RUSH: Trump got some action, because right now Fox is just reporting that the office of the Director of National Intelligence has just blown that Wall Street Journal story to smithereens. “Any suggestion that the U.S. intelligence community is withholding information and not providing the best possible intelligence to the president and his national security team is not true,” and whatever else they went on to say. Fox is reporting it right now.

That was fake news that started out as a news alert last night, and then it got blown up today. They ran the story based on the news alert last night, and then people reacted to it. It turns out that it was something that happens all the time that was changed slightly to make it look like it was unprecedented, when none of it actually was true.

Let me grab a quick phone call here. John in San Diego. Great to have you, sir. What did you think?

CALLER: Wow! That was a heck of a… That was… I turned the radio on expecting to hear you and I hear our president, and I was shocked by what I heard. It… It’s about time! I mean, he was just toying with them with the truth. It’s easy to do when you have the truth on your side, and these guys are just in a… Their hair is on fire and they don’t know what to do. I love it. It made my whole day.

RUSH: What’d you think about the way he answers the questions? I mean, they asked him the questions and he just… Were you satisfied with that, the way he answered the questions, the substance of what he said in answering the questions?

CALLER: Yes, about 95%. It’s off the cuff. When you have the truth on your side it’s really easy to answer questions, and… You know, it’s really simple when you have the truth on your side. When you have to lie abou, you know, every other question? When you have to lie, it’s tough to keep track of all your lies, and that’s the difference between the Democrats and conservatives. It’s great. I don’t know what to say.

RUSH: John, I’m happy you tuned in to listen to me, and you heard the president. I’m glad you weren’t disappointed. I made a decision to stick with this thing all the way through, because I think this is so valuable. I think this is exactly what Trump supporters needed to hear, and those listening to this program today will have heard it. There will be excerpts tonight. The media is already blowing it up. Chuck Todd just tweeted out that President Trump today did the most “un-American thing.” Criticizing the media is un-American, he said. They’re not gonna like it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, folks. I decided to turn into the hate network during the break here, CNN. Well, the president said there’s a lot of hate there, particularly on the ten o’clock show. Do you know who hosts the ten o’clock show? That’d be Malaysian Air 370 vanished into a black hole Don Lemon. That’s right. Don Lemon hosts it. And he said there’s a lot of hate there on that network, by the way, go ask Jeff Zucker how he got his job. (laughing) Jim Acosta’s sitting there going, “What?”

Anyway, so I tuned in to get a little hate ’cause I knew I was gonna get some hate, CNN, and they brought in their media analyst, Brian Stelter. Do you know how Brian Stelter got started? Brian Stelter started a blog called TVNewser, and it was a blog about what was on TV. It was just a blog. He was one of these guys living at home, interested in TV, started — New York Times hired him as a media critic and then CNN stole him away.

Now, get this. Brian Stelter — (laughing) see if you can understand this. Brian Stelter — I had to write it down. He said that it’s obvious that Trump is watching the media too much, because he had all this criticism for the media, and he needs to stop watching the media and he needs to start doing his job because he’s responding way too much to the media, and he’s responding way too soon to the media. So he’ll watch the media and then he’ll tweet something and — can you believe that? The media guy at CNN basically says, “We think the president should watch less of us.” Well, why is that?

There’s two things at work here. Obviously the media would die to be able to prove they’re influencing presidential action. They would die if they could prove that. Second thing is, who are they doing these shows for? I mean, who are these media people doing these shows for? To say that the president is watching too much media, he’s responding too much to it and too soon, does that mean that there are questionable things in the media that the president ought not be responding to? And if that’s the case, why?

I mean, if everything you people in media are doing is up front and aboveboard and straight down the middle and you’re just doing the news, what’s wrong with anybody watching it and reacting to it? “Well, well, the president, he’s watching too much.” How can that be? It’s almost like saying, “He’s taking us too seriously.” Well, if you think that the president or anybody watching you is taking you too seriously, what does that say about what you’re doing? It’s tantamount to saying, “Gosh, he shouldn’t believe everything he sees here.” Well, why not?

It’s the cable news network, it’s CNN, it’s the truth, it’s whatever, you’re the cable news network of record. Why shouldn’t the president believe what he sees? “He’s responding too much. He’s responding too soon. He’s reacting way too much to the media.” Well, then there must be a reason why, must be a mistake to be doing so, why? Is ’cause what’s there is not true, is it because some of it’s just half-baked, is some of it you’re just making it up and having fun here, you don’t intend for some of it to be taken seriously? Why? Why should the president or anybody else not react to it?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: The president also made a big deal of saying he inherited a mess, and he detailed the things that made up the mess. He inherited a mess at home. He inherited a mess abroad. Instability everywhere, but he was elected to fix it. He’s starting to fix it. He’s beginning to do everything he promised he would do on the campaign. They have many productive talks already underway in the area of foreign policy. They have had much more productivity than anybody knows right now because some of this stuff cannot be broadcast.

Some of it has to be maintained in private. But he said that there is phenomenal success happening already, that his defense secretary is submitting a plan to defeat ISIS, that ISIS has spread like cancer. ISIS is another mess that he has inherited but that he promised to eliminate the problem and will. He said he’s going to build and rebuild the military. He said there will not be a military in the world anywhere near as good as ours. He wants a strong military that he hopes he never has to use. And that is the pepper definition of deterrence.

Left wingers never understand. You tell ’em you want to build a brand-new stealth bomber, “It’s just a machine of war. That’s a weapon of war, it kills.” No, we don’t want to use it. “Well, that’s silly, then it’s a waste of money. Why would you build a bomber if you –” because it’s called deterrence. We build the mightiest military in the world that sends a message, if you attack us, that’s the end of you. You build these things for the safety of the American people. He kept going back to that, that everything he’s doing is for the American people and then for the world secondarily.

Folks, it was masterful. It wasn’t scripted. It was nothing that the president had to think long and hard about. He didn’t have to make notes and memorize them and go out. It was improv. It was spontaneous. We had a caller in the last half hour who mentioned how good that was. It was the truth. When you’ve got the truth and when you’re telling people the truth of what you really think, you don’t have to remember it. It’s in your heart. It’s like anything else you believe, you don’t need a cram course on what you believe. You don’t really need advisers to tell you what you believe. You believe it, it’s in your heart, it’s in your mind, and you can easily explain it to people, you don’t have to remember it. And that’s who Donald Trump was today. And they came at him from everywhere.

One of the questions on CNN, they said, “This is horrible. This was a very, very bad moment for the president.” April Ryan is a reporter for the — I think it’s the Urban Network. It’s an African-American network. She got into a spat with Omarosa earlier this week about something. And she was asking him, “Well, you made some promises about the inner city to your campaign. What are you gonna do about the inner city?” And he agreed the inner city is a mess, it’s been a mess for a long time.

And she said (paraphrasing), “Would you meet with the CBC? Would you meet with the Congressional Black Caucasians?” And Trump said, “I would love to meet with the Congressional Black Caucasians. Will you set it up? They won’t take my phone call. I tried to get hold of Elijah Cummings, and he was gonna meet with me.” Elijah Cummings from Baltimore. He’s a member of the Congressional Black Caucasians. And Trump said, “I had a meeting scheduled with Elijah Cummings, I was looking forward to it, he’s a nice guy, and all of a sudden he backed out.”

And Trump said, “I think he had to back out ’cause he was getting a lot of heat from his friends saying, ‘You can’t meet with Trump.'” So he looks at April Ryan, “Could you set it up? Could you set up the meeting?” And she was flummoxed. She was speechless. I don’t know what she expected.

It’s almost like she expected Trump to pooh-pooh the idea of meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, but she looked shocked that he would do so, and then said, “Could you set it up for me?” Now, the CNN people thought that he was being disrespectful. They thought that Donald Trump was insulting her by having her set up the meeting, and that’s where they don’t get the guy. He was including her in the story. He was giving her a role to play. He was showing her respect. But they don’t see it that way ’cause they live in a different world, folks.

They come from a world of political correctness and no sense of humor whatsoever, and because of that they’re never gonna understand Donald Trump. The sense of humor thing alone is gonna prevent them. But they’re also on different worlds. They’re in different universes. They have not encountered somebody who thinks like Donald Trump, who is still around and talking. In their world, people who talk and act like Donald Trump have been shamed and humiliated and relegated to obscurity because they’re so abrasive and mean-spirited and rough around the edges.

But now they’re dealing with a president who’s this way, and in their protected little snowflake world, everywhere they’ve been in their lives is governed and documented by political correctness. They’re just shocked. Like, can you imagine literally believing that what you do and who you are is above criticism? And yet you get to not only criticize people, you get to destroy them? If you’re in the media, you can criticize anybody!

You can destroy anybody with fake news. You can make it up! But let somebody criticize you, and that’s the greatest offense, and that is an offense to the Constitution. Jim Acosta of CNN said, “Aren’t you undermining the First Amendment by calling what we do fake news?” And I’m looking at the TV. I said, “Mr. Acosta, if anybody’s undermining anybody, it’s you and your cohorts undermining the whole concept of news and media.”

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Donna in Frederick, Maryland. You’re next. Hello.

CALLER: Thank you so much, Rush. It is an honor to be part of your program and exercise my First Amendment privilege. President Trump did a phenomenal job, especially with regard to the questionable illegal intel issues and General Flynn. Also the highlight, to me — and I think I could speak for many of “we, the people” when I say this — is when he called the fake news “the really fake news.”

RUSH: No question that he hits a home run when he does that. He may… He told them, by the way. He said (paraphrased), “You all have a lower approval rating than Congress.” He made a point of saying, “You know, you people can make my job tougher when you tell these things that are not true. You know, I’m on the phone with the president of Mexico. And, A, you leak it. And B, you lie about things! The same thing with the phone call to the leader of Australia.

“You leak that he hung up on me. None of it happened.” He said, “You people can make it harder for world leaders who want to talk to anybody here in Washington if somebody finds out about it and leaks and lies about what was said.” He said, “I think you could all improve your businesses if you just tell the truth, if you just try to be straight up with the news.” I mean, he can honestly say, “I was trying to help ’em.” Of course, it’ll never happen because in their minds their job is to destroy him. Nothing is ever, ever going to change that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So I checked the email during the break and somebody says, “Is there anything you saw in that press conference that alarmed you or bothered or you thought wasn’t the best?” Yeah. This Flynn situation, I think, remains a vulnerability. But, of course, I have to share that with you tomorrow. We are out of time today.