RUSH: Grab audio sound bite number one. You know, big kerfuffle, big kerfuffle yesterday over Trump and his comments about George W. Bush. (imitating Trump) “Hey,” Trump said, “he was in office when 9/11 happened. I mean, we weren’t safe, we weren’t safe, 9/11 happened.” Trump says, “Jeb’s out there saying he kept us safe. Maybe afterward, but we weren’t safe before it because it happened.” And Trump’s saying, “I’m not blaming anybody. I’m not blaming George Bush. I’m just telling you what happened.” Well, it turns out Trump has written about this in a book that he wrote. He was very prescient about it early on.

I took the position yesterday because of a finite thing. After Trump made his comments about George W. Bush, I knew what was gonna happen. The media was gonna jump on those comments and saying, “Well, well, well, well, then we shouldn’t be blaming Hillary.” If the reaction to Trump was, wait a minute, somewhere, I mean, it was not universal. Some people agreed with Trump. But some of the reaction to Trump was wait a minute, you can’t blame Bush for that. He wasn’t in office all that long. He still didn’t have his cabinet in place, the Florida aftermath and all that. But then, what I knew was gonna happen, people glommed on to it, the defenders of Bush. “Wait a minute, you can’t blame Bush.” They then came, “You can’t blame Hillary for Benghazi,” which was the thing that concerned me most, is that this is gonna end up or was gonna end up being an exoneration of Hillary Clinton based on a comment that Trump made about W.

And let’s be clear what Trump was doing. And he pulled it off. He succeeded. He’s got the Republican establishment, they don’t know which way is up anymore. They don’t know what’s up. They don’t know what’s down. They don’t know what’s sideways. They are just totally bamboozled and confused. What Trump was trying to do, what he succeeded in doing was tie Jeb to his brother, Bush to Bush, not in an incompetence way — maybe Trump meant that; I don’t know — but what he was trying to do politically was to further the thought in people’s minds that we don’t need another Bush, for crying out loud. We got a Clinton over here, another Bush, we just had a Bush, we don’t need another Bush, and he was trying to tie Jeb to Bush, to W in a way that was not positive, and Jeb took the bait.

He took the bait like my cat goes after little lizards. Well, I tell you, I’m the biggest defender of lizard life in all of south Florida. I went to bed last night at my usual time, it was two a.m. Now, normally what happens, we go to bed and the cat jumps on me and wants to be petted for about 25 or 30 seconds and then leaves. That didn’t happen last night. So 10, 20 minutes after I think I fell asleep, there is this commotion on the bed. The cat is going crazy, jumping and doing all kinds of things, just woke me up. And I said, “What in the world is going on?” I thought nothing of it, and I kept kicking my legs to force the cat off the bed.

Well, when I woke up this morning I saw a dead lizard on the floor. The lizard had obviously been in the bed, or else the cat got it and brought it with her to the bed, and it got loose and she was just playing with it. So you could say the cat spared me or saved me from a runaway lizard attack last night.

But I love those little lizards. They’re anoles, actually. I love ’em. They’re our buddies. They eat insects and all that, and whenever I see Allie with one I dart in there and I grab the little thing and I take it outside. The cat gets mad at me, but I’m sorry, that’s the way it is. I still run the house.

So, anyway, the point is that Jeb just fell for Trump’s, whatever you want to call it, trick and immediately began to defend his brother in those words and just started reminding everybody about that era, which, whether you like it or not, people do not have fond memories of. So from a political standpoint, it was a very successful venture and effort that Trump had made. Jake Tapper talked about that yesterday afternoon. He was on CNN’s Newsroom, and it’s his show, The Lead. He was talking — let’s see, who’s he talking with here. It looks like Brooke Baldwin. He’s talking to somebody in this bite. Anyway, here’s how it went.

TAPPER: What Jeb Bush is doing right now, while it might be bringing some support to him, at least rhetorical support from the likes of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative media figures, it still is doing something that I think Trump wanted to achieve, which is it is tying Jeb Bush to the past, to his brother’s administration, to the establishment. And elections are about the future and they’re about outsiders, especially this election. So even if Jeb Bush ends up winning this debate on its merits — and I don’t know that he will — he will have been tied even further to yesterday and not tomorrow.

RUSH: Well, and the key there is being tied to the establishment and tied to what everybody — well, not everybody. A lot of people have unpleasant memories, obviously from 9/11, but the media succeeded in tarnishing the Bush administration. There was nothing anybody could do to stop it because the Bush administration was not gonna defend itself, did not defend itself and there were just lies and smears going on, particularly for the second term the last four years. So Trump succeeds in luring Jeb into this little trap.

My concern yesterday, just to be clear about this, my concern was that all of this was gonna end up being used by the Democrats and the left to exonerate Hillary, because the minute people came out and started to defend W from the correlation that Trump was making, the next step was then, “Well, I mean, if you’re gonna exonerate Bush, how can you blame Hillary?” And that’s why yesterday I went into a step by step comparison of the way Bush handled 9/11, the way Hillary has not handled Benghazi. Because to me the point yesterday, whatever Trump was doing, remember, we’ve got these big fireworks hearings coming up on Thursday, which I told you yesterday are not gonna amount to anything.

But they’re setting it up as though it could be make-or-break for Hillary. Because once it’s over and she survives it, then they can write the story, “She has overcome! She has taken the best they had to offer, and they had nothing. There was nothing there. Benghazi: Zip, zero, nada,” and it’s forever erased. That’s what the attempt is with these hearings from the leftist standpoint on Thursday. So I was trying to make sure that at least people within my orb didn’t fall for this idea that W equals Hillary. And Bush’s handling of 9/11 does not equal Hillary’s handling or lack of handling of Benghazi. So I appreciate the opportunity here to clarify both of those things.

Now, back to Trump. It is becoming apparent that Donald Trump, for those of you who still — and there’s still a lot of people — think that we’re waiting for a Trump peak and then after that he’s in, he’s not gonna stay in. There’s still a sizable number of people, particularly in the Republican establishment, who I think now are reduced to hope. But it’s only recently they’ve been reduced to hope.

For the longest time, they think this was not serious, that Trump wasn’t, and there was something else going on here besides a presidential candidacy to satisfy, that he had some other objective and therefore at some point he was gonna get out. What is becoming apparent to them, which you and I — well, I’m gonna include most of you in this audience — have known and recognized for the longest time, is that Trump is serious, and he’s far more serious than anybody in the establishment has ever acknowledged.

And he is far more adept at modern-day politics than anybody in either party realizes. What he’s doing is bordering on political brilliance. In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are, and they are insiders. He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the advisor class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.

Here, grab sound bite 21. He’s continuing now this hit on W. But people are missing the point about this. He wrote a book… Let me find this story here. Trump had a book out. Here it is.

“In 2000, 19 months before Sept. 11, 2001, Donald Trump wrote extensively of the terrorism threat the United States was facing. Trump, who at the time was considering a presidential bid on the Reform Party ticket…” Do you remember the Reform Party? What was the Reform Party, Snerdley? A little pop quiz here. (interruption) Who was the Reform Party? (interruption)

Well, it was Perot, but Perot wasn’t around. But you could call it Tea Party; you could call it… It was a group of, obviously, outsiders. Anyway, Trump “was considering a presidential bid on the Reform Party ticket,” in the year 2000. He “went so far…” I mean, it wasn’t the Tea Party then, but it was made up of the same kind of people, the same group of people fed up with inside Washington. Trump “went so far as to say that an attack on a major US city was not just a probability, but an inevitability.

“‘I really am convinced weÂ’re in danger of the sort of terrorist attacks that will make the bombing of the Trade Center [1993] look like kids playing with firecrackers,’ wrote Trump in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve. ‘No sensible analyst rejects this possibility, and plenty of them, like me, are not wondering if but when it will happen.'” So Trump is on the record 19 months before 9/11 saying, in the book foreword (summarized), “I knew it was coming. To me it was inevitable. Had I been in the White House, it might not have happened.”

That’s his whole point today, and he’s got the book that he wrote 19 months beforehand to give himself the credibility and credence on this. He’s not just blabber-mouthing. He’s not just doing his, “I’m the greatest. We’ll be the greatest! I got the smartest; I’ll get the smartest. It’s gonna be fine.” He’s getting specific and reminding people what he said and what he felt, what he intuited 19 months before 9/11.

And he can say that while all these other people who were in office or running for office can say they were thinking about it, nobody was nearly as up to speed on it in advance as I was. In this book that came out 19 months before 9/11, “Trump even mentions Osama bin Laden by name, in a criticism of an American foreign policy that too quickly jumps from one crisis to the next. ‘One day weÂ’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and US jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan,’ [Mr. Trump] wrote.

“‘He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.'” Where have you heard that before? You heard it right here on this program. Crisis, crisis. One day, every day, a new crisis to keep everybody off balance. Now, in the year 2000 Bill Clinton was still the president, and that’s what the latest Trump sound bite is about.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So I checked the e-mail. There are some people saying, “You know, Trump blaming Bush is crazy. It’s like blaming FDR for World War II.” Be very careful, folks, because people did, people blame FDR for Pearl Harbor. Go back. I mean, even today people say there’s still a debate over whether FDR knew and allowed it to happen as an excuse to get in. The point is, it’s not unprecedented to blame a sitting president for things that happened and go wrong.

I’ll tell you what’s unprecedented is a sitting president for seven years, like Obama, gets to do great damage to the US economy, and nobody ties him to it. The Millennials don’t tie him to it. It’s unreal! Sitting presidents get blamed for everything that happens on their watch except this guy. And we all know why. Yes, yes, we do. Anyway, here’s Trump. Now, Trump…

You know, people on the Republican side get very, very sensitive when you start dumping on George W. Bush because everybody thinks he did a great job post-9/11. Keeping the country safe, marshaling forces, unifying the country. So there’s been some backlash to Trump so he’s on the Fox Business Network today with Stuart Varney. He says, “Does former President Clinton have some responsibility, Mr. Trump? I mean, he was president for eight years before Bush when all this 9/11 stuff was being planned.”

TRUMP: I think he does, but I think they both do. Was Clinton possibly also guilty? Yeah, yeah, sure. He should have, you know, maybe been more vigilant, and he actually said he knew about Osama Bin Laden. I knew about Osama Bin Laden ’cause I wrote about him in my book, I think 19 months before the World Trade Center came down. If you read my book, I did have the best vision of anybody, ’cause I said Osama Bin Laden should be attacked essentially about three years before the event took place, and I talk all about Osama Bin Laden. He was a very well-known terrorist at the time.

RUSH: He was. He had gone on ABC News to say that he thought we were paper tiger because of the way we cut-and-ran out of Somalia. The Black Hawk Down incident.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: In Trump’s book, The America We Deserve, published in 2000, and again, 19 months before the attacks on the World Trade Center, in this book Trump predicted a major attack on an American city that would involve weapons of mass destruction. He wrote, “Yet itÂ’s time to get down to the hard business of preparing for what I believe is the real possibility that somewhere, sometime, a weapon of mass destruction will be carried into a major American city and detonated.”

Now, it’s not unusual. He was not the only one. I don’t want anybody to misunderstand. Let’s not forget. Heck, it’s not let’s not forget; let’s remember. People forget so much about the Clinton administration, particularly during the Lewinsky period. Clinton was doing anything he could to distract from the Lewinsky situation, such as bombing an aspirin factory in Africa and sending bombs into Baghdad on a Saturday night, killed a janitor at an office building.

But if you go back, which we did, and we have the sound bites, I mean, don’t have ’em today, don’t want ’em today. I don’t want to get bogged down in this, but you go back and you listen to Bill Clinton make the case against Saddam and weapons of mass destruction in 1998-1999, you know what you’ll find? You’ll find every Democrat who voted for it along with George Bush saying the same thing Bill Clinton was saying: Saddam Hussein, worst guy on earth. Saddam Hussein, gotta go. Saddam Hussein, working on weapons of mass destruction. Saddam Hussein not letting the inspectors in. Clinton led the pack.

So when Bush came along, George W. Bush, after 9/11, started ramping up his effort for Iraq, it was uncanny, because the intel was the same. Clinton had the same intel that Bush got. People conveniently forget that Clinton even talked about it. Well, my point is that Trump was listening, like everybody else, and bin Laden had already become well known. Remember, I think it was Sudan that even offered Bill Clinton Osama Bin Laden. This was dating back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other evidence that we had of bin Laden’s involvement in terror actions against US institutions and people all over the world.

At that point, Clinton was fighting the War on Terror legally in court, indictments and so forth, the wall was up, Jamie Gorelick, CIA, could not share intel with the FBI and vice-versa. So Clinton rejected Sudan’s offer of bin Laden because he said we didn’t have a legal mechanism for accepting him. Had we been dealing with bin Laden as an enemy combatant, it would not have been a problem to accept him. But Clinton didn’t want to go there because Clinton was trying to portray that he was keeping the country safe and that there really wasn’t a danger of terrorism ’cause he had it all handled in the legal system.

It was crass irresponsibility on Clinton’s part. This Lewinsky business, you know, everybody said, “Well, it didn’t involve sex. It didn’t hamper his doing his job.” It did most certainly. It impaired Clinton doing his job in a major way in this specific area and regard. But the point that Trump is making here — and he’s prescient. He’s not just being bellicose and bombastic. He’s actually on the record as having warned about it. So his point is that they might not have gotten away with it on 9/11 if Trump had been president because he was more prepared and attuned to the possibility than anybody else was. He can make the statement. He’s got the backup. I mean, it’s something nobody could ever prove or disprove, obviously.

But remember what Trump’s doing, folks. He is running against the establishment, no matter who they are, Republican or Democrat. And his point is the establishment has just botched everything, and the American people are fully aware of it now. And nobody in the establishment is safe. There are no protected classes or people there, as far as Trump is concerned. He knows where his strength comes from. He knows how he’s built it. He knows how he’s going to continue to build it and grow it. And the people in the establishment are just playing right along with it, not knowing. All these highly paid, highly touted professionals in this business are having rings run around them.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Todd, San Diego. You’re next. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: I’ll give you my son’s comment. Epic dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: That’s what he says when I read something on one of the Rush Revere books that he thinks is really cool. He says, “That’s epic, Dad.” If Trump is gonna be start with Bush number two being the — being the part of the culprit, and when I read his language, when I read his words — we all know words mean things — he’s partially putting blame on Bush 43 for the terrorist attacks.

RUSH: Yeah, he is. And he’s —

CALLER: Well, okay, but why stop there? Let’s go all the way back to Carter and Reagan. Because it was Ollie North that warned us in 1976 who the problem was. So it’s not Bush 43 — and I agree with you yesterday and I’ve been posting it online a lot. Bush came in, he had hanging chads for eight months. He had lawsuit for eight months. He didn’t change out his cabinet, which is definitely his fault. But you know how this works. They inherit —

RUSH: Yeah, but, see, that’s not what Trump’s… Trump doesn’t care about that. That’s not Trump’s objective. Trump is not trying to make case that Bush is responsible. He’s trying to make the case that we weren’t safe, whatever anybody thinks. Jeb’s saying we were safe; we weren’t safe. We were attacked when Bush was in office, and we might not have been if I’d been there. He’s touting himself, but what he’s doing is political.

He’s trying to draw Jeb in to defending his brother, getting Jeb focused and locked into the past and illustrating that Jeb is the establishment guy, when Trump is succeeding by being the exact opposite. So he lured Jeb in with this trap to defend his brother, admitting he’s an establishment guy. That’s the first thing that matters. It is Trump simply exposing the vulnerabilities of his opponent. It’s really, really not about taking George W. Bush to task.

CALLER: Well, I’m holding a double-edged sword ’cause I don’t totally trust Trump. I don’t agree with this tack for politics. I think it’s, you know, more Trump kind of shooting off the hip again. I don’t agree with it, because there’s no purpose in rehashing old business, especially when it’s completely not in proper context. I don’t think Trump put this in proper context by going after Bush. He should have… Why didn’t he go after Clinton? Our target is the left. If our target is the left —

RUSH: Well, he did. He just went after Clinton this morning. He just… Because he’s getting hit, I’m sure, from people who have the same reaction that you’ve had. So he’s making my point. He’s not trying to go after and destroy George W. Bush here. He’s trying to beat Jeb by luring Jeb into a behavior mode that doesn’t help Jeb. It was purely political what he did, but he’s got the book that he wrote making himself look to be prescient on this long before it happened.