RUSH: There is a column today by Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online, and the headline title… I don’t know that he wrote the headline. I’m just giving you the identifier here. “Never NeverTrump.”
This is the definitive piece criticizing the Never Trumpers for their decision to oppose Trump at all costs, even if it means the election of Hillary Clinton. And when I say it is the one, it’s the definitive. It’s the piece that everybody who is really bothered by the Never Trumpers and can’t understand why in the world they would do anything that would facilitate the election of Hillary Clinton — although we do know why.
You get in trouble mentioning why because it offends them. But, I mean, they’re… I don’t know. There are a couple dozen reasons, but three or four primary reasons why the Never Trumpers are Never Trumpers. But Victor Davis Hanson slices and dices it. It prints to 10 pages, so I can’t read the whole thing. It’s well worth your reading. So I’m sure by now Koko is gonna link to it, and I will highlight certain aspects of it as the program unfolds before your very eyes and ears today.
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RUSH: Here Jim in San Antonio. I want to grab a phone call as I always try to do in the first hour. Jim in San Antonio, I’m glad you called, sir. It’s great to have you with us. What’s up?
CALLER: Rush, it’s a pleasure to speak to you, first off.
RUSH: Thank you.
RUSH: You know, Trump —
CALLER: Sorry?
RUSH: Trump is saying that this may be the last election the Republican Party can win.
CALLER: I think this is —
RUSH: I know what he means by that. Who are these people that are saying we got four years? “Eh, if we lose we got four years to put it all back together.” Give me the name. Can you tell me the type of people saying that?
CALLER: Well, I mean, I listen to you, I listen to Beck, I listen to Hannity, but, I mean, some of the No Trumpers right now, some of our leaders in the GOP party and all that, you know, your McCains, all those people and everything.
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: But, you know, I think this will spill over even to some of the statewide elections. You know, midterm elections we’re gonna have a chance. I just do not think we’re gonna have a chance with the electoral vote situation and everything. I think it looks pretty bleak.
RUSH: Oh, I think you’re right. I don’t… There is no… The people that are saying, “Hey, you know, if we lose, we’re gonna really be setting ourselves up for a massive win in four years ’cause after four more years of this, it’s gonna be so bad…” They’re missing the boat entirely. This is it, in a lot of way. Not that there’s not gonna be an America. There’s always gonna be an America.
It’s just what kind of America it’s gonna be and who is going to be leading it and what kind of character and morality and value system is going to be dominant, and that’s what’s at stake. And some of the Never Trumpers don’t think there’s any such crisis at all like that. This is a good transition for me to lead the next hour with excerpts from Victor Davis Hanson’s piece that I talked about earlier at National Review. It’ll dovetail exactly with what you’re talking about.
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RUSH: All right, stick with me, folks. This is really tough to excerpt. I tell you upfront because it deserves to be read in its entirety, and I simply don’t have to the time or the ability to do it. It’s tough, interpretative reading of others’ words. There’s probably nobody better at it than me. I could probably command your attention if I wanted to read the whole thing, but that would not be the best way to approach this. Excerpts and you following it yourself is.
“Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red.” Have you ever seen that map, red and blue counties? (scoffs) We dwarf ’em. We don’t dwarf ’em in the population centers but, I mean, 98% of this country geographically is Republican. You go to the coastal areas and some state capitals like Chicago and other big cities, and it’s all union Democrat. California, for example.
“Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views.” That’s exactly right. Ministry of Truth. State-Controlled Media. News isn’t news anymore. News is what they do in order to move you to arrive to agree with the “correct” opinion of things. Story after story, person after person.
“In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney … were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie,” such as It’s a Wonderful Life. “When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri�hie Ri�h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car.
“If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney … chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.” What this means is that these mild-mannered, moderate/centrist Republicans, when they were being systemically cut up and destroyed right there in front of their faces, sit there and let it happen because it’s the polite and establishment way to do it. You simply do not fight back. You simply do not!
Candy Crowley asserts herself in that debate and saves and rescues Obama on the whole subject of Benghazi and foreign policy, and Romney sits there and lets it happen. Mr. Hanson here is saying: These are the people we think can beat these people? These are the people we think we’d rather have than Donald Trump? These are the people we think are gonna fight back against what’s wrong? We already know Romney didn’t fight back! We already know McCain didn’t fight back, and even if they had chosen to they were destroyed before they would have started.
This is part of a slow buildup to his belief that Trump is the last hope that we have of stopping the path that we are on, that Victor Davis Hanson concludes is national suicide. And along the way he excoriate these Never Trumpers for their focus on the preservation of this movement or that movement or delaying the inevitable for four more years. “Maybe we can get it back in four years, but we can’t ever do anything, if this guy becomes president.
It’s the final two-thirds of his piece where he really, really lays into what is going on. Here’s a section called: “Never in My Name? The only missing tessera in Trump’s mosaic is the Republican establishment, or rather the 10% or so of them whose opposition might resonate enough to cost Trump 1-2% in one or two key states and spell his defeat. Some Never Trump critics would prefer a Trump electoral disaster that still could redeem their warnings that he would destroy the Republican party; barring that, increasingly many would at least settle to be disliked, but controversial, spoilers in a 1-2% loss to Hillary rather than irrelevant in a Trump win.”
Let me translate this, not take this out of context. He’s really contrasting these people. He’s saying these are the guys — the Never Trumpers — that long ago forecast Trump couldn’t win diddly-squat and predicted Trump wouldn’t win the primary and if he did win the primary, couldn’t beat Hillary. He’d get shellacked by 70-30%, 40%. It was gonna be just a disaster. And Mr. Hanson is saying now that they’re really concern is not being shown to be wrong.
For the sake of their reputations, they want the Trump to lose big so that they can say they were right, and a Trump landslide defeat is exactly what they want in that case. But what happens if Trump loses by just a point or two? Well, that’s okay, as well. They would settle for being disliked, ’cause if he loses by a point or two, it could be said that it’s their fault, the Never Trumpers. But Victor Davis Hanson concludes that they would still rather Trump lose than have Trump win and themselves become irrelevant.
“To be fair, Never Trump’s logic is that Trump’s past indiscretions and lack of ethics, his present opportunistic populist rather than conservative message, and the Sarah Palin nature of some of his supporters (whom I think Hillary clumsily referenced as the ‘deplorables’ and whom Colin Powell huffed off as ‘poor white folks’) make him either too reckless to be commander-in-chief or too liberal to be endorsed by conservatives — or too gauche to admit supporting in reasoned circles.”
So again I will explain this. He’s acknowledging that the Never Trumpers have a logic and the logic is that Trump’s past — his bombast, his indiscretions, his apparent lack of ethics, his populism… Not conservatism. He’s not a conservative. His populism and the Deliverance characteristics of his supporters. Mr. Hanson’s saying it’s not just Democrats that think Trump’s supporters a bunch of hayseed hillbillies. It’s the same Republicans who didn’t like Sarah Palin. It’s the same like Colin Powell calls “poor white folks.”
And because Trump has “those kinds of people” supporting him, he just can’t be trusted. He’d be too reckless to be commander-in-chief. This is so bad! These kinds of people supporting Trump, we can’t join them. That’s what he’s saying here. The Never Trumpers are looking at people at the Trump rallies and people that support Trump and they see a bunch of Deliverance hayseeds and they’re compared. They can’t acknowledge being for Trump and being in the same group with that crowd!
You know what? There’s an analogy. The establishment pro-choice Republican who hate the Christian right — always have — are embarrassed to be at the Republican convention with ’em. They always have. You know, here comes Falwell’s Moral Majority and these other family rights groups, and the Republican establishment, the moderate Republicans always say, “Ew, ew! I just wish they weren’t in my party.” Mr. Hanson’s saying there is a strain of that among today’s Never Trumpers.
They just can’t imagine being in the same group of people that they see at a Trump rally. And then he says, “Perhaps. But the proper question is a reductionist ‘compared to what?’ Never Trumpers assume that the latest insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court appointments.” Mr. Hanson says, “That is simply not a sustainable proposition.”
You cannot say that Trump is less conservative than Hillary, and he is aghast that there are Never Trumpers on the right who are trying to claim Trump’s disqualified ’cause he’s not conservative enough, when compared to Hillary Clinton, he is. Which is a point I tried to make last week and apparently got savaged for it. Conservatism isn’t, as we know it, on the ballot this time. So what do we do? Well, we have to start making comparisons.
And we know that Hillary isn’t, and we know that Trump is much closer to it than Hillary will ever be because she will never be it. And Trump, when it comes to his policy statements on border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, Supreme Court? Compared to Hillary, there isn’t any comparison. So why are the Never Trumpers still insisting that Trump’s not conservative enough for ’em when the question is: “Compared to what?” Yeah, maybe Trump versus Cruz, yeah. Trump’s not. Maybe Trump versus Rubio. Trump versus — I don’t know — Huckabee. Pick a name out of the group that lost in the primary. But Trump versus Hillary? What are we talking about here?
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RUSH: There’s another very, very interesting paragraph. Now, remember, the Never Trumpers, they can’t stomach Trump because he’s so odious, he’s so uncouth, he’s so unsophisticated, he’s so intemperate, he’s so ill tempered, he’s so rude. He just speaks like an uneducated dimwit. So Mr. Hanson writes, “Is Trump … all that much more odious than the … present incumbent,” Barack Obama, “who has variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials”?
Barack Obama who has “serially lied about Obamacare and Benghazi,” Barack Obama who “ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school,” Barack Obama who “oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA,” Barack Obama who “has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned? Yeah, “Trump on occasion did not recognize the ‘nuclear triad,’ but then he probably does not say ‘corpse men’ either or believe we added 57 states.”
How in the world, the question is, can you Never Trumpers look at Trump and see this big blob of unsophistication and boorishness and look at Obama and not be similarly appalled? And that is the question, folks. You know, in all of us, the acceptance of all of these negatives and problems of Barack Obama because he’s “one of us,” he’s an establishment guy. He’s got his Ivy League pedigree. He went to Harvard. He represents himself well when he speaks. He sounds intelligent. But look at what he’s done!
Does that not matter?
So Mr. Hanson is wondering how in the world can a guy like Obama, who has really demonstrated that he knows how to destroy things and divide people and split this nation wide open and promote the division and promote the hatred — how does a guy like Obama — get a pass and Donald Trump is held up to some standard that nobody could meet? He has his answers to his questions. If you’ll read the whole piece, you’ll found out why he thinks the Never Trumpers are doing this. It’s essentially self-preservation and fundraising and a number of other things. But in the process he says if this goes on — if there’s four more years of this with Hillary and everything that she’s gonna bring along with it — we are committing national suicide.
We are killing that America that was founded and that we have all grown up expecting to exist in perpetuity.
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RUSH: Just one more thing from the Victor Davis Hanson piece and I’m gonna leave the rest of it up to you to find and read on your own. Again, it is yet another piece, maybe the one, the definitive piece aimed at Never Trumpers asking them, “Do you really know what you’re doing here?”
This segment of the piece is entitled “An Overdue Reckoning” and it deals with the people who are out there on the Never Trump side criticizing Trump because he’s not conservative, not conservative enough, not a real conservative. He’s gonna destroy the conservative movement. If we vote for this guy, if we support this guy, we’re throwing the conservative movement overboard. If we support Trump we’re essentially saying that everything we believed in for the last 30, 50 years has meant nothing if we’re willing to invest in this guy.
But Mr. Hanson’s argument here is that it’s not the most important thing going on at the moment, conservatism, conservative movement. But more than that the very people out there — that’s what this next segment’s about. The very people in the Never Trump crowd who are calling Trump out for not being conservative, he-he-he, may not be all that conservative themselves.
“The old Wall Street Journal adherence to open borders was not so conservative — at least not for those on the front lines of illegal immigration and without the means to navigate around the concrete ramifications of the open-borders ideologies of apartheid elites.”
Mr. Hanson is saying, Really? I mean, these guys are not conservative about their immigration position. They’re for open borders. And that’s not conservative for all of those people who are not in the elites, who are not in the establishment, those people are out there on the front lines of illegal immigration and do not have the means or the resources, the money to navigate around the very real ramifications of what open borders means to communities. Hey, the Wall Street Journal can afford to throw their conservatism on this aside because they’re not gonna live with the results of open borders.
“How conservative was a definition of free trade that energized European Union subsidies on agriculture, tariffs on American imports into Japan, Chinese cheating or peddling toxic products, or general dumping into the United States? For two decades, farmers and small businesses have been wiped out in rural America; that destruction may have been ‘creative,’ but it certainly was not because the farmers and business owners were stupid, lazy, or uncompetitive. By this late date, for millions, wild and often unpredictable populist venting became preferable to being sent to the library to be enlightened by Adam Smith or Edmund Burke.”
Meaning real events in real people’s lives brought about by so-called conservatives who believed in free trade and open borders is decimating the communities where these people live. There isn’t anything conservative about it, and there isn’t anything positive about it from their standpoint. And they’re told that supporting Trump, who wants to try to protect them, who claims that he is going to stop all of these things ruining their lives, for the Never Trumpers to come around and say, “He’s destroying conservatism,” they better realize it’s gone beyond conservatism now. It’s not a debate over who’s conservative and who isn’t and who, thus, deserves to receive a vote and who doesn’t.
“Outsourcing and offshoring did not make the U.S. more competitive, at least for most Americans outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley.” This is a great line coming up here. “Boutique corporate multiculturalism was always driven by profits while undermining the rare American idea of e pluribus unum assimilation — as the canny multimillionaires like Colin Kaepernick and Beyonc� grasped.”
But these businesses get away with throwing out their conservatism, they get away with abandoning their conservatism, and they’re not called out on it. They’re called good citizens. They’re called interested in social justice and all that. His point is who are all these conservatives claiming Trump isn’t one? Are they really?
“Long ago, an Ivy League brand ceased being synonymous with erudition or ethics — as Bill, Hillary, and Barack Obama showed. Defeated or retired ‘conservative’ Republican grandees were just as likely as their liberal counterparts to profit from their government service in Washington to rake in lobbyist cash. So hoi polloi were about ready for anything — or rather everything.”
So you got all these people shouting out that they’re conservatives, and we’d rather have this erudite Ivy Leaguers who make us proud because they don’t sound like cowboys or hayseed hicks, but you’re trying to tell me that Bill Clinton is erudite, that Hillary Clinton is sophisticated and erudite and Obama? And in all these people, Republican or Democrat, are scoring big personal paydays off of their government service. And they’re excoriating Trump for being insincere, disingenuous, and not conservative.
“In sum,” writes Mr. Hanson, “if Trump’s D-11 bulldozer blade did not exist, it would have to be invented. He is Obama’s nemesis, Hillary’s worst nightmare, and a vampire’s mirror of the Republican establishment. Before November’s election, his next outburst or reinvention will once again sorely embarrass his supporters, but perhaps not to the degree that Clinton’s erudite callousness should repel her own. … It may be discomforting for some conservatives to vote for the Republican party’s duly nominated candidate, but as this Manichean two-person race ends, it is now becoming suicidal not to.” And that’s how it concludes. I didn’t read the whole thing, but it’s Victor Davis Hanson at National Review Online just to give you a flavor.
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RUSH: St. George, Utah. This is Kelly. Great to have you. I’m glad you waited. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. The amount of time that conservatives spend complaining about the media bias is such a waste of time. We need to accept it. We need to get in it and change it like you have done. Fox News, the blogosphere, we need to become part of the media machine. You know, conservatives by design are polite. We don’t want to offend. So we need to be vocal. We need to speak up with humor like you and like Greg Gutfeld. Your thoughts?
RUSH: My thought…? Well, I’m just a little confused, ’cause you say we need to get to be part of the media like I do like Fox News. Who isn’t doing that? Who are the people you’re talking about that haven’t done it and need to?
RUSH: Okay. I know what you mean. You’ve got a two-prong bit of analysis going here. On one hand you’re saying all of this cataloging and commenting on media bias, we’re way past that. Everybody knows that. Conservatives have been doing that and basically all that accomplishes is us whining about how unfair thing. Instead of doing that, we just need to forget what they’re saying about us and just go be who we are everywhere, right?
CALLER: Absolutely. And, Rush, you can never retire. What will we do? I understand, you know, your effort. You’ve gotta turn it over to somebody funny — Mark Steyn, somebody like me. You’ve got to —
RUSH: (chuckling)
CALLER: You’ve got to take care of us after you’re gone. You can’t just leave us high and dry. You’re too big a part of what’s happening. You’ve gotta supersede the media. The politicians have got to supersede the media. You’ve gotta speak to the people and override them because they’re a negative, horrible force in our country.
RUSH: Yeah, you know, it becomes increasingly — and, by the way, thank you. I think you overblow it there a little bit, but I appreciate your thoughts very much. The whole concept of media, it’s just an adversary. The media is another adversarial force. I’ve regaled people with these stories I don’t know how many times over the years, but we still have way too many people that are totally — even though they think they’re not, totally — dependent on what the media says before they’ll form an opinion of their own.
People on our side. It’s frustrating in one sense, understandable in another. I think the big disconnect is we call them “the media,” and it’s funny to me now to read. The media is written about by other members of the media, as not a news gathering operation or business, but rather as an opposition force to Republicans and conservatism, and as a support group for Democrats and liberals. They’re openly written about this way! The media is written about as a built-in obstacle.
The media is written about as a political entity, not as a bunch of people in the business of gathering information and reporting it to people that didn’t know it, which is, you know, the Journalism 101 textbook definition. Well, that’s long out the door. That hasn’t been in practice in I don’t know how long. But yet I think we still have a lot of people who treat the media as a giant blob that can be shaped and molded to befriend us or to reflect our point of view, if we massage them, if we hang out with them, if we feed them, if we give them leaks and so forth.
I think there are a lot of people on our side who think they’re part of it, only in the conservative branch or the conservative wing of the media, because all of media that you’re talking about fits right in with the ruling class establishment. They are every bit the members of the establishment that the elected officials and the CEOs and all the other cronyists are. And yet they are looked at — erroneously, mistakenly — by some people as not being that. So the approach to them…
I think they’re just not seen the proper way now by enough people on our side. It’s not about news gathering. It’s not about information gathering. It’s not about reporting anything. It is, as Mr. Hanson said in his piece right here, “The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems to be defined now as that information necessary for people to arrive at correct views or opinions.” So, you take an issue like ISIS. The media is Ministry of Truth. That means they are state-controlled. They work with Democrat governments, Democrat administrations.
And their purpose is to pass on information in such a way that everybody who hears it will agree with the administration view of ISIS. And if you don’t, you are a “reactionary,” or some other name. You are unstable. You’re an extremist. If you reject the accepted definition, explanation of anything — a campaign, a candidate, a military unit, an enemy, another religion. If you accept the approved definitions and therefore subscribe to the correct view and opinion of it, you’re cool. You’re fine.
If you don’t, then the name-calling starts; you’re reactionary, you’re extremist, you’re racist, you’re sexist, you’re a bigot, what have you. And there’s too many on our side who still seem convinced that they can make the media respect them, that they can cause the media to like them, that they can — if they work it right — make the media treat them fairly and properly and so forth. Thereby admitting that they fail to see what the media’s existence really is, at least for us.
It’s just another obstacle. The media is part of the Democrat Party. The media is part of any Democrat administration, and the idea that it can be changed, the idea that they can be persuaded to abandon the administration and be critical of them, is fallacious. It can’t happen, and it won’t happen. They have to be defeated just like you would defeat Hillary. You’re running against Hillary and the media.