RUSH: So we have the trade wars: The Drive-Bys are refusing to credit President Trump for bringing the European Union to its knees. And now it’s on to the ChiComs, it’s on to Mexico, it’s on to Canada, and all of these are going to happen. And it’s all according to plan. If you’re gonna do tariffs, you do it when your economy is roaring, and ours is. And what Trump said he wanted, no tariffs, no taxes, no barriers.

The rest of the world has gotten used to us behaving over the years like we owe the world something because we’re so much larger and so much more prosperous. And we need to, you know, have limits on how big we can get because it just isn’t fair. Of course there’s more hideous reasons for this behavior as well. But those days are over. The Make America Great days are here and the greater America is, the greater the world is gonna be.

It’s that simple. It’s not arrogance. It’s not hubris. Because there can never be too much prosperity and there can never be too much freedom. But there can sure be not enough of it, and that’s what you have if you have a weakened United States. And you’re not gonna have a weakened United States with Donald Trump at the helm.

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RUSH: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just took the United States Senate down to town yesterday. You talk about a guy who said it like it is, was running interference for President Trump and simply swatted away every mindless little allegation. Pompeo was on fire. He was fabulous the last couple days. We have audio sound bites coming up as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today.

Now, piece by piece, Donald Trump is handling every trade situation. Piece by piece, Donald Trump is fixing the legion of trade imbalances this nation has had to put up with for decades. European Union, as of yesterday, done. Now, it may not be politic to say that the European Union caved, but it’s pretty accurate nevertheless.

Donald Trump told them what was gonna be and how it was gonna be, and they resisted, and they went to their friends in the media, and they said, “This guy’s crazy. We can’t do business with a guy like this. This guy’s trying to alter all these years of business of status quo,” and Trump said this is the way it’s gonna be.

And Trump said (paraphrasing), “I’ll tell you what we’re looking for. Down the road, we want no barriers, we want no tariffs. I hate tariffs. I don’t want tariffs anywhere. But we’re the ones paying ’em. The United States has been facing tariffs worldwide. I’m not imposing tariffs on anybody. I’m reciprocating.”

And he is and has been. China has been placing tariffs, not us. You know, I’m stunned, I have to say. Given that the Republican Party’s the party of Reagan, the party of Jack Kemp, the party of supply-side economics, I’m stunned at how many Republicans do not know how to talk about this tariff business. We didn’t put tariffs on anybody. The ChiComs did this. And the Europeans have done it and the Canadians and the Mexicans. And it’s been part of the fabric of foreign policy for I don’t know how long.

Donald Trump’s been complaining about it since the 1980s. He ran for president on the premise that all of this was unfair and it existed because our leaders have been stupid in allowing it. Now he’s fixing it. And he’s doing it while our economy is roaring, which is the only time you should take this kind of drastic step.

But the European Union came home yesterday. They acknowledged they want to get to where Trump is demanding we all get. You can’t get more fair than no tariffs. You can’t get a more level playing field than no taxes. And this is what Trump wants all over the world, by the way. And he’s handling every situation independently piece by piece. European Union, pretty much done. NAFTA, redoing NAFTA, almost done.

This new president of Mexico has appointed a new negotiator who sees it Trump’s way. Mexican president, similar personality to Trump, wants to work with him, get it done. This Macron — it is not Macron. The Canadian. What’s his name? I’m having a mental block. Who’s the little guy running — whatever, Trump can handle this guy in his sleep. And that’s gonna get done. I don’t mean that in an insulting way. I’m just saying that Trump is going to be able to get this done.

China has just begun negotiating. Larry Kudlow sent the ChiComs a message at the Seeking Alpha conference, and he said what is true, that the rest of the world needs us. The rest of the world cannot survive without you. You are the United States market. And the United States market is the market that makes the world go round.

You know all this talk about the left periodically starts complaining about all this conspicuous consumption. You remember Ernest Hollings, the former senator of South Carolina, once complaining, “Too much consuming going on out there. We need dial back on all that consuming. We need to slow down our economic activity. There’s way too much of it going on out there.”

That’s you, folks. And the United States market is the market everybody in the world wants access to. We have the wealth, we have the standard of living, we have the prosperity. The world’s products are bought and sold. And in this the country many people have been led to believe that if it’s from France, it’s sexier, and if it’s from China, it’s more technologically advanced and innovative. And if it’s from the U.K. it’s a little bit better quality if we’re talking about cheese or high end cars. Same thing with Germany.

So all of these imported products that Americans snap up and buy up we have been told over the years that, man, that stuff is really good. That’s why the buy America movement occasionally percolates. People claim American-made products are just as good. They just happen to be more expensive. And why is that? Well, because our goods have tariffs slapped on ’em when we export them to China or Mexico or the European Union because those nations do not want our products.

Those nations want in our markets. But they don’t let us in their markets. And that’s what Trump is objecting to. And situation by situation, piece by piece, Donald Trump’s in the process of fixing it, and he’s doing it from the standpoint that we have nothing to feel guilty about, that we have nothing to be ashamed of, that we have no price we have to pay for being so much larger than anybody else. And mathematics is mathematics. No taxes, no tariffs, as goods move back and forth is the essential, quintessential definition of fair. Because then what matters is quality and abundance, supply and demand. But it doesn’t work if we don’t have access to their market, if our goods cannot make it into the markets of other countries.

You might say, “Well, why should we care, Rush, because you just said that our market is the world’s market.” Yes, it is. But take a look at the ChiComs. The ChiComs have a billion people, more than that. And the ChiComs are having an economic expansion. It goes up and down. Their people are getting wealthier. Their people end up with more disposable income.

It’s a huge market that many American industries want into. Future buyers over there. They’re not letting us. But they will. Trump is gonna succeed. Meanwhile, the Drive-Bys cannot even write about it, they cannot even be honest and give Trump credit for it. In fact, they’re trying to blame Trump for this happening.

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RUSH: People forget we bailed out Europe, our Fed did in 2008. Remember all the talk, Greece, Italy, all these countries going belly up? They need us. It’s not the other way around. We finally have a president who understands the perspective.

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RUSH: Yeah. It was Justin Trudeau. The Canadian leader. I knew that. Just having a mental block, a brain freeze up there, but I finally figured it out. Welcome back, folks. Rush Limbaugh and the EIB Network at 800-282-2882 if you want to be on the program. The networks have refused to declare Donald Trump victorious as the European Union buckled. They caved. Wednesday press conference at the White House Rose Garden, Trump and the chief executive of the E.U., a man named Jean-Claude Juncker “announced that the two trade partners are moving forward on a plan to end the trade war.”

Yes! (chuckling) It’s over. It’s gonna be over pretty soon. Juncker’s presence at the White House illustrated that it was the E.U. that caved. I mean, that’s what that means. He came over here. They acquiesced. Folks, there’s no other way this was gonna happen. They all need us. We defend the E.U., we protect the E.U., we bail them out! We’ve been bailing them out since World War Two. We don’t hold it over their heads. I don’t mean to sound like I’m doing that now. I’m giving you the lay of the land. The reality is they can’t go it without us.

They can’t remain who they are unless we remain who we are, and in a significant leadership position, powerful leadership position. They know it. They’re not gonna acknowledge it. We have presidents like Obama where we don’t acknowledge it. In fact, we try to change that dynamic because leftists resent the power and the size of the United States. But, for example, during World News Tonight on ABC last night, they were so against declaring the Trump the winner they insisted that he was the one that failed under pressure.

The anchor David Muir began the segment, “To the president tonight, under pressure after his own tariffs ignited a trade war. Well, tonight the president with a new promise, reaching out to the European Union. He called them a foe just a week ago, but late today calling a press conference outside the White House to say they will now work together.” The E.U. guy came here. This is willful ignorance, and it’s either that people like David Muir and the other anchors don’t really know what is happening here — which is possible. It really is.

I mean, they’re not much older than Millennials themselves, and their life experience is pale in comparison to their predecessors. They do, folks. I mean, the wardrobe is a trench coat and, when there’s a disaster, you find the nearest hotel, and you go over there on a private plane, and you’re a journalist. And you report from five miles away from the disaster. But you’re on the scene, and that means you have the world experience and you’ve seen the suffering.

You have seen the suffering brought on by the unfair imbalance of power in the world — the United States unfairly at the top, blah, blah, blah. But the people in the European Union understand. Terry Moran, the lead foreign correspondent (which means he has dibs on the trench coat at ABC News) said, “Trump was reeling under increasing pressure from American farmers, congressional Republicans, and nervous Wall Street investors. President Trump suddenly shed his trade warrior persona today and declared a truce with the European Union.”

This supposed Trump capitulation to Europe was the sole theme of this report. On NBC, they barely touched on the story because they know. So the bottom line is that the European Union caved. The ChiComs are gonna cave. Mexico’s gonna cave. Trudeau and Canada is gonna cave. It won’t be portrayed that way, but we will prevail in these trade wars. Trump doesn’t like tariffs. You know what this is? In a way, what this is… Let me give you an example from Sidney Powell’s book, Licensed to Lie.

That book is about… Just briefly let me rehash this to set up the example. It’s about the Enron task force at the Department of Justice. In fact, many of those lawyers are on the Mueller team. It is about how they disregarded the law in pursuit of the so-called guilty. It is how they stacked the deck. It’s how they suborn perjury among witnesses. It’s how they totally gamed and rigged the Ted Stevens case, which was really a bastardization of justice.

And many of the same people on the Stevens case, on the earn task force who are now on the Mueller investigative team led by a guy named Andrew Weissmann — whose boss back in those days was Christopher Wray who currently is the director of the FBI. I mean, it’s a circuitous, incestuous group of people that play musical chairs inside the Department of Justice and the FBI. At any rate, at about the middle of the book, in the case against Ted Stevens, the judge just lashes out at the prosecutors and reads them the Riot Act, and then appoints a special counsel to begin investigating the investigators.

It was amazing. The investigators got a taste of their own medicine! They had never been investigated by law enforcement. They had never been falsely accused. They had never been threatened with jail time. They had never been jailed in lieu of bail. None of what they do to people had ever happened to them — and when it did, they broke. They couldn’t handle it. They caved like a bunch of beaten puppies. Sidney Powell writes about this somewhat extensively, and it’s a great example.

Here you have these people from the DOJ in these cases, Enron and Ted Stevens. They have all of this power, and they do it without any compassion, without any human-interest concern at all for the people they’re pursuing. They’re notching their belts as prisoners are denied bail. Family men with wives and children and all, people who never faced the criminal justice system before, people in many cases being famously accused by these guys. They’re being sent away to jail with their lives in the balance being ruined!

And they’re applauding each other and they’re relegating, celebrating all the power they have to do this. And then the tables end up being reversed, and it happens to them. And they can’t handle it. And they get a taste. It’s a little schadenfreude is the term. They get a little taste, just a little taste of the grief they were routinely passing out to other people. Well, in a way it’s the same thing with these trade deals. The imbalance has been anti-U.S.

We’ve been on the short end of the stick for so long that everybody involved just assumed that that was the world order. This was the structure, and everybody agreed — from one deep state to the next, from one group of elites to the next — that everybody would have access to the U.S. market but the U.S. would not have access to theirs, and this was fair because the United States was unfairly large and unfairly wealthy and unfairly prosperous and unfairly dominant.

So the rest of the world having access to our markets was the only fair thing that could happen, and every president in the past has gone along with it, and we have ratcheted up this situation with further trade deals. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, NAFTA, any number of these things creating the World Trade Court, on the Internet Trade Council where disputes would be adjudicated and the puss always on the short end of the stick. Well, what Trump has done here with the slapping of tariffs is to show these other nations what it’s been like for us.

They’re getting a taste of what it’s been like, and that’s why they’re coming running. Now, the standard operating procedure is that tariffs are bad. “Tariffs are taxes! We are Republicans; we oppose taxes. Tariffs on American exports are only gonna hurt American manufacturers.” Yeah. That’s true, for the time being. That’s why you only do this kind of thing when your economy is roaring, which ours is. And that’s why Trump proposed a little fund of $12 billion to help some of our agricultural people withstand the pain that necessary to fix the circumstance.

But what is happening here? The ChiComs and the European Union, the Mexicans and the Canadians and any other trading partners now with tariffs slapped on them are getting a taste of what it’s been like. Except it’s even worse for them because they don’t have the wealth and the prosperity and the growth and the dominance that we do. But the real outrage here is that previous American presidents, leaders, administrations, Congresses have accepted this arrangement under the guise that, well, we kind of owe this to the world, ’cause it is kind of unfair that we’re so prosperous, and it is kind of unfair that we’re so big, and it’s unfair we’re so powerful.

And so to show them that we don’t intend to use all of our wealth, prosperity, and power to harm them, yeah, go ahead, put a tax on our exports.”

And everybody got used to doing business that way. Because you had to. But since the 1980s there’s a guy named Donald Trump who’s been out there who’s been affected by this, international real estate developer, he’s been affected by it.

And he’s had no uncertain unkind terms for the ChiComs. They also manipulate their currency in addition to this gigantic trade imbalance we’ve had with them, and he’s been fit to be tied about the ChiComs. He’s taking them on and they’re gonna be brought to heel.

At the end of the day no matter what you’ve been told by the Democrats, Barack Obama and the media, the rest of the world needs the United States. They need you! They need you and your job and your commerce and what you do living your life every day. They need you consumering. They need you living your life. They need a strong United States economy. They need a low oil price.

Look at what the Germans had. The Germans had to make a side deal with Putin for natural gas ’cause they can’t provide it on their own. Well, we have more than enough gas we could sell ’em. Trump was livid with Angela Merkel for going to Putin and not coming to us. We’re a NATO partner, after all. Well, that’s what Donald Trump’s doing.

None of what I just told you is the way this is being reported. The way it’s being reported is that Trump’s being a bully, that Trump’s being selfish, that Trump wants all this because there’s some secret benefit to him, probably violating a law that we don’t know about, him and his family. And Trump is being a brute, he’s running around, he doesn’t care who in the world gets hurt. He wants this for himself for some reason, and he’s stubborn and so forth, and he’s gonna end up breaking this existing world order. That’s how it’s being reported.

It’s also being reported that these world leaders Trump is talking to, like the European Union guy and China, that they’re resisting Trump and that Trump is having to eventually abandon his position and come back to it with his tail between his legs. It couldn’t be further from the truth. They’re lying through their teeth to you about how these trade deals and tariff situations are being resolved.

Let’s quickly go to the audio sound bites from the Rose Garden yesterday starting here with number 2. This is Trump and the European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker. And this is a portion of Trump’s remarks…

THE PRESIDENT: We agreed today, first of all, to work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, (edited applause starts) and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods. This will open markets for farmers and workers, increase investment, and lead to greater prosperity in both the United States and the European Union. It will also make trade fairer and more reciprocal. My favorite word: reciprocal.

RUSH: Let me ask you a question. If it’s Trump that’s caving, who is it that’s proposing and has been proposing zero tariffs, zero nontariff barriers, zero subsidies on nonauto industry, who’s been proposing that? Trump, not the European Union. And if that’s what’s being agreed to, then how could it possibly be that Trump is caving? The European Union has not proposed this. Only Donald Trump has been proposing this, and to every one of these so-called trading partners, this has been his message.

If getting rid of some tariffs is good, why isn’t getting rid of all of them? If getting rid of all the barriers or some of the barriers is good, why not all of them? That’s been the message. And it’s not a message the ChiComs have made, it’s not a message the Canadians or the Mexicans have made and certainly not one the European Union — guy comes over here, and here’s, by the way, Jean-Claude Juncker speaking after Trump yesterday.

JUNCKER: Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen, when I was invited by the president to the White House, I had one intention. I had the intention to make a deal today. And we made a deal today.

RUSH: (imitating Juncker) “When I was invited, I had one intention, to make a deal, and we made the deal, and I caved. I totally bent over and caved because I realized that I had nowhere else to go, because nobody has ever dealt with somebody like this before.” That’s what he’s saying.

So Trump’s demanding this or that, he gets it. The other side wasn’t demanding it. And your media is telling you that Trump caved. That Trump had to put his tail between his legs and take the best deal he could get because to the media, Jean-Claude Juncker and any European is the epitome of sophistication, elite status, brilliance and all that. Trump, of course, is just this barnyard hayseed hillbilly from Queens, doesn’t even know how to put the knives and forks in the right place in a place setting.

Here, by the way, is Wilbur Ross. He is the secretary of commerce. He was with Lou Dobbs last night on the Fox Business Network. Question, “Wilbur, we still have a disturbed and distorted trade relationship because of their mercantilist policies. That has to be reversed, does it not, Mr. Secretary, no matter their economic circumstance?”

ROSS: If you have to get into a spat with someone, the right time to do it is when your own economy is booming, as ours is. You have seen the record low unemployment, you’ve seen people coming back to the workforce.

RUSH: And again that is Wilbur Ross, the secretary of commerce.

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RUSH: Here’s Karen, Front Royal, Virginia. I’m glad you waited. Great to have you with us. How you doing?

CALLER: It’s quite an honor, Rush. I’ve been listening to you since 1991, when I was 18 years old.

RUSH: Thank you. I really appreciate when I hear people have been listening that long from the first day they started, and you’re still here. Again, I can’t tell you how appreciative I am of that.

CALLER: No, but not only that, I have six kids, and they listen to you. So it’s a generational thing. You’ve had quite an influence on so many people.

RUSH: Well, thank you so much.

CALLER: I’ve actually never called in before, so just wanted to let you know that. I homeschool, we have six kids, and we’re all huge Trump supporters. We’re not tired of the winning.

RUSH: What is the age range of the children?

CALLER: Our oldest is 17, down to our youngest is 6. I have four in the van with me right now. I’m really hoping they’re quiet for about a minute while we chat. (laughing)

RUSH: Good luck. (laughing)

CALLER: (laughing) They read Rush Revere. They’re all good Republicans, good Trump supporters. But my question for you is, we’ve been told for decades that tariffs are bad for American consumers. I know Trump’s doing the right thing. I used to work in the swamp myself, and it was free trade, free trade, free trade, no tariffs, all bad. And I feel like what he’s doing is right, but we need a lesson from you, from Professor Limbaugh from the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, can you tell us why what he’s doing is right so I can educate the kids and also educate those few Never Trumpers who are left in our world still.

RUSH: You know, it’s a very fascinating question because of your inclusion into the ancient Republican belief in free trade.

CALLER: It’s brainwash.

RUSH: I get your point. What Trump is doing is not free trade, and Reagan supposedly did believe in it, conservatives, Republicans, believe in it. This isn’t it, so why are we all praising Trump. Is that essentially your question?

CALLER: Well, exactly. I feel like it’s gonna result in more freedom but it’s hard for me to understand and to explain why what he’s doing with bargaining and maybe the threat of tariffs and making it more even is better than what was happening before with Reagan and Bush and everybody else.

RUSH: Okay. Let me run through this again.

CALLER: Sorry.

RUSH: No, no. No, don’t apologize. You’ve asked a question that I need to add a dimension to here cause I have addressed this today, but I need to add to the answer your part about dealing with what Republicans always believed about free trade. That’s been really important, because what she’s thinking is, isn’t this somewhat hypocritical?

Could it be possible that people who have always supported free trade are now abandoning free trade because they want to support Trump who’s really not doing free trade. That basically is the essence of her question. It would be useful to define terms. I remember when NAFTA was first proposed. And my instinct on NAFTA was, “This is not good. I don’t like this.”

And then my good friend Professor Hazlett called me. I got to know him, he was University of California Davis, late eighties. He’s now, I think, Clemson. But he’s been at George Mason University, he has become an expert on the cellular spectrum, basically FCC telecommunications expert in all areas of it. But back when I met him, his specialty was agricultural economics and economics in general. And my instinct was there’s something about this NAFTA thing that doesn’t make any sense.

Plus, I looked at the people that were for it, and… (sigh) But they kept selling it with the term “free trade.” NAFTA they told us was free trade, and I was talking with Professor Hazlett and I lodged to him my objection, and he said to me, “So you oppose free trade.” I said, “No, I don’t oppose free trade!” “Well, NAFTA is free trade,” and he walked me through how it was free trade. I said, “It doesn’t look like free trade, not when they can have their drugs cross the border here and deliver products and we can’t do that.”

He said, “Well…” It wasn’t just him. There were other people that also said this. “Don’t forget one of the purpose of NAFTA is to build up the Mexican economy so that they don’t have to come here.” I said, “Well, that would be great if that happened but I don’t see it happening with this.” But the point is my answer to you here, Karen, what we’ve been told all of our lives is “free trade” actually isn’t! NAFTA’s not free trade! But that’s how it was sold. That’s how it was promoted.

Free trade, as I judge it in the real world, came to mean the United States will allow taxes and tariffs on its exports, but we will not place taxes on our imports. Meaning, it won’t cost trading partners Mexico, Canada, Japan. They can send us all the stuff we want, all the stuff they want, and we’ll not put any barriers up, or very few. But they’ll be permitted to. They’ll be permitted to put barriers up, and we’ll go along with it because it’s unfair that we’re so big, and these are much smaller, tinier nations, and we would dominate if we didn’t make these kinds of adjustments.

Anyway, this all became, in the popular parlance, “free trade.” My answer to you is, is that what we were told was free trade all back during the eighties and even into the nineties when the stuff kept up really wasn’t. It was just called that, and it was called that by a number of people to try to coerce others into supporting it, because who could be opposed to free trade? Free trade was something that was readily identifiable with conservatism and the Republican Party, just like tax cuts are. So NAFTA comes along and they start talking about it as free trade.

Perot never went along with it, by the way. Perot was never for it. He recognized what it was. Of course, it was sold by the Clinton-Gore administration. But all these conservatives out there, think-tank types were telling them, “No, this is free trade. This is good, gotta get behind it,” and it never seemed like it made any sense to me. So now we come forward, and Trump is simply we’ve been living for decades with barriers that other nations have put up in the way of our products and services being exported into their countries.

We occasionally have renegotiated the various deals, NAFTA gets touched up here and there, but the basic shell never changes. But they were allowed to put tariffs or barriers against our products that we would export, and so there weren’t any cars exported to China or Japan. (Snort!) But, as you well know, we imported tons of them — and then when it got thick and heavy then we said okay, the Japanese, you gotta build your manufacturing plants in America.

We said, “Okay. This is free trade! Now they’re making the cars here, so that makes it better.” But the barriers didn’t go down. So here comes Trump and he just wants to take down the barriers that these other countries have that put great, expensive penalties on anything we would export to any of these trading partner the countries. So I would maintain that if we’re actually able to get to where Trump wants to go — no barriers, no tariffs — that’s free trade. When there are no taxes on either imports or exports from any of the trading partners — when a product can go in and out and seek its own level because of its value — that’s free trade.

That seems to me to be what’s on Trump’s agenda.