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.
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.
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.
