RUSH: Here’s Greg in Arcade, New York. Welcome, sir. Great to have you with us. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Thanks for taking my call.
RUSH: Yes, sir.
CALLER: Longtime listener. I have a question for you really, and maybe you can answer it. For years the Republican Party has tried to expand the base. That’s all we’ve heard, trying to get the big tent, more people into it. Now you have a guy, Donald Trump, seems to be a novice running, but still, for whatever reason, converted and became a Republican, and is doing well, and is getting independents and Democrats and people that have never voted before. And the establishment is just going absolutely berserk with this “Stop Trump” and everything. My question is, just when did we start issuing tests to say if you could be a conservative. They keep saying he’s not conservative enough. You know, they know nothing about him. He just joined.
RUSH: (sigh) Let me see if I can narrow your question a bit. You’re basically, if I’m right, asking why doesn’t the Republican Party seem more eager, happy, willing, whatever, to welcome in voters from outside the party supporting Trump, the Democrats, the independents, the people that haven’t voted before, when they have been telling us that they can’t win without doing so. They need to expand the base, they need to expand the party, “’cause we just can’t win, Rush, with Republican votes alone.”
Because this is not how they want to do it. The Republican Party wants to expand the base by denying or deemphasizing conservatism. They want to expand the base by making people think that they’re no longer conservatives or the kinds of Republicans everybody thinks they are. For example, there’s a movement at the establishment level of the party to try to put in the party platform acceptance of gay marriage, on the theory that they’ve gotta get with it, and that’s how they gotta get Millennials and young people, ’cause that’s what Millennials care about, and so the Republicans have to show them.
Well, the party thinks that conservatism wants no part of that, that marriage is a union between a man and a woman. So they don’t want to expand the base if it involves conservatism at all being responsible for it. They think conservatism is what’s limiting them. They think social issues conservatism, they think tax cut conservatism is limiting them. That’s why they keep talking about the era of Reagan being over or eagerly looking forward to the era of Reagan being over.
They don’t want the people Trump is bringing in ’cause they don’t like Trump. Trump is not them. Trump represents, if he succeeds, the diminishing of the establishment. Look, the Republican Party had built-in majorities if they would have just joined the Tea Party in opposing Obamacare. Didn’t do that, either. That’s one of the reasons why everybody’s so ticked off.
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RUSH: Here’s Dorothea, Mason, Ohio. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Rush, I just want to point out that, you know, these people that say they won’t vote for Ted if Donald wins or they won’t vote for Donald, are they not realizing that they’re leaving the Supreme Court open for Hillary Clinton and her minions to just assign that and to stack that and how many years would it take us to get over that, if ever?
RUSH: It’s a matter of principle, they say, Dorothea. They simply cannot compromise their personal principles by supporting either Trump — mostly it’s aimed at Trump. Some aimed at Cruz. But they claim it’s personal principles. Personal principles come before everything even if it means electing Hillary. They cannot betray themselves, they say.
CALLER: I think they’re betraying the whole country if they allow us to be left open to the Democrats to appoint our Supreme Court justices to decide the rules that we all have to follow, that we know it’s stacked.
RUSH: Yeah, I hear you. You know me, I —
CALLER: I know you, Rush. I’ve been listening to you a long, long time.
RUSH: I think the Democrats are the biggest problem this country faces, the problems we are in. This last caller — Dorothea, thanks very much — this last caller who wanted to know why the GOP is not interested in all these third-party people that Trump’s bringing in, you know, I misunderstood what his question was gonna be when I was reading it on the board here. When he actually got to it, it was something different.
What I was gonna say to this guy, I thought he was gonna ask me how to get people in, how can the Republican Party attract outsiders. The way to do that — I think — I really don’t understand this. If you take polls of people in this country, they’re miserable. Nobody thinks there’s economic growth going on. Nobody thinks that there are great and vast career opportunities. Nobody thinks it. There is a malaise that has settled over this country. You’ve got Millennials thinking they happened to be born at the time in world history where peak America has already happened. You have young people, whether they’re right or wrong doesn’t matter for now, they really believe the best days of the country are behind ’em. Somebody needs to tell them why.
I told you I got into a knock-down-drag-out with a female establishment babe in the GOP last night. I told her what I tell you here every day. Why in the world can you people not push back? Why can’t you even identify the source of the problems that you all acknowledge we face? What is it that prevents you people from correctly identifying Democrat Party policy? Forget about naming Obama if you’re afraid of race. These are Democrat Party policies that have led to 94 million Americans not working to gazillions and gazillions in the welfare movement and on food stamps, open borders. The very fabric of the country is being purposefully redefined. Why can’t you say so?
You want to bring new people into the party, we had how many Americans, there was never, ever anything other than a big majority opposing Obamacare, going all the back to 2010? All the Republican Party had to do was reach out and join them. You had a built-in majority right there, and a coalition based on opposing Obamacare. You know why they didn’t? There were two reasons. One, they were Tea Party, which meant they were conservative, which meant yuck. The second reason they didn’t, ’cause they really didn’t want to work as hard as it would take to get rid of Obamacare. Who wants to really roll up your sleeves, try to unravel a 2,000-page entitlement? But it clearly wasn’t there, the desire to roll up the sleeves.
They were very happy to go out and promise in a campaign that there’d be plenty of effort to repeal Obamacare, and there were a bunch of meaningless votes, so they could say, “We tried.” But there has been so much — and there remains so much — opportunity. You want to attract unhappy people? Whether Democrats, Martians, I don’t care what they are. There’s a lot of people that want a better life than they’re having right now. There are a lot of people that want a better future than they think exists right now.
There are a lot of people that… Sadly, because of the media, a lot of these people just think the country’s had its best days. They don’t realize all of this is the result of the Democrat Party and its policies. Nobody tells ’em. They don’t realize the state of the economy. They don’t realize the state of immigration, open borders. They don’t realize this is the policy of establishment Washington, DC, both parties. It is the policy of the government. It’s a big majority waiting to be had.
But if the Republicans are not even going to sound like they oppose any of this and instead think that they can save themselves by not criticizing immigration so that Hispanics will like them and maybe then vote for ’em, you talk about pie-in-the-sky and dreaming? By the way, this stuff going on at the platform about coming out and supporting gay marriage to get Millennials? There’s a new one, too.
There’s something else that’s a traditional Democrat issue that the Republicans, I read — I can’t think what it is right now. But it’s along the same lines of gay marriage, that they want to put in the party platform. The Republican Party clearly… To me, it is clear that they’re walking around in a giant defensive shell thinking that everybody thinks they are, racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes; thus they have to do things to prove that they are not.
And you can’t prove a negative. And you can’t advance anything when you’re constantly on defense, which takes me back to Trump. Up until these last couple of weeks, the word “Trump” and “defense” didn’t go together. You talk bull in the china shop offense is what people saw. And it’s one of the large things that drew people to Trump, and it would draw people to anybody who was willing to go on offense and not react defensively to all these mindless, specious allegations about War on Women and racism and all this other.
That stuff’s gotta stop at some point. We’ve never, ever had a greater opportunity than right now to contrast Republicanism, conservatism, whatever, with what the Democrats believe. And we don’t have to even do it on the basis of theory. We don’t have to say, “Folks, if you keep voting for ’em, this is what’s gonna happen,” because it is happening. We can say, “You know what? You voted for ’em, and here’s what you got. You got no job. You got no career.
“You’ve got a law mandating you have to have health care or else you can be fined, or else you can be put in jail or whatever. And now they’re talking about making you rent an apartment to criminals if you own a building on the basis that you’ve been racist in your life. And now they’re threatening to actually conduct legal action against you if you don’t believe in global warming.” There are inexorable truths of life. One of them is that young Millennial socialists abandon it once they get careers and jobs.
And there was a survey or polling data indicating that that’s even happening now as we speak. I just see squandered opportunity after squandered opportunity. How do we get people not on our side, to our side? How do we attract people to our side? It’s the simplest thing in the world to me, but you can’t do it on talk radio. You can’t do it on Fox News. It has to be done in the political process.
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RUSH: I just remembered what it is. It’s climate change that some of the other people at the RNC want to start adding to the platform, an acknowledgment of man-made climate change along with support for gay marriage. And this how they want to go out and broaden the base of the party.