MACCALLUM: Here now exclusively tonight on The Story, Rush Limbaugh, host, of course, of the Rush Limbaugh Show. Rush, thank you for being here tonight. Great to see you this evening.
RUSH: Thank you for having me. This is the one hour on Fox I haven’t done in a while, so it’s great to be here.
MACCALLUM: It’s great to have you back. You know, I want to start with Joe Biden. You’ve seen him run for president twice before, in 1984 and 1988. What version of Joe Biden do you think we’re gonna get this time, and how do you think he’ll do?
RUSH: Well, Martha, let me tell you. As I sit here tonight in my palatial EIB Southern Command studio —
MACCALLUM: (chuckling)
RUSH: — I remain stunned and amazed that the Democrat Party and the media still do not understand who Donald Trump is. They don’t understand how he won. They don’t understand how he’s gonna win again in 2020. They don’t understand the people who voted for him or why. They hold all of that in contempt. Here’s the thing: Joe Biden is probably the best chance they’ve got, and he doesn’t have a chance. They’re probably… I mean, Joe Biden and Crazy Bernie and Mayor Pete?
MACCALLUM: (chuckling)
RUSH: I mean, you’ve got three white guys, two of them are brontosauruses from Jurassic Park, and that isn’t gonna sit well with the rest of this party which has gone so far left. I don’t think… You know, Biden’s putting off this announcement. I don’t know how badly he really wants this, and you have to really want this if you’re gonna have any chance of winning it.
MACCALLUM: All right. Let’s… Speaking of the other folks who are running, let’s listen to Elizabeth Warren talking about relieving 95% of college debt. Watch this…
WARREN: We’re going to roll back student loan debt for about 95% of students who have debt — and part two is to make sure that we never get in this mess again on student loan debt, and that is to make college universally available with free tuition and fees.
MACCALLUM: So there’s a lot of free stuff in a lot of these plans. Medicare for all, Rush. Free college tuition. Your debt goes away. The president, in the latest approval numbers, is down around 39%. So is he vulnerable to all of these promises from all of these Democrats?
RUSH: No. The polls right now don’t mean anything, Martha. Does anybody remember the poll two years before 2016? They all had Hillary winning in a landslide. There’s way too much that’s gonna happen.
MACCALLUM: True.
RUSH: Fauxcahontas is not gonna be the nominee. But, you know, these Democrats are all in the process of trying to out-leftist or out-liberal each other, and they’re in a contest of who can give away the most. But with Elizabeth Warren, forgiving college loans — forgiving that debt — and then promising free college and Medicare for all and a Green New Deal? Why is anybody gonna need to go to college?
Because nobody’s gonna need a job, because the Democrats are gonna be giving everybody a universal basic income. So why does any of this matter? None of this is real. None of this can happen. This is disinformation, and it’s really… I think it’s an indication of just how little they think of their own voters, that their own voters don’t even want to work. They don’t even want to achieve. They don’t want to pursue excellence. They just want to have their hands out and vote for whoever is gonna give them the most?
What a way to ruin a life.
Nobody would raise kids this way.
Why in the world does the Democrat Party think…? Well, I can answer that too. Sometimes the best questions I get are those I ask myself. And why do they care? Because they can’t win on policy. They can’t win on anything of substance. They have to demonize, they have to criticize, they have to impugn and destroy the credibility of all of their opponents and then promise to give everything away, promise to be Santa Claus. And it’s not gonna work against Trump. It might work against a Romney or it might work against a traditional Republican. It won’t work against Donald Trump.
MACCALLUM: Let me ask you this, then, because it seems that when you go to high schools and college campuses and even in Hollywood and other places, that Democrats have won the argument to a certain extent. There’s a feeling in this country among a lot of people that this is the way we should live. So, you know, it really breaks down the country in terms of those who think that we should be given all of these things and the people who are Trump supporters.
RUSH: Martha, if you would go to the places in this country that are not on the coasts, not in the elite, big urban areas — if you would go to the areas that Donald Trump won the election — traditional Democrat —
MACCALLUM: Mmm-hmm?
RUSH: — white, working class and even blue-collar neighborhoods, you’re not gonna find that kind of attitude. These are the people that Democrats used to rely on. These are the people the Democrats have lost. These are the people that vote for Trump, and they love Trump even more than they did in 2016.
The majority of this country is not yet at the place where it wants everything given to them. Of course young people want things given to them! Kids always do. People that are not yet mature, haven’t lived enough. But we’re doing a great disservice to our kids by short-changing their humanity, short-changing their opportunities to excel, to become something, to become larger than themselves. They’re nothing more than pawns that can be bought with votes.
And I don’t think that there is a majority of our population that… Up against Donald Trump, is the key element here. I don’t think there’s a majority of the population that is serious about thinking this is the way the country ought to be run. You know, the student loan forgiveness? What about people who took loans and paid them back? What are we gonna do, give them reparations? Are they gonna ask for refunds? I mean, where does all of this stop? It isn’t gonna happen in the first place. That’s another thing.
All of this is disingenuous and dishonest, and it doesn’t get anywhere near the heart of the problems that we are having in this country, which I happen to think revolve around the dissipation of our culture, the dissolution of our society and so forth. They are the culprits for this, and they need to be stopped, and this kind of stuff is not their route back. And the fact that they’re talking about Joe Biden or Crazy Bernie — who is leading everybody at this stage — I think is a testimony to how bankrupt they actually are.
MACCALLUM: All right. I want to play something for you from Hillary Clinton at the TIME 100 conference that she was speaking at —
RUSH: Oh, good!
MACCALLUM: (chuckles) — where she said…
RUSH: Hillary Clinton!
MACCALLUM: I know how much you love the TIME 100 conference —
RUSH: (laughing)
MACCALLUM: — and how much you love Hillary Clinton, so here she is —
RUSH: (laughing)
MACCALLUM: Ha! So here she is. Here she is talking about why she believed that President Trump should be indicted. Listen to this…
HILLARY: There’s enough there that any other person who had engaged, ummm, in those acts, umm, would certainly, uh, have been indicted. The whole matter of obstruction was very directly, uhhh, sent to the Congress. I mean, if you read that part of the report, it could not be clearer.
MACCALLUM: Well, what’s going through your mind as you’re listening to that, Rush?
RUSH: (Plugging his ears) I was trying not to listen to that.
MACCALLUM: (laughing)
RUSH: You know, this is the irony. Hillary Clinton is who tried to rig a presidential election, Martha. Hillary Clinton and her pals in the Obama Department of Justice and the FBI, they are the ones who colluded with the Russians. They are the ones that gave us this entirely, totally bogus Steele dossier.
For Hillary — you talk about irony — for Hillary Clinton to be talking about impeaching Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton needs to be investigated, she needs to be indicted, and she needs to be in jail, and many of her co-conspirators in this whole sordid affair, which amounted to nothing more than a silent coup to overturn the election results of 2016. Hillary Clinton demanding that Trump — you talk about sour grapes, this is a woman that’s been rejected by the American people twice, rejected by her party in 2008.
She had to rig the primaries against Crazy Bernie in 2016 to get the nomination. She is the last person who ought to be listened to about what ought to happen to Donald Trump. She hasn’t accomplished anything anywhere near what Donald Trump has accomplished. She is in no position to sit here and say what she saw in the Mueller — well, she can say it, she’s an American. But she doesn’t have any credibility on any of this as far as I am concerned. And I’m not alone there.
MACCALLUM: Jared Kushner also spoke at the conference today. And I know you talked about this today. Here he is talking about —
RUSH: I love this.
MACCALLUM: — how much the Russians actually did on Facebook, yeah, let’s play that.
KUSHNER: I think the investigations and all of the speculation that’s happened for the last two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy than a couple of Facebook ads. I spent about — I think they said they spent about $160,000 — I spent $160,000 every three hours during the campaign so, you know, if you look at the magnitude of what they did and what they accomplished, I think the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful.
MACCALLUM: Very interesting to hear from him today on that and a lot of other things, Rush.
RUSH: Well, here’s the thing. He’s right, Martha, everybody, America, please, there was never any evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia. The collusion, as I said, was Hillary, the DNC, and the Russians via Steele. But the Russians — when Mueller announced the indictments of the Russian troll farm — actually it was Rosenstein that went out and announced them. And nobody paid any attention to this, but he said at the end of the announcement, “Nothing in these indictments suggests a single vote was changed. Nothing suggests the outcome of any election was changed. No American is named in the indictment had anything to do with it. Martha, there was never any evidence for this. Mueller, when he got the file from Comey, it was empty. All they had was the dossier —
MACCALLUM: That’s a great point.
RUSH: — and we all know that it was made up. It was opposition research. This was not even an investigation of Trump. What it was was an attempt to overthrow the 2016 elections. And the Mueller investigation, I believe, was actually many things, including a cover-up and a distraction to keep people from understanding what really happened. Donald Trump accomplished one of the greatest achievements of his life against all odds, with no assistance.
His own party wasn’t even that much behind him. He’s done something that few Americans will ever do, and they’re trying to take it away from him, and they’re trying to sully his reputation simply because they don’t like him. This is a sordid situation. I think our country was at great risk during this whole thing and there needs to be an investigation. I hope the attorney general’s serious, because these people need to be investigated. We need to be told who they are, what they did, even though we already know. And they need to be indicted.
MACCALLUM: As you say, the attorney general is on it —
RUSH: — because they came close, Martha, to throwing away the United States Constitution, unelected people came close to actually pulling off what is a coup. And it should never, ever happen again. The American people, some of them who watch, what, the five that watch CNN don’t know it. And the New York Times is even trying to back off the dossier. “Well, maybe it was Russian disinformation.” No kidding, Russian disinformation. They’ve known that for a year and a half. Everybody in the media has known that they have been lying to the American people about this in an effort to get Donald Trump. And he survived it, and if they think they’re gonna take him out after all of this, they’re delusional.
MACCALLUM: As you say, the New York Times is now looking into the dossier. They say that Mr. Steele’s Russian informants could have been pressured to feed him disinformation, which is something that we reported —
RUSH: Oh, come on. Russian inform —
MACCALLUM: They’re just getting into that. Hold on.
RUSH: Russian — who is it — who’s working with Russians? Steele. Hillary’s guy. They’re working with the Russians. Now the Russians made this? Bob Woodward said the other day that we need to get to the bottom. He’s trying to link the dossier to Putin! Not Hillary. The dossier traces right back to Hillary and her campaign in the DNC. Don’t doubt me.
MACCALLUM: Well, they paid for it, and that much we know. So I want to talk to you a little bit about — Joe Lockhart wrote a piece today, the former press secretary for Bill Clinton, and they’re talking about don’t go down the impeachment road. We don’t need to go down the impeachment road, he said, because it’s going to be good enough fodder as we move forward that the president will be under continued, constant investigation with all these subpoenas that are out there. Here’s what he said about you, Rush. He said, “Republicans today are the party of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson, a coalition that in the face of every demographic trend in America will mean the long-term realignment of the federal government behind the Democrats.” What say you, sir?
RUSH: I’m honored that they think this. You know, some days I’m just an entertainer. Some days I’m a has-been. Now I am the face of and the reason for the Republican Party. I think that all of this just adds up to the fact that they’re frustrated. They haven’t been able to, quote, unquote, defeat me in 30 years. They can’t defeat Trump. They haven’t been able to stop him. And I think they’re frustrated.
They’ve thrown every weapon they have in their arsenal at Donald Trump and nothing’s worked. Things that they have used over the years that have been readily available to get rid and take out any Republican they want they have bounced off of Trump. And I think they’re really frustrated. The Republican Party — Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, we are not in politics. We are media titans. But we’re not in politics. This is the party of Donald Trump right now, and the Republicans that don’t realize that had better get on board.
MACCALLUM: Well, that’s interesting, ’cause I know that you said that you are frustrated by other Republicans in your party who you feel should be rejoicing right now, they should be fundraising off this Mueller report finding, and you don’t think they’re doing that.
RUSH: Well, I thought it was strange that, you know, after — I mean, for two years everybody’s waiting with bated breath and biting their fingernails, what’s Mueller gonna do? And then here comes the news, no collusion, no collusion, no obstruction. Where is the Republican Party with the celebratory emails to their voters? Even fundraising or just celebrating the victory? Where are they? You don’t hear them. The reason is, Martha, that this is a battle not between the two parties. This is a battle between the Washington establishment, deep state, I call it the administrative state, and outsiders and Americans who feel disenfranchised or unattached.
The fact that the Republican Party, there are still many people in there that — like Mitt Romney, says he was sickened, oh, he was sickened by what he read in the Mueller report. This is the same guy, Mitt Romney, who they said didn’t care when an employee’s wife died of cancer; same guy that they said didn’t pay his taxes for 10 years. The same guy who they said beat up somebody in prep school. The same guy who said he had a file of nothing but women. They destroyed Mitt Romney, and here he is on their side. What does that tell you?
It’s strange. And I think the Republican Party — I know the first nine months of Trump’s term they all thought this Russian stuff was real. They were afraid to get behind him. Now that’s gone. There’s no reason not to get behind Trump unless you don’t like his voters. And that is I think where the key to understanding this is.
MACCALLUM: You know, I’m curious. I saw the pictures over the weekend that you played golf with the president on Easter Sunday. And, you know, I guess everybody would like to hear a little bit about what his mood was really like and what he wants to focus on now and, you know, whether or not —
RUSH: Actually, it was Friday. It was the day after the Mueller report came out, and Lexi Thompson —
MACCALLUM: Yeah.
RUSH: — who was just – she’s just a sweet — she’s an LPGA pro, and I thought when we showed up there’s no way I’m in Trump’s cart, not with Lexi Thompson in the group. But I was in Trump’s cart. Lexi had her own. Everybody had a great time, there were five of us in the group, including Dana Quigley from the PGA Tour. For those of you who like Donald Trump and have never met him, I’m gonna tell you, he’s everything you hope he would be. He makes everybody the focus of attention, everybody has a great time, he is a tremendous host, he’s funny.
I mean, every hole he talks about that green is better than any green on any other golf course, except his other course. That lake, that lake, that’s better than anything they got at Pebble Beach. Everybody knows it. He encourages you when you don’t hit the ball well. He just makes everybody have a great time, and there’s breakfast beforehand and lunch afterwards. And there’s not a whole lot of —
MACCALLUM: But Rush, did you win? Did you win?
RUSH: Well, I’ll tell you, the first time I played with him I was having a great front nine — (crosstalk)
MACCALLUM: — question so far.
RUSH: — and he took away my strokes on the back because I didn’t deserve any, he said I played — did I misunderstand your question?
MACCALLUM: No, that’s my question, I wanted to know if you won.
RUSH: Oh. I was on his team. He picks whoever’s playing the best and puts himself on their team. And he may change teams two or three times in a round. It’s just fun, Martha. It’s not like when you go out with the guys who are playing and teams are against each other. It’s a faux competition, but it’s just fun. If somebody hits a bad shot he tells them to drop another ball. We’re out here having fun. There’s no stress.
MACCALLUM: Everybody’s having fun. So let me ask you one last question.
RUSH: Yeah.
MACCALLUM: I’m curious if you felt, you know, when you were with him that any of this stuff is weighing on him. I know that Elijah Cummings wanted to dig into eight years of financial records is something that some in the Trump camp are not happy about and they’re pushing back hard. Did that come up at all?
RUSH: No. To me, around me he’s one of the most confident people. He talks about this stuff, but he does not at any moment express any concern, certainly no fear. He’s reassuring to people. He knows who he is. He knows how people see him. He knows he’s the president. He knows people are reluctant to speak, they’re gonna be respectful. And so he anticipates things that they’re thinking or wondering about, and he will provide answers to things.
He didn’t at any time sit down and tell me what he thought of Mueller or what he thought of this or that. He can’t tell who’s gonna leave there and speak and who isn’t. But that wouldn’t go along with the recipe for these things, which is fun. But he doesn’t hide from any of this. I mean, at lunch after the round was telling Lexi about the golden showers story and how ridiculous it is and everybody was laughing at the fact that the media believed it, the fact that people actually thought that Trump would have hired some prostitutes to urinate on a bed because Obama had slept in it.
MACCALLUM: Oh, my God.
RUSH: We’re laughing ourselves silly over this as he tells the story. So it was a great time with him. It always is.
MACCALLUM: Well, I’m glad that was the one story that came up. Rush, thank you so much. Great to talk to you tonight, and thanks for spending so much time with us. Good to see you, sir.
RUSH: Thank you, Martha.
MACCALLUM: You bet.