RUSH: Mark Halperin, who’s the producer of this Showtime show we played the sound bites from yesterday with the establishment Republicans at dinner complaining about Trump. “The guy can’t talk. He’s not articulate. He doesn’t have a straight thought. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. All he’s got is a bunch of damn votes.”
Well, Halperin was on MSNBC yesterday morning and he said that Donald Trump is the most talented candidate for president he has ever seen. Mark Halperin, well-known leftist mainstream media guy said Donald Trump is more talented than Barack Hussein O. And Eugene Robinson, the Washington Post, was stunned. He couldn’t believe this. He said, “You don’t include Obama in the list?” Halperin said that Barack Obama was in third place. “Trump is one of the two most talented presidential candidates any of us ever covered.” The other one is Bill Clinton.
He said, “Look at what Donald Trump does every day to defy. It’s just in terms of pure political skill.” He said you cannot overestimate. He said Trump doesn’t have advisors. He doesn’t have strategists. You know, David Axelrod and Plouffe worked for Obama. And Clinton had James Carville. Donald Trump doesn’t have anybody. He is his own foreign policy advisor. He is his own domestic advisor. He’s got a media person. He’s got a spokeswoman. He’s got somebody that deals with the media for him, and that’s it. Everything is him. He doesn’t have any analytics people. He doesn’t have focus group research. He doesn’t do polling.
Everything is raw political instinct, Halperin says. He’s got no back rooms. He’s got no career-oriented consultants. He’s not running an ad campaign. He’s not spending any money. And he’s running rings around everybody. That’s Mark Halperin. And all of that’s true, by the way, and it’s another reason why there’s such frustration. Trump has blown up every rule. From the consultants angle, look at the political consultants business. One of the most famous political consultants, what’s the guy’s name, Snerdley, that ran John Kerry’s campaign?
Bob Shrum. Bob Shrum has never won a race. And Bob Shrum is reputed to be one of the greatest campaign consultants on earth. He ran Kerry’s presidential campaign. He’s run a bunch of ’em. He’s been on TV as an expert analyst about campaigns. And then you got Mike Murphy on the Republican side. But these guys are all over the place. And they get rich. They place all the advertising and they unusually get 15% of all the budget. That’s the agency commission, it’s what they get, that’s how many of them get paid. So the more money the candidate raises, the more money the candidate spends, the better the consultants do. And these guys are the experts.
Mike Murphy, for example, Sharron Angle and Christine O’Donnell, he’s out there saying (imitating Murphy), “Okay. All right. Fine. You think they’re gonna win. They can’t possibly win. They don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t have anybody like me running the show.” And he was pretty much being truthful and honest. But it’s a closed club, and these guys go from candidate to candidate to candidate. Trump doesn’t have one. Can you imagine?
In football terms, this is the equivalent of having a quarterback so good like Peyton Manning, you don’t need an offensive coordinator. You don’t need a coach devising a scheme; your quarterback’s good enough to do it. So these consultants, just them alone, “Oh, my God, my job’s on the line. We’ve got a candidate here showing we’re not needed.” It’s this kind of stuff that’s on the line here, folks. Trump can’t win. If Trump wins, it makes so many of these establishment people look and seem irrelevant in jobs they have succeeded in convincing everybody are necessary to the point that everybody just accepts that they are.
I have a minor way of relating. When I started doing talk shows everybody and their uncle said, “Well, you have to have guests.”
“No, I don’t.”
“Well, you can’t do a show without guests. What do you mean? Everybody does it.”
I said, “That’s why I don’t want to.”
“But you can’t.” Even when I started in Sacramento and didn’t have guests, and the ratings started coming, looking good, there were still people saying, “You know, this isn’t gonna last, you’ve gotta have guests.” They were still trying to get me to have guests.
They finally said, “Why don’t you want guests?”
I said, “One simple reason: Everybody else does. And there’s no guest that cares anywhere near as much as I do about the success of my show. And besides, these guests are gonna be on every other show, and why are they on those shows? They’re not on those shows to promote the shows. They’re on the shows to be promoted. They’re on those shows to sell a book. They’re on those shows to hype a TV movie, episode, what have you.”
Plus, it was make-or-break time for me. I needed to find out if I could be the reason people would listen to radio, not a bunch of guests, not a bunch of promotions, giveaways, contests, records, this kind of stuff.
But the point is, I was fought for three years on it. “You have to do guests.” And I said, “I don’t want to.” One of the most fortunate things that happened to me was to have a program director back me up on it. It’s rare. Well, that’s what’s happening here. There’s so many things just assumed a candidate has to have: employees, staff, got to have foreign policy advisor, got to have a bunch of advisors. Got to have a consultant; you’ve gotta have this. And all of these people come from the establishment. Not Trump. There’s a lot of stuff threatening them.
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RUSH: Trump has put out an anti-Hillary Clinton ad on Instagram. Now, most of it’s video, but I can play enough of the audio that you get the drift. It’s 15 seconds and it starts out a little music and there’s graphics.
“When it comes to facing our toughest opponents,” and then there’s video of Putin practicing judo, there’s video of a masked Islamist with the words “Democrats have the perfect answers,” and then it morphs to Hillary barking. And it ends with Trump. “We don’t need to be a punch line. Trump: Make America great again.” So the only thing you’re gonna hear here that makes sense is Hillary barking. We’ll post the link to this ad at RushLimbaugh.com so you can see it, but this is how it goes.
When it comes to facing our toughest opponents, here’s Putin judo, masked Islamist. (Hillary barking) (Man laughing) Putin laughing, and then the graphic, “We don’t need to be a punch line. Trump: Make America great again.” With Hillary barking. Just first ad, 15 seconds, people are going to eat it up.
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RUSH: That’s another thing. Trump produces ads that people like, think are funny. Imagine all the free airtime Trump’s ads are gonna get as well, even though he’ll buy some. But we’ll link to that ad. It’s really good. It’s just 15 seconds, but you’ll love it.