RUSH: And here we are, right here in the EIB Network, Rush Limbaugh, the nation turns wary and concerned eyes to this program for answers and reassurance. And I say that because I’m getting emails from people: “Rush, it all seems like it’s falling apart. What can you tell us?”
JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny south Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!
RUSH: What I can tell you is — and I’m gonna go back and do it — that I predicted all this. And I’m not making this about me. Don’t misunderstand. I know a lot of hosts try to make it all about them. I don’t have to make it all about me. It already is. I’m gonna go back, and I’m gonna go to the archives from two years ago. I warned everybody that we were gonna be right here no matter what Donald Trump did. We are here. We’ve had the opportunity to get ready for this. Everybody has.
And then after that we’ll get down and break down some of the specifics going on with Cohen, the rat, now testifying before Mueller. Cohen said that he wasn’t gonna have anything to say until after the investigation was over and he’d been sentenced — not sentenced — he wasn’t gonna have anything to say ’til early next year about it. But for some reason Cohen’s out there on television talking to George Stephanopoulos. I mean, I don’t know why. Could speculate that the special counsel is behind it. “Yeah, go ahead, rat. Say whatever you want to say out there. Just make sure you say this.”
The rat has done a total 180 on Donald Trump. A total 180 and the rat has made a calculation that even three years in jail is gonna result in him earning more money from a very adoring media paying him for books and movies and firsthand interviews than anything Donald Trump can do for him or would have done for him had he stayed loyal. This is an illustration of the power of the swamp.
You know, you can ask questions. What was Trump doing with this guy in the first place? Can’t change that, so, I mean, if you want to ask it, feel free. I’ve had my own questions about some of the staffing choices that have been made, but they’re not mine, and we’re not running things. So we sit here and do the best we can putting it all together.
But let’s go to back to the audio sound bites, just the archives here and just a couple of sound bites, it’s just a couple of minutes here. Because my emails indicate that a lot of people need a pep talk, which I totally understand. I just want to remind you that we knew this is how it was gonna be. I mean, not to the degree of predicting specifics, but even then this is pretty close. This is November 22nd, the first bite, November 22nd, 2016. This is a couple weeks after the election, just a couple weeks after the election. And all of a sudden everybody’s zeroing in on Russia.
By the way, again, whatever happened — these people literally think that they’re gonna get Donald Trump in jail over these payments to these women. There is no way that’s gonna happen. Now they’re trying to link Russia to the inauguration. They don’t really have anything that’s criminal on Trump. They’ve got plenty that’s criminal on Cohen. They don’t have anything.
They’re trying to create buzz that what they have on Trump is criminal. They’re trying to create the narrative and the soap opera script every day that Trump is a hardened criminal, has been for a while, and it’s all now just being exposed, when the truth is they haven’t uncovered anything criminal. They haven’t uncovered anything that’s impeachable. But it’s really hard to resist this never-ending onslaught 24/7 in the media. Here goes from November 22nd, 2016.
BEGIN ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: I feel duty-bound to warn you and to give you a heads-up about what we’re gonna face. Donald Trump’s gonna have perhaps the most embattled presidency in — well, certainly in our lifetimes, and I dare say maybe in modern American history. They’re not going to quit and they are a new kind of stupid. They are not logical. They make no sense whatsoever. But they are going to have the media on their side, and that’s the danger.
And the fight is really just beginning. However evil and intense the election was, I just want to make sure that you are all prepared for what’s coming down the road, because it isn’t gonna be pretty. And it’s gonna be really important for Trump to have people just like him surrounding him, and that is fighters, people who are fearless, who will not be daunted by this onslaught that’s coming. And I think he does in many respects.
END ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: Now, I was speaking there specifically about the media and, of course, all of their known associates, which is pretty much everybody in the Democrat Party in the Washington establishment or the swamp. And that has been borne out in spades. Everything predicted there and more has been borne out in spades. And it’s, therefore, to me not surprising.
Now, I can share with you that at this time November 22, 2016, there were a lot of people — I wish I could name names, but I can’t. I don’t have permission to name names, and I guess it’s not necessary. I mean, you’ll just have to trust that these are people whose names you would recognize who were telling me, “Rush, the election’s over. Now everybody’s gonna come together and if Trump plays ball, then he can get these people on his side. I mean, after all, he’s president. And all he’s gotta do is just dial it back a little bit and Trump could be respected.”
And I said, “What makes you think that?” And I started getting gobbledygook as explanations. What I detected was it’s what these people hoped. They hoped that all of a sudden this opposition to Trump would end because the election was over and it was time to move on to what’s next. And I have to tell you that I was dumbfounded hearing this from people who are students of the media, who know the media as well as I do and then know the Democrats.
I said, “You really, really think that now that the election’s over, there’s going to be some sort of unification around the idea that Trump won, some kind of acceptance?” And they told me, “Yeah.” And I learned later it’s because that’s what they hoped would happen. They didn’t want to have to go into battle and defend Trump every day. They didn’t want to have to do this. And it wasn’t even about them. They’re not being assaulted. They’re not being attacked, the people I’m talking about.
You know, I draw the analogy — I mentioned it yesterday. I had a dinner party at the house years ago when Sarah Palin was getting this same kind of treatment. And one of the invited guests asked if they could bring a couple people who were “really, really nice and really would love to show up,” and I said… (sigh) My instincts were, “No. I don’t know who they are.” But I trusted the friend and said, “Yeah, go ahead and bring ’em,” and these two guys spent most of the night telling me how we had to throw Sarah Palin overboard because the media hated her now and there was no way of saving her and it’s time to get rid of her and find somebody else. I was just…
Well, this is a dinner party of my own that I walked out on early and caught my flight to LA, which I was gonna be doing later that night anyway. I was aghast because here we had people basically suggesting that we need to kowtow and cave to the media. They essentially said, “The media’s destroyed her, Rush, so we gotta let her go,” and I just… I said, “The media’s destroyed her so we have to let her go? It’s not about us, in this sense. You know, you have always in matters like this. You’ve got many different groups of people, but basically two.
“You’ve got the group that’s in the arena, and then you’ve got the spectators — and I always marvel at the spectators acting like they’re in the arena when they’re not, telling everybody what they would do and what ought to be happening, when they wouldn’t last a day in the arena! But they feel confident and free to judge everybody who’s in it,” and they rip ’em or they praise them or whatever, but they themselves wouldn’t last a day in it! I said, “Sarah Palin’s not… She hasn’t done anything to be thrown overboard! She hasn’t done a damn thing wrong.”
“Yeah, but, Rush, they’ve destroyed her. Don’t you understand? She can’t be saved. We have to find somebody they’re not going to destroy.” I said, “You really think we can do that?” Well, here we are with Trump. Now, I haven’t heard it to quite that degree, people who think we need to throw Trump overboard. But I’m starting to get people frustrated that the media’s not coming around and won’t come around, and I’ve been trying to tell people, “They’re never gonna come around!” These people are not going to stop.
They’re not gonna stop of their own accord until they think they’ve succeeded. That’s why it’s gonna be an ongoing battle, and that’s why there’s only one guy who could withstand all this and continue to fight back against it, and that is Trump. You know, we have three dogs. (This is funny.) One of the dogs is obviously the leader. They’re women. They’re females. And one of the dogs will go whenever anybody’s walking by, this dog will go to the gate and start barking and protecting the homeland and all that.
The other two stand about 10 feet behind, and they start barking too. “Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! You listen to us.” But they’re not on the front lines. It’s funny to watch, and this is what this is. We got people on the front lines, we got people not on the front line and some of the people not on the front lines are trying to act like they are, but they don’t have the guts to go there. “Trump’s gotta do this, Trump’s gotta do that, Trump’s gotta…”
If we start modifying in order to lessen media criticism — or to, even worse, try to get media approval — what do you think happens to what we’re trying to accomplish? It means somebody’s caved on it. So this was imminently predictable. I don’t even think it took that much intelligence to predict this. It just required a bunch of serious observation. Now, here’s the next bite. This is from January 23, 2017, three days after Trump was sworn in…
BEGIN ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: You go back and you look at Obama when he’s inaugurated in 2009. He’s got a lot of people on his side. He had the media. He had the media big on his side and the whole the Democrat Party on his side. He had a lot of people backing him up. He had a lot of people pushing him forward and validating. Trump has no one except the people that voted for him. Trump has no one in Washington. He’s got his advisers. He’s got some Republicans. But the entire Washington establishment is opposed to him.
The media is trying to undermine him. The Democrat Party’s trying to undermine him as they set up what will no doubt be impeachment proceedings when they think it’s time to do it. That will happen. Trump has nothing but the people that voted for him, and if the media can soften some of their verve — if the media can succeed in separating some Trump supporters from him — then their theory is he will be weakened even further and exposed even more as fraudulently and illegitimately elected and illegitimately serving.
END ARCHIVE CLIP
RUSH: And, by the way, all of that is happening. Every syllable of that is happening. Let me find… There’s one bite here later in the roster. Yeah, grab sound bite No. 11. That was so right on the money about invalidating the election, saying he’s “fraudulently and illegitimately elected.” Here’s Joe Lockhart who used to be a spokesman for Clinton, then took some time off, then rented his house to Obama after Obama left the presidency. Lockhart went to do PR for the NFL. He didn’t last very long there for whatever reason.
Now Lockhart’s back on TV pushing leftist Democrat issues, and he was on CNN this morning with Alisyn Camerota. Question: “So we have Orrin Hatch this week who said, ‘Who cares?’ He said, ‘I don’t care about things like that Michael Cohen’s allegations,’ and I remember when they did care when there was philandering from the president in the past. So what is this? Have we two different standards here?” This is what Lockhart said…
LOCKHART: The largest perspective is a case has been built this week that the president was not legitimately elected. If you look at the Russia stuff and the campaign finance stuff and the fact that 40,000 votes going the other way over three states… We now don’t know, and that’s why this is important. It’s not the campaign finance. It’s not, “Did they have a meeting in Trump Tower with some Russians?” It’s, “Was he legitimately elected?”
RUSH: This has been what it’s always about, always, ever since election night 2016 these people have been trying to overturn the results because they’ve been trying to make the case that Trump’s election was illegitimate! And so now these payments to the porn star and the other babe are being touted as evidence that Trump would not have won if people had known he was breaking the law when he made these payments!
So this is what it has always been about and what they are sensing and smelling in the water now.
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