RUSH: We’ll start in Coronado, California, with Smokey. Welcome, sir. It’s great to have you with us as you are caller number one today.

CALLER: Hey, thank you, Rush. Rush, I called before. I was sort of an anniversary caller. I called the day after the election, 2016, one of the happiest days of my life. Interestingly your take the day after the election was different than what I thought. And what I wanted to do, two things, I wanted to kind of just remind you what you said a year ago and sort of see what you think might change if anything.

You were very adamant that the left, the media, the whole machine would not accept Donald Trump. They would do everything in their power to delegitimize him. They would fight him at every turn and would never accept him as a duly elected president, and I have to say, your prediction — I listened to the podcast last week mainly for entertainment purposes and kind of to improve my mood and so forth, and I just remember the cautious tone you took, very cautious tone, and, I have to say, you were extremely accurate on how things turned out.

RUSH: What was your reaction when you first heard me make that observation? Were you sad? Were you happy? Were you surprised? What were you?

CALLER: Well, you know, I think, Rush, going back, I mean, I was so happy. I was suffering from a little bit of extra fine bourbon at the time —

RUSH: Right, right, and my comments kind of threw cold water on it all so you —

CALLER: Yeah, exactly. It was such a big day, it was like, God, this is so great. We’ll get tax cuts. We’ve got a majority in the Senate, they can’t stop us. You know, it’s almost like this is a done deal. And, you know, you basically told us it’s not gonna be so easy.

RUSH: Well, let me take the occasion of your call to say something here. None of this that’s happening, the church shooting, none of this stuff, surprises me. And, look, I’ll admit that you get up and you hear about the news or you get home and you hear about the news, and I don’t care how much you’re prepared for, it angers and saddens and all of that.

But I have to tell you, folks, in a general sense, none of this surprises me. He’s right. I did remind everybody that winning this election was just winning one election, and it didn’t mean that everything was now fixed and this election did not put everything back on the right path. It was patently obvious to me — this is based not on specific news events or people’s reactions after the election, but rather on my encyclopedic, encompassing knowledge of the American left, the Democrat Party, and the Washington establishment and my understanding of it — these are truly elites. They’re elites in their own minds, which is important to understand.

It’s not just that they are elites as seen by other people. In their own minds, they are elites. In their own minds they are better people, better human beings than you and I are. In their own minds, they’re the only ones entitled, qualified, what have you, to have the reins of power. They are the only people capable. And what happened on Election Day last year was never supposed to happen, never. They didn’t even conceive of it. They were in such denial.

Now, some of them are now saying that they realized Hillary was running a bad campaign, that she was a bad candidate, but in their world there was no way a majority of Americans were gonna look past all of the baggage that Donald Trump owned and had brought into the campaign himself. And, to this day, they remain shocked and stunned and disoriented and angry, and they are focused only on one thing, and, to them, Donald Trump is an infestation of vermin, of rats, insects, termites, whatever, and they’ve got to get rid of him. And they’re not gonna stop until they do.

You don’t, for example, if you get termites in your house, you don’t just let nature take its course. You call the exterminator, and if that exterminator doesn’t work, you hire another one. You don’t tear down your house. Trump is representative of an infestation of vermin. I’ve had more discussions with people who are sad that they thought by now that all the anger would have been exhausted and people would finally be willing to work together. But it’s like Clarence Thomas asked, what binds us together anymore? There isn’t any one thing such as patriotism that holds us together, like it has in the past.