DOOCY: As you can see right here we are joined by the King of Radio. Rush Limbaugh joins us from his Southern Command post down in Palm Beach, Florida. Rush, good morning to you.

EARHARDT: Good morning.

RUSH: How is everybody? It’s great to be with you guys. It’s really an honor. Really a privilege, really a pleasure. We could not go to sleep last night, so excited to be here today. And now the time has arrived.

DOOCY: It has indeed. Rush, we’re gonna talk about your Betsy Ross T-shirt that is — it’s shocking the number of people who — there it is right there. That’s the reason –

RUSH: Right, there it is.

DOOCY: We’re gonna talk about that in a couple of minutes. But, first, what did you make of the president yesterday seeing the writing on the wall, it would be a protracted legal fight, they’re already printing up the census, he decided to essentially ask all the government agencies to send all the data about citizens and noncitizens to the Commerce Department and they will try to figure out how many citizens we have in the country?

RUSH: I think everybody’s looking at this in the wrong way. It’s a testament, too, by the way, to the power of people who write the narrative every day. I call it the Washington soap opera and I firmly believe it’s the media that’s running the Democrat Party today, not the other way around.

The real controversy here, is who took the citizenship question off of the census and why? Why is the controversy wanting to know who among us happens to be a citizen and who isn’t? Why is that controversial? It would seem to me that this kind of attention should have been shown when somebody in the Obama Regime decided to get rid of it.

Because we all know why. They don’t want noncitizens to be invisible. They want ’em – or, they do want ’em to be invisible. They don’t want them counted as noncitizens for a political purpose. All of this, everything the left does is political, and they couch it in compassion and concern and not wanting to target or single out anybody.

My problem with all of this is that the American left today seems to have one major problem that is guiding every agenda item they have, and that is they don’t like this country. They don’t like this country as founded. They don’t like this country’s place in the world. And so they want to diminish us. They’re too afraid of American superpower, American exceptionalism.

But this idea of who’s a citizen and who isn’t, why did that question get taken off? That’s where everybody’s focus should have been. And I’ll put this on the Republicans. Look at the way things happen. Obama takes the question off. The Republicans do what? (snoring) Say nothing.

Then the Republicans get back and we want to put it back on, President Trump, because it’s common sense, put it back on. The Democrats fight, oppose, make it hell on earth to try to get this done, and this is a great illustration of the difference in the two parties and how they operate politically. I think it’s outrageous that the desire to know who here is a citizen is controversial.

DOOCY: Well, I don’t know exactly when they did stop putting it on, but that certainly is —

EARHARDT: 2010. 2010 when President Obama — it’s been on there from 1870 to 2010. Rush, will you elaborate —

RUSH: Exactly my point. The controversy, who took it off and why. Look, we know the answer to this. It just needs to be explained to people. As far as people are concerned, wanting to find out who’s here is the suspicious thing. Wanting to find out who among us is a citizen is now the suspicious or controversial thing. This is 180 degrees out of phase. It’s wrong. And I applaud the president for trying to get this done, and I think by hook or by crook he actually will get it done. He’s focusing everybody’s attention on it when it is the first thing you have to do to effect positive change.

EARHARDT: Will you elaborate on how exactly this would affect elections? Why don’t the Democrats want this on the census report? You said it’s political. Will you elaborate on that?

RUSH: Well, ultimately they want these people to be able to vote. The reason the Democrats want open borders — look, there’s a lot going on with this. The first thing behind this is a globalist movement to eliminate the whole concept of citizenship. And, look, I know some of this is gonna sound strange, but it really isn’t. This is happening. They want to replace concept of citizenship with residence. And these are global elites who want to manage the world and control as much of the population as they can.

And the first thing you do if you really want to do that is get rid of this concept that people are citizens of different countries. You replace that concept with residence. Now, you bring it to this country specifically. The Democrats here want open borders. They want as many people crossing the border as possible, multiple reasons. One is, they need a permanent underclass.

The Democrat Party is a party that, the worst thing that can happen to it is for people to become self-reliant, for people to be able to produce for themselves. They need people constantly in need, dependent, they need to create as many victims as they can, people hopeless, thinking the game is rigged, they have no chance because the deck is stacked against them. The Democrats are gonna pave the way for ’em, gonna protect ’em, and so they need as many of these people as they can get, people with no chance, no hope, and they become the champion. They need these people. They want them to vote.

Right now you have to be a citizen to vote, except for in California. They want noncitizens to vote there. They’re trying to make that happen. Keep an eye on California. It’s the model for what the left wants the entire country to become. But the whole question about politics here, Ainsley, is noncitizens can’t vote. The Democrats want these people to vote and that’s the underlying desire and energy behind this as far as they’re concerned.

JENKINS: Rush, let me ask you about this division within the Democratic caucus between Speaker Pelosi and the significant four —

DOOCY: The squad.

JENKINS: — led by the squad, that’s right, led by Ocasio-Cortez, AOC seemingly to play a race card with Pelosi. What do you make of this situation?

RUSH: I think this is another example. Do you think at the end of the day when we get to 2020, when we get to the campaign, the election, they’re gonna be disunified? They’re not. Look, this is the Young Turks in the party wanting to have some say-so. It’s time-honored. There’s nothing new going on here, except Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calling Pelosi a racist pig, essentially, which is humorous and funny because you don’t normally see Democrats make that allegation about each other.

But, again, we’re looking at this the wrong way. We think we got a great news story here of division in the Democrat Party. The real story, the Democrat Party, you guys, is their utter failure to get rid of Donald Trump. Their frustration is immeasurable. And this is what’s driving everything they are doing.

They thought they would get rid of Trump before he was inaugurated. Then they came up with the phony collusion thing. They’ve thrown every weapon they’ve got at getting rid of Donald Trump, and they have failed, and they are beyond their ability to deal with it. They normally target somebody to take out on the Republican side, they can do it in two weeks. They can do it in six months, however long they want to spend at it. They can’t damage Trump, and it’s driving them crazy. They are more irrational than ever.

But, at the end of the day, I think this is nothing more than something that is amusing to watch, but in terms of the effect it’s gonna have on the Democrat Party, negligible. The effect on the Democrat Party is going to be from Donald Trump and the Republicans because we’re the opponents.

When you get to the end of things here, Cortez is not a forever opponent of Pelosi. Maybe internally, but not when it comes to the big agenda items. They’re gonna end up on the same page at the appropriate time. If they don’t and I’m wrong about this, I’d be glad to be wrong, but I don’t think I am on this.

DOOCY: Well, let’s see how it all turns out. In the meantime, Rush, I had heard, I’ve been reading that the Betsy Ross T-shirt that you came up with is flying off the shelves because it is benefiting Tunnel to Towers, which helps all sorts of families who have lost a member — there it is right there — of law enforcement. This all got started before the Fourth of July when Nike announced they were gonna put the Betsy Ross flag on some shoes and Colin Kaepernick expressed his displeasure with it —

EARHARDT: He was offended.

DOOCY: — for a variety of reasons, and then you came out — there’s the shoe right there — and now you have put this particular flag on a T-shirt, and you wonder, what did Betsy Ross ever do to anybody.

RUSH: You know, there’s an overarching thing to this too. And you can look at the American women’s world soccer team as an illustration of this too. I’m not convinced, by the way, that Nike didn’t dredge all this up as a PR stunt, but even if they did, here’s the point. You have people, in the case of the soccer team they want to be on the team, they want to represent America, they go out and perform, they achieve something magnificent athletically, what do they do with the platform?

Start trashing America. Start beating up on the country they claimed they wanted to represent. Kaepernick looks at a pair of tennis shoes. “I don’t like that flag. That flag stands for this and that.” Nike said, “Okay, we’ll cancel it.” I’m tired of this with no pushback, Steve. There are millions of Americans who do not respect and do not think it’s cool to constantly trash America and blame America when the people doing it have become incredibly wealthy.

They’ve had never-ending opportunities. They have had more opportunity than anybody in the world over, and they still persist in wanting to trash and criticize and blame America, and some of us are just fed up with it. So I went to my wife when the Nike thing happened, I said, “How quickly could we turn a T-shirt around that featured Betsy Ross, Stand Up for Betsy Ross and give people a vehicle to push back?”

Because there are a lot of people out there that feel a little powerless. They’re as livid about this as I am, but what can they do about it? So we’ve given them an opportunity. We partnered with Tunnel to Towers on this to make sure people knew this was not a pursuit of profit on the part of me or my organization or my program. We do everything here. We fulfill them, we order them, we design them, we sell them. In four days this week it’s the largest selling item that we have ever had.

DOOCY: Wow.

RUSH: It’s the single greatest revenue generating item we’ve ever had in the RushLimbaugh.com store. People have just glommed onto this, I like to say, like nothing else that we’ve ever offered. It’s really been fulfilling because people want the opportunity to push back, if nothing else, for self-satisfaction about this.

Because it’s getting tiresome, Steve. It’s getting tiresome to listen to a never-ending parade of people on the left rip this country, criticize this country, blame this country, when none of what they’re saying is applicable. This is not the land of grievance. This is the land of opportunity. This is the land of wealth and prosperity like nowhere has ever been in American or world history. And we’re tired of it.

EARHARDT: You’re right.

RUSH: And so this was just a simple little way —

EARHARDT: Yes.

RUSH: — for people to push back and benefit a charity that does great things for law enforcement, first responders, military, and people who suffered greatly at 9/11.

EARHARDT: Rush, thank you for remembering all of them and doing this. That’s wonderful.

DOOCY: And I heard Rush say that there are a bunch of websites that are selling bootleg, fake Rush Limbaugh material —

RUSH: You know how many there are? At the end of the day yesterday there were 70 knockoffs, 70 different people —

EARHARDT: So how do we get the real thing? (crosstalk)

RUSH: Can you believe how popular this thing has become? That’s one of the great illustrations. No, our legal department is on those people, have no fear, no, no, no, no. But they’re trying to sell it as though it’s official.

DOOCY: Rush Limbaugh and the only place to get the official one to help Tunnel to Towers is the RushLimbaughShowStore.com.

RUSH: Or you can just go to the website and click on the “Store” tab. Thank you guys very much. Have a great weekend.

DOOCY: Thank you, Rush.

EARHARDT: Thank you. You, too, God bless you, Rush.

JENKINS: Thank you, sir.