Rush: The Elites Won't Figure Out the Trump Phenomenon Until They're Honest with Them

The Elites Won't Figure Out the Trump Phenomenon Until They're Honest with Themselves About What They've Done

Rush Limbaugh
March 01, 2016

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I didn't think it was possible, but the GOP establishment is panicked even further. They're now just out of their gourd. And you know what? They're getting a bunch of leftists to join them in their supposed fear of what will happen to the GOP if Donald Trump gets the nomination. We have audio sound bites of this coming up.

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Now, one thing about this I've never understood, but I think now it's coming into focus, I have never understood, like at that now famous dinner that I had with Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham in New York where they tried to pitch me on amnesty, the Gang of Eight bill, and I steadfastly refused. Schumer kept talking to me about the future of the Republican Party was over if they didn't join the momentum for the Gang of Eight, if they didn't try to secure the Hispanic population vote by supporting amnesty and the Gang of Eight bill.

And I remember saying to Senator Schumer, "Do you really care that the Republican Party wins the White House? I mean, that's not what you want. You'd be happy if they never won the White House. So what is this?" And in this whole campaign now we've got people, both parties, but they all -- this is the key -- they all happen to be members of the establishment. They're all professing to be paranoid to one degree or another over what will become of the GOP if Trump gets the nomination.

And the original question still holds. Why are all these liberals in the news media, the Democrat Party, in the pop culture, wherever you find them, why are they so concerned that the GOP might fail to exist? Why are they so concerned that the GOP might be destroyed? And, of course, the answer is, given the current structure, the Democrat Party loves the GOP as it's currently constituted and as it currently operates.

The GOP has practically conceded to being a second-tier party. The GOP is practically the Washington Generals to the Harlem Globetrotters. The Democrat Party is the Harlem Globetrotters. The Globetrotters could not have played if they didn't have a team to beat. They couldn't have played. They wouldn't have had an act if there was no patsy on the other side.

So if the GOP dwindles and fades away, the Democrat Party's got a little bit of a problem. Look, it's not something they'd lose any sleep over, but one of the primary ways they survive is by pitting their opposition as evil and Satanic. They need villains and if the Republican Party fades away to nonexistence, where's the villain? And in this the two parties are almost complicit in this establishment arrangement. They both feed off of each other and as long as the Republican Party knows its place, and that is for the most part, loser.

Now, you might say, "Rush, what do you mean? They won the Senate. They won the House." Yeah, but look how they operate them. They've not done much to stop Obama even after they won control of the House. And they certainly haven't done much to stop Obama since they won the Senate. So it's almost back to the days of Bob Michel when the GOP House was 150 members. But nevertheless the Democrats need them there. They need a foil. They need somebody to be victim. And the Republicans in this circumstance go along with it because they get to maintain their membership in the elite.

Now, one of the things that is really detrimental about this all this, aside from all the obvious things, is that for a republic like the United States -- not a democracy, although I'm not gonna split hairs here. But we are a republic. We're a constitutional republic. And for a republic to exist and for it to be on its continuum -- and this is a fundamental reality, and it goes all the way back to Socrates, Sophocles, Plato, and all those other Greek guys that ran around speaking with pebbles in their mouths so they could improve their articulation, a republic needs respect for the opposition in order for it to survive. And that respect for the opposition is what leads to ongoing competition. And that respect for the opposition is long gone.

The Democrats, the left, bye-bye, there is no respect for the opposition whatsoever. It's not even considered legitimate. We've gotten to a point now where the left and the Democrat Party really, in their dreams, would love to sweep away any serious opposition, not have a level playing field, but have no playing field at all. But now when they're faced with that possibility, when they're faced with the GOP imploding -- this is what they're all afraid of if Trump gets the nomination -- now they're worried, oh, no, they need their opponent, they need their enemy, they need somebody guaranteed and happy to come in second place.

So the audio sound bites today are just incredible as the party leaders, several of them, establishment leaders now plot plans in order to take control. They're now talking about Romney as a safety valve emergency candidate at the convention. They're talking third party. All of this is happening precisely because they have accepted the role of Washington Generals, primarily since the election of Barack Obama. So there is that factor, and it's kind of fun to look at this and track it, which we will do as the program unfolds.

There's also, everybody's wringing their hands today over one of the sacred principles of journalism that may be being violated and just cast aside and thrown away by the New York Times. And you know what it is? The agreement between everybody involved that off the record means off the record. Yes. It's very, very dangerous out there. Very, very bad, folks, because the New York Times may be violating all of its journalistic integrity -- ahem, integrity -- because of this.

Apparently Trump had an editorial board meeting with the New York Times not long ago. It was off the record. It was taped, but it was off the record. And off the record means whatever is said cannot be repeated, cannot be alluded to, cannot be confirmed without the express permission of the interviewee, in this case Trump.

Off-the-record get-togethers are important for a lot of reasons. It's one of the only ways that people suspicious of the media will talk to them. And if it's ever disrespected or violated it causes all kinds of problems, and the New York Times thinks they're sitting on a bombshell.

Apparently... We shouldn't know this, but we do. Apparently Trump gave them the impression in this off-the-record meeting that his claim to deport 11 million illegal immigrants and build a wall is just an opening position in a negotiation. Somebody at the New York Times referenced this interview to BuzzFeed, which is... How would you categorize BuzzFeed? BuzzFeed is like a Teen Girl for the... I don't know. It's a specialty site. Ben Smith's place. Anyway, Smith was the guy that they leaked it to.

And so Smith is out there saying this tape exists, and Gail Collins -- who's on the editorial board of the New York Times that would have been involved in this off-the-record meeting -- wrote a column, and Ben Smith as BuzzFeed referring to the column suggests that the second sentence that she wrote in this piece is actually a great indication of what Trump had said. This happened on Tuesday, January 5th. And Gail Collins refers to the fact... It's an opinion piece. She doesn't refer to the tape. She doesn't refer to the interview with Trump.

She just seems to know that with Trump, whatever he says is really nothing more than an opener in a negotiation. And from that point, negotiation takes place. And then if you read The Art of the Deal, you find out that Trump's openers are sometimes three times more than what he actually will settle for. So they're trying. They're talking about violating the off-the-record sacred cow. They are attempting, at the New York Times, to leak out there that Trump is lying to his support base about the number one issue they support him.

Nobody will confirm. What this has led to now is everybody and their uncle calling on the New York Times to release the tape. They're calling on Trump to demand that the New York Times release the tape. They're calling on the New York Times to release it. "Since we know about it now, since it's out there, it would not be fair -- it would not be right -- to hide the contents." I want to remind you, the LA Times is still sitting on a video of Barack Hussein Obama and some wacko Middle East money man who is a supporter of his and underwrites terrorism.

I'm having a mental block on the name. His last name is Skyhook, but I think it's Rashid Khalidi or something like that, and the LA Times has been sitting on this video. Everybody knows it exists. They've been sitting on this video since the 2008 campaign. They will not release it. They claim it's not relevant. But obviously at the New York Times, somebody there did not want this to be sat on. Well, it turns out that Byron York of the Washington Examiner had an interview with Trump (unbeknownst to anybody) that Trump had spoken to the New York Times.

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When he asks him about his negotiating position on things, he specifically asks him. (summarized exchange) "I read The Art of the Deal," Byron York says. "You say that you have to be bold in negotiation, and you often say that you start out by asking three times what you want in order to get what you want when the negotiation's over. So 'build a wall.' Is that really what you talk about, or is that just your opener?" And Trump answers, hem-haw. He does not... He does not cave and say that he didn't mean it or any of the sort.

But he does acknowledge that he does do strong positions. Sometimes they're negotiating openers; sometimes they're not. The point is, I think the Byron York interview happened very near, very close to the time Trump gave his interview to the New York Times off the record. Again, that was Tuesday, January 5th. I don't think there's probably gonna be any kind of a bombshell in this New York Times interview that Trump did. I think we're gonna get pretty...

If it ever is released, you watch. If it's ever released it's gonna be pretty close to what Trump's already told to Byron York. And he did not admit anything to Byron York. He just acknowledged, "Yeah, I have that negotiating position. Yeah, we started out with strong positions." He's making a joke. "Okay, maybe the wall won't be 10 feet. Maybe it will be eight feet. Maybe it will be 15 feet or 13 feet." He makes jokes about it and so forth, but he does not concede that anything he said isn't true.

But it is clear that anti-Trump forces everywhere are doing their best now to drive a wedge between Trump supporters and Trump, 'cause they can't figure out how else to do it. And here's the thing: They'll never figure it out until they're honest with themselves. I have spent I don't know how many hours -- I'd have to add up the hours, but it's many -- on this program. And what I've said has been transcribed and thus published at RushLimbaugh.com so anybody can go get it, search the website and find it.

Koko can go find all these examples and link to 'em today if he wanted to. Every instance I have explained this divide, what the establishment has done and is doing to create this anger, to create this segment of the population that wants no part of politics-as-usual. I have spent hours explaining it, giving the justifiable reasons why people feel the way they do. It's not hard to figure this out at all, but the people in the establishment still don't get it. They still think of this as a temper tantrum that the children are going through -- and this is not a temper tantrum.

This is not going away.

This is not a phase.

And do you know why?

Because there's an element of this that hasn't been touched on by a lot of people. The anger at the establishment is due to a lot of things. But in addition to that, for the first time it's about class. You take a look at the middle class in this country. You go back to the sixties. There hasn't been any significant improvement in the economic status of the middle class in many, many years. And yet the smart people -- the establishment, the elites, the special people, whatever you want to call them -- look at what they have done. We mentioned this a couple of weeks ago.

Look at what happened to the college education. College education used to be -- and in many places is still thought of as -- what? A step up. A college education is thought of as not just an option. It's a requirement. If you want to better yourself, if you want to be a success (however you define it), you have to go to college. Look at what the people who run universities and look at what the people who run institutions that fund them have turned them into. A college education today is a millstone around people's necks.

A college education is not a step up because you're gonna spend your whole life repaying your loans to go. Look what else they've done to college. Look at the worthless stuff that's being taught. It's useless when applied in the real world. But the degrees are seductive to young people that touchy-feely care about things. So they go get degrees in Insect and Mammoth Studies and come out with literally nowhere to go, after spending six figures or more for the privilege of being there for four years.

So the middle class, which is all...

The class consciousness is important in this because not too long ago, if you were in the upper class, you didn't laud it over people. You didn't try to act like you were in a place they didn't know about; they weren't entitled to. You weren't able to understand it, and you were not persona non grata. Today, all that's different. The upper class wants nothing to do with anybody else. They mock, openly make fun of the people who make this country work. And the people who make this country work are aware of it and know it. This is not a phase; this is not temporary. This is the end of patience, the end of faith. People in the middle class have finally figured out that the so-called betters are screwing everything up.

They're not making anything better for anybody other than themselves.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I'm gonna have a little bit more detail on this as the program unfolds. Charles Murray had a great place in the Wall Street Journal recently. He made the point here that what's happening with the massive support Trump has is class based, is class related, in addition to being economic and religious. And he makes... In addition to the point I made about college -- that's been destroyed, really. It's no longer a way up. It's a millstone around people's neck. But it's not just that.

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He cites the Iraq war, all of these things that have caused people to lose faith in the people telling them they're the only ones qualified to deal with these things. The Iraq war, the response to Hurricane Katrina, the financial crisis that remains. The establishment thinks that's over -- the recession, the financial crisis, the TARP bailout, and then the stimulus, all of that stuff -- and it's gotten worse. It hasn't improved anything, and people know it because they're living it. All this stuff was supposed to stop crises.

It was supposed to stop emergencies, reverse directions. So you have the financial crisis, the stimulus, Obamacare, immigration. Everything is being made a mess of. It isn't improving anything except it's satisfying the desires and the wants of the so-called ruling class. It makes a lot of sense when you think about it in class terms, and then you realize how the establishment/ruling class/whatever you want to call it, they haven't still the foggiest idea why this is going on and what it really represents. Even today they don't.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: No, I don't believe that happened. I don't believe that Obama renounced Reverend Wright. No, no. That's not what happened. In fact, there was pressure on Obama to renounce Reverend Wright 'cause Reverend Wright was all over the place, the G-D America, chickens have come home to roost, we deserve what happened to us on 9/11, all that stuff. I don't want to relive that. But there was pressure on Obama. He went out, he did a so-called great speech on race, but he didn't renounce Reverend Wright.

In fact, I think what he said was he could no more renounce Reverend Wright than he could his white grandmother or some such thing. Or if he did renounce, it wasn't a full-throated disavowal of Reverend Wright. And he certainly wasn't peppered to do it 25 times in two days like is happening to Trump.

So Jeffrey Lord has a piece on that today in the American Spectator about the hypocrisy that exists here with everybody going after Trump because he didn't disavow on one show. He disavows Duke everywhere but one show and they won't let it go and they're trying to make associations with it. And Jeffrey Lord says look at Obama, he wouldn't renounce Reverend Wright and nobody demanded that he renounce Reverend Wright. And it's a good point.

It's just like this New York Times super-secret video that they've got with Trump. The LA Times is sitting on that video. His name is Rashid Khalidi. The tape is from a party in tribute to Khalidi. He's a PLO advisor turned University of Chicago professor who was headed to Columbia University to assume a professorship endowed in honor of Edward Sayyid, who is a notorious terrorist apologist.

Obama attended this soiree and was seated with Khalidi at the table of honor. Bill Ayers attended. The LA Times has video of the whole thing, and they will not release it. They will not allude to what happens on it, totally unlike what is happening with Trump and his New York Times thing.

Here's the BuzzFeed headline: "Donald Trump Secretly Told The New York Times What He Really Thinks About Immigration." So you see here, readers are supposed to believe that Trump admitted to the New York Times on tape that he's been lying to his supporters all along, that he's just stringing them along. That's what they want you to believe.

Now, does anybody believe that Trump is that stupid? Is he that stupid that he would actually tell the New York Times that what he's saying about deporting 11 million illegal immigrants, building a wall, is just bunch of BS? He's not gonna go tell the New York Times that. They're demanding this thing be released, and I bet you that it wouldn't be substantively different from what Trump told Byron York who interviewed Trump about this very concept one week after Trump did the New York Times interview back in early January.

Of course back then nobody knew Trump had done it. Nobody knew about this 'til yesterday when somehow the New York Times forgot about journalistic integrity and somebody there called up Ben Smith or somebody at BuzzFeed and said, "You know, you see Gail Collins' column?"

"Yeah, what about it?"

"Well, I want to point out a sentence. You know, Trump was here at an off-the-record meeting with the editorial board. I think Gail's alluded to it here, Ben, you might want to..." And bammo, we're off to the races. And it's just the latest in flailing efforts made by people scared to death of Trump, to try to separate him from his supporters. And this is another thing that these people don't get. The New York Times cannot cause Trump supporters to abandon him. Paul Ryan can't make it happen; Marco Rubio can't make it happen; Ted Cruz can't make it happen.

There's two reasons why. The first is that only Trump can damage himself. It's the old philosophy. None of these people made Trump. The New York Times didn't make Trump. All these other establishment types. Trump's not where he is because he's been heralded and promoted and had a lot of buzz. Trump built this relationship with his supporters himself. He's the only one that can tear it asunder.

But there's a second more important reason. Trump's supporters are not gonna abandon him. They're not gonna let go of him because of what he represents. In one sense, he's a vessel. He is the only, after repeated efforts, he's the only possibility of wresting control of the country back from the upper class that has seized it and at the same time has stopped working for all Americans. That's what Trump represents here. And a lot of people who think this is a personality cult also misunderstand what's going on here.

And at the root of this misunderstanding -- and do not doubt me on this -- is the arrogant condescension that the ruling class for average, ordinary Americans. That's the root of this misunderstanding. Not hard to understand when it's explained to you. You know, we hear terms like "flyover country" thrown around. But, you know, after a while the people that live in flyover country, they begin to understand what it really means. That's a put-down. It's not just a joke. It's an actual put-down. It's the part of the country you don't want to live. It's the part of the country you don't want to be in except unless it's an accident.

I read a story yesterday by Clive Cook. And I think he's a Brit. He tells the story of a friend of his from the UK who has lived in Washington for a while. He grew up in London in Cambridge or Oxford in the seventies and said there was all kinds of class distinctions in the UK then, but the upper classes didn't sneer, and they weren't exclusionary, and they didn't laud their exalted status over everybody else. They got along, the class lines were drawn and everybody knew it, but there was no sneering from top down. There wasn't any arrogant condescension.

So this guy announces to his friends in Washington that he's gonna buy a house in West Virginia, and they immediately think he's lost his mind. "You mean you're gonna go live next to people that strum a banjo on the front porch, don't have any teeth? You're gonna hang around with a bunch of people that pull shotgun triggers all day long while yelling about pro-life?" He said he had never seen anything like it. These are good people, friends of his in Washington who had this instinctive insulting sneering attitude about people they don't know who live in West Virginia. And the attitudes they had about them were based only on the fact that they did not live in Washington; they live in West Virginia.

So the guy goes, builds his house, buys his house, whatever, meets his friends in West Virginia, and they're wonderful people, they're fine and dandy people, and they're of course nothing like what his Washington buddies described. And his point is that this sneering condescension is something that people in the middle class, both lower, middle, and upper middle class, are fully aware of. They're fully aware of this condescension toward them.

And these special people in the elite ruling class who've been in charge of everything, who think they're the smart ones, they're the best and brightest, they've got the ideas, the best ideas to do the best things for the country, and all they're doing is making a mess of things. Like screwing up a college education, screwing up the American financial system, bailouts, stimulus that don't work, that don't help anybody except the people that made the mess in the first place. They're fundamentally fully aware of all this.

Then you add to that the cultural rot. People of certain religions are being mocked and laughed at and made fun of and are openly being told they are the problem. Things are happening in neighborhoods and businesses that ten years ago were unthinkable. They think they voted for people sympathetic, trying to stop it. Nothing stops it; it only gets worse. So these people are fundamentally devoted to an overthrow and an upheaval. I hesitate to use the word "revolution," but my point here is that this is not just about Trump.

And, by the way, for you Trumpists, this is not a Trump put-down, please. You can check your sensitivity at the door here when you turn on the program. Your devotion to Trump is fine and dandy. I'm just saying that your issues, the things that have you animated, you cannot be separated from Trump because the issues are even bigger than Trump is. Trump's the best opportunity that you've had, that these people have had to fix what they think needs to be fixed that other people have broken.

And they're sick and tired of being told that people better than them, higher on the class structure ladder, they're the ones that should be in charge. No, they're the ones that have made the biggest messes. They're the ones that screwed everything up, and, in the process, they've taken care of themselves. They're not facing any of these other dire consequences that everybody else in the country is. This is real. It's not a tantrum. It's not a phase. And all of these efforts to separate Trump supporters from Trump isn't gonna happen. The only guy that can do that is Trump. And he'd have to work pretty hard at it, if he even wanted to. I don't think that's even a possibility.

But this is so much bigger than just... It's not a personality cult. "We gotta have Trump! We gotta have Trump!" because they're devoted to Trump in a hero-worship sense. It's what Trump represents. It's the opportunity... It's the voice that they haven't had. It's the voice that hasn't been listened to. It's the voice that they've been shouting but nobody's been doing anything but making fun of them for speaking. It's perfectly understandable.

But if you're in the ruling class (the establishment, part of the elites or whatever) and you can't get past your arrogant condescension of the people supporting Trump or any other candidate that's not your chosen -- if you can't get past why they exist and who they are -- you're never gonna understand this, and you're never gonna be able to do anything about it. And I have as evidence, Tom Brokaw. Now, here's Brokaw. Brokaw wrote a book called The Greatest Generation, and to this day I think he got the idea for it on this program, but I don't want to go any further.

It was a great book with a great premise about the World War II generation. But Brokaw was on the Today show today at NBC, and he was talking to Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie, and they were all wringing their hands about "angry" America and what's to blame for it. "Who's responsible for it? What is all this anger? Why are all these people angry? What does it mean, Tom?" You know what Tom said? "Intractable GOP opposition" to Obama is to blame for angry America. Now, folks, you couldn't be more wrong about that if you set out to try.

But Tom Brokaw exemplifies the thinking here in the so-called establishment. The "intractable Republican opposition" is to blame for anger. So, according to Brokaw, the anger out there is that people ticked off that the Republicans, I guess, are not working with Obama. And the people want Washington to "work," and they want people to cooperate, and they want there to be compromise, and they want Washington to get along.

He doesn't even know who's mad! If he doesn't even know who's mad at what...? This is so cliched to think the anger is people ticked off the Republicans are causing gridlock. There isn't any gridlock! The Republicans have been getting along just fine with the Democrats. The Republicans have been making it a point not to stop Obama, not to oppose Obama. "We can't get anywhere near a government shutdown!" Whatever Obama wants in the budget, he gets that and more.

There isn't any lack of working together. There's too much. But this illustrates how clueless these people who live in their cocoons really are about the attitudes of the American voter. Look at... Did you see the story out of Massachusetts? The Democrats there woke up one day and found 20,000 Democrats have registered Republican. A modified Operation Chaos. Why did they do this? In Massachusetts, 20,000 Democrats reregistered as Republicans. They want to vote Republican. They're not try to sabotage the Republican side. They want to vote in the Republican primary, and the Democrats in Massachusetts are worried stiff over this.

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