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RUSH:  I’m serious here, folks.  Why is Hillary doing this debate?  I just saw a still shot of Hillary getting off the airplane when she arrived in Las Vegas yesterday.  She was on the steps.  You know, her airplane’s a Boeing 737.  They have to roll the stairs up to it.  She’s getting off it, I’m just telling you, she doesn’t look like she’s gonna look tonight. 

There’s nothing to gain by doing this tonight, right?  I mean, it seems to me if you make a calculation, she’s got everything in the world to lose here, and how much to really gain?  I don’t know, maybe they think they are just gonna finally hammer that last nail in this coffin and be done with it forever, not just this election.  

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RUSH:  It’s a big debate; it’s the last debate of the season; and no matter where you look, folks, everybody in the Drive-By Media is saying this is over, it’s all over, but the actual voting.  It’s all over, but the shouting. 

I mean, even these websites that you can bet on the outcome, even some of those websites in the U.K. are already starting to pay off before the votes have even been taken, they’re starting to pay off on people who invested or made the bet that Hillary was going to win. 

But it isn’t over. 

I’m sitting here thinking of the contrast.  Now, I’m gonna ask you some questions to which there are obvious answers.  But if you go back to just the Republican primary period during the calendar and you look at that campaign and Trump in it, Trump was just dominating and dwarfing everything and everybody.  Nobody even had a chance. Nobody was even ever really close to Trump in the Republican primary. 

Now, the media treatment of Trump then was obviously different.  There weren’t any Democrats involved so the Drive-Bys weren’t actually defending anything and they were helping to build Trump up. They were helping to establish the Trump myth.  But the point is that during that period of time during the Republican primary, massive amounts of American people loved Donald Trump, did they not? 

I mean, it was something like nobody had ever seen in politics anymore, at least in their lifetimes.  You couldn’t find seats, empty seats at a Trump rally.  It just captivated everything. 

Now you fast forward to today, did all of those people who just couldn’t get enough Trump — now, admittedly we’re talking Republican primaries, but don’t forget there were a lot of Democrat crossover votes in certain open state primaries.  Did a lot of or many of those people who just totally loved Trump and were totally invested in his campaign, have they gone away now?  Have they vanished?  Have they been humiliated and embarrassed?  Has the media finally convinced them that Trump’s the bad guy that they’ve been telling them he is and they finally admit it now? 

All the things that they knew about Trump back during the Republican primary are things people know today.  There really isn’t anything new in terms of the perception of Donald Trump other than instances of people having come forward or tapes of Trump from 10 or 11 years ago, but none of it portrays a Trump that nobody thought didn’t exist.  Sorry for the double negative. 

In other words, there aren’t any real surprises that have occurred about Trump.  The opinions that people had of him back during the Republican primaries are pretty much the same.  But yet we are being led to believe that Trump’s support doesn’t exist anymore, and Trump’s support is walking away and abandoning him at a record clip. 

And why is this happening?  Well, this is happening because the media, while they ignored Trump during the primaries is now all of a sudden starting to focus on him and telling everybody what a reprobate bad guy he is. And now the people in this country who ignored all of that about Trump during the primaries, now they’re paying attention to it, and they’re saying, “Oh, wow.  This guy really is a bad guy.  I think I made a mistake liking this guy back during the primaries.  I think I’m gonna abandon Trump.” 

Is that what’s happening here?  That’s what they want you to believe.  They want you to believe that they are actually persuading ardent Trump supporters to abandon him in droves here.  Now, don’t misunderstand.  I know that this is a different campaign than the primaries.  The opposition now is Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party, of course, the establishment.  The opposition is the media, where that wasn’t so much the case during the Republican primaries. 

During the Republican primaries the media hated everybody.  So they sided with Trump for the entertainment value, got their ratings up and so forth, televised everything Trump did.  But there were stories about Trump and this and that.  What we’ve learned about Trump in the last two months was not anything anybody didn’t know or suspect, other than supposed eyewitness testimony having come forward. 

But what would make people back in the Republican primary days, let’s say from last August until March or April or maybe even May, people that love Trump, couldn’t get enough Trump and were gonna support Trump no matter what from last August to May, all of a sudden starting in June and July, some of those people began to abandon Trump and now they’re supposedly abandoning Trump in droves.  And they’re finally realizing, the media wants us to believe, finally realizing that Hillary Clinton is the only sensible choice here.  Something about that equation doesn’t register properly with me.  But that’s the narrative.  That is the story. 

And, again, what is that?  That is a narrative, a story, a tale, if you will, that is exactly the way the establishment portrays presidential politics every four years.  I maintain you cannot apply the standard conventional wisdom or political playbook of a presidential campaign to a guy like Trump because he’s not in it. He’s not in the business. He doesn’t have any history in the business, doesn’t have any fingerprints on policy, doesn’t have a record.  So the only thing that they had to go after Trump on is personal things, character things. Not policy related things. 

Hillary Clinton ought to be sitting there at 55 or 60% if the story they’re telling is true, but she’s not.  Now, she is ahead by 11 points in one poll, 12 points by another, seven points over here.  The LA Times poll that’s had Trump up is tied, Rasmussen is tied.  But I’m trying to envision how many people who were totally into Trump during the primaries who are now abandoning him and for Hillary Clinton.  I’m having a tough time understanding how that happens. 

I would never abandon whoever the Republican nominee was.  I would never abandon whoever it was for Hillary Clinton.  But apparently that’s beginning to happen and has been happening for the past, oh, what, two weeks, three weeks, month, everybody’s bought into this narrative, everybody’s bought into this meme.  And it’s led by polling.  It’s defined by polling.  Something about it is just, I don’t know, strange.  It’s all confusing out there.  Because a lot of things that we’re told are happening, to me, are at odds with human nature. 

Let me ask it a different way.  I could be dead wrong about this, too.  Going back to the primaries, say from August until March or April, how much of the support for Trump was soft?  How much of it was people strictly voting party line:  There’s an R next to his name, so that’s the guy I’m supporting?  How much of Trump’s support was elastic and loose?  They want us to believe that a tape from 2005 and a couple other things released can cause massive numbers of people to abandon Trump. 

But why were they with him in the first place, then?  If this is all it takes, and in the history of campaigns, this is all it’s taken.  This is exactly how they defeated Mitt Romney.  It’s exactly how they defeated McCain.  It’s exactly how they tried to defeat George W. Bush.  Every campaign features the Republican nominee being treated as a pariah, the Republican nominee demonized.  Every campaign.  Doesn’t matter who the Republicans nominate, same thing, and every campaign, same thing seems to happen. 

People that originally liked the Republican nominee all of a sudden seem to end up being convinced by the Democrat Party and the media that the guy they originally supported is indeed a villain and a reprobate and not worth their support, and thus they abandon.  Same pattern.  Every four years, every presidential election in my lifetime this has been the pattern.  And it’s being repeated now.  Something about it still doesn’t jibe. 

Folks, I have no inside knowledge of anything.  I don’t know what’s gonna happen.  I’m just sharing with you the way I react to all of this.  And knowing what I know, it’s really hard, it is really hard to trust things that come from the Drive-By Media anymore.  It’s really hard.  But yet the stuff is seductive because that’s all there is, essentially.  It’s the creation of a narrative that depicts human behavior in ways I don’t understand. 

I know there are undecideds out there.  I don’t know how many there really are.  But the way people change their minds, make up their minds about who to support, I mean, if you’re supporting Trump from the get-go, what are you supporting?  You are totally opposed to status quo.  If you’re supporting Trump, a political novice who has no experience whatsoever and who has entered the race with specific objectives, how in the world could you be talked out of that and persuaded to vote for the exact opposite of why you supported Trump in the first place? 

This is what they want us to believe is happening in mass numbers.  I can understand it two or three people here, a hundred people there, I don’t know.  But these massive shifts in people supporting?  Maybe it’s true.  Maybe people are less committed than we think there are.  I just think that if you signed up for Trump from the get-go, there are specific reasons that haven’t changed.  The establishment’s still the establishment, and they are worse than ever, and it’s more obvious that the game is rigged than ever. 

Why in the world would you abandon it, your opposition to it?  Why would you give up at the moment of truth? If you really feel like something needs to be changed, why would you abandon the effort to change at the last minute?  But that’s they want us to believe is happening.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: It’s Bruce in Lima, Ohio.  Great to have you here, sir.  Hi.

CALLER:  Rush, man, I can’t believe I’m talking to you.

RUSH:  Well, here you are, sir.

CALLER:  Wow!  I’ve been following you since 1988.

RUSH:  Well, that makes you a lifer.  Thank you very much.

CALLER:  Yes.  Well, as far as your analysis of what the perception is like, people are leaving Trump in droves, I don’t think that’s the case at all.  I don’t think he’s really had that much of support as people think.  I think, you know, he had just that bare 40% of the Republican Party from the beginning during the primaries, and I don’t think he’s done a very good job of building a coalition and getting the rest of the party behind him.  I think he’s been too divisive.  I myself was a big Cruz supporter, and I was very, very reluctant to side with Trump until I started really paying attention more to Hillary and how corrupt she is.  I think there’s no way Hillary should be anywhere close to the White House.  And I reluctantly am gonna have to vote for Trump.

RUSH:  Okay, here’s the thing.  Here’s the thing.  That’s exactly right.  And I don’t know a single Republican who doesn’t say that — well, wait.  That’s not exactly true.  There are some Republicans in the media who don’t say that.  But that’s my point.  Look, I understand what you’re saying, that Trump never really had massive Republican support.  The reason he won this thing is because there were 15 other Republicans vying, and that vote was divided and cut up in all kinds of ways, and it didn’t take much for Trump to win. 

So at the end of the day, while Trump is the Republican nominee, he didn’t have even majority support of the Republican Party.  And now you’re saying he’s failed to put that coalition together.  He doesn’t even have the full Republican Party behind him; much less is he peeling off any Democrats and others.  So that’s what you’re saying, but yet you say Hillary Clinton has no business being in the White House.  I don’t know any Republican who thinks that, either, other than some in the media. 

Look, I don’t want to name any names.  You know who they are, magazine writers and website people, but outside of people that live in Washington, I don’t know a single Republican that wants to vote for Hillary, so why are they?

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RUSH:  Okay.  Here’s how it works.  The conventional wisdom in the Drive-By Media says that Trump is hemorrhaging support for whatever reasons and he’s got one chance left, this debate tonight, Trump’s got to turn it around tonight.  Is support for Trump that fickle?  Really?  Okay, if that’s the case, what do you think Trump has to do tonight to go back and find the people who loved him in December and in January who apparently have abandoned him now, what does he have to do to get ’em back? And what else does he have to do to turn it around?

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