×

Rush Limbaugh

For a better experience,
download and use our app!

The Rush Limbaugh Show Main Menu




RUSH:  Let’s now head to the Donald Trump Air Force One tweet. As with most everything that you see in the Drive-By Media, there’s much, much more to this than meets the eye.  There’s much, much more to this than it might appear.  

Let’s start with the Trumpster himself in New York City in the lobby of Trump Tower.  He came out of the elevator and sought out the media for this.  He was not being peppered with questions.  He came out of there — I watched it — he came out of that elevator and walked up to where the bank of cameras or microphones or maybe some journalist was there, he walked up and purposely made the point here that the Air Force One replacement order is just out of control and we need to cancel it. 

TRUMP:  The plane is totally out of control.  It’s gonna be over $4 billion, it’s for Air Force One program.  And I think it’s ridiculous.  I think Boeing is doing a little bit of a number.  We want Boeing to make a lot of money, but not that much money. 

RUSH:  All right.  Now, I was reading my tech blogs on this today. (laughing) I just love this because they’re typical young whippersnappers.  They think they know everything and that Trump is this raging idiot.  And so they recruit all the stats of what a Boeing 747 costs without factoring in the modifications necessary to make it an Air Force One.  They don’t know that there are two of them that are being bought.  I mean, it’s just funny.  

So here’s the deal as it’s currently understood.  We’re talking about the Boeing 747-8.  That is the largest version of the Boeing 747.  They are not selling well.  Boeing has had to reduce production because orders for this plane are not what they had hoped.  As with all Air Force Ones, there are two, and both travel on every presidential trip.  One is either a decoy or a backup and the other is the primary.  But they both fly, because if one of them has a mechanical, you can’t put the president on anything other than this airplane.  

Trump cannot fly his own plane as president.  He may try, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the security, the avoidance technology for attacks, missile attacks and so forth, shielding for various kinds of other attacks to disrupt communications.  Air Force One has a legitimate, fully outfitted operating room on board.  

If the president is shot, rather than take him to a hospital, if it’s close by they’ll take him back to Air Force One. And they could even do some surgery, they wouldn’t want to, in flight. But if they had to get out of there real quick and go someplace they could. I mean, Trump’s plane simply doesn’t have what the law requires for the president to be kept safe and secure, plus it’s not big enough.  

Now, some of the naysayers here say, “Well, Trump’s just mad because he’s not gonna get to fly on it because these two 747-8’s are not gonna be ready for service ’til 2024.”  So the tech blogs think Trump is just mad because they’re not gonna get ’em built soon enough for him to use.  That’s not what’s going on here.  

Now, the actual money involved, Trump says that the contract is $4 billion and that’s just out of control, that’s just irresponsible.  We’re wasting money here.  Well, the actual contract details as best I’ve been able to come up with are these.  There are three contracts to get this whole production going, and the first three, which are the down payment, totals $169 million.  

The two brand-new Air Force Ones, according to Pentagon estimates that have been made public — now, there could be hidden costs, other things that haven’t been made public, but the public cost of the brand-new two Air Force Ones is $165 billion.  That’s two-and-a-half billion short of Trump’s four billion that he says Boeing is going to be paid.  

The Air Force announced this plan two years ago.  They promised to use the most proven and advanced technologies and commercially certified equipment to keep costs under control.  Remember, now, this is for two airplanes, not just one, and $165 billion is the published cost.  However, there’s much, much more going on here, ladies and gentlemen, than meets the eye.  

The first item of interest is that the Pentagon, Bob Woodward at the Washington Post has an exclusive that the Pentagon has buried evidence of $125 billion in bureaucratic waste.  This is not the $600 toilet seats.  This is $125 billion being given to people and payments to support the existence of a bureaucracy that really has nothing to do with the defense of the country.  It’s just a bureaucracy supposedly out of control.  

Now, we’ve gotta take this under advisement, too, because it’s the Washington Post, it’s Bob Woodward, and the left automatically hates the Department of Defense.  They despise ’em ’cause that’s where we go to war. That’s where the weapons of war are.  And you know leftists and weapons of war, from guns on up to nuclear missiles, they just hate it all. They don’t like it and they’ve been trying to cut the Pentagon budget for years.  It’s interesting that this story comes out as Obama is on the way out even though it’s been researched for a year.  

Isn’t it interesting the Washington Post never published a story about bureaucratic waste at all for eight years under Obama and here we are on the verge of Trump being inaugurated and here comes this massive story of Pentagon waste. But we’ll throw it in the mix because Trump is making the same case, $4 billion for two airplanes, it’s ridiculous, we can’t pay Boeing that much.  

There’s also, ladies and gentlemen, additional information. In addition to the Pentagon and this $125 billion, are you aware that Boeing donated one million — whoa.  Boeing were huge underwriters of the Clinton Foundation.  Boeing paid Bill Clinton a number of millions of dollars to go out there and do speeches.  It could well be that Boeing is engaging in business overseas that Trump doesn’t approve of, that he doesn’t like.  

He thinks Boeing ought to bring some of that business, some of those jobs back.  It could also be that Trump is simply negotiating.  This is what he does.  If you’ve read The Art of the Deal, you know that he will publicly negotiate. He will call out the people he’s negotiating against, and it could well be that by calling Boeing out and claiming they’re charging $4 billion, he’s negotiating with them in public.  

There’s a whole lot here and the Drive-Bys are just treating this as the tweet and the tweet alone.  “Look at Trump.  He’s out there ripping Boeing, $4 billion, Air Force One.”  These are the kinds of things that experts are brought on TV to say, “This isn’t done. This is not what happens in transitions. This is not presidential at all. This is embarrassing, got a president that doesn’t even know what he’s doing. These kind of discussions of contracts should be kept behind closed doors in private matters and so forth, not airing in public like this.”  

I don’t think you can rule out the fact that Boeing was dancing big and riding hard with the Clintons.  The amount of money that Boeing donated to the Clintons — I had it right here in my Stack, and I must have thrown it away thinking it was a dupe of something that wasn’t. I’ll find it during the break here, but Boeing and the Clintons have been inseparable.  A humongous amount of money that Boeing donated and expected Hillary to win.  That’s part and parcel.  Boeing underwrote the Hillary presidential campaign by virtue of this campaign donation.  Well, I don’t know, charitable donation, whatever, to the Clinton Crime Family Foundation and hiring Bill to do speeches all over the world for 200 grand a pop.  So it’s much more going on here than anybody knows.  Other people are accusing Trump in his ignorance of attacking Boeing’s stock price and it’s just unseemly, it’s not right, it’s not fair.  

One thing people are gonna have to understand about Trump:  He’s not stupid; he’s not a bull in a china shop.  You may end up disagreeing with him profoundly.  You may not end up not liking him at all before this is over.  I don’t know.  But he’s not dumb, and he’s not ignorant, and it’s not that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.  He knows exactly what he’s doing and is doing it for a reason.  He’s doing this on purpose.  There is an objective to this.  The left just can’t help themselves, though.  They have to cast this guy… 

They have to portray him as somebody that’s a walking mental midget, that literally has no idea what he’s done here by winning the presidency, that has no idea how to talk, has no idea how to behave. They continue to make the mistake of plugging him into their model. They’re plugging him into what they think an accomplished politician is, and he’s not that, he’s never been that, and he’s not going to be that.  He doesn’t want to a politician, successful or not.  He is president and he’s going to lead this country in the ways that he’s being very open and honest about.  

Anyway, let me take a brief time-out here.  I’ll find these exact Clinton numbers and get back to you we’ll get started on the phones here fairly quickly as well.  Sit tight.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here are the numbers, the Boeing numbers with the Clintons.  By the way, also keep in mind, Boeing is in the middle of selling planes to Iran.  Let me remind you about this.  Remember the Corker Bill, folks.  Senator Corker, Tennessee, came up with a bill during the time Obama was negotiating the nuclear deal with the Iranians, and the Corker Bill was presented to us as the way the Republicans in the Senate were going to be keep Obama honest and make sure that he didn’t do anything nefarious. 

It was a way of getting around the Senate having to vote on this as a treaty. It actually green-lighted Obama to do whatever kind of deal he wanted without the Senate being involved.  That’s what ticked everybody off.  The Republicans told us that the Senate was not going to invoke the treaty clause and therefore require 60-some-odd votes in the Senate for passage of the Obama’s deal.  Instead, they did the Corker deal, and the Corker Bill was going to be a substitute way of the Republicans making sure Obama dotted all the T’s and crossed all the I’s.  

It was a… It was a… (sigh) Well, I’m trying to think of another word for “lie.”  We were misled.  The Corker Bill and the deal was actually a green light for Obama, and we later came to find out why.  We know that the Republican Party has become a pro-amnesty party because of donors. The Republican Party, as we discussed for the past number of years and really intensely during last year’s campaign — the Republican Party — became more devoted to its donors, i.e., money than to its voters and their desires and ideas.  And we couldn’t figure out, “Why are the Republicans of all people facilitating nuclear deal with Iran?  

“Why would the Republicans want their fingerprints on a deal that allows the world’s state sponsor of terrorism to nuke up?”  Well, it turns out it was Boeing.  Not totally, but one of the reasons. Remember this, Mr. Snerdley?  The Iranian national airline is essentially falling apart, and because of sanctions and freezing of their money in our banks, they haven’t been able to modernize enough their infrastructure, including purchase new aircraft.  So the Corker Bill was about getting the sanctions lifted and approving Obama’s deal because Boeing wanted to go sell the Iranians new commercial airliners.  

And they couldn’t do that with sanctions in place.  They couldn’t make a deal.  And so the Republicans were instrumental here in making it possible for Boeing, and Boeing had donated to Republicans to make this possible.  You can’t throw this here… You know how Trump is talking about the Iranian deal. He hates it!  And don’t think he doesn’t know about all this.  You know, Trump going out tweeting about $4 billion and Boeing and a new Air Force One? There’s so much more behind this than what it’s being portrayed.  

So there’s a possibility here that Trump is really irritated at Boeing for helping facilitate the Iranian nuclear deal — or not.  I mean, I’m throwing out possibilities here. But I’m telling you, something is going on.  Here’s the story of Boeing and the Clintons.  Ready for this? In 2010, two months after Hillary went to Moscow to broker a $3.7 billion trade deal with Russia, “Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation… Then in July 2012, just months after the State Department helped it secure major deals in Indonesia and Saudi Arabia, Boeing said it wanted to sponsor a speech by Bill Clinton… 

“Bill Clinton was paid $250,000,” and Boeing also gave Hillary $166,735 in 2016 for her campaign.  So Hillary Clinton as secretary of state had helped Boeing broker two deals, one in Russia (a $3.7 billion deal) which got them a $900,000 contribution to the Clinton Foundation, and in 2012 Boeing hired Bill to do a speech for a quarter mill — chump change compared to what they’ve been sending Hilary. Plus, they sent about $170,000 in campaign donations.  Trump knows all this.  He’s very much aware of the cronyism that’s been going on.  

Now he’s out saying… (telephone ringing) Hang on, folks.  Somebody’s calling me here.  It’s a wrong number.  I heard something and said, “What the heck is that?”  It sounded like a tech malfunction. I looked over and saw it was my phone.  Did that sound like a phone ringing to you? (interruption) Okay.  I did not lose my place.  You thought it was some tech snafu, too, and were wondering what the hell was going on.  I’m sure you thought what are you doing wrong in there that I’m gonna get mad at. 

So Trump is very much aware of all this and goes out and publicly says, “We’re throwing $4 billion away on this Air Force One plane.” He said, “Tear it up. Cancel the order.”  Well, it’s a little late to cancel the order, but I’m telling you, folks, there is much, much more going on here than one little Trump tweet would indicate.  I think you should use this as, eh, a little bit of a teachable moment.  Trump is not the dummy.  He’s not ignorant.  

He’s not the inexperienced bull in a china shop that they want you to believe he is.  And as we’ve just demonstrated here with this one little 140-character tweet about canceling the order for the new Air Force Ones because Boeing is charging too much, look at what all the backstory is.  Boeing in Iran. Boeing in Russia. Boeing with the Clintons. This may not sit well with Trump.  So the point is, there’s always stuff going on behind a Trump tweet or a Trump story that you don’t know.  Trump is not a surface individual.  There’s more depth to him than anybody wants to acknowledge here. 

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH:  You could buy sixty-five EIB One aircraft — sixty-five of ’em — for $4 billion.  Ah, they’re about 60, 65, depending on… Well, actually that would be a G650, but you could buy between 61 and 65 of ’em, depending on how you chose to outfit them and paint them and so on.  A lot of money.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

There’s much more to this than meets the eye when it comes to Trump and Boeing.  He’s just not out there tweeting for the hell of it.  If you put it all together, folks, it makes perfect sense.  Trump is not happy with the things that have been going on in this country, domestically, foreign policy.  

He doesn’t like the Iranian nuke deal. He doesn’t like any of Obama’s trade deals. He doesn’t like much of our foreign policy, and Boeing is in the thick of it.  Boeing is right smack dab in the middle of many things.  And so this tweet that Trump has put out there today is not just an idle Trump’s gotta say something, he’s bored kind of thing.  There’s obviously something very meaningful behind it. I tried to explain the details in the previous hour.  

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Here Bill’s in Atlanta.  You’re next, sir.  It’s a delight to have you with us.  Hi. 

CALLER:  Rush, it’s a delight to be on.  It’s 27 years of dittos with you, so thank you very much. 

RUSH:  Wow.  You’ve been a long time.  I appreciate that.  I really do. 

CALLER:  Oh, yes.  I think it’s absolute insanity what we’re spending for the Secret Service and the budget in its entirety. And then you talking about new Air Force Ones just sent me over the top.  If I had a nickel for every time I wanted to call you I’d probably have a G7 by now, but this one sent me over the top.  I cannot understand, it’s absolute insanity.  And for someone to lease — and again I know it’s gonna happen anyway, maybe it will only be $3 billion instead of 4.  It’s still ridiculous.  Washington and Adams road horseback to Washington, and now we gotta cart the president around.  They’re just a person.  We’re all just people.  We are replaceable when it comes down to running our government, and we do it every four years and I just can’t understand — 

RUSH:  Wait.  You think we go way overboard in security for the president? 

CALLER:  Oh, my gosh, if you looked at the Secret Service budget where it grew from when Kennedy was president to where we are now, exponentially craziness is what it would be, I believe. 

RUSH:  Well, I don’t know how many takers you’re gonna get on that. 

CALLER:  Oh, my gosh, you think? 

RUSH:  Kennedy is dead — 

CALLER:  Well, okay, bad, okay — 

RUSH:  Well, I mean that’s what causes all this. We are reactive here. 

CALLER:  Yeah. 

RUSH:  And, you know, “Squeaky” Fromme took a couple of shots at Gerald Ford.  And so they ramped up again.  And we don’t know, you know, what attempts are — 

CALLER:  But at some point don’t we have to understand that just one person, we just can’t — 

RUSH:  I know where you’re coming from.  You’re saying we’re all human beings, how can one of us, even if he’s elected president, be that much more important?  It’s just not possible. 

CALLER:  Thank you.  We have the military — 

RUSH:  Somebody could step in there and assume the job and we would all go on like nothing happened. 

CALLER:  Yes. 

RUSH:  Well, you know, the argument could be made easily the other way, too, because of the impact on an event like that would indeed have worldwide ramifications. 

CALLER:  Of course.  But we would get through it, wouldn’t we? 

RUSH:  Yeah, but it would be better not to have to.  It would be better not to have to.  Look, I agree, if you think Air Force One, $4 billion for two airplanes. And then you couple that with a hundred, what, Washington Post exclusive story today on the Pentagon hiding $125 billion of bureaucratic waste, I still find it fascinating that we didn’t find out any of this during Obama.  We’re only learning about it now on the eve of the inauguration of Trump.  

But I can tell you, I flew into Martha’s Vineyard once for a golf trip on EIB One and I was advised to put a chaff dispenser on the airplane in case there was a surface-to-air missile attack on me ’cause it’s all liberals that live there. And I priced it out and it’s way over the top. Do you know, a seven-inch television set, not even high-definition, a seven-inch television set for a private airplane is $5,000 because you can only buy it from certain places. 

It has to have FAA approval on all kinds of crazy — $5,000 for a seven-inch, not even high-definition TV.  It’s a racket.  It’s like a concession stand at a ballpark.  That’s the only place you can go ’cause they won’t let you bring it in so they can charge you whatever they want.  And I’m sure there’s a lot of that built in for security and cost otherwise on Air Force One.  Just stands to reason.  

Look, we’re nearing the end of the broadcast segment here, Bill and of course since I’m offering every caller — I don’t know for how much longer I’m gonna do it, but for today I definitely am, a free brand-new iPhone 7 or 7 Plus if you want one. 

CALLER:  Well, of course I would, I’d love one. 

RUSH:  Well, which carrier are you? 

CALLER:  T-Mobile. 

RUSH:  T-Mobile.  Cool.  Okay do you have a color preference? 

CALLER:  Absolutely no.  Good grief.  You never look a gift horse in the mouth. Whatever you got the most of. 

RUSH:  Okay, fine and dandy.  We’ll surprise you.  But it’s either gonna have a T-Mobile or an AT&T SIM card in it, but it’s unlocked.  It’ll work on T-Mobile. 

CALLER:  Awesome.  I mean, that’s obviously very generous. 

RUSH:  You’re more than welcome to it, and if you take it to their store, tell ’em it’s unlocked. Well, tell ’em it’s gift and take it in the box and that you want to move your T-Mobile number to it, and they’ll happily take care of you.  Hang on so we can get your address.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

All the networks are now doing in-depth reports on what-all goes into manufacturing Air Force One.  Folks, I’m gonna tell you, I think… (long pause) Well, let me… I’m gonna hold it in reserve.  I was gonna give Trump credit for a lot of stuff, but that may rub some people wrong so let me just hold it back.  Ari Fleischer is out there.  Now, see, this is what happens.  Ari Fleischer says, “Hey, people tell me that there’s no price tag on this contract yet, so Trump may not know what he’s talking about.”  They’re making the mistake once again of… (sigh) 

I’m trying to maintain any composure, because to me this is so easy.  Who was it? Salena Zito said that Trump critics make the mistake of not taking him seriously but taking him literally.  Trump supporters do take him seriously but not literally.  Trump is a provocateur.  Trump has all kinds of reasons for throwing that tweet out there by Air Force One and the contract cost at $4 billion.  That’s why I spent 20 minutes explaining the backstory here, that Boeing has times to Obama… You know Boeing relocated from Seattle to Chicago after Obama’s election?  

Why the hell would Boeing move from Seattle?  So they move to Chicago, they get in bed with the Obama administration, they donate money left and right to the Clintons. They’re involved in the Iranian nuke deal.  And look, that’s fine, don’t misunderstand.  I’ve taken a tour of Boeing, the jumbo jet factory out in Seattle when we were doing our program out there one time.  I’m fascinated by airplanes, aviation, the whole thing, and I have admiration for just the people that work at Boeing and the whole manufacturing process, the design, everything about it. 

And Boeing is free to sidle up to whoever they want to politically. But it’s obvious that the way Trump looks at the world, Boeing made some bad decisions, sidling up and assisting the Iranians? Trump doesn’t think that’s a good deal.  He doesn’t think it was wise for… Hillary Clinton greased the skids for Boeing to go to a deal in Russia, and that’s fine and dandy, except Boeing paid her back.  Boeing was donating to her and her husband left and right.  But there’s much more going on here.  They can do their exposes on what it casts to make Air Force One.  

I guarantee you what the media is gonna be doing now is looking into the cost of Air Force One and the manufacturing, what all goes into it and asking how we’re being ripped off and what does Trump that we don’t know.  And they’re gonna miss what his real point with this is.  They’re gonna miss what he’s doing, which I think they’re gonna continue to do.  Even friendly media at Fox is gonna miss this because they’re not gonna interpret it properly.  

Do you know that Air Force One actually came in to being with JFK? He was the first president… In fact, the first plane JFK threw on when it was designated as a presidential plane was a Lockheed JetStar.  And if you want to know who those were like, Auric Goldfinger owned one in the Bond movie.  At the end of the movie when Goldfinger’s jet’s going down with Pussy Galore in there and they’re all parachuting out and Bond is trying to save the day, that’s a Lockheed JetStar.  And it was deemed… You know, Eisenhower flew on one. 

It was deemed just for whatever reason, insignificant, not safe enough, large enough. So they defined a Boeing 707, and that lasted through Reagan, from 1960 some odd all the way to 1989. I mean, George H. W. Bush was the first president that got the Boeing 747s that are currently being flown as Air Force One.  So now they’re in the process of upgrading.  These are 30 years old.  They’re completely air worthy.  But the line is that it now takes so much time and money to keep them maintained in tip-top shape, and there are two of them, and they go on every trip.  

One is a backup in case of a mechanical, and the other sometimes is used as a decoy.  They’re both equally outfitted, and they’ve got 30 years on ’em, and they’re nearing their life span, so this new Boeing deal delivers these two new planes in 2024.  Trump’s not even gonna fly on ’em.  But there’s so much more going on with this little tweet of his, and we’ve done our best to help you understand all the possibilities and all of the vagaries.  But now they’re gonna be doing stories on why does it cost so much and the systems, and they can’t tell you half of it because of security concerns and privacy.  

But, trust me.  They have shielding from electromagnetic pulse; they have technology that would protect the plane as best it could, anyway, from surface-to-air missiles, because the airplane itself cannot take evasive action and stay put together.  The G-forces would destroy it; it doesn’t have the maneuverability to do it anyway. So they have to have some other method.  The communication system, worldwide satellite, infrared, all kinds of… The president cannot ever be out of communication and has to be able to survive a nuclear attack.  

Air Force One is shielded in case a nuclear detonation occurs somewhere.  Passengers would survive the radiation.  If it was in the middle of an explosion, no, but it would survive the radiation. If it were not near the explosion but the radiation cloud spread, it would survive. The passengers could survive inside because of the radiation shield.  It’s phenomenal what is in these airplanes and the technology that’s there.  And a lot of it’s still classified that we don’t even know exists.  There’s a full-fledged operating room on Air Force One. 

I mean, a genuine hospital-type operating room.  You’ve gotta have doctors and nurses on board if you’re gonna have an operating room.  It’s massive. (interruption) Kitchen? The galley you mean?  I mean, there’s two or three of them. There’s three or four levels in these planes.  That’s why it fascinates me.  You know what fascinates me about technology, both this and anything is the brainpower that has to exist — like writing software or designing something to anticipate problems that haven’t happened — and to build in solutions to those problems that haven’t happened.  

You have to anticipate what the problems might be.  For example, bear with me.  I’ll give you one example of what I’m talking about here.  It’s not the best, but the space shuttle, or any rocket launch.  We used to have two different launch pads.  One was at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and of course, Cape Canaveral. Do you know that it took much more thrust and power to launch from Vandenberg than Cape Canaveral? (interruption) You did?  Do you know why?  The earth is rotating. It’d take more thrust at Vandenberg.  

The earth is rotating faster at the quarter as you get close to the equator, faster in Florida than it is in California and in Nevada.  And the rotation of the earth is its own boost. Before you even add power, there’s a degree of boost.  And the von Brauns of the world and the Oppenheimers had to figure this all out.  It takes much more power to get a rocket into space the farther north you go, because the earth rotating around its axis is going slower.  

You might say, “Wait a minute, the earth is one thing. It’s one ball, and it’s all rotating.”  Yes, but at equator, for example, for the earth to travel the same distance that, say, it travels up in the latitude, longitude of New York. The equator has to go a lot farther, so it’s going faster.  And that speed gives rocket launches a bigger boost, so it takes less rocket fuel.  That’s why the launches occurred in Florida and not further north.  Well, there’s no way under the sun I would ever… I wouldn’t even conceive of a possibility. 

I had to read that and learn that somewhere.  Those are the kinds of things that dazzle me that you’ll find in your iPhone or that you’ll find in your computer or whatever high-tech gadget you use, or a modern-day fully loaded airplane, like Air Force One, and it’s just amazing.  And these things cost.  It costs money to figure these out and plan for them, to incorporate them. So this $4 billion price tag’s probably high, but Trump’s reason for doing this… Oh, they’re also saying, “Trump’s trying to destroy the Boeing stock price!” Boeing stock price is down pennies.  That’s not what this is about.  

Pin It on Pinterest

Share This