RUSH: Now, I was mentioning to you Victor Davis Hanson has a piece that posted just around noon at National Review Online, and I guess you could describe it as an advice piece for Trump and the debate. And when I say it’s an advice piece, don’t think that Victor is being presumptuous. It’s not that at all.

He’s like every one of us. He wants Trump to excel. He wants Trump to smoke Biden. He wants Trump to mop the floor with Biden. He wants this debate to be the end of the campaign. That’s how much we all want this debate to be a win-win for Donald Trump. And I was going through some of the things in Victor’s piece earlier, and I touched on one of them. Let me just read what he wrote rather than paraphrase it myself.

“From his frenetic pace on the campaign trail, Trump has mastered four-five minutes of reviewing his record. And it is one he can run on and win: expanding the economy, stopping most illegal immigration, empowering minorities economically in historic fashion, making superb judicial appointments, recalibrating U.S. foreign policy on Iran and the Middle East, confronting China, restoring the industrial heartland, and ending optional overseas interventions while increasing the military budget. And he can recount all this with ‘we’ rather than ‘I’ as he so often does on the campaign trail.”

Now, let’s go through these, because I love Victor Davis Hanson, and I marvel at his ability to write like he marvels at my ability to speak. This is just excellent. This has everything that Trump needs to say when recounting his record. The point is that Trump could do that off the top of his head because he’s been doing it in the rallies. Four- to five-minute review of his record.

Expanding the economy. There’s nobody else that can say this. Trump has the goods. He’s got the data. He expanded a failing economy that he inherited from Obama. Remember, Obama and his team, including Biden were trying to tell us that there was a new era, that we had to adjust our expectations, and this new era was one of decline, that America simply shouldn’t have these grand expectations that every generation was gonna do better than the previous generation.

No longer. Because Obama said that, in some cases, we don’t even deserve that as a nation. We have stolen many of the natural resources that we have. We have come by others in an ill-gotten way and that America has enough injustice in its past, racial injustice, gender injustice, all this other stuff, that we kind of deserve to take an economic hit. This was the message that Obama had. So we had economic growth of no more than 1% every year.

So Trump comes along and says, “The hell with that.” He brings the industrial Midwest back. He brings manufacturing jobs back, after promising to do it, after pointing out how he could do it. Obama, during the campaign of 2016 is running around making fun of Trump, saying, “How’s he gonna do it? Wave a magic wand?”

So Trump has the record. Trump can remind everybody that he did this. He also stopped most illegal immigration. Now, he can talk about it with the wall or not. But the fact of the matter is most illegal immigration has been brought to a screeching halt. Minorities? African-American unemployment at an all-time record low. You can’t remind people of this enough.

Now you have Fiddy Cent. Fiddy Cent out there saying, I’m voting Trump. I don’t want any part of Joe Biden’s taxes. Do you realize Joe Biden has promised to raise your taxes? Now, a lot of people say, “No, Rush, he’s only gonna raise taxes on the wealthy.” No, he’s not. He’s gonna repeal the Trump tax cuts, folks. That means your taxes go up. Everybody’s taxes are going up. He’s gonna raise taxes, he’s saying, $4 trillion over 10 years. Four trillion.

You can say good-bye to individual prosperity and wealth. You can say good-bye to wealth creation. Good grief. That is horrible. And it’s taxing everybody. When Biden promises to repeal the Trump tax cuts, that includes everybody, ’cause that’s who got tax cuts with Trump, the middle class, the lower middle class, everybody got tax cuts with Trump. And Biden comes along and promises to cancel those, then everybody gets a tax increase. He’s lying through his teeth if he tells you that only the rich are gonna be paying the new taxes.

So he empowered minorities. He has made great judicial appointments. That is a major, major talking point. This business of a peace deal in the Middle East, United Arab Emirates and Israel and perhaps the Saudis coming down the road, without involving the Palestinians. This is something they all said could not be done. Trump has a record, he has a braggadocio record if he wanted to brag about it, he’s got a huge number of achievements here. He is getting us out of wars that he doesn’t believe we should be in. All the while increasing the military budget.

Now, here’s the potential problem area. Biden is gonna accuse Trump of being Typhoid Mary, this according to Mr. Hanson. Biden will try to accuse Trump of murdering tens of thousands because of the worst record on COVID-19 in the world. Kamala Harris tried it with Mike Pence. You know Plugs is gonna literally accuse Trump of murder, or just short of it. He’s gonna accuse Trump, because of his irresponsible policies, of the unnecessary deaths of 200,000 plus Americans.

“Trump needs a concise refutation ready that the U.S. record on the pandemic is comparable with most major European countries and better than some.” Now, this is where I perceive Trump to have a problem. Not a problem. Wrong way to phrase it. Trump sees a lot of things in the sense of a competition. Because that’s been his life. And so when he starts talking about ventilators or masks or any of the other PPE that we had to massively mobilize to manufacture to deal with the first wave of the virus, he loves to talk about how, “Oh, we have more PPE, we had more ventilators than anybody in the world. We ran rings around ’em. They called me from around the world, ‘How did you do it?'”

Because his world is the world of competition, winning. His world is winning competitive actions. And he thinks that’s how people will reward him if he can portray himself as a winner. And he wants to be shown appreciation as a winner.

Now, in this circumstance what Mr. Hanson is saying is forget that aspect of it. He just needs a concise refutation to be able to portray the U.S. record on the pandemic as comparable with most major European countries and maybe even better, that we have nothing to apologize for, we did the best we could and we are right up there with the best in the world.

He could point out, “The U.S. leads the world in finding effective drug protocols and vaccinations that will eventually conquer the virus.” He could certainly say that. It’s true. “No one believes data from China, India or Russia. His argument that seven months of lockdowns now are doing more cumulative damage to the health and lives of Americans than the virus is increasingly undeniable.”

And that’s just the point he has to make, if you ask me. We’ve got seven months of lockdowns in some of these Democrat states. They’re still locked down in Pennsylvania, for crying out loud. Some of this stuff is ridiculous. It’s all being done to hurt him. It’s all being done to undermine the national economy, prevent a national economic recovery so as to prevent Trump benefiting from it.

All he’s got to do is point out who is in charge of the current lockdowns, point out they are Democrat states being led by Democrat governors and that these lockdowns that are still in place are doing more combined damage to the health and lives of Americans than the virus itself is. I think that’d be such a great point to make. Just throw it right back on Biden and his party. They’re trying to get a free pass on this. They’re trying to get a free pass on COVID-19. And they don’t deserve one.

It is their actions that are continuing to cause people to suffer. In New York City Broadway isn’t gonna open until next July. Good grief, folks, there’s no reason for this, other than politics. So if Biden brings up COVID-19 and how Trump is responsible for all of these deaths, Trump has a built-in response, built-in reply if you ask me.