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RUSH: Now to the audio sound bites. Rich Lowry on with Megyn Kelly last night on the Fox News Channel. She says, “When Palin gave the endorsement, many said that Trump has won over the conservative base, that hers is an endorsement from the conservative base, and you and the others at National Review stand up tonight and say, not so?”

LOWRY: The point we’re making is, it’s up to conservatives who think that Donald Trump, whatever his virtues are, doesn’t truly understand the ideas and principles that make this country great. It’s up to those conservatives to stand up and say, “No. Sorry. We oppose this.” If you truly are a conservative, you believe in ideas and principles. It’s not just attitudes. It’s not just who you dislike. It’s limited government, it’s the Constitution, it’s liberty. Those are the things that truly make this country special. And they are basically afterthoughts to Donald Trump.

RUSH: He continued with this…

LOWRY: He has been on the other side on big, hot-button, defining issues like abortion, gun control, taxes, even on immigration. He is really conning people. This is someone who three or four short years ago was criticizing nice, pleasant, polite Mitt Romney for being too harsh on immigration. It wouldn’t surprise me if one day Donald Trump, if he gets the nomination, wakes up the next day and says, “You know what? Deporting people? The best people in the country told me it’s not possible. Forget it.”

RUSH: So the all-out effort is on now to convince you, if you are in the Trump camp, that you are making a grave error, that if you are doing this because you think Trump is a conservative, National Review wants you to believe that Trump is not a conservative and therefore you shouldn’t fall for anything that he’s saying. (interruption) What was that, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption) Mr. Snerdley says, “We’ve heard all this before.” We have heard this, but not in this format. I mean, an entire magazine is not devoted — every page — to the concept.

Yeah, people have run around, “Hey, Trump’s not a conservative. Hey, he voted for Hillary,” or, “Hey, he loves Hillary Clinton. She went to his wedding,” or, hey, “He’s made donations!” People have been saying this all campaign, and it isn’t mattering. Do you know why it doesn’t matter? (interruption) Well… (interruption) Well, wait… (interruption) What? (interruption) Okay, well, Snerdley says, “It’s not ’cause they don’t read National Review,” but it’s not just National Review saying this. I mean, any number of others are saying it.

Jeb Bush has been trying to say it. John Kasich’s been trying to say it. Any number of Republicans. The bunch of conservative pundits elsewhere have been trying to warn everybody that Trump is not a conservative, and don’t fall for it. Is Trump running as one? Look, I’m back to the makeup of the Trump coalition. The majority of it is probably Republican, but it’s broad-based. I mean, you’ve got a lot of people in the so-called Trump coalition, 20% Democrats. Demographically, it’s spread’s pretty broad. An argument that Trump isn’t conservative is not gonna matter. That’s not why they’re supporting him in the first place.

But National Review’s gotta put down a marker. They are establishing who is and who isn’t a conservative, and that’s one of their roles. But I don’t know, folks. I mean, was Mitt Romney conservative? McCain? Is McCain conservative? (interruption) I know. McCain hated conservatives. (impression) “That’s right, Limbaugh! I had you in mind. Ha. Ha-ha-ha!” Let’s move on to audio sound bite number seven. Roger Stone. Now, Roger Stone is… How would you describe the guy? He’s a raconteur. He’s a sometime Republican consultant.

He had ostensibly been working on Trump campaign, then left it early last fall. He was formerly married to a woman named Ann Stone back in the nineties. Ann Stone. Does the name ring a bell? She was leader of a group called Republican Women for Pro-Choice, or Pro-Choice Republican Women or some such thing. She was one of the… They’re divorced now. She was one of the early prominent Republican women trying to drive the pro-lifers out of the Republican Party. She was prominent at the Republican convention in 1992. Stone has been known as a consultant who likes to play tricks on opposing candidates. Megyn Kelly went out, found him, too, and brought him in last night and asked him, “Is what National Review is doing damaging to Trump?”

STONE: …his campaign being a conservative insurrection, an uprising with the fact that he is, uh, poised to sweep through these primaries. Everyone who signed that either will, they’re all friends of mine and they’re good people, but they’re purists. There’s plenty of red meat, conservative red meat in Donald Trump’s platform on immigration. You might have the first president in my lifetime who’s actually unencumbered and actually able to cut federal spending, rebuild our military, and make the country great again.

RUSH: Megyn Kelly then said, “Well, they’re not really challenging your assertions about Trump making America great again. They’re saying they don’t believe it.”

STONE: I agree with William Buckley, the founder of the National Review, who once said, “I’m for the conservative candidate who can win.” Donald Trump has crossover appeal to blue-collar Democrats, to African-Americans, to non-Republicans because he is free to criticize both Republicans and Democrats. That’s why he is potentially the strongest candidate. I first met him, by the way, when I was organizing Ronald Reagan’s campaign in New York in 1979 and he and his father were raising money for Ronald Reagan. So don’t tell me he hasn’t been on the front lines, because he has. On the Second Amendment, there’s only one candidate for president with a concealed carry permit, and I guarantee you he’s packing heat right now.

RUSH: All right, so that’s Roger Stone for Trump, who is basically challenging one of the premises put forth by National Review. He’s bigger and beyond conservatism, and so you can’t really hit him with any strength or lasting effect from that focal point. Once again, CNN, in the midst of all this, is still trying to figure out where I come down on all this, and I find this fascinating. I played it earlier. Play it again. Audio sound bite number nine. This is Tom Foreman on Anderson Cooper 360 last night.


FOREMAN: Trump has enjoyed oceans of praise on conservative radio.

RUSH ARCHIVE: The last 10 minutes of what Trump did last night sealed the deal. The sincerity, the appreciation for the audience.

FOREMAN: But now that he’s taking on his closest challenger, Tea Party favorite Ted Cruz, the tide is turning.

RUSH ARCHIVE: A genuine conservative, even in the Republican field, would not go after Cruz this way.

FOREMAN: As the months passed and the battle with Cruz became inevitable, the conservative talkers sharpened their words, and the dean of conservative talk, Rush Limbaugh?

RUSH ARCHIVE: I think Trump is making a strategic error in the way he criticizes Cruz. But, folks, it’s unrealistic to expect that they’re not gonna go after each other.

FOREMAN: The conservative talkers will almost certainly hurt Trump if they keep hitting him this way. But if he looks like he can win the nomination and the White House, they could change their tune again. After all, they’ve been mad at the Democrats a whole lot longer.

RUSH: Sticking with CNN, this is Dana Bash on CNN’s Newsroom this morning with the infobabe Carol Costello. And they’re talking about National Review’s entire issue devoted to stopping Trump. And Carol Costello says to Dana Bash… She’s the… She used to be the congressional then the White House, now she’s the chief political correspondent. She’s climbing the ladder there at CNN. And Costello says, “So what do you think the impact of National Review is gonna be on Trump?”

BASH: You saw John McCain had problems in 2008. Mitt Romney first in 2008 and then 2012 never really got the heart and soul of the base behind him. And in large part, it’s because he changed his position on abortion. He changed his position on other issues, uh, that have been really important to conservatives. That has been thrown out the window for Donald Trump. He was outspokenly pro-choice. He has been outspoken in his history, even in a book that he published, wanting a single payer universal health care system. And so much of the conservative base, they just don’t care. It’s not that they don’t know, but they don’t care.

RUSH: Okay. Why don’t they care? This is the thing. Let’s take that for the moment as true. There’s an explanation for it, and that’s what… Actually, if I may be honest, that’s the focal point for me in this whole thing. I’m trying to explain to myself so I can pass it on to you why certain things that used to matter don’t now. And this is a great example. Although I’m… She makes a big deal here about, you know, Trump book he published wanting single payer, but it doesn’t matter. Why doesn’t it matter? There are two immediate answers that come to mind.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay. So here’s Dana Bash on CNN last night, and she’s saying Trump was outspokenly pro-choice. He has been outspoken in his history in a book that he published, wanting single payer universal health care system, and much of the conservative base, they know it, they just don’t care. It’s not that they don’t know. They just don’t care. Trump was, as I understand it — this dates back to 2000, the year 2000, he’s toying around with the Reform Party ticket. There have been 16, 15 years go by. A lot more is known about it. Trump’s not talking about it now.


But beyond that, the Republican Party nominated somebody that essentially gave us Obamacare. You know, you can sit there and say, “But Trump is for single payer!” Well, the Republican Party didn’t stop Obama from doing Obamacare. I mean, what are these people supposed to do? Yeah, in the first term they didn’t have the votes to stop Obama, but then they ran for office in 2010, they ran for office in 2014 promising us that they would use the power of the purse, they would defund it, they would try to repeal it, and every effort they made was phony.

These people are not stupid. Why continue to invest in a Republican Party which has openly said it’s not gonna stop Obama? You can talk about Trump all you want. It’s not Trump that’s sidling up with the Democrats on amnesty. And if you don’t think that’s the number one issue that’s animating all of this, then you’ve got something really big to learn. That issue pretty much encompasses everything else people are supporting in Trump. It defines the massive change, the rejection of the two party status quo on all of this.

So at this stage, you know, whether somebody’s conservative or not conservative enough, we’re so far beyond that right now. I’m talking about Trump’s supporters. I’ve got my analyst hat here on, folks. I could be wrong. But this is what fascinates me, trying to understand why people do what they do. My whole career has been devoted to understanding the left and telling you who they are and passing it on to you so you’ll recognize it, be able to stop it. I have said for I don’t know how long, I don’t know how many years I’ve been saying, the single best thing we could do is educate everybody to ideology so they can spot liberalism ’cause it’s openly destructive.

We’re living seven years of the destruction of liberalism, undiluted, concentrated liberal destruction. We don’t have to speak theoretically. We don’t have to issue warnings. All we’ve got to do is explain to people why they can’t get a job, explain to people why open borders are happening, explain to people why the Iranians are getting a nuke, explain to people why 94 million Americans are not working and can’t find a job. There are demonstrative reasons, and you can trace every damn one of them to the Democrat Party and the American left, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, all of them. And we don’t get one syllable of that from the Republican Party.

So what are these people supposed to do? They understand immigration; it’s not hard. It’s called the law and people are breaking it, and the people breaking it are being rewarded and given things that the people who are not breaking the law are having to pay for. It’s not hard to understand this. “But Donald Trump, Donald Trump, he wants single payer.” Sorry, we’ve already got it, if you haven’t noticed. We’ve got Obamacare, and we’re heading down that road already. And who gave it to us? Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats, not Donald Trump. And who didn’t try to singularly stop it or repeal it when they told us they would? GOP. What are people supposed to do?

“Well, Trump’s not a conservative. I don’t know.” They’re not even thinking about that. This is serious stuff to these people. In addition to their livelihood and their careers being destroyed, they’re being blamed for everything because they’re racist. They’re being told they’re bigots. They’re being told they’re sexists. They’re being told that they are the problem. They are being told by the Democrat Party and the American media that they have been the problem since the founding of this country, and they are openly told, “We’re taking it back from you. We’re taking it away from you.”

And so college educations are being perverted with this wacko studies and that wacko studies. This has been, for seven years, a sitting duck of an opponent waiting to be blown to smithereens for all time. American and worldwide liberalism. We’re living it. We don’t have to warn people. We don’t have to say: “if you’re not careful, we’re gonna end up,” ’cause it’s happening. So somebody comes along, gonna put the brakes on all of it or seems to, and massive change in direction. It’s not hard to understand this. But if your livelihood depends on — ah, never mind.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Back to the audio sound bites. We got a few of these here and we’ll get your phone calls in interest wrap up the very, very busy broadcast hour.

Ana Navarro is a Republican strategist. She’s a Republican consultant. She is on CNN all the time giving the Republican perspective on things. She lives in Miami. She travels though. Wherever there’s a camera she’ll go. I’m just kidding. I met Anna at a cigar dinner one night and she gave me the business about the Republican Party and immigration. I was missing the boat, better get my mind right on it. And she was funny.


So she was on CNN New Day today, the show with Alisyn Camerota and responded to the National Review entire magazine, the entire issue devoted to taking out Donald Trump. And Alisyn Camerota, formerly of Fox News, by the way, who then went over to CNN. So the question is was she a liberal and hiding it at Fox, or is she a conservative and is a liberal faking it at CNN? I mean, these are the big questions. This is the kind of thing people want to know. So she’s talking to Ana Navarro. She said, “What do you think of National Review coming out with a special edition basically devoted to proving that Trump is not a true conservative?”

NAVARRO: My only question to them and to conservatives now taking this line is, what took you so long? It’s almost a little bit too late. And, you know, I think Donald Trump has handled it, frankly, very well. He basically doesn’t deny it. He says, “Yeah, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve given money to Democrats. I’ve invited the Clintons to my wedding. Yeah, it’s true. But this is where I am now.” I’m not sure how much of an effect it’s going to have now. It should have been nipped in the bud months ago.

RUSH: You know, she’s speaking for a lot of people. Where was this back in September? Where was this back in August? It’s too late now. And have you heard Trump’s tweets on this? He’s had a series of tweets. In fact, some of them go back to last year, or maybe it was April of this year. In April of this year Donald Trump was actually tweeting that he felt very bad for National Review, it was losing so many readers and we needed to be helping it. He was urging people to help National Review because it was very important that it survived for the conservative movement.

Now, that was back in April. His tweets now are essentially — I’m paraphrasing it, I don’t have it in front of me, but basically, “You know, it’s a dying paper. It’s a dying paper, and it’s a shame to see, but it’s a last-gasp effort they’re trying to save themselves at my expense, but they don’t have any influence anymore. Nobody cares.” Typical Trump response. Ana Navarro says, “Hey, Trump’s admitting that he gave money to Hillary, admitting that he invited her to the wedding. That was then; this is now.”

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