RUSH: So I went to bed last night at about 11 o’clock out here on the Left Coast. That’s 2 o’clock eastern. Everything was quiet, and I stayed up an additional half hour waiting to see if there was any breaking news. I mean, 10:30 West Coast time is 1:30 East Coast time, and there was nothing. I woke up… I went to bed and it was very, very peaceful. I wake up to all hell breaking loose! I said, “Is this ever gonna end? Is there ever gonna be a normal day again?” (interruption) No, no, no. I’m not talking about the hurricane. That’s actually going well.
Did you see that they have restored 1.4 million people back to power last night? FPL apparently is making great progress in restoring power. Remember they said it was gonna be out maybe for months? I know. You know why they do that? They do it on purpose. They get it back on in weeks and people say, “Wow,” just like they’re doing now. But here they are. That’s fantastic. There’s 2.6 million still out of power out of a little over 6 million, so we’re really moving fast.
Trump did an appearance there today. I think he flew down to Fort Myers. He’s meeting victims and governor… I mean, everybody down there is just really doing a bang-up job. There were trucks, power people, contractors, tree and landscapers just waiting for this storm to get out of there and drive south into south Florida — and they’ve arrived, and they have begun their work. And that’s up. I mean, that’s an upper. That’s a positive thing. Thanks to all of those people that are — and they’re gonna get paid. I mean, this is commerce at work, here.
Pelosi calls it “triple” down.
Anyway, so I wake up today, and all hell is breaking loose — and, you know, I wade through it. I do not knee-jerk react to anything, particularly when the Drive-By Media is involved. When the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party are involved in setting a narrative every day, writing the script for the soap opera, I’m sorry, folks: I am immediately suspicious. I am not fatalistic. I am not pessimistic by nature except in a few things, and I’m not gonna tell you what those are. But certainly not this.
So I hustled and got out of the hotel, and I raced in here to start trying to make sense of things. So when I got up, the news was that Trump had caved on the wall, that Trump at dinner with Chuck and Nancy last night had caved on the wall. And then I saw that a lot of people, Trump voters, Trump supporters, believed it! They were saying, “That didn’t take long. It’s not even October, and Trump has already sold us out.” I understand people have been sold out so many times voting for Republicans that they are conditioned to be sold out.
So they just figured this Trump thing may be too good to be true. Chuck and Nancy, first they make a deal on the debt ceiling and spending, and Trump’s praising them and praising it. Mitch and Paul are over there fuming that they’ve been sold out and then thrown under the bus. And now this thing comes along, and everybody’s just fatalistic about it and thinking that it’s over. But I stop and I ask myself: Would Trump really do this?
Does Trump not know how he would blow up the entire support base he has by making a deal with Chuck and Nancy, and taking the wall off the table while granting amnesty to anybody? I don’t care if it’s children, if it’s seasoned citizens. I’m asking myself: Would Trump really do that? Is he that…? Fill in the blank. But a lot of people do think it, a lot of people did think it, and right there pushing that narrative is the Drive-By Media — and certain Republicans are helping that narrative be pushed.
They think that Trump caved to Chuck and Nancy on the wall. So I came in here and I started digging deep, and I said to myself: “Don’t get caught up in this. What you need to do is just chill.” So I started looking into things. And we’ve got, I mean, a mountain of things to go through. But I’m gonna tell you what Trump just said a few moments ago on the tarmac in Florida when he and Melania and his team landed in Florida. It’s a tweet: “We have to have the wall. If we don’t have the wall, we’re doing nothing.”
And then a tweet came 25 minutes later from Fox Business: “The wealthy Americans are not my priority. My priority are people in the middle class and that’s where we’re giving the big tax reduction.” That’s another thing that blew up yesterday. When I got… (chuckling) You know, I got back to the hotel after the program yesterday and I’m deluged with messages from people, “Well, we were played. We were played! Trump’s talking about raising taxes on the rich now, and that’s the only reason I voted for him.” I mean, deluged.
I had more people reacting to that than I have people reacting to me, anyway, on this Chuck and Nancy deal with the wall. So that’s something we’ll put off to the side. We’ll come back to the tax business, because that’s the fundamental issue as well. There is a pretty good summary of events here that goes like this: Chuck and Nancy claimed after a dinner at the White House with the president that a deal had been done on granting amnesty to the DACA kids, the DREAMers. (They’re not kids anymore, not all of them. Thirty percent of them have reportedly committed criminal acts, some felonies.)
Chuck and Nancy said that Trump had agreed to enshrine protections for 800,000 illegal immigrants, the DREAMers, “in a border security package excluding the wall.” Remember something, folks: The media’s primary task since the inauguration has been to separate you, if you are a Trump supporter, from Trump. That has been their objective. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t destroy Trump, that only Trump can. Where have we heard that before? Only Trump can destroy Trump. They can’t. They’ve been trying.
They know they can’t. So they’ve been trying to drive a wedge between you — Trump supporters — and Trump. So if Chuck and Nancy come out and say, “We got a deal! We got a deal! Amnesty for the kids and Trump said to hell with the wall” and media reports it, all hell breaks loose. Meanwhile, Trump’s in the White House doing whatever he’s doing, not even aware this guy going on until after the fact. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said there was no agreement on the wall during the meeting, which puts the ball back in the court for Chuck and Nancy, who said not only was there a deal but that Trump had thrown in the bonus that he doesn’t care about the wall right now.
Huckabee Sanders said: Nope, no agreement. Trump said the same thing in his tweets this morning: “No deal was made last night on DACA. Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent. Would be subject to vote.” He then tweeted a follow-up message: “The WALL, which is already under construction in the form of new renovation of old and existing fences and walls, will continue to be built.” And then Trump pushed Congress to pass legislation protecting the immigrants but said he wanted big — that’s in all caps: “BIG border security.”
As he left the White House to go out to the helicopter to chopper to go to Air Force One to go down to Florida, Trump admitted that he was fairly close to reaching a deal with Chuck and Nancy that excluded the wall and that the Republican leaders are on board. Chuck and Nancy then released a statement around the same saying the president’s tweets were “not inconsistent” with what they said. So Chuck and Nancy are backin’ off a little bit from the original statement. You know how this works, right? I’ll give you an analogy. Apple introduced the iPhone on Tuesday.
They got a new feature in the new iPhone that you’re not gonna be able to get for nine months (chuckles), if then. They can only make 10,000 of these things a week, 300,000 a month. They’re having trouble with components. At any rate, the big deal on the new iPhone is Face ID, facial recognition. No more fingerprint ID. This phone bombards your face with 30,000 dots with a 3D sensor that measures the contour of your face, and it can’t be fooled if you grow a beard, it can’t be fooled if you put on glasses, it can’t be fooled if you get a sex change. It can’t be fooled.
So they’re demoing this, and the first national public demo “doesn’t work.” (chuckles) It didn’t work because it did. It did exactly what it was designed to do, but the media didn’t care. The media wants Apple to blow up. The media wants Apple to be embarrassed. So they ran to the microphones and they ran to the keyboards and they begin pounding, “Apple’s premiere issue big fail, big fail! Face ID, big fail.” It didn’t fail. I’m not gonna get into tech explanations here with you, but it did exactly what it was supposed to do.
Those of you who have an iPhone with fingerprint ID you know when you restart the phone you have to manually enter your passcode before Touch ID works. It’s designed this way. Somebody had been playing around with the phone that Craig Federighi was gonna demo Face ID on. It was his face that the phone will be told to recognize and had been trained to recognize. All these other assistants were turning it on; they didn’t know… This is so new, they didn’t know the phone was trying to find Federighi, and when it didn’t, it shut down, exactly as it’s supposed to do.
Somebody other than you picks up your phone, tries to use it, and it isn’t you; the phone shuts down and says, “Screw you!” Well, it doesn’t. It’d be fun if it did on the face. But Federighi didn’t know any of that. So he picks up the phone and it says, “Please enter your Apple ID,” and the media… The point is it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It worked flawlessly, but the first report was, “Big fail! Brand-New Apple Stellar Feature Face ID Blows Up!” And in the next 12 hours, the bloggers were so happy, ’cause they hate Apple. They hate Apple like they hate Republicans. It’s amazing. And they were so happy to report that the big, biiiig feature blew up all over. Oh, it was the greatest thing! It was orgasmic.
Except they were wrong. They weren’t curious, and even half of them that reported this knew that the system had done exactly what it’s supposed to. So the same here. In the first report somebody says, “Trump caved on the wall! He made a deal with Chuck and Nancy. Amnesty for the DREAMers and the wall is gone!” So that’s what everybody knows. That’s first reported, second reported, third reported, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, twenty-fifth reported — until the counterversion gets out there. And it doesn’t matter how powerful the counterversion is, and it doesn’t matter how many people type, tweet, broadcast the counterversion.
The first version is what makes the impression. This is a very frustrating thing to me, by the way, because I’m lied about so much, and I don’t respond to most of it. Even when I do, you know, what are the odds? The first thing that’s reported is what people believe, even sophisticates, even people who understand how the media works. Even people who understand the tricks, the subterfuge, the deceit, the dishonesty — even those people — fall for the first thing that’s reported. Now, I’m not defending Trump.
What I’m telling you, folks, is I don’t know yet. But it looks to me like Trump is tweeting all morning long that there is no deal, period, and there certainly isn’t a deal on getting rid of the wall. It may happen later, but it’s not gotten rid of. It’s not gone. Boil everything down. Is Trump…? I’m asking you who voted for him. Is he this tone deaf? Is he this ignorant? Does he not know what got him elected? Does he not…? And I’m telling you, some of the staunchest Trump supporters are out there, and they’ve jumped ship.
Steve King from Iowa’s talking about (paraphrased), “This is it! Trump’s blown it. What the media couldn’t do, Trump did,” i.e., force his supporters to leave. Mitch and Paul are probably up there going, “All right! All right! We’re saved.” And Chuck and Nancy are having talks with the media saying, “What do we need to do to keep it going our way?” Meanwhile, Trump’s down in Florida actually doing some work what the rest of these people are engaged in PR messaging and so forth, which will probably triumph over reality.
It always does. That’s one of my major problems with media in general. So here’s Trump’s tweet: “No deal was made last night on DACA. Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent. Would be subject to vote.” “The WALL, which is already under construction in the form of new renovation of old and existing fences and walls, will continue to be built.” And Schumer and Pelosi more or less agreed with Trump’s take on the meeting. They had a joint statement that hit inboxes as Trump was talking this morning.
“President Trump’s tweets are not inconsistent with the agreement reached last night, and, as we said last night, there was no final deal, but there was agreement on the following…” Oh! There wasn’t a deal? But Chuck and Nancy said they had a deal and that Trump had caved on the wall. Or somebody did. Maybe they didn’t assert or allege it and the media reported it. “President Trump’s tweets are not inconsistent with the agreement reached last night.” Not inconsistent? “As we said last night, there was no final deal.” There wasn’t?
Well, America woke up today thinking there was and that they’re eating the excrement sandwich. Now Chuck and Nancy said, “As we said last night there was no deal.” You didn’t say last night there was no deal, Chuck and Nancy. You led everybody to believe there was a deal and Trump caved on it. “But there was agreement on the following. We agreed the president would support enshrining DACA protections into law and encourage the House and Senate to act. What remains to be negotiated are the details of border security…” That remains to be negotiated? Like the wall remains to be negotiated? Yes. “What remains to be negotiated are the details of border security with a mutual goal of finalizing all details…”
So they’ve not finalized the detail.
Okay. A lot to digest here, folks. We’re just getting started.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: At 10:21 p.m. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said they were mistaken. She said while DACA and border security were both discussed, excluding the wall was certainly not agreed to. That’s like two hours ago, and then Trump followed up in a series of tweets. He defended the DREAMers again but said no deal has been made. He said, “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated, accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really?”
He said, “They have been in our country many years through no fault of their own, brought in by their parents at a young age, plus big border security.” So I can see why people are worried.