RUSH: Here is Courtney in Springfield, Missouri. You’re next. It’s great to have you with us. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. I’m big fan. I’ve been a Rush listener since I married my husband. He’s a former Marine, and we are both big Trump supporters. And I guess my question for you is I went to the rally, I followed along with Trump for a long time. I believe he wants to secure the border.

I guess I don’t understand, in light of what happened yesterday with the caravan portion moving to Tijuana, I think he’s got a lot of power of the presidency to secure the border, and do you think he’s not properly advised of these powers? Are they just not willing to fight on this? I guess that’s what my question is.

RUSH: Yeah. You know, there’s an undercurrent here of — not just you — I talk to many people who supported Trump primarily for his commitment to stopping illegal immigration either with a wall or through some other means. And when you see a random story in the news that says illegal immigration is still happening at an all-time high, record high, you scratch your head, whoa, whoa, whoa, what’s going on?

And that’s probably where you are. And why isn’t the president doing more to stop this? And keep your radio on. I’ll discuss this. In fact, if you want to hold on, go for it. If you can’t and have to hang up that’s fine too.

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RUSH: Courtney’s question, why doesn’t the president do more. Do you realize the pressure on the border? These caravans are showing up, and I’ve got some audio coming up of the guy who has invented finding out exactly who these people are. The drug cartels are behind a lot of this, but the length of the border we have on the southern border, I mean, it’s why there is this need for a wall. It’s almost impossible to manually police it.

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RUSH: I want to go back to Courtney. Courtney is in Springfield. Did you hang on? Are you still there?

CALLER: I am.

RUSH: I’m glad you did, because it’s a subject that has a lot of offshoots, and it has a lot of potential for trouble for President Trump, potential trouble, because this is the issue I really believe that got him elected.

CALLER: Oh, I agree. The day he came out on the issue, my husband said that’s who I’m praying for. I was not completely on board, but I like that he fights, I like that he’s willing to stand up for what he believes in, and it just seems to me that if images keep coming out of people coming across the border directly after he said we’re doing this, we’re sending the military, I just think that smacks that we’re not serious about this.

RUSH: Well, the military is there but they’re in a support role.

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: I want to play a couple sound bites while you are here on the phone. You’ll be able to hear them. They originally aired on Tucker Carlson’s show on the Fox News Channel on Tuesday night. There is a filmmaker named Ami Horowitz, and he’s been making a film about the Central American caravan. He actually has gone down and embedded himself in the caravan with his camera crew, his camera, and he’s produced a mini-documentary called The Truth Behind the Caravan.

And he was asked, “You said how organized it was. I know we’re not allowed to speculate, but do we know the answer, who this caravan is, who is behind it, how are they being manipulated or propelled here within what’s going on?” Here’s what he said.

HOROWITZ: This whole thing cost millions and millions of dollars. The fake news, if you will, that the mainstream media is trying to propagate is the fact that all this organic thing and all the water and the food and the medicine all dropped from heaven. It’s baloney. It’s all highly organized. It’s paid for by a number of organizations. We don’t know exactly where the money is coming from.

We do know that Pueblos Sin Frontera, which is the main group which organized this caravan, has a couple of front organizations in the United States, and the money is flowing from them. We know there are some leftist groups – it’s forbidden to say that Soros is part of it — but Soros has in fact funded at least some of those groups in the past.

RUSH: You notice he says that it is forbidden to say that Soros is part of it. Who is forbidding that? Well, conventional wisdom, the media, the Democrats. “You see Soros behind every rock. You can’t say that.” Now, the group that he mentioned there, Courtney, Pueblos Sin Frontera is out of Venezuela, and they do have front groups here in the United States, and there is no question that this caravan, however many there are, is not organic, it isn’t spontaneous, it didn’t just start because of strife somewhere.

These people have been organized. They have been sponsored. They have been promoted, manipulated, whatever. They maybe have even been made promises. And they’re on their way here in any number of different caravans. Now, the news is that five million more, which is almost a third of the population, wants to show up. Now, in addition to your feeling about Trump not doing enough to stop this, what are your thoughts about the people behind it? What is the objective, do you think?

CALLER: Oh, I’m sure the goal is to change the — I mean, you get a new underclass and the goal is to change the voting dynamic entirely, and that’s the concern. I truly believe that that is what a lot of Republicans, conservatives, Republicans, that’s why they support Trump, and I think that’s why you’re getting a lot of the Reagan Democrats supporting Trump also. Immigration’s a big issue.

RUSH: Yeah, well, illegal immigration. But in addition to you’re not being able to say, not permitted to say it’s Soros, you’re also not permitted to say it’s an invasion. But it is. It is nothing but an invasion. You have this many people on their way to the United States. They know full well it’s illegal. They know full well that it’s against the law for them to come to the country the way they’re trying to. And it’s not deterring them at all. It’s not stopping them at all. The United States is being flooded with more and more of these kinds of people. And there is a political movement behind it.

I sit around and I think, “Who in the world could benefit from this, and how? And who would want to benefit? Who would want to benefit from the United States being diluted? Who would want to benefit from the United States being weakened? Who would want to benefit from the United States becoming an even greater and bigger welfare state? Who would benefit from that?”

Sadly, there is a political party that would. And it’s really sad that this political party seeks to benefit from the ultimate demise of the country. And that’s why it’s so hard to persuade people on the fence about this, ’cause they simply won’t believe it. You’re not gonna find your average Millennial and have him believe the Democrat Party really wants to hurt America. It’s almost an impossible task. Yet it’s happening right in front of our eyes.

CALLER: I guess my big concern is, do you think that the president’s not properly advised on all the powers of the presidency that he has, that he can use to try to stop this?

RUSH: No. I think he’s singularly fully aware of what he can do.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Why it isn’t being done, that’s a whole other question to which I don’t have answer. I would just have to join you in speculating about it. I mean, look, he’s got countless opposition. He’s probably got some people in his own administration opposed to whatever he wants to do. I mean, you know that building a wall is not a unanimously supported thing. Even on the Republican side, I don’t know about Defense Secretary Mattis, but a lot of people don’t want to use the military here. They don’t want to use ’em in a meaningful way to stop this.

So I don’t know what Trump has at his disposal that he’s not using that he could other than threats and intentions. You know, for a while, after he was elected, the numbers of people seeking to come here illegally did plummet. I mean, it was a serious withdrawal. I mean, the numbers went way, way down. But they’re back up now to the point that they’re near a record high. And Trump continues to talk about it, continues to talk about building the wall, continues to stop it.

Now the Democrats have the House, so you know there’s not gonna be anything legislatively to stop it. There isn’t gonna be a wall. The Democrats are not gonna participate in that. So it becomes increasingly frustrating. I wish I had a better answer for you on what the president could do, can do, would do to stop this. But if he’s insistent on building the wall, I mean, I don’t know how this is gonna happen now with the Democrats controlling the House.

CALLER: Could he not cut off funding to — I mean, he’s talked about cutting off funding to sanctuary cities. I mean, can he not put pressure on these other areas and —

RUSH: Well, look at what happens. Look, he could do anything that is constitutional within the law, but look what happens when he does. He just appointed a deputy attorney general that the Democrat Party went and found a federal judge in Maryland to try to get it canceled! The Democrat Party is trying to tell the president you can’t nominate that guy, he should recuse himself! Whenever Trump put a travel ban in place, two of them within the first month of his inauguration, look what happened!

So whatever he does, Courtney, the left is gonna be able to find a left-wing Obama-appointed judge somewhere to stay it, to stop it. And that, then, delays everything while the Trump administration then has to draft a response, has to present their evidence in court, deal with the allegations the Democrats are making and we’re talking months again before a simple presidential decree is determined to be constitutional or not, when it is from the get-go.

So, yeah, that’s why it is doubly frustrating, because whatever he does that would be the fulfillment of a campaign promise or a common-sense executive action or executive order is gonna be stopped by some Obama or Clinton judge before the end of the day the proclamation comes.

Like birthright citizenship. The president can stop it with an executive action because the 14th Amendment does not guarantee birthright citizenship! And before the end of that day they were in court demanding a stay of the president’s order while it was examined in the court. Anything that he suggests or does.

Now, action would be another thing. If he literally deployed troops on the border and used them as the wall, the Democrats would go get a judge and say, “You can’t do that, posse comitatus,” whatever they would say. Then it’d be up to Trump to either keep troops there or to withdraw them in abeyance following the court’s jurisdiction.

But that leads to a whole other question. When did it become the rule of law that a federal judge somewhere in the state of Washington or the state of Hawaii can stay and delay a presidential executive action? There’s a lot of stuff here that’s upside down, and I’m telling you, Courtney, it’s all due to this intense, nearly insane opposition to Trump.

I was just watching CNN and Max Boot. Max Boot, his mind has become polluted with hatred for Trump. Max Boot, he was never really a card-carrying conservative, but he tended that way, he was certainly Republican. He’s just gone to the other side. He was like on CNN ripping Rubio for becoming a Trump mini-me for opposing the recount in Florida! There’s nothing unusual there. These conservative Never Trumpers are trying to say that it is embarrassing to be opposing the recounts in Florida. The recounts in Florida are lawful, they are called for, the raises were close, it makes us look bad to have to fight every Democrat objective.

It’s just mind-boggling how many people are selling out everything they’ve ever believed because they hate Donald Trump. Jeff Flake did it. John McCain did it. You want to know why we lost the House? We lost the House because of McCain! McCain thumbs down Obamacare. If we had followed through, if we had actually succeeded in repealing and replacing Obamacare in the House of Representatives, McCain’s thumb down vote in the Senate nixed the whole thing. The House did their job.\

But because the Senate failed, the House gets shared blame in it. Now, it was tough. I mean, the whole House wasn’t in favor of it. Many of the traditional House leadership wanted nothing to do with repealing and replacing Obamacare. But Trump succeeded in getting enough votes that it passed there. McCain nixed it. Do you realize that was a big — Republican voters vote on results and vote on substance in many cases. And repealing and replacing Obamacare and immigration are two gigantic failures of the House of Representatives.

You know, there’s a lot of voters out there who will vote against a Republican even if it means a Democrat in charge if the Republican betrays them yet again, they’ve had it. It happened.

I’ll tell you, this Republican Party eating itself alive because of what I think is an irrational hatred for Trump. And I don’t know what they’re afraid of! It’s almost like they’re afraid everybody’s gonna think of them the way they think of Trump if they don’t oppose him. And what we found out is that something that we knew, and that is that establishment Republican are just as unconcerned about the American people’s opinions and attitudes as inside-the-Beltway Democrats are. Anyway, Courtney, thank you. I appreciate it. I wish I had a better answer for you, but I don’t.