RUSH: So, I checked the email during the break. “Rush, this is crazy. What more can Trump do? You’re acting like Trump doesn’t want to solve the issue. Sounds like you agree with Mayor Pete. But, for crying out loud, why would Trump put everything on the line with his tariff threats?”

That’s a good question out there. Because Trump has put everything on the line with these tariff threats. He’s going against the grain, which is what Trump does. And I think this is the magic that Trump — I think it’s instinctive — it’s not something that I think that he needs to study and make sure he does.

And that points up something. I’ve learned a lot in life, and I hope everybody does as they grow older, it’s the whole point of things. And I remember back to the first days and weeks and years when this show started. And there was no grand strategy to it. It had a big, overarching goal: Be great, be the best show, be the number one show documented by ratings and audience research, the number one.

That was the objective. There was no plan on how to do it, and there wasn’t any five-year plan, three-year plan or any of this. It was just me being myself each and every day here on the radio. And then, as that happened, everybody began analyzing it. People that I worked with, people in the media. They could not avoid it. People were analyzing what I was doing. And I had to make sure to never read any of that and to never listen to any of it.

The last thing I wanted to know was what I was doing so that I could consciously continue to try. Because once you have to consciously continue to try what you already are, you’re gonna stop being what you already are and you’re gonna start trying to copy what you think you are.

If this sounds confusing, it is. I think in a psychological sense it’s highly relevant to Trump. Trump is who he is. And more so than I ever was he is bombarded with people every day telling him what he needs to do and how he should do it and when he should stop doing it and change it and start doing it this way.

And the number one thing Donald Trump is under assault for is precisely who he is. His mannerisms, the way he speaks, his enthusiasm for tweeting, his stream-of-conscious honesty, those are the things that Trump is constantly being told he’s got to change. Because, believe me, there are people who would love to be able to talk Trump out of being Trump.

Trump doesn’t need advisers in a PR sense. He doesn’t need advisers to tell him who he is and how to keep being who he is. The danger when you try to keep being who you are, you stop being who you are. Being who you are shouldn’t require any effort at all. Who you are au natural is who you are.

The minute you start trying to be who you are — I had to resist it. I mean, there were a lot of well-intentioned people that said, “Well, if you want to keep this up, you’re gonna have to change. If you want to keep this up, if you wanna really be doing this a long time, you’ll have to moderate this and change a little bit.” Some of them well-intentioned, some of them weren’t, but it didn’t matter because none of it was right.

And it’s another reason why I’ve never listened to anybody else who does this. I don’t want to even inadvertently start copying other people and not be who I am. And being who I am in the sense of what interests me, what doesn’t. If I start trying to imagine, for example, every day what all of you want to hear, I’m finished.

I didn’t do that at the beginning. I just assumed that you would want to hear it because this is a good show. And you don’t want to miss it. But if I started trying to imagine what you all want out there, how many of you are there? Any day there could be 12 to 15 million of you in a day. I can’t do it that way, and neither can somebody like Trump. And the pressure that he is under to change who he is has got to be enormous.

And that is precisely his strength, that who he is is the antithesis in practically every way Washington, D.C., is normal. He’s the antithesis. It is one of the reasons so many people in that town are out of their gourds, because, to them, normalcy as they define it, is the coin of the realm, and Trump is the biggest abnormality that’s ever come along. And he’s under constant pressure to change it. He’s under constant pressure to politicize things in the standard operating way.

Like what got me going on this is Mayor Pete’s suggestion that Trump doesn’t want to solve the border, he, rather, likes the crisis and the chaos because it permits him the issue to campaign on. That’s not the way Trump looks at things. His advisers might be telling him things like that. That’s not how he looks at it.

Trump is a problem solver. Trump is a doer. Trump gets things done. That’s how Trump notches his belt: Missions accomplished, projects completed. Now, in a negotiation there’s all kinds of gamesmanship, but you never take your eyes off the real objective, and that is getting what you want as quickly as you can, problem solved.

I look at Trump and the pressure that he is obviously under, and we all know the pressure from the Never Trumpers, the pressure from the media, the pressure from Democrats. But even some, I’m sure, in his administration in the early days died, just would have killed if Trump would have been a normal president, since they finally got a gig in the administration. Get me a guy who’s normal so I can bank this, so I can put it on my resume that I’ve been here. And that just isn’t who Donald Trump is.

I have a fascinating piece here. It got me thinking about this today. Victor Davis Hanson writing at American Greatness, called: “When Normality Became Abnormal.” And this is a great Victor Davis Hanson piece. All of his are noteworthy and all of them are exceptional, but this one you’d have to put in the greatness column. Let me just give you a couple pull quotes. It prints out to five pages. I can’t read the whole thing.

“Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention,” meaning conventional wisdom. “Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.

“Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.”

Everybody knew this. And they were fine with it. The entire Washington establishment was fine with the Iran deal even though it was not in the U.S. best interests in any way, shape, manner, or form. It wasn’t in the best interests of our ally Israel, but everybody in Washington pretty much was on board with this, especially the architect of the Iran deal, Barack Hussein Obama.

Now, they weren’t gonna run around and say it, but their actions betrayed it. Except Trump did. Trump came along and blew it to smithereens. He canceled it without a second thought. It didn’t take any advisers. It didn’t take any strategy sessions. Trump knew it was a bad deal. It was a bad deal for America. It didn’t make any sense. Why would you want to enter into a deal that allows Iran to eventually nuclear weaponize themselves? Why? For what possible reason could that ever make sense to reasonable people. And it didn’t.

Now Iran is furious.

But guess what? “Iran is in a far weaker — and eroding — strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest,” because they didn’t get the money. Trump canceled the money. They didn’t get the money that was gonna allow them to modernize, to buy jets, to prepare their nuclear facilities. “So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance.

“Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin…” What this means is that if the Iranians launch a ship that takes out one of our ships, that we would relate against the port that that ship came from, not Tehran. We wouldn’t launch a general strike on the country at large.

Or if they launched a plane that fired missiles at one of our ships, the response would be to the air base that that plane came from — or if they launched a missile at one of our boats, our tit-for-tat would be to hit the silo from which the missile was launched, rather than the point of contact, which would be a general attack on the nation. That’s what Iran accepts. That’s what Iran understands, that if they launch a plane that fires a missile that takes out one of our boats, that we’re gonna hit the port or the airport or the air base where that thing is based.

That’s what they’re figuring. So they’re willing to do that, but they don’t think that we’re gonna hit back, because what they have at their disposal now is chump change, compared to what they were in line to get. This is what you have to keep in mind. Iran taking out a boat, ramming a boat, is chump change compared to where they were headed. So they’ve gotta make it look like they’re still big guys, that they’re still powerful, they’re still unintimidated, and so forth. But Trump took everything away from them with the Iran deal.

Up next: “Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtue signal” that they got it on climate change, and everybody knew that the adjustments that were gonna be made were insignificant and inconsequential. The Paris climate accords were nothing more than a grand stage where all of the elites in the Western democracies could say, “We care. We get it.” But what it really was, is “a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West,” that’s us, “to the ‘developing world,'” a typical United Nations scam to pick our pockets.

That’s what the Paris accords really were, with a side benefit of harming “Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now,” because Trump withdrew from it. “Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention,” meaning the Paris accords. “The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance…”

So, in other words, we met the targets in the Paris accord without being a member. We walked out of it; it didn’t amount to anything. It didn’t accomplish anything except save the United States from the usual United Nations scam. Yet everybody in favor of it knew exactly what it was. They were willing to subordinate the United States, once again, because we’re the superpower that deserves to take it on the chin for being a superpower. And Trump just doesn’t see it that way. The piece from Mr. Hanson goes on to note all of the things Trump has accomplished that go against every definition of normalcy or normality.

Moving the ambassador’s residence to Jerusalem, moving the embassy to Jerusalem is one thing. This is a key point, too. In the old Washington, and still in many segments of the Never Trumper world and in the conventional Washington elite world, “China was fated to rule the world. Period.” It’s just something everybody had concluded. We couldn’t keep up with China. I’m not making this up, and Mr. Davis observes it here: “Whining about its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on.

“Progressives knew the communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and destroyed civil liberties, and yet in ‘woke’ fashion tip-toed around criticizing [China]. Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant to the family of nations. In a protracted tariff struggle, there are lots of countries in Asia that could produce cheap goods as readily as China, but far fewer countries like the United States that have money to be siphoned off in mercantilist trade deals, or the technology to steal, or the preferred homes and universities in which to invest.”

So those are three examples given here of how Trump has come in and just literally upset the applecart by being who he is. It is his natural inclination to look at these things — the normalcy of the Washington establishment — and (laughing) to not understand it because it’s senseless. And to understand the Washington establishment on the United States’ place in the world, you have to abandon the concept that we’re the good guys and that we are a deserving and decent superpower.

And you have to believe that we pose the greatest threat to the world because of our power and we’re too intimidating and we’re too mean, and, “We have our own flaws, so who are we to preach to other people about right and wrong?” That’s the prevailing conventional wisdom. And Trump is under constant barrage to stop this, to change this. And we’re lucky, I think, that he is very much in love with himself. And I don’t mean this humorously or … It’s a decent thing. Loving yourself is very important, folks.

Not bragging about yourself or being sick about it, but if you don’t like yourself, if you’re not comfortable with who you are, then you’re gonna always try to be something you’re not, and you’re finished ’cause everybody’s gonna recognize you as a phony eventually. The last thing Trump is is a phony, and the problem Washington is having is they just don’t know how to deal with somebody who’s actually normal and filled with common sense and reason. That’s why they’ve gotta mischaracterize him, blaspheme, slander, libel, and all the rest.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: One other thing here from the column by Victor Davis Hanson, and it is the revitalization of the American energy sector. The normalcy, the normality of Washington, D.C., was that we were gonna always be a net importer of energy; that what with climate change, we couldn’t start destroying our own environment to go get oil. It was just cleaner and easier to buy it. Plus, we needed spend money with our allies to make sure they didn’t nuke us. It’s the same old thinking that subordinates us under the guise of somehow making us safer and more liked.

Well, since Donald Trump was elected: “Three million more barrels of American oil are being produced per day just since Trump took office. New pipelines will ensure that the United States is not just the world’s greatest producer of natural gas but perhaps its largest exporter as well. Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East,” and, by the way, gasoline prices are on their way back down, again.

It’s not something Democrat Party is very excited about. Trump continues to try to do something about the open-border situation. But all of this serves as a great reminder of the way things were when Trump was elected which tells us why he was elected. It reminds us (it’s 2-1/2 years ago) who Trump naturally is. It is what people elected. He’s not somebody programmed to be the way he is, not somebody advised to be the way he is, but somebody who is the way he is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Yeah, you know, I could probably get this guy in in 20 seconds, but I don’t want to put the pressure on him, since now it’s 15 seconds. By the time I took it, it would be 10 seconds.

But we’ve got a guy on phone from Katy, Texas, who said the references I made to everybody being who you are, not what somebody wants you to be, but remaining who you are, that’s the big challenge. He said it’s something Mozart said during his lifetime and that therefore I am in great company. It’s a very nice thing. Thank you, Spencer.