RUSH: The media is beside itself. CNN cannot drop this. McCain, wherever he is, very, very sick. He rallied to come out and rip Trump for this.
THE PRESIDENT: I had a call with President Putin and congratulated him on the victory, his electoral victory. The call had to do also with the fact that we will probably get together in the not-too-distant future so that we can discuss arms, we could discuss the arms race. We are going to remain stronger than any other nation in the world by far. We had a very good call, and I suspect that we’ll probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control, but we will never allow anybody to have anything even close to what we have. And also to discuss Ukraine and Syria and North Korea and various other things. So I think probably we’ll be seeing President Putin in the not-too-distant future.
RUSH: Okay. So McCain just — I mean, he was livid, and so were the rest of the Drive-Bys. All of Washington. “I had a call with President Putin, congratulated him on his victory, his electoral victory,” as though there was any doubt. Now, I frankly believe — and I’m telling you, I know Trump better than any media person out there. And I’m telling you, Trump knows what he’s doing here. He’s jamming ’em. He’s goosing ’em. This is no different than, “Hey, Russia, if you’re listening, maybe you could find the 33,000 missing Hillary emails.”
Trump knows that they’re gonna blow a gasket, and he loves making ’em blow their gasket congratulating Putin. These people are all wound up on still on the fact that Trump and Putin colluded to steal the election. So here’s Trump congratulating Putin on his electoral victory. The guy is a tyrant thug dictator. There wasn’t any election. It’s like Fidel Castro’s elections or Saddam Hussein’s elections. Got 99% of the vote and the 1% are shot. Trump knows this. He’s just tweaking ’em.
But McCain, this just isn’t something that’s done. Civilized members of the establishment, of the swamp, simply do not congratulate tyrants and dictators for winning elections. It’s just not who we are. As Obama would say (impression), “This is not who we are. This is not our values.” Except when Obama was congratulating them, then it was perfectly fine.