RUSH: Okay, let’s JIP Trump. Trump just started in Portland, Maine. Let’s see what he does, if anything, with Romney.
TRUMP: — a little bit of a thing called a debate.
HECKLER: (interruption)
TRUMP: Get him out, please. Get him out.
RUSH: Trump people going nuts here. They just threw out a protester.
TRUMP: What are they doing, right? What’s the purpose? What are they doing? Well, it gets a little television time, I guess. But, you know, I was going to the debate, I was going directly in from Florida, I’m down in Florida, we’re campaigning, we’re doing really well in Florida. We’re campaigning against a guy that has the worst voting record in the history of the state of Florida, named Rubio. He’s — I call him lightweight. He’s a lightweight. But got the worst record in the history of Florida. So I don’t know, I should do well there, let’s hope I do well there, I love Florida.
But I was going to Detroit, and I said to my people, “I have to stop in Maine. I felt so — I just had to stop in Maine.”
AUDIENCE: (cheers)
TRUMP: So I wouldn’t say that it’s a very direct route, would you say? Instead of going this way, I went this way and this way and that is good. I’m so glad. And, you know, to put —
AUDIENCE: (cheers)
TRUMP: — to put this incredible sold-out crowd and you have thousands of people outside, to put this crowd together in a period of, what, 24 hours? And Maine is amazing. You know, Maine is one of the most beautiful places on earth. And people don’t realize how large your landmass is. I was talking to Paul. As large as all of New England —
RUSH: No, no. Turn Trump down. He knows everybody’s waiting to hear what he says about Romney, just stringing everybody along here. This is smart showmanship. Just hang in there, folks.
TRUMP: — with great interest as we get to, you know, go down the line, we’ve had some amazing results, and right nearby with New Hampshire it was an amazing, incredible thing, and, by the way, they — every single time I went to New Hampshire, whenever I met with people they’d always say number one problem, number one problem, heroin. Number one problem. And I’d say, how is that possible? You look at these beautiful fields and the beautiful little roads and everything’s so beautiful, and it was the number one problem, and it comes from our southern border, and we’re gonna close up that border and we’re gonna build a wall and we’re gonna stop the drugs from coming in, believe me. We’re gonna stop.
And people are gonna come in to our country but they’re going to come in legally. They’re gonna come in legally. But we’re gonna solve the problem. But, you know, I watch these pundits, and when I first started, my wife Melania and I, we came down the escalator, right, and I first started, and it was an amazing thing. I said, you know, we have to do something, because we have people that don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing in running our country. And I got some of that today, you know, just in hearing some of these things, but they don’t know what they’re doing, we have to do it.
And it takes guts to run for president. I’m not a politician. I’m not a politician. All talk, no action, nothing gets done. And, anyway, we’re coming down, and I said to myself, you know, there are so many things, and then I watched the pundits, and they said, “Oh, Trump, I don’t know, we have some great talent running.” And trying to figure out where, where, what’s the talent, what’s the talent. But, you know, you come down and you do it and you start talking about trade and you see what happens with trade. Trade has been — trade has been such a disaster.
But the pundits all said, you know, I came out at 3%, first one. My wife said, “You know if you run you’re gonna win, but you actually have to run. You can’t say you’re gonna run because they won’t poll it. But even if they do poll it people still say you’re not gonna run.” She said, “But if you run, you’re gonna win.” I said, “Oh, she’s my pollster, she’s my pollster.” I paid her less money, but she’s my — she’s better than the pollster. So you know what happened, I started at three, the first day or something, I was at three, which I wasn’t exactly thrilled about, then it went up to six and went up to 12, went up to 18, and then it kept going up.
And every time I went up the pundits would say, “He’s plateaued, you know, plateaued. Well, he’s always gonna get six, that’s a six solid group.” Then I went to 12. “Well, you know, it’s a solid group.” Then I went up to 24. And they said — and don’t forget, that’s with 17 people. We had 17 people. That’s a lot, 24 with 17 people is pretty good. So we went up to 24, and they said, “Well, that’s the max. There can’t be any more.” Then we went up to 28, 32. So CNN just came out with a poll: Trump, 49.
AUDIENCE: (cheers)
TRUMP: That’s high. That’s high. And, you know, I’m very proud of it, because this is not a plateau. This is a movement. We have a movement going on, folks. TIME magazine did a story recently, a couple of weeks ago talking about what’s going on. And they’re never seen anything like it. People have never seen. They say actually — and I don’t think I’m exaggerating this at all, and I don’t want to exaggerate, but many of the great writers, of which there are very few because the media is among the most dishonest people I’ve ever dealt with, but they said, they said that in the history of this country there’s never been anything like this, what’s happening. We were in Huntsville, Alabama, the other day, we had 35,000 people, 35,000 people. We were — we went to Arkansas, which you saw —
HECKLER: (interruption)
TRUMP: Is that another one, ay-yi-yi. Get ’em out. Get ’em out. Get ’em out. They just don’t stop. All right, get ’em out. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Terrible. Incredible.
RUSH: Another protester.
TRUMP: You can be nice. But if you’re nice they’ll say, “Oh, you were so soft.” Then you can be vicious. “Get outta here,” right? And then they’ll say you were too harsh. So I’ve developed an — “All right, please get ’em out.”
RUSH: And they’re being thrown out.
TRUMP: I love you, too. I love you, too. I love you, too. And, by the way, you know, I’m self-funding my campaign. I’m putting up all my money. I’m not — but you have to do — all I want, I don’t want your money. I just want one thing, your vote on Saturday, get out and vote.
RUSH: Get outta here.
TRUMP: Don’t forget, I did that big, long turn, slightly long, big turn, so you can get out to vote, okay? That’s the least you could do.
AUDIENCE: (cheers)
RUSH: He went really out of his way to get to Maine so they should vote for him.
TRUMP: Thank you very much. So our country and our theme is make America great again. And over the last little while, I’ve met so many people, thousands and thousands and of thousands people we have like this. We’re only confined by the size of the room.
RUSH: He’s got about four minutes to get to Romney and we gotta bump out here, folks. Just letting you know in advance.
TRUMP: I have more confidence in this country now than I’ve ever had before. I have seen, I mean, millions of people really because when you get 35, 40,000 people for rallies — and we have by far the biggest rallies, I will say that. And Bernie is second, he’s second, but he’s a distant second, but he is second, I have to give him credit for that. But we have by far the biggest, and I see by far the most people, and this country has unbelievable people that love our country. Just remember that.
And I want to see the day in the not too distant future when Apple makes their iPhones in this country and not in China and all of these other places.
AUDIENCE: (cheers)
TRUMP: Now, I heard and I saw just a little bit of it, but I heard that Mitt Romney made a fairly long speech.
AUDIENCE: (booing)
TRUMP: And I mean honestly I’ll just address it quickly ’cause it’s irrelevant. Look, Mitt is a failed candidate. He failed. He failed horribly. The third debate —
AUDIENCE: (commotion)
TRUMP: — he failed badly. That was a race, I have to say, folks, that should have been won. That was a race that absolutely should have been won. And I don’t know what happened to him. He disappeared. He disappeared, and I wasn’t happy about it — I’ll be honest — because I am not a fan of Barack Obama, and that was a race and I backed Mitt Romney. I backed him. You can see how loyal he is. He was begging for my endorsement. I could have said, “Mitt, drop to your knees;” he would have dropped to his knees.
AUDIENCE: (roaring laughter)
TRUMP: He was begging!
RUSH: There you have it.
TRUMP: He was begging me. And did you see how great…? He said, oh, I’m not big like him. He’s a great businessman, all that stuff. Well, since then I’ve done much better. And now he tries to demean me. But we’ll talk about that in a second. Mitt was thinking about running again. He ran a horrible campaign. It was a campaign that should have never been lost. You’re running against a failed president. He came up with the 47%! He demeaned 47% of the people in our country, right, the forty…? The famous 47%.
Once that was said… I’ll be honest: Once that was said, a lot of people thought it was over for him. Then the last month and a half he disappeared. And I called his people. I said, “You have to do yourself a favor.” Obama, say what you want. He was on Jay Leno, he was on David Letterman, he was all over the place the last three or four weeks! Mitt was looking for zoning for a nine-car garage or something in California, right?
AUDIENCE: (laughter)
TRUMP: I said, “What’s he doing? Who cares about a garage? You’re running for president!” And Mitt was a disaster as a candidate, so what happened — and it was very strong, and I think if the press goes back, they’ll see it. When I heard he was running again, and I wasn’t sure I was gonna be running. But I was very, very strong to Mitt and to everybody and publicly. Not to talk to him, ’cause I didn’t even want to talk to him. I was so disappointed in him, because he let us down. He let us down.
You know, it’s one thing you lose and you work and you work and you go. He let us down. He should have won. Something happened to him. He went away. He was gone. He was horrible in the third debate. It was a horrible… Something happened. I don’t know what happened. Maybe someday they’ll write a book. His campaign guy was terrible, terrible. He had a terrible campaign manager, who’s always on television. Stuart Stevens or something. He’s always on television knocking everybody.
The guy ran one of the worst campaigns in the history of modern politics. And Mitt ran probably was the worst one that most people have seen, ’cause most people thought that the Republican candidate would win. So when Mitt started raising his head a few months ago, I was very strong. I said, “Mitt Romney should not run. He’s a choke artist,” and I said it very strongly. I wanted to keep him in. And then Jeb Bush actually convinced Mitt not to run. Can you imagine? Jeb! Jeb sold him!
AUDIENCE: (laughter)
TRUMP: Jeb! He’s a good salesmen. See, now that he’s out I’ll say, “Jeb is a good salesman,” right? He’s a high-energy salesman.
AUDIENCE: (wild laughter)
TRUMP: But Mitt was afraid of Jeb because he was afraid that Jeb would get the money and Jeb would get whatever and, you know, I wasn’t… I wasn’t afraid. I wasn’t afraid of Jeb, I can tell you that. So what happened is —
RUSH: Okay, folks, I have to bump out here. We have to go to our obscene profit time-out. We pretty much have it there, treating the Romney speech today as an irrelevancy from somebody who has become irrelevant and it’s really not worthy of much comment. And you put him and Jeb Bush together and do high-energy salesmanship and you lose to Democrats and who wants any more of that? So that’s pretty much the summary. He’ll keep going, but we have to take a brief time-out.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right. Our microphones are in Portland, Maine, still. We’ll go back and JIP Trump. He’s now gotten back to Romney and Rubio. So here’s a couple more minutes of Trump today.
TRUMP: — on the west side of Manhattan, that I built buildings all over the Manhattan. He didn’t mention any of this. He talked about a beef and he talked about a water company — which, by the way, I still have! I supply all my clubs with the water. You know, numerous of those things I have. The magazine, other things.
HECKLER: (disruption)
AUDIENCE: (booing)
TRUMP: Get him outta here. Get him out. Get him out.
AUDIENCE: (commotion)
TRUMP: Hey, by the way, speaking of Mexico, I won the Hispanic vote by far in Nevada. Right?
AUDIENCE: (roaring cheers)
TRUMP: We won. We won the Hispanic vote in Nevada in the polls.
RUSH: It must have been an Hispanic protester they just threw out.
TRUMP: We won Nevada, we won South Carolina, we won New Hampshire; then we had the big, big Tuesday where we won a tremendous number. And I have to tell you this. So ultimately Mitt chickened out, and now he’s saying… He probably sees Hillary is very weak, and now he’s saying, “I wish… I wish I tried it.” But ultimately he didn’t because he would have gotten beaten very badly. But I’ll tell you what. A couple things were mentioned that we have to discuss. First of all, when he talks about me. I wrote just a couple of them down.
When he talks about me, they don’t want to talk about a 92-story buildings all over the place. They don’t want to talk about the Bank of America building in San Francisco, 1290 Avenue of the Americas. They don’t want to talk about the West Side Railroad Yards where I built a city on the West Side of Manhattan, a tremendous city on the West Side of Manhattan. They don’t want to talk about 40 Wall Street and all the buildings. They want to talk about… water, which I still have! I supply all my clubs. I have a water company.
They want to talk about a magazine, and I have a magazine. It goes to all my clubs. They want to talk about little, tiny things, wherever you can find… By the way, a school, little deal? I loved it when it was there. They called it Trump University, Trump Initiative. But I will tell you just so you understand on the school: The school had 98% approval rating, but you had an attorney that felt, “Oh, maybe I can sue Trump and get something.” The school had a 98%… In other words, 98% of the people that took the courses, we signed report cards.
That’s why you can’t settle a case like that. You put somebody up on the stand. “Did you write this?” The most beautiful thing. They did a commercial, they took it down where two people were going and saying negative and then we showed them the statement that they wrote. They had to take the commercial down because 98% of the people that took the course, that took the courses, said really wonderful things about it. The other thing is it’s got an A — an A! — from the Better Business Bureau. So I say, “How do I settle a case like this?”
AUDIENCE MEMBER: It’d be a B+ now!
TRUMP: A B+ would be okay. Too. A B+ would be okay, too. But we did better than a B+ so —
RUSH: All right, there you have it. So Donald Trump… He said he’s gonna go through a couple of things point by point that Romney mentioned, and one of them obviously is his businesses that have failed and the Trump University. He responded to that.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: We are not gonna go back to Donald Trump. We’ve got the flavor, what we wanted, how he was gonna react to Mitt Romney. I’ll just pass along one thing that happened during the commercial break, and it’s still going on, the issue that he decided to refute Romney on was China and trade. Romney attempting to say that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing in trade would cost everybody money, China will end up winning.
And Trump took it on, and the way he did it was to explain that he knows more about trade and business than Romney, and he’s got a store that’s worth more than Romney’s worth. And nobody believed that his store on Fifth Avenue could be worth that much, three appraisers went in and found out it’s worth five times what Romney’s worth, independent appraisers.
Now he’s describing how he bought the old post office in Washington, and it languished for 35 years and everybody wanted to develop it, nobody could, but he’s come along and done it, finest hotel the world, they’re gonna open two years early, did it with the GSA. The point is he’s describing this to his audience there, explaining the bid process and how he did it and how he does his business.
I don’t care, folks, whatever you think, Trump is explaining this to people in ways that candidates don’t explain how they do what they do. The politicians don’t explain how they do what they do. Trump is going rhyme and reason, verse, step by step, the bid process, here’s what I was up against, this is what I had to do, this is what I did. You can check it. You can call anybody.
But the bottom line is that when it’s all over, nobody doubts he knows what he’s doing is the bottom line. Nobody doubts that he’s extremely competent in the way he tells the story. He brings this crowd along with him step by step. What he had to do, what other people had failed in doing. He gives them insight into how he does deals in his business. Whether it’s smoke and mirrors or not is not relevant. The point is the crowd is there assembled and people watching on TV cannot help but conclude the guy is an expert in this and does do deals that he wins. And that’s how he’s refuting Romney on doesn’t know what he’s doing in trade and dealing with China and that kind of stuff.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: You’ve heard it said that Reagan went over the heads of the media to get to the American people. I would say Trump is kind of going under the media to get to them, and I will explain… (interruption) No, no. Nothing about knees.