RUSH: There’s so much going on in the Democrat Party. I’m gonna tell you what. Debbie Dingell was on CNN earlier today. She’s a Democrat, Michigan. She says she hasn’t made up her mind on impeachment yet. And you know why? ‘Cause she’s not crazy that the president would be acquitted in the Senate.

And you know who else came out and said that? Delaware Senator Chris Coons. And you know how they both said it? The Republicans are a bunch of creeps. Exactly what I told you, the Democrat philosophy on getting rid of impeachment yesterday. We discussed it exactly what I told you it’d be. Well, I gave Pelosi the road map for doing it.

Chris Coons was on, I guess he was on CNN. I saw the video blurb on Fox, they replayed it. And he was sitting there talking about (paraphrasing), “Well, if they bring the trial to the Senate here, there’s no way the Republicans are gonna vote to convict him. It’s gonna be an exercise in futility.” And then he started just ramming the Republicans. Just ripping ’em. Accusing them of having guilt complexes the rest of their lives over this vote.

But they’re setting it up. With more and more Democrats coming out now shouting that there’s no way Trump gets convicted in the Senate, I’m telling you, they’re setting it up here for Pelosi to change course. And then on the other hand, they’re presenting another picture. Nadler runs the Judiciary Committee, and he’s raring to go. On Monday next week we get back and he’s gonna let Trump even send up a lawyer if he wants to.

So on one hand they are presenting a picture full speed ahead. And then, on the other hand, if you know how to look at it, they’re applying the brakes.

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RUSH: I want to go back. I meant to say one thing about impeachment in the Senate. Oh, and Brenda Lawrence has kind of flipped again. She came out over the weekend in a podcast opposed to impeachment, then they took her to the woodshed, came out for impeachment yesterday, but now she also, in further statements about this, has made reference to the fact that Trump’s gonna be acquitted in the Senate. You got her, you got Debbie Dingell and Chris Coons, Democrat senator from Delaware all just pummeling the Republicans because Trump will be acquitted, and what good is that gonna do us? Rotten, rascally Republicans and so forth.

So the road is in the process of being paved here for Pelosi to get on an off ramp. And Schiff looks competent compared to Nadler. By the time Nadler gets done, Nadler is the guy that shepherded Bob Mueller through his disastrous appearance. Now Nadler’s ratcheting up to get his own impeachment time here. That’s gonna be blown sky-high.

Nothing’s changed in terms of the radical Democrats in the House. They want this, they want the black mark of impeachment, they want it on Trump, they’re gonna do everything they can to make it happen, and they’re in a hurry. One thing I wanted to say about the Senate. I actually believe that if this ever does go a trial, you know what’s gonna happen? I think more Democrat senators would vote to acquit Trump than Republican senators would vote to convict him. They have to run for reaction, too, and there isn’t gonna be any substantive evidence at all presented if there is a trial.

Everything that’s happened up to now has been so one-sided, nobody has heard the Trump side of things, Trump lawyers, Trump witnesses, excellent lawyer cross-examination of Obama and Schiff witnesses, Democrat witnesses. And yeah, I meant to say Obama because I think he’s thick as thieves in all this.

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RUSH: Here’s Chris Coons. We actually have the sound bite. He’s a Democrat in the Senate. And I think this is part of maybe a test-market. It may be trial balloons here to see how this plays. But he was on CNN last night with some fill-in host who said, “Why do you think 50% of the American people think the president should be impeached and removed but the number hasn’t moved? In the CNN poll, 50%, even throughout the hearings it didn’t move. Why do you think it hasn’t moved?”

COONS: I think the challenge now over this Thanksgiving break is for Republican House members and senators to reflect on what role they want to play in this. Whether they want to simply follow the polls and think about what’s perhaps in their best interests at the next election or think about history. It is disheartening to see that the number of folks who oppose his removal hasn’t increased after that compelling testimony. But I do think those of us in Congress have to be looking at the long term, at history, and at what sort of a precedent we’re setting for the guardrails on presidential misconduct in office.

RUSH: Well, there’s a better bite than this. He went on to talk about how the Republicans are not gonna vote to convict, and that’s gonna be their problem. But he’s now the third prominent Democrat to mention this as the likely end point of any official impeachment action in the House. It’s important because at the end of the day, why do this if the president’s gonna be slapped not guilty, acquitted, in an election year. So we’ll see. I think my theory here that Pelosi’s looking for an off ramp is at least getting a trial balloon.

One more thing related to this. Politico has a story. “Democrats See One Last Chance to Boost Public Support for Impeachment.” Here’s Chris Coons. Isn’t this fascinating, “After the compelling testimony,” he can’t believe, he can’t believe public opinion on impeaching or removing Trump hasn’t moved. There wasn’t any compelling testimony! It was a bunch of people who never met Trump who were repeating secondhand and thirdhand information.

And their biggest complaint was that Trump went outside the channels, the normal channels of the interagency group in implementing his foreign policy in Ukraine. Translation: He ignored us. He didn’t use us. He didn’t take advantage of our brilliance and our experience. Screw him. Their feelings were hurt. Their noses were out of joint. These are the elites of the elites. These are the people who think they make and run American foreign policy.

This upstart outsider comes in and basically says (raspberry) you. There wasn’t any compelling testimony. That is the point. Compelling testimony would have had some evidence of an actual crime, of actual bribery, actual extortion. The only thing that happened during these hearings is that more and more people continued to hear about Plugs and his son Hunter.

You know, in a way you gotta feel — the New York Post has a story today that Hunter Biden was in a jiggle joint in D.C. Do you know what that is, Dawn? Strip club. Well, you never know. I mean, people clean and pure as the wind-driven snow might not know the term jiggle joint. It’s a strip club. He was in there and apparently he was smoking crack because he set a Styrofoam cup on fire in there and people could smell it.

And so they went to the proprietor, the manager, the guy running the joint, “Yeah, yeah, we don’t allow anything illegal to go on here in our jiggle joint.” It was unfortunate. So the news, all the people that never knew a word about — oh. Oh. And Hunter Biden was spending money like crazy, buying that jiggle and that jiggle, and he was using credit cards with other people’s names on them. That’s in the New York Post story.

So the evidence that these hearings have ended up producing is more oriented toward Hunter Biden having a job he has no qualifications for, being overcompensated to the max, only because his dad was vice president. That is evidence that has been produced. Now, Schiff tried to cover it over and mask it and prevent it from being discussed, but they couldn’t very well when Trump was ordering an investigation or asking for an investigation of this very guy. There wasn’t any compelling testimony.

Anyway, Politico: “Democrats See One Last Chance to Boost Public Support for Impeachment.” And here’s the pull quote. “Just weeks from a likely impeachment vote, some Democrats acknowledge they may never convert the core group of supporters who have weathered crisis after crisis by Trump’s side. ‘We’d all love to see it change, however we don’t expect it to,’ Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) said Tuesday. And it’s unclear what impact — if any — the Judiciary hearings,” run by the porcine Jerry Nadler, “will have in shaping public opinion.”

Well, if Nadler’s hearings on this run the same course that his hearings with Bob Mueller, hee-hee-hee. It’s gonna be a gigantic flameout preceded by a bomb. “The first hearing on Dec. 4, announced Tuesday, will feature a slate –” Oh! This is key. The first hearing “will feature a slate of constitutional experts explaining what constitutes high crimes and misdemeanors.”

Folks, if you have to do that after all this time, if Nadler’s first witnesses are a bunch of geeks, a bunch of think tank nerds in the same vein as those civil servants that testified for Schiff, if they’’re coming in and giving scholarly definitions of high crimes and misdemeanors, then it must mean that there haven’t been any yet. You know, impeachment is such a thing it doesn’t happen until it is obvious. But the Democrats are using impeachment as just another arm of political opposition research.

They’re not gonna lead off with compelling witnesses that are gonna cause people to be glued to their TV sets as evidence after evidence after evidence is presented. No. They’re gonna bring in a bunch of think tank scholars to give the liberal left-wing version of high crimes and misdemeanors. What that actually means is the Democrats think you are so dumb, so stupid that you have to have explained to you what a high crime and misdemeanor is before they can present any evidence of such things. It just means they haven’t moved the ball an inch in all of this.

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RUSH: Jay in Algonac, Michigan. Great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: How are you, Rush? Right to the point here. I’m gonna go out on a limb. I want to know your opinion on something. So I know that Washington, D.C., is a vacuum. And I believe that the Democrats believe that when they went into the impeachment inquiry, that it could only be a win-win for them. I believe that they said maybe something good will happen and maybe we can make this happen and maybe we can throw Trump out of office. But if we see that we can’t do that, we’re gonna provide an avenue that’s gonna allow House members that are Democrats to insulate themselves, and we will be able to retain the House because I believe they know the presidency is done next year. I believe they know the Senate is done next year. Their only retention of power is the House. And if they insulate their members in the hard districts, the swing districts to be able to say, “No, I can’t vote for impeachment,” they’ve softened the wrath of Trump on the campaign trail. What do you think of that?

RUSH: Well, the reason I took your call first — we got a full board up there, I could have chosen anybody. The reason I took your call first is because your point provides a transition for me to explain how this whole effort has bombed. Maybe they were trying to insulate Democrats who won in 2018, the midterms, in Trump districts. But the only way they could do that is by letting those people vote “no” on impeachment. And they’re not letting them do that.

Pelosi’s making these people commit suicide. There’s no other way to describe this. You’ve got some Democrats that would love to do what Brenda Lawrence did, and say, “I think censure, not impeachment.” And she will not let them. She is demanding unity. She’s forcing unity.

I want to share with you some headlines from today and pay attention to this first one. It’s the New York Times. “They Voted Democratic. Now They Support Trump.” You know what this story’s about? The New York Times went in to many of these districts that Trump won in 2016 and yet the Democrats won in 2018. And they went and talked to voters in those districts, and they asked them, “Okay. You voted Trump 2016. You voted Democrat midterms. What are you gonna do in 2020?”

Over 65% said they’re voting for Trump again. They voted Democrat. Now they support Trump. In other words, the people in these districts that voted Trump in 2016 and then voted Democrat for Congress in 2018 are going back to Trump in 2020. It’s a New York Times/Siena College poll. Two-thirds, 66% of voters in battleground states who voted for Trump in 2016 but voted for a Democrat in the midterms are going to vote for Trump again.

In other words, this constitutes a gigantic bomb. It means that the Democrats winning those districts in 2018 did not mean that people were voting against Trump. Because they clearly say they’re gonna vote for him again. There’s also a very big lesson here for Republicans in this polling data.

If the effort here is to provide these people with some kind of insurance, it has bombed out. Now, we don’t know, this poll does not say, will these people who voted Democrat in 2018, will they vote to reelect those Democrats in 2020 as they vote for Trump at the same time? That’s gotta scare the Democrats. If they’re gonna vote for Trump, they’re probably not gonna vote Democrat again in a presidential turn. It’s a very different model.

But here’s some other headlines. “Impeachment Fight Leaves Voters Cold in Contested Wisconsin,” AP. “The Unexciting Reality of Impeachment: Very Few Minds Have Been Changed,” Washington Post. And then that New York Times headline: “They Voted Democratic. Now They Support Trump.” Can you say they bombed? Can you say that Schiff and company blew it? Well, these headlines sure as hell say you can.

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RUSH: It turns out that Ronna McDaniel of the RNC, the chairwoman, has actually tweeted out these headlines, Drive-By headlines the last 24 hours, “They voted Democratic. Now They –” it’s Democrat. They voted Democrat. “Now They Support Trump.” That’s the New York Times story we just talked about. People voted Trump in 2016, voted Democrats in the midterms.

Now, by the way, why would you do that? I mean, if you really want to get into the weeds, why would people — you elect Donald Trump in 2016, then you elect people that are gonna try to stop him in 2018? And then these same people say they’re gonna go back and they’re gonna vote for Trump again in 2020. So the Democrats — believe me — one of their primary objectives has been to drive a wedge between all Trump supporters and Trump, or as many as possible, and they haven’t been able to. Trump’s got a 90% approval rating in Republican Party. They have failed abysmally in that effort.

The AP headline: “Impeachment Fight Leaves Voters Cold in Contested Wisconsin.” A state that Trump won, shockingly, and the impeachment fight is not turning anybody against Trump there. That’s a big bomb. And in the Washington Post, “The Unexciting Reality of Impeachment: Very Few Minds Have Been Changed.” That’s the Washington Post. CNN’s poll basically says the same thing.

The Democrats, it’s come back to bite ’em, exactly as it was forecast to do. You could even say that it may have backfired. Now more and more Democrats are talking about, “Hey, wait a minute. If this actually goes to the Senate, the Republicans are not gonna vote to kick him out of office. He’s gonna be acquitted.” Meanwhile, it’s full speed ahead with Jerry Nadler and his hearings starting on the 4th of December. So there is a race. Tthe Democrats are in a race to get this done. They want to get it done as quickly as possible.

Now, Byron York has a piece out today that says the reason the Democrats are in such a hurry is they want to get this done and out of the way before the Hawkeye Cauci. That’s when the primary process traditionally begins. You have the Iowa caucuses and then the New the Hampshire primary, and the Democrats want to have this all out of the way by then. They can dream, but if there is a trial it’s not gonna be over by the Hawkeye Cauci. The Turtle will see to that.

I can guaran-damn-tee you without even talking to the Turtle that there’s no way this trial is gonna be over. He wants Democrat Senate candidates for president to not be able to campaign. Keep ’em there. They’ve gotta stay there during a trial. I think there’s another reason for the speed of this. Actually, a host of reasons. One of the reasons for the speed is that they know it’s not working. And they’re in the process of losing the public’s attention over this.

There was a moment before Schiff’s hearings began where they had the public’s attention. ‘Cause impeachment’s a big deal. In many people’s lives it never happened before. Last time 1998, ’99, whatever the Clinton impeachment was. Prior to that it was Nixon, but it never got very far because Nixon resigned. So most people have never — Clinton Senate impeachment trial is the only one. And then the Schiff hearings began, and as a TV show they were dull and boring, and there was no compelling testimony.

So it didn’t work, and minds aren’t being changed. We had a caller yesterday who I think nailed this. This is, in large part, about the black mark on Trump, impeachment, just to be able to say, “The impeached President Donald Trump. The impeached President Donald Trump said. Donald Trump, impeached in 2019, said,” blah, blah, blah.

I think there’s another thing at work here. Let’s be honest. The health of certain Supreme Court justices is not good. Let’s say there becomes a Supreme Court vacancy next year. Do you think the Turtle’s gonna say, “Sorry. We can’t nominate and confirm any Supreme Court nominees during an election year,” like he did in 2016? Hee-hee. No. It will be full speed ahead to nominate yet another Trump justice. And that is gonna cause a meltdown like we may not have seen despite everything they’ve tried with Kavanaugh.

But I think they want the black mark to be able to impugn any Trump Supreme Court nominee. There’s a number of things working as to why they’re trying to speed this up. But at the top of the list is that it is failing right now. So speeding it up contains any number of contexts such as speeding it up and getting it over with as little damage to the Democrats as possible.

Speeding it up and getting that black mark on Trump as soon as we can for the campaign. Speeding it up and getting that black mark on Trump so that we can discolor any Supreme Court nomination that he might make. And speeding it up so that we can get it out of the way by the time our primary contests actually begin. But it’s that very objective of speeding it up that is gonna put all kinds of land mines in front of them. And they’re gonna step on a bunch of them. Mark my words.

Because, my friends, the truth of all of this is, you go back to election night 2016, every Democrat effort to achieve their objective of overturning the election results of 2016 has failed and failed spectacularly. They have not moved the needle at all among voters in this country that they made a mistake and that Trump needs to be removed from office. They haven’t gained an inch.

I don’t care what impression you get watching the Drive-By Media, they haven’t gained an inch in that objective. And in the process, they have looked petty and small. They have allowed and let the media to totally compromise whatever remaining integrity it had left, which wasn’t much.

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RUSH: Here’s Don in Naperville, Illinois. Great to have you, sir. How are you?

CALLER: Hi, Rush. Happy Thanksgiving from the Western suburbs of Chicago.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Earlier in the show you mentioned that the Democrats have all kinds of reasons for wanting the impeachment thing to just go away, speed it up, speed it up, speed it up. But you are fine in calling Mitch McConnell the Turtle and I really hope that this is one of these times when he is in fact a turtle. I think there’s a golden opportunity here to show the difference between what Adam Schiff does and what the U.S. Senate does. Have a real trial. Call real witnesses. Get somebody who represents the other side —

RUSH: Oh, he’ll do all that.

CALLER: (unintelligible speaker phone)

RUSH: He’ll do all that, that’s mandated. All of that will happen. And I’m convinced that he’s gonna take his time with it. ‘Cause a trial is where the Democrats are gonna get blown out of the water. And it’s gonna be followed by an acquittal.

CALLER: Absolutely. I just don’t want the Republicans to hand the Democrats a sound bite, you know, hey, we did all this nice and slow and then the Senate blew it off. I hope that’s not the case.

RUSH: Yeah, I understand you’re afraid that the Turtle might take this and try to get it done inside of a week just to get rid of it and blow it off because there’s nothing — well, here’s the thing. In truth, because of the nature of the evidence here, Don, a trial may not take more than a week. Depending on how many hours a day they devote to it because they don’t have anything. All they’ve got is a bunch of people that have never met Trump with second and thirdhand versions of what Trump supposedly did.

They don’t have any evidence of breaking the law. There’s nothing. It wouldn’t take that long. But the Turtle could use a trial, as you’re suggesting as an opportunity for Republicans to put a lot of stuff on the record about this. There’s something that tells me, though, that it isn’t going to get to a trial. I can’t offer anything firm. It’s just one of my gut reactions right now.