RUSH: Something that’s got me rather disappointed today. I must admit I’m a bit down. There’s a column by David Brooks in the New York Times today, and the title of the column is “The GOP Is Rotting.” So I figured I had to play prominently in this because I’ve always played prominently in David Brooks columns. I’m always held up as one of the primary perpetrators in the dissolution of the party, the damage to the party. But I didn’t make the cut in this column. Sarah Palin and Fox News are held out today as the primary perps destroying the Republican Party.
Okay, now, back to David Brooks. “A lot of good, honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe middle ground. You didn’t have to tie yourself hip to hip with Donald Trump, but you didn’t have to go all the way to the other extreme and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake, either. You could sort of float along in the middle, and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed.” Now, this is a false construction. There isn’t this grand middle where Republicans of no opinion are lurking, waiting for Trump to go away.
Trump doesn’t have polarization like that. There’s nobody paying attention that is of that mind. Trump has what is called, in the media world, “perfect polarization.” What that means is, he’s got pretty much an equal amount of hate versus an equal amount of love. If you’re out of balance in polarization — if 80% of the people hate you and 20% love you — then you have a problem. Not personally, but if you’re employed somewhere, for example, you’re gonna have a little bit of a problem.
But perfect polarization, Trump has it. In fact, I would actually say that there is a greater percentage of people in the country that love Trump than hate him. I think the idea that half the country hates Trump is overblown. But we’ll go with it because that’s the theme of the Drive-Bys. So David Brooks is saying here that there used to be a place for Never Trumpers to live where they didn’t have to really sign on and love Trump, and they don’t have to go to the extreme like Jeff Flake. I’m sorry, but that’s not true.
Every Never Trumper is a Jeff Flake. There aren’t any mild-mannered Never Trumpers trying to straddle the middle. Part of the definition of being a Never Trumper is being vocal and passionate about it. But, anyway, Brooks believes that this mythical place after a peaceful middle once existed, but for some reason it has vanished because, he says, “Now it’s clear that middle ground doesn’t exist. That’s because Donald Trump never stops asking.” Ready for this?
You’ve had to swallow all of that in order to be a Trump supporter. Now, this is a “conservative” columnist. This guy [Trump], with comprehensive ignorance, is getting more done in the first year of his administration than anybody David Brooks has ever voted for. Donald Trump is getting more done in the first 10 months of his administration than anybody David Brooks ever wanted to be president, hands down. Yeah, and I’m gonna throw Ronaldus Magnus in there. I’m not saying Trump is a replacement for Ronaldus Magnus. Don’t misunderstand here.
I’m drawing the analogy for David. David Brooks was not a big Reaganite, either, at the time. But the idea that Trump’s got this comprehensive ignorance and is a racist which makes it impossible for us sophisticated people to ever, ever support him? “At the same time,” writes Brooks, Trump “asks the party to become the party of Roy Moore, the party of bigotry, alleged sexual harassment and child assault. There is no end to what Trump will ask of his party. He is defined by shamelessness, and so there is no bottom. And apparently there is no end to what regular Republicans are willing to give him.
“Trump may soon ask them to accept his firing of Robert Mueller, and yes, after some sighing, they will accept that, too.” You’re right, Brooks. We can’t wait for that one. It’d be a great Christmas present. So, Brooks says, “That’s the way these corrupt bargains always work. You think you’re only giving your tormentor a little piece of yourself, but he keeps asking and asking, and before long he owns your entire soul.” Can you believe this? The torment these people go through? Look. Okay. You don’t like Trump. Fine.
But, man, Trump’s not corrupting everything. Trump is cleaning things up! You know, Trump’s draining the swamp. The broadcast engineer had a point for me today: “Trump is draining the swamp in ways we never dreamed it would happen.” Look at all the sexual harassers being outed. Look at all the elite, sophisticated, we-know-better-than-you-how-to-treat-women, we-know-better-than-you-how-to-govern people! All of these people are dropping like flies, and it’s all because of Trump. If Hillary had won, none of this would have happened.
He thinks that he’s comprehensively ignorant. These people, these elites, they do think this. That’s the thing that really gives them their self-esteem. That’s what… They really think they are that much smarter than everybody else, and they just… They’re having trouble dealing with being outsmarted here. They were outsmarted the day Trump won the election. They were outsmarted the day Trump survived the Access Hollywood. They were outsmarted the day Trump survived the Trump dossier.
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RUSH: Okay. So Brooks continues here. “It’s amazing that there haven’t been more Republicans like Mitt Romney who have said: ‘Enough is enough! I can go no further!'” This is the money paragraph for Brooks: “The reason, I guess, is that the rot that has brought us to the brink of Senator Roy Moore began long ago. Starting with Sarah Palin and the spread of Fox News, the GOP traded an ethos of excellence for an ethos of hucksterism.” Now, usually I’m in that paragraph. Usually I lead that paragraph.
I’ve been left out of this paragraph, and Fox News has been substituted. I’m not aware — and it probably has happened. I’m not aware that Brooks has blamed Fox News for what’s gone wrong with the Republican Party. I mean, that’s the conservative columnist in the New York Times?
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RUSH: This Tim Miller guy, the Jeb Bush campaign staffer? The Washington Post is reporting that he was planting or feeding anti-Roy Moore stories to the Washington Post. This guy, Tim Miller, is such a Never Trumper that he said… I guess it was back in 2016. I forget when he said it, but it was during the campaign. He said, “Hillary Clinton could beat Donald Trump even if she was in jail.” It was in April of 2016. “Hillary could beat…” This is a Jeb staffer! “Hillary Clinton could beat Trump even if she in jail. That’s how unpopular Trump is.”
His point was… I’m gonna have to paraphrase what it was. His point was, “Why in the world would we throw away the agenda for world leadership that we implemented all over the world after World War II?” Now, McCain was being entirely up-front honest about that, because that’s exactly what the establishment has done. Their view of the United States and its place in the world is entirely different than yours and mine. Now, some of the people I’m talking about literally believe we need to get rid of the whole idea of nation states and borders.
Not all of them think that. But they do agree that the United States should have much more concern over the world than just itself. It’s an argument Trump made recently in one of his speeches, the G20, whatever conference he attended. In Vietnam, I think, is where it was, where he was talking to all the other attendees. He said, “Look, I am gonna make America great again, and you should be making your countries great again. And when we’re all working together to make our countries great again, it’s all gonna work out well. The world is gonna be better than it’s ever been.”
Well, that’s the antithesis of the way McCain was thinking. In their world, the United States, Marshall Plan, rebuilding Europe, NATO, Churchill’s Iron Curtain, establishing the Cold War, all of these were constructs of the elite leadership of the United States in the postwar period. So their purview is not just the United States. Their area of concern, dominant influence is the world and primarily the free world, but never mind that. Their idea, their psychology is one of power and control, not just of the United States, but of the world.
And in that worldview, the United States can clearly be guilty of things. The United States can be a problem when trying to accomplish their world vision. They view Trump and his nativism and make America great as taking the United States out of this, quote-unquote “worldwide leadership role.” The problem with that is that people who have been implementing this so-called worldwide leadership role have not been assuming leadership of the United States or primacy of the United States. They have been agreeing, for example, with the climate change advocates that we’re to blame.
He doesn’t understand it, and I agree with him. Well, these people really do think that they are special and smarter. Brooks epitomizes this. They really do, folks. They think they’re born better. They have better DNA. They have better genealogical traces. They have a better genome. They really believe it. And they have thrown everything they have at Trump. They have conspired, and they have combined all of their massively large intellect, all of their intelligence — and they’ve fired everything they can at the guy — and at the end of the day, they really haven’t made a dent.
Now, some of you may think that they have by slowing Trump down. I’m not gonna deny that things could have been happening at a more rapid clip. But I still think it’s almost unbelievable that Trump has been able to get anything done, given what has been arrayed against him. But yet he does. The economic news, the reversal of fortune to the advantage of the United States on borders and illegal immigration, the massive amount of regulations that have been canceled. And there’s still massive amounts of regulations to go that need to be canceled.
There are still a lot of things to do, but the momentum is still on Trump’s side. And these people are literally beside themselves. Now this sexual harassment stuff’s come along and taken them out. I mean, Trump has come along and who would have ever believed that this would be one of the ways that the swamp gets drained? But it is. Every day, if you pay attention, we’re treated to a new round of just abject disbelief on the part of these people who cannot believe what’s happening to them.
You can put yourself in their shoes and imagine that you are smarter than anybody in your neighborhood. I mean, by a factor of five. It’s not even close. You’re wealthier. You know, play the game. Pretend. You’re wealthier, you’re smarter, and you’ve got people the neighborhood trying to stop you from what you think would be improvements in the neighborhood, and you think you’re gonna mow ’em down. You’ve got the power, you’ve got the money, you’ve got the intellect. And everything you do, you end up as the Coyote and they are The Roadrunner.
And that’s how they find themselves most often with Trump. They can’t believe it, and so they’re in a continual state of disbelief, which causes them to become even more irrationally angry — and “irrationally” is the word.
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RUSH: Here’s what McCain said that I paraphrased. This was in Philadelphia at something called the World Leadership whatever it was. World Leadership… He was getting the Liberty Medal at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and this is what he said: “To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past…”
But we’ve abandoned that, because the people in that leadership group — the elites, the swamps — have been replaced as they’ve died or retired by either socialists or communists. We’ve gotten to the point now where this precious leadership of 75 world McCain talks about blames the United States. Wherever you go, wherever there’s a world body, the European Union, NATO, you name it.
I don’t care where you go, the United States is always having fingers of blame pointed at it. Now, most of this is from a bunch of lesser nations simply trying to fleece us financially. But I don’t care what the reason is, and we don’t have people standing up for America. We have people joining this parade, “Yeah, we got some problem, we’ve discriminated, yep, we’ve been harassers, we’ve been this or that.” Obama led the world in apologizing and blaming the U.S. And that’s what Trump has gotten hold of and is correcting, and it’s about time.
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