RUSH: You know, Trump did not tell any Democrats — and you know what’s fascinating, folks? If I may add. There are four reporters — and I don’t remember all their names. Maggie Haberman is one from the New York Times, and there’s another one at the New York Times, Schmidt, maybe. There’s a couple from the Washington Post. And these four reporters are the primary reporters of leaks.
And so they have accrued great reputations as having inside knowledge right inside the Trump administration. They’ve got sources in the Oval Office. And not a one of those four reporters had any advance knowledge of the military attack on Baghdadi, and this thing had been in the planning stages for weeks and, in fact, you want to hear something brilliant? Not brilliant from me. You get me being brilliant every day. No, a brilliant strategy here.
The announcement of withdrawing troops from Syria was part of the strategy to set ’em all up! And it worked! Look at all the people that fell in line. Every predictable Never Trumper Republican, every RINO Republican and every Democrat and the entirety of the media fell for it hook, line, and sinker. The Never Trumpers especially, they just couldn’t contain themselves, writing about how Trump was turning over Syria to ISIS. By pulling the troops out, he was veritably handing Syria to ISIS. He was the epitome of incompetence. He was the epitome of a joke.
The Never Trumpers were out saying that this move by Trump proved everything they had ever been saying about his unfitness and lack of qualifications. And it was all a setup. Announcing the troop withdrawal — we’re talking 50 American troops, advisers. But that was part of the strategy. It was part of the setup. It was part of setting up Baghdadi and his group. And it worked like a champ.
But back to the point. You know, I don’t want to gloss over this. This is something a lot of you might have been worried about because, you know, we’re big on allies, and the Kurds have been our allies, and some of you might have been afraid that Trump was abandoning the Kurds. Now, I gotta be careful how I say this because I hate me-too-ism. But, folks, I don’t doubt Donald Trump.
You know, I don’t live in the place where a lot of people do. I don’t mean you, but there are some Trump supporters who believe that he’s barely holding it together and one of these days he’s gonna make the big mistake that we can’t defend. You know the kind of people I’m talking about. That’s not me.
If Donald Trump announces that we’re getting out of Syria, I do not doubt him. I do not immediately conclude he doesn’t know what he’s doing. I try to put it in context with what I know about him. Then I withhold judgment. Part of this is you’re not gonna get me tricked into criticizing Donald Trump. I’m not gonna fall for it. I’m not gonna let it happen. Too many people do. Too many people can’t wait because they just have crises of confidence.
And so this announcement of troop withdrawals, the troop drawdown in Syria was a classic. It was part of the operation. But here’s the point. All of these super reporters, these four reporters, two of them from the Times, two of them from the Washington Post, they didn’t have a word about it. There were no leaks. Which makes me wonder how much of what they’re reporting is true in the first place! Apparently there are people all over Washington leaking everything about Trump, but about this there were zero, there were zero leaks?
I’m wondering how much these reporters are just making up. They never name their sources. The sources are always anonymous. They’re always current or former U.S. government officials or intelligence operatives or whatever. How much of it are they just making up? And don’t discount that. I think much of the news about Donald Trump that is passed off as sourced by experts “troubled by what’s happening in the administration” may be just made up. The Washington Post has given us all the evidence in the world that they are capable of it.
These obits, obituaries for al-Baghdadi, we don’t need any more evidence. That’s just piling on. We don’t need any more evidence they’ll make it up. Not one leak. And this operation had been in the works for weeks. So the time came for Pelosi and Schiff and some of the other Democrats, “Hey, you’re supposed to consult us. You’re supposed to tell us about it, you’re supposed to bring us in.”
And Trump could have said, “I tried to. I tried to give Pelosi the truth of what’s going on in Syria, but she threw this hissy fit and stormed out and went out to the microphones and claimed that America needs to pray for me because I’m losing my mind. I had a meeting with ’em. I had ’em in the White House. I was gonna brief ’em.”
You know what I wish Trump would have said? “I didn’t think I had to tell the Democrats what was going on. I thought the whistleblower would.” Would that not have been great? He didn’t say that, but that would have been piece de resistance.
So these four reporters, not one of these aces — Maggie Haberman, I can’t remember the other three — but not a one of them had the slightest idea this operation against al-Baghdadi was in place and that it was being formed and planned for weeks. Now in the aftermath they’re trying to say Trump didn’t know about it. He was not consulted ’til the last minute because the military knows Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing. This is all BS, folks. It’s literally all BS.
Trump was involved in it from the get-go, had a hand in the strategy. The stuff they would never say about Obama. And yet they had to go grab Obama off the golf course on the day they were gonna take out bin Laden! Remember? Obama was out playing golf. They had to go get him, rush him back to The Situation Room and put an official U.S. president’s jacket on him. And then there were all these pictures of Obama studying the live video feed of the operation to get bin Laden.
He was on the golf course! But, of course, when the Drive-Bys get to Obama, why, he was the architect, he was the sole planner, it was his idea, nobody else had any decent additions to make so Obama scripted the whole thing and was so confident he went out and played golf.
They had to go grab Hillary too. She was out reading emails. You cannot have one iota’s positive or even neutral coverage on Donald Trump. And the media is still freaking, as evidenced by the Washington Post. I don’t know how much of what the Washington Post published you’ve read. Let me share with you some of this. Their headline, “Austere Religious Leader,” blah, blah, blah, blah, “al-Baghdadi Dead,” cared deeply for his flock or whatever.
“An austere religious scholar with wire-frame glasses and no known aptitude for fighting and killing,” died today. “Despite the group’s extremist views and vicious tactics, Mr. Baghdadi maintained a canny pragmatism as leader. … A shy, nearsighted youth who liked soccer but preferred to spend his free time at the local mosque.”
The Washington Post changed their headline of al-Baghdadi’s obituary. The actual obituary is what I just read from. That’s even worse than the original headline.
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RUSH: It goes without saying, the death of al Bookr al-Baqi Sab-Sahib Bagdhadi really fouls the media’s narrative on Syria that Trump is incompetent, that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, that Trump has turned Syria over to ISIS. Now that’s all blown up. Saturday Night Live is routinely embarrassed and was embarrassed hugely Saturday night. They ran a big skit on how Trump has been creating all kinds of new jobs for ISIS in Syria — and at the very moment Saturday Night Live was doing their stupid, foolish script, we were wiping out the ISIS leader.
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RUSH: Back to the phones and Dallas. This is Wynn. Great to have you. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. I just wanted to say thank you, and I was listening to the president’s press… (silence)
RUSH: Did we lose the cell? We appear…
CALLER: (garbled)
RUSH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Your connection bopped out on us. We need to have you start it again. You said you were “listening to the president’s,” and then you cut out.
CALLER: I was listening to the president’s presser, the al-Baghdadi presser, with my two daughters yesterday, and I told my daughters, “The reason why the president is using such strong language is because he’s not just talking to us as Americans. He’s also talking to the enemy,” and —
RUSH: What do you mean…?
CALLER: (crosstalk)
RUSH: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I… Whoa, whoa. What do you mean strong language?
CALLER: Well, what’s being described as “strong language” by the media when he uses words like —
RUSH: You mean when he said, “He died like a dog! He died like a coward! He was whimpering and begging and screaming!” That kind of tough talk?
CALLER: That kind of tough talk. Exactly.
RUSH: That’s not tough talk. It happens to be a factual description of the way the little coward went! Oops! I’m sorry. Tough talk. I called him a coward! Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Forgive me. I’m looking heavenly. Please forgive me!
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: Oh, my God. I called Baghdadi a coward.
CALLER: (laughing)
RUSH: How old are your daughters?
CALLER: They are 8 and 11.
RUSH: Well, okay. So you’re given ’em good less. So you told ’em his audience is not just Americans but terrorists all over the world, that their number’s up, they’re next, they’re not gonna get any pass from us, right? That’s your point.
CALLER: That’s correct. But, you know, other thing I observed — and I have to mention this, too. I noticed how incurious the journalists who were present at the presser were, and then throughout the rest of the day on all the shows on TV, no one seemed to be asking any questions about who was captured. The president mentioned that those who weren’t killed surrendered.
RUSH: Well, why do you think that they were not curious?
CALLER: Well, I think they were focused on the president dissing Pelosi and (crosstalk).
RUSH: Nope. That too. But the reason they were not curious is they are not going to ask questions that they think might allow the president to look good. So, “Other terrorists captured? To hell with that! We’re gonna ask questions that make Trump, in our view, look like a bumbling idiot and a fool and maybe somebody that didn’t even know this operation was happening.” I’ll guarantee you that most of the journalists there assumed that Trump didn’t know anything about this, that he had to get a briefing from the military before he went out.
And they were gonna be able to trip him up. And they were convinced because this is what they think of him. He’s incapable of this kind of elite thinking, this kind of advanced strategic military thinking. Because the buddies of the media, the leftist officer corps in the military have been telling him, “This Trump is an idiot! This guy, he doesn’t understand the front end of a gun from the back end of a gun. This guy is an absolute joke.”
So they’re gonna believe this stuff. So they’re gonna ask him questions based on their presumption that he doesn’t know anything about the operation, and they’re gonna try to trip him up. And Trump blew them out of the water with detail after detail after detail. They are genuinely incurious because they don’t want and will not do anything that makes Trump look good. This is why reporters began talking about how “inelegant” Trump was, like what you were talking to your daughters about.
They started contrasting Trump’s coarse language and mean-spirited, vindictive invective — as opposed to Obama’s elegant subscriptions of the steps taken to preserve the body of bin Laden in salute to Islamic tradition. “Obama was so wonderful. He was so thoughtful. He was so elegant and well spoken. And Trump (sputtering) is just a stupid, disgusting Neanderthal!” And so that guides the coverage throughout the day.
I’m here to tell you: The media, folks, is freaking out over this. They’ll never report how much they’re freaking out, and they’re try to cover up how much. But just go back to last week when Trump announces the Syria pull out. Oh, did they have a field day! They had a field day. They went all of their think tank and military think tank buddies, and the story all week was, “Oh, man, this guy’s making life more dangerous! This guy is just giving Syria to the Russians.
“This is further Russian collusion. This guy’s working with the enemies of America. This guy’s so inept and so incompetent, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. This is endangering everybody,” blah, blah, blah. All the experts out to talk about what an idiot Trump was. This operation has been in the works for weeks, and there wasn’t a single leak about it. Nobody found out. Even all these reporters who are wired; they know everything.
I think most of what you see in the news that is sourced to anonymous people… I’m gonna tell you right now, I think over half of it is just made up, literally made up like Adam Schiff made up… While he was chairing his Intelligence Committee, he made up facts that Trump told the Ukrainian president to make up dirt on Biden, to dig it up and make it up. He told him nine times, told him, “Don’t get back to me ’til you’ve got what I want.” It didn’t happen.
I think people are making things up and telling the reporters as official sources. The reporters don’t care. If it sounds bad, they run with it. But somewhere along the line from invisible, anonymous source/leaker to journalist — to either publication or broadcast — somebody in that chain is literally making it up half the time. It gets reported and it gets published or broadcast as media fact. I say this because these four ace reporters — two from the Post, two from the Times — say nobody told them a thing about this operation.
If they’re that wired, if they’ve got people inside that are telling them everything — if Trump is surrounded by saboteurs, if Trump is surrounded by people that are trying to undermine him — then where were they on this operation? Trump did not tell the Democrats. Isn’t that interesting? The one specific group of people that were not brought in on this — Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats, Schumer in the Senate — didn’t know a thing, and there were no leaks. Folks, this was a bang-up operation, and it starts with Trump announcing the Syria troop withdrawal.
And I am convinced, like I’ve said now a couple of times, that it was part of the plan.
The Syria withdrawal was part of the plan. It had one primary objective, and that was to make al-Bakkir Sahib Skyhook al-Baghdadi relax. (impression) “Ah, the Americans… Death to America! Death to America! The Americans are pulling out. I can continue to murder and rape and behead, and I will do it and I will make videos,” and bam! Next thing he knows is his suicide vest goes on off ’cause he set it off because he’s about to be wiped out. “Death to America! Death to America!” Death to Baghdadi! The Washington Post loved him. “He was an austere religious leader who used to love soccer and he got caught up in a bad crowd.”
So the withdrawal was part of the plan, brilliantly conceived and executed here.
You know what? I even heard somebody say in the Drive-Bys, “Where was Pompeo?” Secretary of state. This operation was monitored from The Situation Room at the White House. Pompeo wasn’t there. He was in Kansas. That’s where he’s from, by the way. And so people were trying to discredit the operation by saying Pompeo wasn’t there, obviously Trump hates Pompeo, obviously Trump doesn’t trust Pompeo.
Pompeo is the secretary of state. You know why Pompeo did not come back to Washington? So as not to create anybody’s interest. Pompeo flies off to Kansas, he got previously scheduled business there, does not race back in time, does not call attention, does not have all the body contact watching him.
He’s secretary of state. There’s press corps constantly watching his movements. If this guy’d made a scramble back to Washington, they would have wondered why. So he was kept in Kansas in order to keep cover on the operation. And then it’s a bang-up home run of a job.
By the way, can I talk to you about risk-taking? Let’s look at this from a hypothetical. Imagine if it had failed, in the midst of this faux impeachment fiasco, imagine if it had failed. Remember what happened to Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter 1979, some of you may have not heard of this. Some of you may not know Jimmy Carter other than as a home builder. Like, pop quiz. Do you know what the Kingdome was?
Well, that’s where the Mariners and the Seahawks used to play. But a lot of Millennials have never heard of the Seattle Kingdome ’cause it got torn down. Now they’ve got CenturyLink Field. And that’s not long ago. That’s recent. A lot of people don’t know, Jimmy Carter, 1979, 54 Americans are kept hostage by the Iranian government, including among them Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And Jimmy Carter allowed his presidency to be consumed with those American hostages. Remember this, Mr. Snerdley?
The Iranian hostage situation is what gave birth to the ABC late-night TV show called Nightline. It started out America held hostage, Day whatever. And by the time they got to Day 1,000, Ted Koppel said, you know what? We may as well make this a nightly show and just call it Nightline. And so that’s how it began.
Well, Jimmy Carter, the economy was in malaise, everything in the country was going — interest rates — ha-ha — interest rates today are 0.2. Interest rates back then were 12 to 14%. If you went out to try to buy a house, the best thing that could have happened to you was to be turned down for your mortgage ’cause you had no way of paying it. Jimmy Carter scheduled a rescue mission. His best and brightest military people conceived of a mission led by helicopters.
And they were to land in the desert, have ground troops go into Tehran, liberate the hostages, get ’em back out to the helicopters, and lift off. Well, Jimmy Carter’s helicopters landed and then a sandstorm came along and they were all incapacitated. The operation was blown, everybody knew about it, Jimmy Carter looked inept on top of inept.
Now, imagine if this had bombed out. Imagine if this operation had not succeeded, how that could have fed into what the Democrats are trying to do with impeachment. And yet Trump fearlessly authorized the mission and it was successful. Immensely so.
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RUSH: Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist has a piece, “The Real Reasons Why [Drive-By] Media Are Freaking Out Over Trump’s Successful … Mission” to Wipe Out Al-Baghdadi Sahib Skyhook. Here are the three reasons: “1) Positive News Coverage Hurts Media Efforts to Destroy Trump. 2) ISIS Founder’s Death Complicates Media’s Syria Narrative.” Boy, does it. That narrative is Trump’s a buffoon. He’s incompetent. He’s an idiot, doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s endangering everybody. Pulling troops out? What the hell!
Now everybody knows pulling troops out was part of the plan. Her third assertion here is: “Trump Foreign Policy Successes Undermine Media Impeachment Drive. The biggest champions of impeachment are the media, seeking to save face after their 2016 and Russia collusion hoax failures.” Boy, is that ever true. I still believe that it is, in fact, the media that’s leading the Democrat Party.
I think the media gives the Democrats their energy. I think the media prods them. I think the media is the intellectual leadership. I think the media charts the course for Democrats to follow, and they make their marching orders known inside of news stories and TV appearances. I don’t think there’s any question. Not that the Democrats are not capable of this. I just think the media has become the actual leaders of the Democrat Party and the American left.
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RUSH: Here’s Marty, Grand Rapids, Michigan. Great to have you, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hello, Rush. I’d like to know why Nancy Pelosi is the only one whining about not being briefed. Was McConnell briefed or Schumer or Kevin McCarthy? Because from all reports, they weren’t briefed either, but neither are they complaining. And then as she complains she said the Russians were briefed before she was. That is a lie. The Russians were only informed that we were flying through airspace they controlled, which is a common courtesy. And why’s she the only one —
RUSH: Wait, let’s not gloss over that for a second. That’s an important point. What Trump did, he called the Russians and he called the Turks, and he said, “Don’t panic if you see some American helicopter traffic.” He didn’t detail the mission. He didn’t tell anybody what was going on. He just told them to pay no attention. You might see some of our helicopters on a mission, training mission, whatever it was.
You’re absolutely right about that. Well, of course Pelosi’s gonna complain because that’s what they do! It’s standard operating procedure. Trump does something, you claim it’s impeachable. Trump does something, you claim it’s incompetent. Trump does something, you claim that it is irregular. And you do it in this premise that he is in the middle of impeachment, doesn’t deserve to be president.
You do it on the basis that, “We’re the Democrats! We run the House! He ought to tell us.” The retort to this is he tried to tell you last week some of this stuff, but you stormed out in a pique and claimed that he needed to see a psychiatrist and that we needed to pray for him. It’s just all politics with them. And they’re really upset, Marty, that this was a successful mission, and they’re trying to deflect from it. That’s why she’s on her high horse. And I suspect you knew all of that. Right?
CALLER: Yes, it was more rhetorical, but I just wondered why she’s the only one that has a beef. The others are quiet on the matter.
RUSH: Well, I don’t think she has a real beef. I think it’s all manufactured. She wouldn’t have a beef it were Obama who didn’t tell her, and neither would the Republicans. You know, I was thinking. Obama has — such a disaster. Obama is responsible for this coup. In fact, the Lee Smith book makes the point that Obama was working on getting rid of Trump up to the last hour he spent in the Oval Office, that Obama is just thick in all of this.
And there can be no doubt about it. These people like Brennan and Clapper and Comey, they would not have done this as rogue renegades. They had to think they had cover. They had to believe somebody had their back, and they had to believe — no, they didn’t. I was gonna say they had to believe they were doing their patriotic duty. They were following orders. Or they were doing this with the implicit knowledge that the president approved, ’cause he did!