RUSH: Time to get started on the phones, and we are gonna start in my adopted hometown of Sacramento, California, where Jeff Sessions addressed a law enforcement gathering today. Details of that coming up. This is Gary. It’s great to have you, Gary. How you doing, sir?

CALLER: Yeah. Good morning, Rush. Let me explain myself as a listener of yours for the last three or four years and a voter who doesn’t think either Hillary or Trump is a caliber of person that this country deserves as a leader. So I’m not more anti or pro one than the other. I think they were both crappy choices. But my reason for calling is, I’ve been listening three or four years to you and I seem to notice a change in your focus for the last year or so that’s bothering me, and I wanted to ask you about it, and give you a couple examples.

RUSH: All right. Well, I don’t like members of the audience being bothered, by me, especially. So ask away.

CALLER: Well, in the first two years, your focus seemed to be on doing the right thing for America. And in the last year or so, it really just occurred to me a few days, your focus seems to be more on justifying the rightness of Trump doing things that, if Hillary, heaven forbid, had won and was making the same decisions and taking the same actions, you would be fricasseeing her every moment of your show.

But when Trump’s doing the same things — and the examples I wanted to point out were if Hillary had won and had appointed her daughter and son-in-law to positions in the government, you’d be having a fit. I would be too. Or if you found out later on that they were working for the government and without the appropriate security clearances because Hillary said, “Well, it’s okay, we’ll take care of that later,” you and I would both be looking to have her head. The tax bill that you were defending today on Trump’s part saying, you know, you can’t find anybody that hasn’t benefited thus far, well, that’s true. But I think if Hillary had won and done the same tax bill —

RUSH: She wouldn’t.

CALLER: Well, I understand that, but if she had, you’d be quick to point out —

RUSH: No. No, no. Let’s not deal with “she had.” You’ve gotta give me specifics of things that have happened, not if or would have. We can play that game all day along. You know, if you hadn’t gotten through here, I wouldn’t have to deal with this today.

CALLER: One more example, then, that has happened, and that’s this thing now with the porn queen trying to sue Trump.

RUSH: Oh, yeah.

CALLER: You pointed out this morning that the porn queen is suing Trump because, I think your words were some person paid her money. And if Hillary had won and she was trying to pay off the porn queen, I think you’d be quick to point out that it was Trump’s lawyer that was paying the porn queen instead of just —

RUSH: Okay, Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohn. paid the porn queen, Make America Horny Again tour babe, paid 130 grand.

CALLER: It seems like you’re trying to defend what he was doing where you wouldn’t be more —

RUSH: No, I’m not defending what Trump is doing in a lot of these things. You have to listen a bit more carefully. I haven’t opined. In fact, I have. I’ve compared this to the Access Hollywood video. I said, Americans are tired of this kind of stuff being used by liberal Democrats in the media to disqualify Republicans. And you’re right, Democrats will get away with it. They always have. They’re made heroes. They’re made heroes. Bill Clinton was made the star of the Democrat Party for this kind of crap. But my point is, if you haven’t figured out one thing, do this. I exist to deny liberals success. Liberalism, the Democrat Party pose the greatest threat to this country remaining what it was founded to be, anything else out there.

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RUSH: I ran out of time with our caller from my adopted hometown of Sacramento. And I got the point made. I want to say it again without having to just ramrod through this. His whole point was that when he first started listening to me, I was pure and right on the money.

But now that Trump’s come along somehow I’ve corrupted myself because I’m giving Trump a pass on things that if it were not Trump, it were Hillary in there, I’d be reaming her a new one every day. And since I’m not reaming Trump, it means I have gone from being whatever I was to a cheap and tawdry defender of Trump while sacrificing and compromising my principles. And it’s in fact the exact opposite.

I’ll give you a specific. He said if Hillary had brought Chelsea in there and her brothers and made ’em key advisers, you would have never stopped screaming about it. But when Trump brings in Jared and Ivanka and all the rest of them, you don’t say a word. That’s not true. I did. I have questioned Trump of his staffing from the get-go. There have been things about it I still don’t understand.

I never understood Gary Cohn. I chalked it up to Trump trying to buy favor with the swamp. Go get a Goldman Sachs Democrat, put him in charge of economics, and try to calm some of the waters of criticism, but I knew that wasn’t gonna work. There’s nothing Trump could do to stop this cacophony, cascade of criticism. It doesn’t matter what he does, other than resign, which isn’t gonna happen.

On the Stormy Daniels Make America Horny Again Tour, I’m not gonna get sucked into this. CNN owns this. If CNN wants to beclown themselves and spend all day on whether or not a porn star had an affair with Trump and can now talk about it because she didn’t sign the NDA, go ahead. It’s nothing more than a repeat of the Access Hollywood video. It’s the Democrats with nothing.

The Democrats have nothing. They continue to try to unearth things that they think are gonna cause the American people to wake up and throw Trump out. It isn’t gonna happen. Because the American people, enough of them are fed up with this kind of stuff affecting their vote! They’re fed up with it. Folks, I’m gonna tell you two things. I knew when Trump came down the escalator on June 16th of 2015, while everybody, including me, was laughing themselves silly over the things he said, I knew that he had a real chance at winning this thing.

And as time went on and I saw these rallies, I became convinced early that he was gonna win, that there wasn’t anybody in the Republican side that could even get close to stopping him. Because I know America. The next thing, when the Access Hollywood video dropped — and I’m sorry to be redundant with this, but remember, folks, this audience has people tuning in for the first time every day. So really, I can’t hurt myself too much from repeating some things that are important.

When that Access Hollywood video hit, it’s the only time in the campaign I tried to get hold of anybody at the campaign. And I did it with an email. And I said, “Whatever you do, do not allow this to affect day-to-day operations.” I said, “The American people that are gonna vote for you are not going to be dissuaded by this because they know exactly what it is. It’s been held for just this kind of use, to derail you. And they’re not gonna let it happen. The American voters that are gonna vote for you, President Trump, are fed up with this kind of tactic being used in the late moments of a campaign. They’re fed up with it and it isn’t gonna work.”

I knew that it was not going to harm Trump. Can’t tell you why. It was just instinct. Trump is by no means pure. And Trump is by no means an ideological conservative. And I have been one to first point that out. But he right now is the only thing standing in the way of the forces of the left ruining this country, in my humble estimation. Trump and his agenda succeeding is the only thing — and may not even be stopped. It may just be a matter of delay. But I’m not gonna let the left, I’m not gonna let them influence the way I think about what ought to be the best thing happening for this country, from issue to issue to issue.

As far as I’m concerned, the left needs to lose every time they take the field. It’s the only hope we’ve got. They have to lose. They have to continually lose. We have to continually beat them. This is what irritates me most about Republicans is they haven’t been willing to mount that fight. Trump is. To me, that’s at the top of the heap of things that are important.

You know, I’m not a single-issue guy in the sense that if there’s something Trump doesn’t do that I think he ought to do because I’m a conservative and he’s not doing something conservative, I’m not gonna throw him overboard if that means the left wins. I’m not gonna do it. That’s just me. They need to be stopped. Look at what they’re doing!

They are destroying the education system. They are destroying pop culture, entertainment. They are ruining every institution and every tradition which has defined this country as great and exceptional. They are targeting every damn one of them. They are targeting the Constitution. They are targeting law-abiding people. They are targeting the moral underpinnings of this country by going after only certain religions.

And if they succeed, there’s always gonna be an America, but it’s not gonna be the one founded. And if it’s not the one founded, it’s not gonna be exceptional. It’s gonna be just one of many nations in the world under the auspices of the United Nations and some big global elite who, if they had their druthers, would even get away with national boundaries. And we would all just be one giant landmass with this bunch living there, this bunch living there, and we’d be integrated or segregated or whatever they wanted us to be.

The United States is a great nation at risk in a dangerous world because we are the enemy of every leftist individual and government in the world. We remain the one obstacle standing in their way to converting this whole planet into their vision of what life should be like. And that’s why we are constantly under attack and why we are constantly under assault, and it’s why it’s so maddening and frustrating to see American institutions like the media and the Democrat Party basically join that movement, to transform America.

And it is rooted in their hatred of conservatism and, by extension, the Republican Party, because we represent opposition to them. And it is I think the result of all of us standing up and acting as a bulwark, which has made them even angrier, made them even more irrational. They knew the opposition was there, but they never saw it, didn’t have any power. You know, Republicans would win now and then, but big deal, you get ’em out of office after a couple years, it’s no big deal.

But there’s a serious opposition to them now, and their automatic guaranteed victories are no longer automatic and guaranteed, and that’s the way it ought to be. So if my primary objective, my primary desire is that they lose, I’m not gonna help ’em win by joining their silly chorus of irrelevant criticism. I certainly am not gonna join ’em in one of the most bogus political hoaxes and scams that’s ever been perpetrated on the country, and that is this whole idea that the Russians impacted the results of the election in 2016.

There is no way. They cannot get away with this — and the problem is, they are. They’re ruining people! They are ruining people that had nothing to do with something that didn’t happen, and they’re not stopping! This investigation, this march — whatever you call it — continues unabated. We’ve got Mueller and his 16 left-wing lawyers, and we don’t know every day what they’re doing until we see their indictments. To me, this is really, really serious and important stuff.

Yeah, maybe we get some relief by making a couple comic jokes about it now and then for comic relief or what have you. But it remains terribly important and serious. And so if there is a mechanism in place that can continue to thwart that effort and beat that effort back, then I’m not gonna do anything to sabotage that. They would love for me to do that. Oh, they would love for me to turn to Trump.

Do you realize how popular I could become by doing that? Do you realize how po…? Do you realize how much respect I would gain? Do you realize I could own CNN if I would do a Sam Nunberg sober? But I’m not gonna do it. The problem is, there are plenty of other people that might. But I’m not one of them. So that’s my priority list and my priority level, and hopefully that will explain or help you to understand why I do and don’t say or do certain things.

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RUSH: And, by the way, one more thing on Stormy Daniels, the porn star of the Make America Horny Again Tour. Supposedly now she’s free and able to divulge the details of her supposed affair with Trump because she didn’t sign the NDA, and Trump’s lawyer paid 130 grand. You leftists, you Democrats, you have to remember something. We’ve lived this before. We’ve been there. We’ve been here; we’ve been there.

There was a guy once named Bill Clinton who was shtupping an intern in the Oval Office. There was a guy in the White House who was reputedly a rapist. There was a guy in the White House who was hitting on female aides — and what were we told? We were told, “Everybody does it! It’s just sex, and it’s nobody’s business,” and that it didn’t affect the way he was doing his job and we were told effectively to shut up. We were told to shut the hell up and mind our own business.

Well, my guess is you have a bunch of people who remember that, and now when you want to start crying wolf about Donald Trump, they’re out there asking you, “What’s the big deal? It’s just sex! Everybody does it — and besides, unlike Clinton, this stuff, if it happened, happened years ago. It hasn’t happened in the Oval Office, it hasn’t happened in the residence.” It hasn’t happened at every campaign stop that the horn dog president made.

It happened years ago. You leftists, you love settled law! Well, this is a settled subject. Even your feminazis shut up and laid down and stood down when Clinton was out shtupping the intern. Your feminazis said it was okay. And why? Because Bill Clinton was too important to the agenda. Why, one of the feminazis in the media even promised to give Bill Clinton any number of Lewinskys that he wanted, all because he was keeping abortion legal.

So, I’m sorry. If you expect people to get all upset about some rumor about Trump from ten years ago, have at it. CNN, go ahead and devote another 10 hours to it. Go get some drunk guy as a guest to start telling us the truth about this, too, and see how far it gets you.