RUSH: Let’s start with some economic news, ladies and gentlemen: “U.S. Employers Added 313,000 Jobs in February.” The expectations were 200,000. That’s the number the so-called experts were forecasting. This blows past that. “Construction, manufacturing, business services drove the gains.” Construction (we’re building new stuff), manufacturing. Jobs Obama said would not be coming back, jobs Obama… During the campaign when Trump was talking about reviving the manufacturing sector, Obama’s out there making fun of it and mocking it by saying (impression), “What’s he gonna do, wave a magic wand?

“Those jobs are gone! Theeeey’re not coming back,” and here they are. They are roaring back. Donald Trump — in less than a year and a half — has more than made up for the stagnation and the decline that was the United States economy for the entirety of the eight-year Barack Obama presidency. This is remarkable. It is… I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is unprecedented, but I’ll guarantee you this. It doesn’t take long to call the roll in presidents in this class who have inspired and triggered — and make no mistake.

Make no mistake: This is not some cyclical recovery. This is not a cyclical rebound. This is a policy- and confidence-driven, substantive economic turnaround, and it would not have happened had Hillary Clinton been elected, and it probably wouldn’t have had if 90% of the Republican field in the primaries had been elected. That’s how truly unique this is, and it is important to point out because there are substantive real reasons why this is happening.

And it’s not because we’re learning to connect with each other. And it’s not because we’re learning to heal ourselves or any of the so-called bromides that the left claims are necessary to do. We are reinvesting in this country, and we are investing in the country with the idea and the concept that it is great. And we are reviving American greatness, which is exactly what President Trump said his objective was. He is driving people crazy!

He is literally driving the left insane. Their inability to keep up with this, their inability to do this on their own, the fact that Trump has been able to overcome their purposeful stagnation of the American economy — and make no mistake about that. Obama’s policies were oriented toward stagnation, massively growing government, taking as much capital out of the private sector as possible and transferring it to government programs.

Make no mistake: The open-borders aspect of the Obama administration — flooding the job market with people who cannot speak the language, cannot read, do not have any skills, all of this — was oriented towards stagnating the U.S. economy. Now, I realize many people (particularly who may be new in the audience) are asking, “Why would anybody want to do that? Why would any American want to slow down the U.S. economy?”

I admit, it’s a tough thing to convince people that’s true. But don’t doubt me. Their reasons for doing things of that nature have nothing to do with you. It’s not because they care about people. All of these things you think about the Democrat Party and the American left are mostly wrong. They are into power and control, and the more dependent people are — the more people cannot get by, by way of their own efforts — the more power the Democrat Party and the American left can accumulate. It’s no more complicated than that.

There’s also a globalism aspect to it with the American left, and this was even stated publicly on a number of occasions by Obama, that this whole concept of American exceptionalism was unwarranted. (impression) “That’s kind of arrogant, to think that we’re better than anybody else. Who do we think we are? There’s no such thing as American exceptionalism. They probably think they’re exceptional in Norway too. We gonna tell ’em they’re not? They probably think they’re exceptional in Venezuela.

“So, you know, who are we to say that we’re better than anybody else?” That’s, of course, not what American exceptionalism is. The American left really does not like this country and thinks it is unjust and immoral and that that can be traced to its founding, our founding. And their objective is to cut this country down to size, that we have simply grown too large by being unfair to other people in the world. So don’t doubt me — and we are now witnessing the important point here.

We’re now witnessing what can happen with leadership — positive, affirmative, can-do leadership — brought to us by somebody who lived and breathed during the last period of American greatness, thus knows it can happen. And this is the benefit of experience. Everybody said, “Trump doesn’t have any experience! It’s dangerous. He’s an outsider, doesn’t know what he’s doing.” He has lots of experience. He has life experiences, lived when America was enduring and going through periods of greatness and economic expansion and growth.

Trump lived through that, prospered during it, knows it can happen, was frustrated that it had been slowed down and stymied and wanted to reignite it. Why? Because he loves people, as we all do — and he loves the country, and was cringing as What was done to it. Now, if you dig deeper into these employment numbers, just the raw numbers are staggering, folks: 313,000 new jobs! I remember when the January number came out. It was a little bit lower than expected. I think they were expecting, if my memory is right, 255,000.

It was 200,000, and the Drive-Bys and the media all started saying, “See! They’re already starting to slow down. Trump’s recovery’s a phony thing. It’s not real. We can’t sustain that!” And then we are here. February numbers: 313,000. Expectations: 200,000. But, man, this is just a part of the story. The labor force participation rate. That number kept shrinking during the Obama years, the percentage of Americans able to work who are not working was growing too rapidly under the Obama administration.

One of the reasons why is every month new people were losing their jobs; the Democrats come up with things to say it was a good thing, “funemployment.” Do you remember that? Being employed was a good thing, because that afforded you the opportunity to reconnect with family and friends that you may not have seen for years because you had the arduous task of having to work. Nancy Pelosi was on this song-and-dance tour as well, claiming that jobs were one of the most damaging things to human relationships America had.

And when people lost their jobs, they could reconnect with people and maybe discover what they really wanted to do. Remember Pelosi said (summarized), “You lose your job and now you can start going to the park and painting scenes like you’ve always wanted to do your whole life!” Well, what enabled people to do that? How do you eat if you are not working? Well, that’s where the left comes to the rescue. They’ll pay you not to work.

So eager are they for you to lose your job and become dependent on them that they’ll pay for it. So while the labor force participation rate was shrinking, everybody that lost their jobs kept eating. And if that’s the case, what’s the incentive to go back to work? There wasn’t any. The economy wasn’t expanding. Wages were not going up. Taxes were exorbitant. The incentive to go back to work had really been curtailed on purpose by Obama.

This offended Donald Trump as well as all the rest of us, and now there are all kinds of reasons to want to go back to work, including the personal ones. A sense of self-worth, a sense of contribution, a sense of identity — a sense of belonging, rather than becoming dependent and guilty and accomplishing nothing. The hallmark of the Obama administration population, in less than a year and a half, has been reversed.

The number of employed Americans has set a record in the eighth record of the Trump administration (which is not even a year and a half old) of 155,215,000 employed Americans. But you go even deeper. Manufacturing jobs. There were 31,000 new manufacturing jobs in February. The total number: 263,000 brand-new manufacturing jobs under Donald Trump. These were numbers Obama could not have realized in eight years, ladies and gentlemen — and didn’t — in less than a year and a half!

Also, it must have been really dire out there on the left, the internal polling, because Nancy Pelosi (when she can get a coherent sentence out) is walking back her comment that Trump’s tax cuts are nothing more than “crumbs.” From the Washington Free Beacon: Nancy Pelosi yesterday “appeared to moderate her position about the value of bonuses and pay raises resulting from” the tax cut. “Pelosi had previously called the bonuses ‘crumbs’ and ‘so pathetic,’ and many in her party joined her as they made an issue out of the tax law while it was generally unpopular.”

It was unpopular because of them. It was unpopular because of the media lying to people about it, telling people that they were not gonna get a tax cut. The only people that were gonna get a tax cut were corporations and the rich. They were lied to, just like they’re lied to during Russiagate. They were lied to! The American people, sadly, believed it. Now life and reality are showing them an alternative, which is the truth. (impression) “‘Certainly we love when people get a bonus, and if they get a raise,’ [Pelosi] said.

“‘But if it is so small in comparison — if the choice was made for corporate America and the top 1% in our society, at the expense of working families, something is wrong with this picture.'” So she can’t even… She just… In her existence, cannot walk it all back, but she knows she has to because the internal polling on this must be devastating for the Democrats. “Pelosi referred to the law as a ‘dark cloud hanging over the Capitol,’ using her preferred nickname ‘the GOP tax scam.'”

Now we move on to the tariffs. I have to tell you… Oh, one other thing on the unemployment situation. The black unemployment rate is the second lowest ever. More blacks and African-Americans are working in America than ever before, and the unemployment rate among African-Americans is the lowest it has been since the 1970s. More importantly, “participation climbed to its highest level since April of 2009,” which happens to be Obama’s first year. So the employment jobs numbers are just off-the-charts good everywhere you look.

This is causing panic from the top to the bottom of the Democrat Party. It’s causing panic throughout the American and worldwide left because none of this is supposed to be possible. America’s best days were supposed to have been behind us. That was Obama’s theme, and we had to enter into a new way of thinking: Manage the decline. None of this, the establishment, the elites told us… None of this was possible anymore because of a global economy and because of climate change and other pressures. None of this was possible.

We had to learn to lower our expectations. In less than a year and a half, the basic premises of the Obama presidency have been nuked. They have been thermos-nuked.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Gonna start in Orlando. This is Parlor and welcome. It’s great to have you here, up first today.

CALLER: Hey, Rush, thanks very much. I know you got a lot of callers, so I just want to get a point out, and that is that with those number numbers that you just quoted in the first hour of your show, can you imagine — and can the country imagine — how much more phenomenal those numbers would be, as great as they already are, if the country was united? (chuckles)

RUSH: Oh, yeah. I know what you mean. It wouldn’t even require the country to be united, if it just wasn’t this degree of Balkanization or partisanship, absolutely. I know what your point is. Trump is making all this possible even with this daily attempt to destroy him, and I know, it would be… I talked about this, I think, at the beginning of this week, you know, after hearing and reading a little bit about stuff said at the Academy Awards.

When you get past the partisanship of all this and the study, the anger of it, what you’re left with is just sadness over what’s happening to our country and that way too many people who live here don’t like this country. Some of them have an active hatred for it. It’s sad. You want to come up with a solution for it. You want to somehow be able to reach ’em. But they’re not reachable. So they have to be defeated.

But, yeah, I got totally what you’re talking about, how much better it would be if there were — you know, if everybody was all-in on at least the premise that we all benefit from a great economy. We can’t even unify behind that! We can’t even unify behind the fact that this is a recovering and great economy! If everybody were just united on the premise that a great economy helps everybody…

There’s another story here about a hamburger joint, and I put it at the back of the Stack so I’m probably not gonna be able to find it in time. There’s some hamburger joint… By the way Home Depot was pledging $50 million to train 20,000 skilled laborers, military veterans wanted, college degree not required. Red Robin! Red Robin is a popular burger chain. They are cutting 570 jobs, in this economy.

So I read the headline and said, “What’s this all about?” I said, “It has be minimum wage.” It is. They’re cutting 570 jobs because of an arbitrary, mandatory minimum wage that has nothing to do with current economic circumstance. They can’t afford it. So rather than it resulting in people getting a raise, it’s resulting in 570 of them losing their jobs — and that’s because of the liberal view or definition of what makes a good economy. It’s just stinks!