RUSH: “Donald Trump Suggests Challenging TV Network Licenses over Fake News.” He doesn’t let this stuff go. This is what pushing back looks like, and he’s all alone. He doesn’t have anybody except his buddies in the media helping him. He doesn’t have anybody in the Republican Party joining him in his — whether it’s a purposeful or instinctive — effort to defeat the left. The story here is from Reuters.

“President Donald Trump suggested challenging licenses for NBC and other broadcast news networks on Wednesday, a salvo that followed reports his own secretary of state had called him a ‘moron’ after a discussion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal,” which then led Trump to prepare an IQ contest between him and Tillerson and which the president assured us he would win.

Now, while the Never Trumpers and the intelligentsia and the pseudointellectuals and the left inside the Beltway have shriek fits over this, I think it’s hilarious. And I don’t care if Tillerson called hum a moron. It doesn’t matter to me. And I don’t care if it was because Trump supposedly ordered a 10-times increase in our nuclear arsenal, because I don’t think things happen the way we are told.

I don’t think Trump would call somebody on the phone, “Hey, I want a tenfold increase in the nuclear arsenal. Get it done!” Now, we’re supposed believe that happened because we’re told what an idiot Trump is and how he’s out of place and so forth, and then Tillerson reportedly called him a moron after that. But, anyway, back to this. Trump said, “With all of the…” I want to read this paragraph to you as Reuters wrote it. (chuckles)

“‘With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!’ Trump, a Republican, wrote in a post on Twitter.” Have ever said, “Harvey Weinstein, a Democrat”? No. Now, the networks… Let me just clue you in here — and since the president is a moron, he may not know this. The broadcast networks do not have licenses. The only broadcast entities that are licensed are individual radio and TV stations, of which the networks own very many.

And they own affiliate stations in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, in all of the top-ten markets. So the license challenge would affect them, but it would not… The NBC Nightly News does not have a broadcast license. The NBC prime time television shows, they’re not subject to broadcast license. Their stations are. And it’s true for radio stations. And those license are granted by the FCC. And I don’t know what the renewal period is.

It used to be five, now I think it’s 10, and each renewal can be challenged. Individual stations have to prove — they have to file documents showing — that they’re operating in the community interests and all that. That was my job at a disco FM station I worked at in Kansas City was to do community assessment six months a year during license renewal years. You had to go out, and you had to go talk to a local professor or you had to go talk to a librarian for two hours and listen to them tell you what was wrong with the community and how they thought your station had to deal with it.

Then you go, “Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am. Three bags full,” go back, file the paperwork, and don’t change anything. Or if you did it, you put it on Sunday morning when nobody’s listening. Or you hire the librarian to do a show from four to five a.m. on Sunday. “Do whatever you want, whatever gets it you in, and it’s your hour.” Things like that happen. I don’t think it’s that strict anymore, but Trump nevertheless challenging broadcast licenses. (laughing)

It’s just… It’s part of the relentless nature he has. They are fake news, they’re bad for the country, and they ought to have to earn the right to be this bad. They ought to have to earn the right. They ought to have to pass some kind of regulatory scheme in order to be able to do fake news. I know what he’s doing with this, and it’s how he keeps his base riled up. But more than that, he’s keeping pressure on calling them fake news, which they are and which they detest.