RUSH: Here’s Sarah in Billings, Montana, Sarah, I’m glad you waited. Happy to welcome you to the program. Hi.
CALLER: I’m a conservative. My family members are conservatives. Several family members said they will not vote if Donald Trump gets the nomination. I’m concerned the same thing will happen like the last election. Just wondering what your thoughts are.
RUSH: Well, my thoughts are I need to ask you some questions. Let’s see. You won’t vote Trump if he gets the nomination, and that a lot of Republicans won’t show up if he does. And that we’ll just lose again. What about Trump do you not like?
CALLER: It’s not me that’s saying this; it’s my family members. They think that he is very rough around the edges, that he’s unpredictable. At least with Hillary you know you can’t get any worse than Obama. So because Trump is unpredictable, they’re not willing to vote at all.
RUSH: You know, people that are not willing to vote, to me, that’s quite a threat. It’s almost — I wouldn’t put it up there with blackmail, but at the same time, if somebody says, “I’m not gonna vote,” one of my reactions, “Well, then why should I listen to you?” You’re willing to take yourself out of the process. You’re willing to make yourself a nonfactor. In fact, if anything, you may be furthering the election of that which you profess to dislike. It doesn’t make any sense to me, in that sense, given the importance of this election coming up. I mean, I understand people that don’t think Trump’s conservative, but do they see no value whatsoever in what’s happening here in this campaign?
CALLER: You know, I think it’s about Trump’s morals and his presentation. They don’t like him.
RUSH: Okay. That’s interesting. We’ll deal with that when we get back. Thanks, Sarah, very much.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I heard what she said. I had limited time there. I actually am lucky Sarah was talented enough to say what she wanted to say in a limited amount of time, but I didn’t have any time to respond. I heard what she said. I’m checking the e-mail. “Rush, she said ‘morals,’ Trump’s morals? What about the Clintons’ morals.” I heard it, all right? Let me react to this here. I think you’re misunderstanding. When somebody like Sarah calls — and, remember, she wasn’t talking about herself. No, no. She was talking about her “friends and family.”
And she said her friends and family don’t like Trump’s morals and they don’t like that he’s rough around the edges. They don’t like the way he talks. And so, if he gets the nomination, they’re gonna take it out on the Republican Party by not voting. They’re not saying… Look, I know these people. They’re not saying that they prefer Hillary’s morals. They want to punish the Republican Party. It’s like the four million that didn’t vote in 2012. And, by the way, the Republican Party and the Drive-Bys are engaging in push-back now.
They’re trying to tell us that the four million that didn’t show up… “In the first place, there weren’t four million that didn’t show up,” they’re trying to say. And the next thing they’re trying to tell us is, “No, no, no, no! They weren’t people upset with Romney ’cause he wasn’t conservative enough. That’s not what happened.” It is, and those people didn’t show up because they’re mad at the Republican Party. It’s not that they are doing what they do because they prefer the values of the Democrats. They want to punish everybody by having the Democrats win. That’s the objective here. When you say, “Harumph! Harumph! I don’t like Trump!
“He’s rough around the edges. I don’t like the way he talks and he’s not a conservative, and if he’s the nominee, I’m not voting,” it’s another way to say, “Notice me! Hey, I’m important out here. I’m important. I don’t like Trump — and if I don’t like Trump, then you’re not gonna get what you want, and if that means you get the Clintons, then deal with it.” It’s not that they think the Clintons are more moral Trump. I mean, I don’t think anybody would make that claim. If we’re talking about morality, there’s nobody on the Democrat side, folks, that’s gonna trump anybody on the Republican side here.
Don’t think anybody’s preferring Clinton’s morals. This is more like, “If I don’t get what I want, I’m gonna punish you by making sure you don’t get what you want.” And she said something about how she didn’t like… Not her. Not her. Not her. Very important. It wasn’t her; it was her family that didn’t like the Trump’s presentation. Which is another way of saying they don’t like the way Trump insults people and he calls people losers and third-rate and all that. You know why I don’t mind it?
Because for the most part, I happen to agree with what he’s saying about the people he’s describing when he’s talking about the Democrats and Obama and all these others. I don’t think there’s any mystery why Trump is doing what… You know, I’ll tell you a couple of very, very interesting things that I have seen over the break, and this one is fascinating. And, again, it’s the Drive-By Media pointing it out. I don’t know how much of it you can believe, but the nuts and bolts of this are that a lot of Trump’s supporters have no plans to vote.
Have you seen those stories? You see those stories last week, that the biggest challenge the Trump people have is actually getting their supporters to go vote? “They love the guy. They show up in his rallies. They’re cheering. But a lot of them, why, they don’t really plan to go to the trouble of voting!” This is what these stories said. I have never seen that written or postulated about any other candidate’s supporters. I’ve never seen that. Not that I can remember. I never heard it said, “Yeah, Reagan’s got a whole bunch of supporters out there, but the big challenge is gonna be to get ’em them to show up at the polls on Election Day!”
I’ve never seen that said. But it was all over the news last week about Trump’s supporters. And then there’s this. I’ve been trying to make this point for I don’t know how long. Well, two or three months, the last three months of last year. This is… Actually it’s from New Year’s Eve when I printed this out. So this is a story from late 2015. It’s in the New York Times. Their number cruncher ran the statistics on Trump’s supporters, at least as they’re able to determine Trump supporters, and you know who the number one support group of Trump is according to the New York Times?
Registered Democrats.
Now, I know many of you conservatives who don’t like Trump are going, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! See? See? I knew it! I knew it! It’s the Democrats! We’re getting sandbagged. We’re getting tricked. It’s the Democrats that like Trump, Rush. They’re running the Reverse Operation Chaos! I’m telling you what they’re doing and you’re falling for it.” I heard it all, folks. I understand. Don’t… A, I’m not falling for anything. B, I remain wary of all this. But let me just tell you what they say here. Nate Cohn is the number cruncher here, the statistician New York Times.
He reveals, “Mr. Trump appears to hold his greatest strength among people like these: Registered Democrats who identify as Republican leaners…” So Trump’s number one support group is registered Democrats who are leaning Republican in the polling data out there. Meaning Reagan Democrats is who we’re talking about here. Trump “fares best in a broad swath of the country stretching from the Gulf Coast, up the spine of the Appalachian Mountains, to upstate New York.” What would you do if I told you that some in the deep, dark crevices of both parties’ establishment and apparatus…?
What if I were to tell you that some of the big money people and powerful thinkers in both parties are starting to calculate that Donald Trump could win New York, as a Republican, in the presidential race? Have you seen that? Well, there’s a story today if you take a look. I’ve got it somewhere here in the Stack. My point is there’s such fear out there in both parties. “This guy can win New York! Oh, my God.” He may lose New Hampshire and Iowa, though, and if that happens, then all this is out the window and all the bets are off.
But there’s still sheer panic out there where Trump is concerned. “Mr. Trump’s best state is West Virginia, followed by New York. Eight of Mr. Trump’s 10 best congressional districts are in New York… Mr. Trump’s strength fades as one heads west. Nearly all of his weakest states — 16 of his worst 19 — lie west of the Mississippi. … He leads among Republican women and among people in well-educated and affluent areas. He even holds a nominal lead among Republican respondents that Civis estimated are Hispanic, based on their names and where they live. …
“He has held between 26 and 32 percent of the vote for five months” that they’ve been polling here, the New York Times. Now, here’s the thing. And I’ve made this observation before. For all of you who are conservative and say, “Trump’s not a conservative. I couldn’t support him. I don’t know why you are, Rush.” A, I’m not supporting anybody. I’m just telling you what goes on day to day here. You’ll know when I’m supporting somebody. I’ve got two or three ways this could go that I would not be unhappy. I don’t have all my eggs tied to one basket; I never do.
Anyway, for those of you who are conservative who say, “I’m never voting for Trump,” you better keep one thing in mind: That’s exactly what the Republican Party wants. Do you understand the Republican Party wants to rid themselves of you? The Republican Party… Jeb Bush. Jeb Bush made it plain as day. Jeb Bush’s objective was to win the Republican nomination despite the base. Remember this original plan? He had so much money. He was going to have so much money.
He was gonna wrap up all the delegates with that money even if he lost the primary vote of conservatives in many states. Now, you know as well as I do that the Republican Party’s not happy with its base. They’re embarrassed of its base. I have almost a perfect illustration. How many of you have watched the documentary The Making of a Murderer on Netflix? You haven’t? Oh. Folks, you have to watch this. It’s about… I have to be real careful describing this. It’s a documentary. It’s not… There’s no actors in it. It’s all real people. It’s about a sequence of events in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, back starting in 2003 up to the present involving a man named Steven Avery, who was imprisoned by the Manitowoc County Sheriff’s Department for 18 years for a crime he didn’t commit.
DNA evidence cleared him. Shortly after he got out of jail, after he was released, a murder happened on the Avery property, and he has been convicted of that murder. The law enforcement went right after him, so he’s back in jail. He’s been in jail for a number of years now. The documentary tells the whole story. This poor guy’s got an IQ of 70. His family is in the auto salvage business. They are… I’ll tell you what they are. They are what elites think of the Republican base (maybe a bit of an exaggeration there): IQ 70, ill-spoken, hick, hayseed, maybe a little slow, not the brightest people around, embarrassing to be around.
You wouldn’t want to be anywhere near them. You give thanks every day you’re not them. (It’s a bit of an exaggeration.) So my point is the Republican Party has done everything it can to signal that it would like a new base. My point is that Donald Trump has come along and has put together a coalition of people that the Republican Party claims it wants. He’s running strong with Hispanics and men. He’s running strong with women. His number one support group is disaffected Democrats, the old Reagan Democrats!
These are the people that Republicans tell us are the reason they need to support amnesty. They’re the reason they’ve gotta support the Obama agenda, ’cause they’ve gotta go out and they’ve gotta show people that they are capable of working with Democrats and “getting things done.” I mean, Trump’s coalition is almost exactly what the Republican Party claims it wants, and yet they’re out there doing everything they can to destroy it. Well, it must mean it’s not actually what they want, or it is what they want but they want one of their elites to believe responsible for putting if all together. I don’t know.
It’s all fascinating to me in a whole lot of different ways.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Jeff in Orange Beach, Alabama. Welcome to the program, sir. Great to have you here.
CALLER: Rush, how are you?
RUSH: Good.
CALLER: So good to talk to you.
RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.
CALLER: Well, I was in Biloxi on Saturday night. A dear friend of mine happened to be the chair of the campaign, and I’m an elected official, and I was hesitant to go. But when I got there, I ran into mayors of major cities in Mississippi. I ran into some of the biggest lawyers in Mississippi. And every one of them who were there, were just die hard supporting him. And the conversation was, “We were afraid to be seen because the GOP would be so mad at us that there’d be bad repercussions if we were seen there.” But to be truthful, what he spoke is an undercurrent going on across the country. People are tired of the political correctness, and he just says it the way it is. And everything you’re discussing about who was there and who they think the GOP face there is, they’re wrong. It is a small percentage. But the people that I saw there were diehard voters and diehard Republicans.
RUSH: Well, I know something about this. There were 15,000 people at this event in Biloxi, and Trump… Now, this is an indication. Nobody else does this, Trump spotted a CNN photographer, and he had the presence of mind to know that the CNN photographer was not showing the entire crowd. And from the stage, Trump called this guy out and challenged him to show the entire crowd. “You get your camera, you aim it, and you show everybody who’s here! You show the size of this crowd,” because they weren’t. He called ’em out on it.
That’s something that doesn’t happen. This crowd stood up and cheered. They loved it! Because to many of the people of this country, you’ve also gotta beat the media if you want to win an election. It’s not just the Democrats. You gotta beat the media, because they’re one and the same. There’s a story in the New York Post: “Elites and Media Really Hate Donald Trump’s Voters.” I’ve talked about this in my own way on a number of occasions. That’s true, too. It’s along the lines of the Republican Party not happy with its own base.