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Rush Limbaugh

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RUSH: I want to tell you, in case you haven’t heard this, that Ted Cruz was among the many who have made the trek to Trump Tower in recent days, and there are all kinds of names being bandied about.  Cruz I understand was at Trump Tower for five hours meeting with people. 

He had a one hour meeting with Trump that I hear went very well, by the way, and that Cruz may be, I think is being considered for attorney general.  And I just want to say that if that happened, that would be fabulous.  I can’t think of anybody, maybe Jeff Sessions, but man, you want somebody committed to draining that swamp, the Department of Justice and all of the Obama administration cronyism and corruption that exists in that place. You want somebody that will happily and proudly root it out in a committed — I can’t think of anybody better than Ted Cruz.  And Jeff Sessions coequals here.  I hear Sessions is in line for this, too. 

And Trump has assured everybody that he’s the decider, and only he knows.  By the way, you have to love this.  The New York Times is reporting that his whole transition team is imploding and that people are leaving and that they’re unhappy and that no foreign leaders have called Trump. So Trump gets on Twitter.  He says the failing New York Times continues to lie, foreign leaders from all over the world have called me and he names the countries, and he says my transition team is going smooth as it can be and I am the one who’s going to pick the people.  I’m the one who decides. 

Now, everybody is continuing to make the mistake that they made all through the campaign. Both parties, by the way, made this mistake.  I tried to help people.  I tried to tell ’em you cannot look at anything regarding the Trump candidacy, or now his presidency, the way you’ve looked at the politics before.  He’s not in politics.  He’s not bringing a political organization to the presidency.  He’s not somebody that’s been in elective office.  Why does this this matter?  Let me tell you why it matters, aside from the obvious things. 

Politicians lead their lives for public consumption for the most part.  I think this is why many people think people in politics are phony.  They dress, they speak, they travel, where they go, how they spend leisure time, all of it is rooted around positive political perception within the norms of how that is defined.  Politics is its own business, in a sense.  It has its own protocols and its own ladder for success.  And there are things, like any other business, that you have to do or you have to get close to doing in order to succeed, it is thought. 

Trump’s blown all this up, is the point.  But tax returns are the best example I can give you of this.  Everybody in politics and everybody who thinks they’re gonna get into politics before they get into it, starts structuring their life for the eventual public disclosure of things, because it’s required.  And so they file taxes that are designed to look okay to the public and to the media.  They have the requisite amount of money going to charity.  They present themselves as one of us or as close to that as they can. 

Well, now, in Trump’s case, I can assure you that the idea of running for president is a new idea to Trump.  When he was filing his taxes and running his business all through the nineties and in the early part of the 2000s, I am very confident in saying that he wasn’t filing his tax return with the idea that it would ever be publicly scrutinized by people deciding whether or not to vote for him.  But everybody in politics does.  And that’s just one example.  Everything politicians do is designed to survive or thrive the kind of public scrutiny it gets from the media and contemporaries and voters. 

Trump has not done that.  Now, the people in politics say that if you want to go anywhere in our business, you have to change.  If you decide to come into our business you’re gonna have to do it the way we’ve always done it, we the consultants, we who have been successfully been elected and hold office, and Trump has blown all that up.  And he says no, and he hasn’t tried to conform with the Washington-New York-Boston political corridor at all, and he’s not now. 

But they continue to insist that he do it.  And when he doesn’t, that’s when the media implodes, starts writing stories about how Trump doesn’t get it, Trump doesn’t understand, Trump is disrespecting the media, because the media demands and expects to be treated with a certain amount of deference, a lot of deference, and Trump is not treating them this way.  And they don’t know how to deal with it.  They don’t know how to deal with somebody who’s not going to play according to the playbook. 

Look, politics, the establishment, it is a very, very tight knit group, and it is made up of a bunch of people who do nothing but conform.  That, in fact, is the coin of the realm, conforming to the norms, conforming to the what you have to dos and what you don’t do, conforming to what the powers that be decree must be done.  None of that applies now.  And the people who demand that, or in their whole lives have lived it and now expect it, don’t know how to adapt to somebody like Donald Trump, who has no interest.

The reason he ran is to blow all that up.  The reason he wants to be president is to get rid of all of these conforming protocols that make everybody in this business robotic, no way.  He doesn’t want to conform in this way.  He’s gonna stay who he is.  He’s gonna do the things he set out to do.  He’s gonna get them done the best way he knows how, based on his own experiences of success and achievement. 

The people over here in the establishment and in the political corridors, political consultants, elected officials, lobbyists, you name it, are bamboozled.  They don’t know how to react to this.  They have, all their lives, lived with everybody in their group conforming and acknowledging and behaving according to the playbook or the rules.  And when somebody doesn’t and succeeds, they’re lost.  And that’s where we are here. 

In their world, everything Trump does, everything he’s done spells defeat.  Everything, from his opening announcement.  He shouldn’t have survived that and did.  He shouldn’t have survived any of the October Surprise things.  He shouldn’t have survived the Access Hollywood video, but he did.  They can’t figure it out.  It doesn’t make sense to them.  So they’re going to continue trying to destroy Trump the same way they’ve been trying to since his announcement. 

They have not learned that it doesn’t work.  They will not learn that it doesn’t work because they don’t know any other way.  It’s that tight knit, and Trump is in there blowing it all up, for example, the transition.  You’re supposed to go out and get a bunch of old Washington hands.  You’re supposed to hire people who have done this for previous presidents, have worked themselves for previous administrations, have been hirers and firers. 

Trump’s not doing any of this.  He just got rid of a bunch of people who were starting to do it that way.  The real reason that the Chris Christie national security team is gone is because Christie was doing what Christie knows.  Christie was going out and getting people who are part of that corridor, that establishment. He was going out and getting lobbyists and others, but he thought friendly lobbyists. 

You know, there are Republican and Democrat lobbyists.  To Trump they’re all a problem.  And he was going out and he was putting together a team, national security team based on people with previous national security experience, and Trump doesn’t want any part of that ’cause he doesn’t want to be sabotaged.  Trump’s smart enough to know that over half of Washington doesn’t want him there. 

And he’s not gonna purposely hire any of those people to be in a position to do him harm.  It’s no more complicated than that.  But they fully expect him to do that.  In their world, there are only a few people who know how to staff the West Wing.  There are only a few people that know how to put together a national security team. 

There are only a few people that know how to vet people for AG, for commerce secretary.  And if you don’t use them, you don’t have a prayer of putting together a working administration.  And Trump is throwing all of that out and saying, “I know who I want in these jobs, but what I don’t want is people who are gonna be in a position to sabotage me or suborn me.”  ‘Cause he’s not stupid.  He knows full well. I don’t know what percentage of it is, the number of people who don’t want him there. 

Oh.  There’s Larry Arnn on TV.  You know, Larry Arnn, I hear, of Hillsdale College, is up for education secretary.  Do you know how fabulous that would be?  You know, when I hear these names being floated, I think of all these Never Trumpers who would not be open, they said Trump is gonna destroy conservatism, Trump’s gonna destroy the Republican Party.  If you look at the people that Trump is considering, I dare say that he’s got a greater list of potential cabinet members than a straight-down-the-line Republican would put together. 

I’m not on the transition team.  I’m not on any team.  I haven’t spoken to Trump since he was here for an interview, whenever that phone call was.  (interruption)  Why do you — what?  Whoa.  Well.  They are guys I would pick.  The staff is telling me, “You seem to know a lot about what’s going on.  Are you part of the –”  I don’t know anything going on.  I’m telling you, I know who Trump is.  I know who the left is.  I know who the Washington establishment is.  I know how they are, how they think, what they do, what they expect. I know how they try to ruin people, how they promote people, how they sabotage things.  I know this.  I haven’t been sitting here as a potted plant for 30 years. 

So Larry Arnn’s being interviewed on Fox right now because his name’s been bandied about.  Can you imagine if Larry Arnn ended up as education secretary? You put him in there at education and Cruz or Jeff Sessions as attorney general — look, I’m here to tell you that the names I have seen floated are more solid and better in terms of conservatism than your average Republican nominee would put together.  You know why? 

Your average Republican nominee would pick some Democrats.  Yes, to be fair, and to be magnanimous, and to reach across the aisle. Even if a Republican were ever to win in this dramatic a fashion, which is doubtful, but even if a Republican were to have won, we still would have had some Democrat names being floated, and we would be assured we can trust these are good Democrats, these are people that believe in the greatness of America. We’d been sitting here thinking, oh, my God, sabotaged and screwed again. 

And that’s not what’s happening.  And because it’s not happening, it is Washington, official Washington that’s imploding.  It’s the media that is imploding.  It’s Obamacare that’s gonna implode.  It’s the Iran policy that’s gonna implode.  It is our immigration policy that is going to implode.  And that’s why all of the supporters of these various things are imploding.  And they’re reporting it that Trump is imploding, that his transition team is imploding.  And it’s not.  Trump is getting rid of the deadweight.  Trump, when he makes mistakes with hires, he fixes it immediately. 

We are witnessing insiders who are being shut out react to being shut out, and human nature is very easy to predict here.  If you’re an insider, if you think you’re a power broker, if you think you’ve been close to power all your life and therefore would be attractive to, say, a new President Trump, and you’re not picked, well, you’re gonna be righteously indignant. And you’re gonna think Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, why, here I am with vast experience, I’m a power broker, I’m a power maker, and Trump’s overlooking you.  Well, you’re not gonna sit there and say there’s anything wrong with you.  There has to be something wrong with Trump.  

And that’s what we’re witnessing here right now as the effort is ongoing to make you and everybody think that Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, the country is at great risk because of this, and that nobody knows what they’re doing because Trump doesn’t have any political experience. It’s a dog and pony show out there and it’s a disaster waiting to happen! That’s what they want you to believe.  It’s the exact opposite.  This is the new normal. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome has already reached escape velocity, and the guy hasn’t even been sworn in.  Now, I’ll give you as an example: Trump leaving Trump Tower, his home last night and going to 21 for dinner.  The media has had a legitimate conniption over not being told, over not being taken, over not having a pool of reporter there or a series of reporters.  The AP is using as their example, “We were there when JFK got shot.  We were there when Reagan was shot.  We need to be there.”

That’s their reason.  That’s… Isn’t that cool of them, the reason they want to be there?  But I’m holding here in my formerly nicotine-stained fingers the New York Times December 26th, 2008, during the Obama transition period.  “In the news-free zone that is Barack Obama’s preinauguration Hawaiian vacation, this passes for a bulletin: The president-elect ditched his ‘press pool’ of media minders to take his daughters to a water park on Friday morning.

Now, was the media upset over that?  Was the media all over itself, telling everybody else, “Obama ditched us! Obama disrespects us! Obama’s not behaving with protocol!”  No.  You know what they wrote in the New York Times?  “In making his dash — with his Secret Service security detail, to be sure — Mr. Obama drew attention both to the seemingly odd but important rituals of the presidential (and prepresidential) bubble and to just how much this very private public man chafes under its constraints.”

So excuses were made when Obama ditched his “bubble” to take his kids out to a water park.  When he ditched the media, when he didn’t take ’em along when he was on vacation in Hawaii, it was understandable, because this is very, “very private public man chaf[ing] under its constraints;” we have to cut him some slack.  And then I’ve got one here from the AP December 1st, 2000.  The same thing, same thing.  

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