RUSH: Here’s Peter in Ontario up in Canada. Welcome to the program. Great to have you with us, sir.

CALLER: Absolute, honor, Rush. Thirteen years ago in south Philadelphia, I was a permanent resident, moved back to Canada, I met you in a roast beef place in south Philadelphia. You were such a gentleman. And I’d heard you before, and from that day on I never stopped listening. So I’ll make my point quick.

RUSH: Wait a second. Wait, wait, whoa, whoa. That would have been Nick’s Roast Beef —

CALLER: Exactly.

RUSH: — not that far from the Linc. I remember that.

CALLER: That’s right, 19th and Jackson.

RUSH: Yep.

CALLER: I was a big guy, though I’m 50 pounds lighter now, but I remember getting on the right side of your hearing and you’re just a very gracious man, and everybody I run into nowadays that — ’cause basically up here you’re syndicated because if we get stations in Buffalo, in Toronto, you know, we hear you. So you got a big crowd up here.

RUSH: I appreciate that. Thank you.

CALLER: Listen. I have a short tech question after if it’s possible. The way I look at this is we have guys like Lindsey Graham who we know Lindsey’s not gonna — you know, he’s already said he’s not gonna support it. We also know that there’s, you know, over 20 Senate seats coming up in the midterms. So I think maybe this is Trump’s way of getting ahead of it, to put people on record, to show what establishment really is.

So when it comes right down to it, you know, by that time especially, people I think are gonna be much more engaged in the midterms than they ever have been. Trump can show that, look, you know, we need to get these Senate seats at least out of the establishment. No matter where they go, they gotta be out of the establishment, which of course would come to the Republican end.

RUSH: Peter, you are very shrewd. I have a story in the Stack but I’ll get to out of the break here about how the Democrats have aligned with Trump on an issue because it’s gonna be a factor in ’18, and these Democrats are up for reelection in Trump states, and it’s this issue — I’ll tell you what it is when we get back — that the Democrats in the Senate have aligned with Trump on. You haven’t heard much about this. But that’s why I’m here.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here is the story I was referring to. It’s from Reuters. The headline: “In Rare Bipartisan Display, Democrats Back Trump on China Trade Probe — Three top Democratic senators, in a rare show of bipartisanship, on Wednesday urged U.S. President Donald Trump to stand up to [the ChiComs] as he prepares to launch an inquiry into Beijing’s intellectual property and trade practices in coming days.

“Senate Democratic leader Chuck [You] Schumer pressed the Republican president to skip the investigation and go straight to trade action against [the ChiComs]. ‘We should certainly go after them,’ said [Chuck You] in a statement. Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Sherrod Brown of Ohio also urged Trump to rein in [the ChiComs].” You may not believe this. Reuters assigned nine reporters to this story. I’ve never seen that. It must have been a field trip. Nine reporters to this story!

“Reporting by David Lawder and Lesley Wroughton; [a]dditional reporting by Steve Holland and Ginger Gibson in Washington, and Elias Glenn and Ben Blanchard in Bejing [sic]; [e]diting by Kevin Drawbaugh, Lisa Shumaker and Tom Hogue.” Here’s the bottom line: Almost every senator up for reelection in 2018 came out in support of Trump’s China trade opinion and sanctions. We haven’t seen this many Republicans come out in a press conference and sound this supportive of Trump ever, but Democrats did.

You’d have to watch this on C-SPAN. The Drive-Bys didn’t cover it. Trump is not ideological. Trump is what is being described as “vertically pragmatic,” but he’s not ideological. He doesn’t see people as left or right, even now. Even now with all the attacks that have been run on him from the left, he still doesn’t see people primarily as liberals or conservatives, because he isn’t either one. A vertical pragmatist. Folks, this is what has me so frustrated.

If you take the political identities away, the labels — take them away from Trump. Just put him up there as a non-ideological president. The things that he campaigned on and the things that he’s trying to do ought to all have broad bipartisan support. Because every damn one of them is aimed at improving things for the American people. Be it immigration, be it the economy, whatever the issue, everything Trump is advancing — on the basis of sheer common sense — should have broad bipartisan support.

Now, naturally, I’m not naive. I know that none of these people want Trump to succeed. I haven’t changed and ventured away from that belief by any stretch. I’m just buttressing my point here today that we are paralyzed. Now, you could say we’re paralyzed by politics and you’d be right. But we’re paralyzed by ignorance, and we’re paralyzed by a lack of common sense, and we are paralyzed by political partisanship. We’re paralyzed primarily by stupidity and ignorance. Why do these Democrats all of a sudden out of nowhere and behind closed doors…

I mean, they’ll use this in their own reelection ads, the videos supporting Trump. These are senators from states that Trump carried. Why? They’re supporting him because they think Trump is still gonna be president in 2018. They think Trump is still gonna be president all the way through 2020. You know, short of what Mueller comes up with, everybody thinks that. Even the people who want Trump out do not have a mechanism of getting him out of office before 2020. So the objective is simply paralyze him — just paralyze everything he wants to do and freeze him — and that’s what they’re doing.

I’m telling you here and now, it is ticking off the American people to a degree that is not understood inside the Beltway. If I’m mad about it, I will guarantee you that people in this audience are. If I’m getting frustrated about it, this beyond the bounds of ideological belief, component, principles. Just in the sense of getting things done, just in the sense of taking what’s wrong, rebuilding roads and bridges, the things that need to happen in this country. We do need to fix immigration. We do. That’s why he got elected.

All of these things that he’s proposing are nothing more than vertical common sense. They’re all being opposed for a plethora of reasons. But the one thing that we can never overcome is this total ignorance and lack of common sense. I don’t know how you overcome that. It’s taken how many generations to educate that out of a majority of Americans. How long has it taken for the education system to dumb people down? A generation is roughly 23 to 25 years.

So how many 23- to 25-year cycles has it required, has it taken for us to get to the point where way too many of the people live in this country don’t have any common sense? Don’t even know what it is, and if they do have it they’re afraid of it because it’s categorized at racism or bigotry or what have you? We end up being paralyzed by ignorance and stupidity, and I really go more long the lines of ignorance.

I mean, we’ve always had a percentage of people in any group. There’s always gonna be the stupid and the intellectually challenged. I’m really talking about people that are capable of learning but have been misled, mis-educated, mal-educated, mis-taught, what have you. The ignorant. It’s deeply troubling. They are now in positions of prominence and power — and with those positions, they have very high opinions of themselves. They think they’re smarter than everybody else. It’s embarrassing how little they know.