RUSH: There is an ongoing — supposedly. Supposedly in the Drive-By Media, the Democrats are being walked back on their desire to impeach Trump by Pelosi. Pelosi is saying (paraphrasing), “I don’t think you got it yet. Keep digging. But we’re not there yet.” Meanwhile, all these other Democrats, Swalwell and all these other people are out there, “Oh, no, we’re gonna impeach, we’re gonna remove Trump.” Swalwell is predicting that Trump is gonna be removed from office.
Now, one of the prevailing theories on this is that if they impeach Trump, they go through the motions. And impeachment is a political thing and it’s two phases. The impeachment is the House of Representatives bringing up charges, the charges of high crimes and misdemeanors, the impeachable offenses. Those are called articles of impeachment, and the House of Representatives creates those, and each different article has a manager or a lawyer that will present that case, however many articles there are, to the Senate, which is where the trial takes place.
So just because the House impeaches doesn’t mean anything. It’s not good. I mean, you don’t want that. It happened to Clinton. But then you have to go to the Senate, you have to get conviction on some or all of the charges. And you have to be convicted of impeachment, and then you’re thrown out of office.
So the prevailing theory is — and even from the Trump White House — let ’em go ahead. It’s gonna tick off the American people, and it’s gonna backfire on ’em, the American people want to move on, there’s no collusion, the Mueller report’s out and all that. I have a different take on this. Everybody cites Clinton. And, in fact, Senator Grahamnesty was on Hannity last night, and he made the point that look what happened to Bill Clinton.
His popularity shot up to the seventies when Bill Clinton was being impeached. The American people don’t want this. They don’t want the president they elected thrown out of office by the opposition party. Well, what do you think has been the effort going on here for two and a half years?
But I think there are some stark differences between the impeachment of Clinton and how it was handled and what this would be. In other words, I don’t think that we should conclude that it’s an automatic slam dunk that the impeachment process would necessarily redound positively to Trump.
Are you of the frame of mind, point of view that if they try this, Trump benefits because the American people are worn out? All right. Well, let me present to you my theorems here, and then you tell me what you think of this. ‘Cause it’s true. Mr. Snerdley is very typical here. A lot of people on our side — I just quoted Lindsey Grahamnesty 2.0 — are saying, “Go ahead. Go ahead, House Democrats, impeach Trump. You’ll just end up reelecting him, just like impeaching Bill Clinton reelected him.”
Well, let’s go back to the Clinton impeachment. Number one, and something everybody is either forgetting or ignoring, and it’s a very gigantic difference between the two situations. Throughout the Clinton impeachment, the Drive-By Media defended Bill Clinton every day on every charge, every step of the way.
Not only did the Drive-By Media defend Bill Clinton, they hid the actual charges in the articles of impeachment. The Drive-By Media hid the evidence against Clinton. They buried the fact, by not talking about it, that Clinton’s crimes were perjury and suborning perjury and witness tampering.
Bill Clinton lied under oath. Bill Clinton asked other people to lie under oath. He tampered with witnesses in that process. Those are real instances of obstruction of justice. Trump is nothing compared to what Bill Clinton did. Donald Trump has not obstructed justice in any way, shape, manner, or form, except in their dreams. But Bill Clinton did.
When you lie under oath to the grand jury, when you suborn perjury of other witnesses and tamper with them, those are separate crimes. One is obstructing justice and, of course, the separate crimes of perjury and suborning perjury and witness tampering. Instead, the Drive-By Media told us all the time that it was just about sex. They said that Bill Clinton was being impeached for Lewinsky, that Clinton was being impeached for all of the women that he had had extramarital affairs with under the watchful eye of Hillary Rodham Clinton — and make no mistake, she knew about all of them.
I mean, there was Gennifer Flowers. So while the Clinton impeachment is ongoing and the trial is ongoing, the media’s not talking about it. You have to discern this for yourself. The media is castigating the Republicans. The media is beating the Republicans every day, shaming ’em. “You’re trying to throw somebody out of office for sex! You’re trying to impeach somebody for sex. It’s none of yourself business! It didn’t affect the way he did his job. Sex should be out of limits,” and so forth.
They never talked about the fact that Clinton was actually being impeached for perjury, real obstruction of justice. Now, it ain’t gonna be that way with Trump, folks. The news media’s gonna do the exact opposite. If these people on the Democrat side go ahead with impeachment, instead of hiding Trump’s alleged crimes… Remember, Trump hasn’t committed a crime here. He has not committed a crime. He has not obstructed justice. There is no way a case could be made. But they’re gonna impeach him, and who knows what the charges will be.
But whatever the charges are, the media will amplify them. The media will promote them. The media will support the impeachment. The media will be, as it is today, an extension of the impeachment process in the House of Representatives. Whatever crimes, questionable conduct that they dredge up, they… In fact, they will help the House of Representatives dredge up additional crimes and bad behavior.
And if they have to make stuff up (which they will have to do), they will do it, and the media will be right there helping them. And the media will present everything they and the Democrats come up with as indisputable fact. And we will be told that it is impossible to let Trump remain in office having committed so many ethical lapses, so many crimes — whatever it is they come up with — and it will be as relentless as the first two years of reporting on Russian collusion will be.
This is just the next phase of the coup, folks. The media hid Clinton’s crimes. They chastised the Republicans. Let’s not forget, Lindsey Graham version 1.0 was a conservative in the House of Representatives, and he was one of the House managers that tried one of the charges against Clinton in the Senate. The Senate didn’t want it. The Senate didn’t want to deal with this trial. They didn’t want the House to do what it did. But the House did it.
The House managers, many of them, were so humiliated by what the media did to them that they immediately abandoned conservatism for a while. They hid. They wanted no part of it. Everybody involved on the Republican side acted embarrassed, acted ashamed simply because of how the media treated it. So when the impeachment effort, when the trial failed, there was this gigantic party and celebration at the White House — and, of course, the media was there. All of this that I just described is gonna play out during the presidential campaign.
It will be the presidential campaign. If they follow through on this impeachment business, it will be the presidential campaign. The only reason — not the only, but the primary reason that Bill Clinton survived impeachment is because the media went out and destroyed Republicans in the House, particularly the House managers, and lied to the American people about why Bill Clinton was being impeached.
You go out and run a test. Find some people that were alive back then and old enough to be paying attention and ask ’em what they think Clinton was impeached over, and they’ll tell you Paula Jones or Monica Lewinsky. That’s what they’ll tell you, right? And that’s not what it was at all. Well, he wasn’t impeached over that. He was impeached for perjury, suborning perjury, lying under oath, tampering with witnesses. But they all cast it aside as, “A bunch of Puritan, no-fun, stuffed-shirt Republicans don’t want anybody having sex, just jealous that Clinton got so much, and that’s why they’re out there impeaching him.”
That what it was, and a lot of people ended up believing it. So Clinton’s approval ratings did, at one point in all this, reach the seventies. Think that’ll happen with Trump? So, Mr. Snerdley, now that I have run through what the… (interruption) Well, he encouraged Lewinsky to file a false affidavit. He encouraged Monica Lewinsky to file a false affidavit and give false testimony if and when she was called to testify. He told her to conceal gifts that he had given to Lewinsky that had to be subpoenaed, attempting to secure a job for Lewinsky to influence her testimony.
It’s all kinds of things that he did!
Suborning perjury, witness tampering, trying to get Lewinsky to tell lies or not tell the truth. But that’s not what Clinton was impeached over! So I… Look, I’m sitting here. I don’t know how an impeachment process would play out terms of public opinion, but I can tell you I just described for you what it’s gonna be. I want to go back, folks. I want to take you back to January 23, 2017. Do you know when that is? That is three days after President Trump was inaugurated. Three days after he was inaugurated, I warned everybody.
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RUSH: [T]he 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. …
This election is not over. This election is not cemented. It is not validated. It isn’t real, because Trump is illegitimate, and the only thing Trump has — and it’s important, it’s the most important thing — the only thing he’s got are his supporters. And therefore his supporters have got to stay as energetic and as front and center and as supportive as they were during the campaign. … [I]t is really important that the people that voted for him maintain their support and be publicly willing to demonstrate it.
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RUSH: Three days after Trump’s inaugurated. See, that’s a classic example of how people who listen to this program are on the cutting edge.
Three days after he’s elected, I warned everybody what was going to happen, and people come to me asking, “How did you know?” That’s not the question. The question is, “How did you not know? What is there that you…?” It’s plain as day to see if you know Democrats, if you know liberals, if you know how they operate. If you’ve paid attention the last five years, you can’t possibly have missed it — and if you just watched the way they behaved during the transition, it’s impossible to have missed what they were gonna do.
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RUSH: I’ve got a couple calls on the board about my little mini-monologue there on impeachment, the differences between the way Clinton’s impeachment was handled and the way a Trump impeachment would be. And rather than have these people on hold while I get on to other things, I’m gonna take the calls now so that their calls are close to the actual time I discussed what it is they’re reacting to.
Our first call is Robert in Houston, and it says here that you disagree with my take on this. That’s good. What do you think?
CALLER: Well, Mr. Limbaugh, God bless you, sir. It’s been the second time I got to talk to you in my lifetime. It’s as good as Tiger winning the Masters again. I agree with what you said about the difference between the effort to impeach Clinton and the present day concerning the media. I just want to understand, do you think the media has that kind of influence still today, which I totally disagree with. I think they were one of the losers in the 2016 election.
I believe they’ve been showing themselves losers in popular opinion ever since then. And, frankly, I don’t think many people in the country except the absolute extreme loyalists care what they think anymore. And everybody’s gonna know it’s a sham. They’re gonna have their hard nuts wanting to do anything they can to Trump. But I don’t see that kind of influence —
RUSH: Well, there is evidence to support your claim. And I don’t deny it. The ratings for CNN — folks, I mean, last week the bottom fell out for them. I mean, I think their top was 300-and-some-odd-thousand people, 12 plus. In the demo they were I think barely over a hundred thousand. It was really horrible. And they’ve been shedding viewers for quite a long time. The same thing happened at MSNBC. Although their numbers are not as bad, they have lost significant audience.
The New York Times and so forth, I mean, they’re actually rallying a bit with their subscription business. I don’t know how the actual newspaper copy, the hard copy sales are doing. And so if you want to use that as an indication that their sphere of influence is way down, I wouldn’t dispute that, but I don’t think you can write it off. I don’t think you can just assume that everybody has written the media off, no longer believes them.
I know they finished dead last in a survey of various industries people say they respect or disrespect. The media’s down there near the Congress and so forth. But Congress is always down there. It’s not newsworthy anymore that Congress doesn’t have a lot of high respect. I think it’s more Will Rogers than anything.
But the fact remains that they are going to do, if there is an impeachment procedure, they are going to deal with it the way I just described. Now, you could look and say it’s exactly what they’ve done the last two years, and they were unable to bring it off. They were unable to drive Trump’s numbers down. They were unable to get them down to the thirties and twenties to force him out of office, and they gave it everything they’ve got. And there is that.
They gave it everything. Everything they have used to successfully drive Republicans from office they’ve used and used again. They’ve invented some new ones. It all failed. But it doesn’t deter them. They just double down and continue on with it. And they’re gonna do it if there is an impeachment procedure.
I’m not suggesting, by the way, that Trump’s supporters are gonna fade away. I didn’t mean to convey that by playing the sound bite of me three days after Trump was inaugurated. I only played that to show you that I knew what was coming, and I knew what wasn’t going away, that they were gonna impeach or whatever they could and had to do to try to get rid of him. They’ve failed to this point.
And I’m not saying that their impeachment would succeed. I’m just telling you if you think the impeachment of Trump is gonna be equal to the impeachment of Clinton and make Trump that much more popular, maybe, but it’s gonna have to happen a different way because it was the media — you go back to — when this happened with Clinton, folks, Fox News had barely gotten started. There wasn’t anything in conservative media.
Fox News Channel had just barely gotten started during all that. There wasn’t any conservative Web apparatus to speak of. And so the Drive-By Media back then still carried considerable influence. They were starting to lose it. Their monopoly had been busted what with the arrival of this program.
It’s a tough call because they’re gonna be out there, and they’re gonna be doing everything that they’ve been doing the last two years and running interference for the Democrats. I do agree that their audience has fallen, and that does mean that their sphere of influence is down, but where it isn’t is with Millennials.
Millennials are buying hook, line, and sinker into what the Drive-By Media reports because they stream media, and that’s how they get their news these days, Yahoo News or Facebook news feed or what have you. And we all know what social media has done to conservative influence. But Robert, good thoughts, and I appreciate your call.
Here’s Jim in Danville, Virginia, wants to weigh in on it. How you doing, sir?
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thank you for taking my call. And I just wanted to reiterate your previous caller. I agree with your statements about what the media’s gonna do. Though unlike your previous caller, I don’t think it’s gonna have an effect. And to give an example, my wife and I did not vote for President Trump because we didn’t trust him. We voted third party. We didn’t think he was conservative enough.
But because of his actions since he’s been elected, not only will I and my wife vote for him, but my 18-year-old daughter is also voting for Trump. And most of her friends of the same age are also Trump supporters. There are too many forms of media out there today to be able to get accurate media to not have to rely on the lamestream news anymore. They’re a nonfactor, as far as I’m concerned.
RUSH: Well, there’s another thing, since you say that, there’s another thing to add. The media is — let’s be honest about something. The media is wearing people out here, folks. Why is CNN losing audience? They lied to their audience just like the FBI and the CIA lied to the media, although I don’t know if that’s actually true. The media was in on it.
I think these people are all in the same club, so to speak. I don’t think there is any reporting going on. There were just various people on the left, in the political movement of the left have their jobs. Journalists job is to act like they’re journalists. The FBI guys act like their FBI, but they’re all left-wing hacks. And they gave it everything they’ve got, and they took their shot at the king, and they weren’t able to connect.
So, any impeachment of Trump, it isn’t gonna feature anything new. There isn’t any bombshell out there. It’s just gonna have to be all of this other stuff recycled and repackaged. And it’s all gonna be oriented about obstruction of justice and what a reprobate Trump is. And, frankly, that’s been litigated, and it isn’t gonna have any impact because it hasn’t up ’til now.
Now, this whole business of obstruction of justice, there’s a key line from the attorney general on why there isn’t any, why there wasn’t any obstruction by the president. I don’t care about this Don McGahn story. Supposedly the president called Don McGahn, said, “You fire Mueller, I hate Mueller, you get rid of him.”
And McGahn said, “I will refuse, I will resign first, I am an honorable guy.” And so Mueller wasn’t fired. Trump is now saying, “I don’t ask people to fire people. If I want to fire people, I’ll do it.” Mueller did not get fired. Barr said the president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.
Intending to fire Mueller is not obstruction of justice. Even if it were true, it didn’t happen! So the media can do nothing but recycle everything that’s already bombed out. There’s a part of me — well, I can’t tell you what I really think — I just better shut up. They can’t come up with anything new. If they do they’re gonna have to make it up, which they’re entirely capable of doing, by the way.
“The president took no act that in fact deprived the special counsel of the documents and witnesses necessary to complete his investigation.” See, there it is again, this word “investigation.” You know how that drives me nuts. There was no investigation here. But I’m not gonna go down that road today. You know the drill.
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RUSH: Here’s northern Colorado. Jim, you’re next, and welcome, sir, to the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Good to talk to you, Rush, from the oil fields of northern Colorado where we are booming. How are you today?
RUSH: I’m doing well. By the way, “oil fields in northern Colorado.” I just read that the governor of California is on the verge of eliminating — stopping — all oil drilling in California and offshore, just as an aside. I’m telling you, California is the place to watch. That’s what we’re gonna have to be able to point to and say, “If we don’t stop the socialists, this is where we’re headed.” I’m sorry to interrupt you.
CALLER: Not a problem.
RUSH: You reminded me of that.
RUSH: Well, that’s another good point. That needs to be said too. Let me ask you this, folks. The Mueller report came out last week. How many of you have received congratulatory, upbeat, “Hey, man, we’re really happy” emails or any kind of correspondence from your Republican elected official, even asking for money? How many of you have heard from your Republican senator or congressman, “Hey! Hey! We’re off and running! The Mueller report’s out and there’s no collusion”?
Did you get any such thing? No. It’s radio silence. The Republican Party… (interruption) Yeah, you get one from Trump and that’s it. You don’t get one from your congressman. You don’t get one from your senator. (interruption) Did you get did you get one from yours? (interruption) Nope. See that’s the thing. Where is the celebration on the Republican side for this? You would think that you would be flooded with emails and notifications asking for money in a disguised way, celebrating the results of the Mueller report. But that hasn’t happened, has it?
RUSH: Here’s Phil in Torrance, California. You’re next, sir. Hello.
CALLER: Good morning, Rush, or good afternoon, where you happen to be. I’m calling from California, and let me tell you, it is an absolute honor to speak to you. I think you are the greatest.
RUSH: Thank you, sir, very much. I appreciate that.
CALLER: But now, as far as this issue on impeachment’s concerned, I’ve had a rather dark view of the Republican Party for a long, long time, and I suspect a lot of conservatives have as well. I’m concerned that if they had a secret vote in the House — well, in the Congress as a whole — not only would the House impeach him, but the Senate would convict him.
RUSH: If it was a secret vote?
CALLER: Yes, sir. Now, if it’s a public vote, well, maybe there’s some wiggle room there. But you have told us for years, and I believe a hundred percent of it, that there is the swamp. How many people in the Senate are part of that swamp? How many Republican senators are part of that swamp?
RUSH: Oh, yeah. There’s no question about that. None whatsoever.
RUSH: Uh, well, I can’t… Look, I can’t disagree with this, folks. I think that if there was a secret vote — if you could vote and nobody knew how you voted in the Senate — it would be close. It would be close. It’s all about the fact that the Washington establishment is made up of people from both parties, and Trump is persona non grata. He’s an outsider no matter what he does, no matter the achievements. In fact, the better he does, the more they hate him.
The better he does, the worse they look. How many politicians have come along and promised to lower unemployment for blacks and Hispanics — and how many have done it? The Democrat Party has existed on the basis that they are the only proper place for blacks to vote, the only place blacks will be supported and defended and promoted. And yet here’s this guy, Donald Trump, who’s revived an economy, and African-Americans unemployment is at an all-time low.
Ditto Hispanic unemployment, and those are just two statistics. The economy in general. But what it really is that has the people that Phil here is talking about in a tight wad is “Make America Great Again.” “Make America Great Again,” to them, is nationalism. It is the destruction of the existing globalist order in which the United States is one of but many — albeit powerful, one of many — nations. Make America Great Again is a throwback to a preexisting order where the United States was the dominate leader of the world for good — for good reasons, decent reasons, wholesome reasons.
And it is a threat. Trump is a threat to blow up this existing order where all of these people have their network, their paths planned, their children’s places in life guaranteed and planned. It’s morphed into personal dislike and hatred for Trump’s personality on top of all that. So you’ve got a bunch of people like McCain and Romney in the United States Senate who, in private, probably are Republicans would not vote to support Trump. But that’s why the vote is not private, not taken in secret.
Anyway, I had hoped to get to these Jared Kushner bites in this hour, but I didn’t. So we’ll lead off the next hour. He spoke to the TIME 100 Summit today, which in and of itself is no big deal. It’s a washed out, overwrought event. I mean, it’s TIME magazine. It’s just a reason for these powerful people that we’re talking about to get together and tell each other how much they matter. But it’s what he said to them that has ’em all ticked off.
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RUSH: Baton Rouge, Louisiana. This is Kerry, and great to have you, sir. Glad you waited. Hello.
CALLER: Yeah, good morning, Rush. I was thinking about the point that the previous caller had mentioned on your scenario about the media playing this different. Because he was saying that the ratings for CNN and MSNBC and people like that are so low that it’s not gonna make that much of a difference. But I think that he’s overlooking the Big Three. I mean, what is your opinion? Don’t you think that the Big Three like CBS, NBC, ABC, that their ratings are still significant enough to effectively still keep this in the limelight and beat up on President Trump enough?
RUSH: Well, this is the thing. Let me reset the table so people understand what you’re commenting on. In the first hour, I did a little riff on how people think the impeachment of Trump is gonna lead to more Trump popularity ’cause that’s what happened to Clinton. I pointed out the big difference is that the media supported Clinton, defended Clinton, and didn’t even tell the country what Clinton was really being impeached about.
They lied and said he was being impeached for sex, when in fact he had been impeached for suborning perjury, committing perjury, and witness tampering. But the media covered all that up, and they promoted it. I said, “In a Trump impeachment scenario, they’re gonna be adding to the fire. They’re gonna be condemning Trump. They’re gonna be helping the Democrats. They’re gonna be telling people that Trump is guilty of this stuff, that he deserves to be impeached.”
You know, I think combined they reach as many 12 to 15 people a night with their nightly newscasts and so forth, which is not insignificant. The demograhpics for the nightly news happen to be made up of people demographically who tend to vote every election. These are people that are 55-plus. That’s the primary… You can tell who watches the evening news by looking at the products that are advertised, like Preparation H and toenail fungus stuff.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: Well, you can. Advertisers know who’s watching. But those people tend to vote with much more regularity than do, say, Millennials. So you’re basically saying that you don’t think the media can be written off as a relic here. You think they still have significant influence with a number of people that present a problem?
CALLER: Yeah. Of course, it’s not just the news. I mean, of course you got the news, you know, like the Big Three, the news networks, whatever. It’s the entire media. We’re talking about all the talk shows, the supposed late-night comedy talk shows, the daytime shows. All of that is so massively anti-Trump.
RUSH: Well, so is primetime entertainment TV.
CALLER: Exactly.
RUSH: And so are many —
CALLER: It’s still an uphill battle no matter what.
RUSH: I agree.
CALLER: In other words, the whole media has gone over to that.
RUSH: Let me tell you: How else…? How else do you explain, ladies and gentlemen, a poll where — and this was last year — 42% of the American people believe the Russians tampered with votes, voting machines? Because of this story of Trump-Russia collusion. That’s the impression that was given: Russian collusion with Trump in the election. How do you affect an election? Tamper with the votes.
That’s what people — 42% of the American people in this poll — said they think happened. That, to me, says the media still carries a lot of weight. I think it’d be a mistake to say that they don’t. Now, in your universe, where you live, maybe you and your friends don’t watch ’em anymore (and a lot of people don’t) and you don’t trust ’em even if you do watch ’em and so forth. But there are still a lot of people in this country to whom the mainstream media is the bible.
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RUSH: Mark in Galveston, Texas, great to have you, sir. Glad you waited.
CALLER: Thank you, sir. I appreciate the opportunity. Lone Star dittos from the great state. I have a quick analogy for this whole Mueller episode, because you’re right; it has not been an investigation. But what it has been is a three-year-long hand of poker. Okay? Trump is sitting with his hand and the media and the Democrats are sitting with their hand, and they both know who has the winning hand. They both know that Trump has the cards; he didn’t do anything they’re accusing him of.
RUSH: Boy, that analogy is just excellent.
CALLER: Thank you.
RUSH: It is. In just in the strictest terms of what happened and how the, quote-unquote, “game” was being played, you’re right on the money. My only — and I’m not nitpicking you here, and I’m not trying to take away from the literal brilliance of your analogy. But to me, this is always, always gonna be one of the most serious challenges to the existence of our country as we know it that we have ever seen.
The way it played out was like a game of poker. But this was an attempt to force a duly elected president out of office by people who were never elected to anything, who were ignoring the Constitution, who were breaking the law and who need to go to jail. People that play poker and lose do not go to jail, and they don’t threaten the existence of the country. This was a serious — If this had succeeded…
Meaning, if the Mueller report had concluded that the duly elected president was in fact and is a traitor, and was a Russian agent, and did steal the election and that Hillary Clinton should be president? If that’s what this report had said, it would have destroyed this country. That’s how close, I think, we came. Because of your description of Trump being accurate, it didn’t happen. He didn’t fold. You’re exactly right. That was the gambit. But for us to even get in this game, these people that start this game were one of the greatest challenges that our country has faced in putting it down and swapping it away.
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