everybody stays in places they don’t own or that don’t have their names on it. “It’s not just the bragging rights that Trump gets when he goes to his own properties…” See, there’s no… Trump cannot illegally parlay this trip into profits for Trump organizations ’cause he’s not staying in Trump hotels. This is one of the biggest hit pieces, and it’s disguised.
But this is one of the biggest hit pieces that I have seen in a while for what it actually is and how it actually portrays Trump and the allegations and the insinuations it makes. “Staffers know his meal preferences and the exact temperature he likes a room set at. He’s often surrounded by long-time friends and acquaintances who have memberships to the commander in chief-owned retreats.” And all of this is gonna be none of that.
Trump’s gonna have to get by, he’s gonna have to rough it — and with people he probably doesn’t like, because he’s bigot and he’s a racist and he probably doesn’t like the Saudis. And if there’s anybody around that’s got ties to terrorism, he isn’t gonna like it. He may blurt out, “Hey, you’re a terrorist! I do not want you in the meeting!” They’re afraid he’s gonna call out a leader as a terrorist. Oh, my gosh, the staff, the media, they’re in panic mode because Trump is just so unpredicatable.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This business about Trump: “He’s got a short attention span and you better show him a lot of pictures, maybe of some beauty pageants, otherwise you’re gonna lose him.” You know what that really means? Trump does no-BS meetings. You get in, you get it, and you get out. There’s no happy talk. There’s no sitting around, get acquainted talk. “How are the kids?” It’s “What are we here for?” Get in, get it, and get out. You know who’s incapable of foreign travel is Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton could not have done a trip like this standing up, and Huma practically admitted it, that it took a village to get her anywhere and to keep her there once they got her there.
Listen to the last paragraph of the story: “In Saudi Arabia, people with knowledge of the planning for Trump’s trip say the caterers are planning to offer the president steak and ketchup…” So they put that in there a second time. “The people with knowledge of the Saudis’ planning insisted on anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the sensitive details.” So, once again we have the same kind of anonymous, unnamed sources providing the meat of a story for the AP.