RUSH: “Jim Acosta: ‘Having the President Whip People Up at Rally After Rally Is the Most Depressing Thing I’ve Seen as a Journalist.‘” This is at the Citizen CNN conference yesterday in New York City.
ACOSTA: If you want to ask me what makes me the most depressed about my job, it’s covering the rallies. And it gets to the larger point of what it’s like covering the president of the United States, in — in particular Donald Trump. In many ways, the danger is not what Trump is doing to America. The danger is how America is changing under Trump. And I never thought I would see the day where I would go to a political rally — and, you know, people would give you a hard time — you know, people yelled at me at Hillary Clinton rallies during the 2008 campaign. But at rally after rally after rally, having the president of the United States whip people up into a frenzy and attack the press, to me, is the — the mo — most depressing thing that I’ve ever witnessed as a journalist.
RUSH: Man, oh, man. Where has this guy been? (summary) “To see Trump whipping people up at rally after rally and having people get mad at me as a journalist is the most depressing thing I’ve seen as a journalist.” Jim, you can give it up. You got all kinds of stuff. You could go be a waiter. You obviously listen well. Ahem! Mr. Acosta, however, was not finished. Somebody needs to walk the guy back from the ledge here.
ACOSTA: You have thousands and thousands of people who are willing to join in and do the same thing. Um, at the rally in Montana the other night, uh, when President Trump praised Greg Gianforte for body slamming Ben Jacobs, I remember looking over to the supporters in the crowd. And there was one guy, one young man who was doing these body slam moves. You know, and — and — and he and his buddies were all getting a good laugh out of it. And then he looked at me, and he goes like this, like, “I’m gonna cut your throat.” And, you know, just… (stammering) I went up to him afterwards, over, and I talked to him about. And — and he was just sort of laughing about it. I — I — I guess he wasn’t serious about it. But, to me, that’s the Trump effect on America.
RUSH: What do you make of this? So it’s no different than when Trump is on stage, “Hey, Russia? Hey, Russia! Maybe you could find Hillary’s emails. The media’s looking for them and nobody can find them. Maybe you can find Hillary’s 30,000 emails and let the media know. They’d love to hear from you.” And everybody on the left/the media has a heart attack thinking Trump is asking the Russians to hack Hillary’s server.
Hillary’s already done the hack! Hillary’s already done whatever she’s done to hide the emails. No sense of humor! These people have no ability whatsoever to relate to people as they actually live! So Trump praises a guy for being able to body slam somebody. They see no humor in it. They don’t have any idea how to relate to that. They see that; they think Trump… They really do. They think Trump is promoting violence. They think Trump is recommending and praising voter violence. “Body slamming somebody!”
They just… I have never seen a group of people this large that is so distant and absent from reality, from day-to-day life and how people talk to each other. He goes up to this guy and the guy’s laughing. “Hey, man! Hey, Jim Acosta. How are you doing? I really didn’t want to slit your throat. You know, I’m just funning with you, dude. You’re out there trying to destroy everything I believe in, Mr. Acosta. I’m just having a little fun with you!”
So these people in journalism, they can go out and they can destroy anybody they want. They can take shots at anybody they want. The people at that rally have respect for Trump. The media can do whatever they want to try to destroy Trump. But you let somebody throw it back on them and it’s a gigantic disgrace. It shows something terribly wrong with American culture. What’s wrong with American culture is that the elites of Washington, D.C., not only do not understand real-life America, they don’t like it much. They really have…
I think what they hate about Trump more than anything is those of you who elected him. I think that’s what this really boils down to, when you get down to brass tacks.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So CNN with their daylong “Trump lies, Trump this, Trump that, spreading lies and hate prior to the election,” all this stuff. The media is totally aligned in this narrative today. Jim Acosta at a CNN event yesterday said (summarized), “Having the president whip people up at rally after rally, it’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen as a journalist.” You know why it’s depressing? The reason it’s depressing is because he sees it.
He’s seeing all of this love, all of this massive support for Trump while he harbors hatred for Trump, and therefore he harbors hatred for the people who are there. I think, when you synthesize all of this down, the real resentment here is for the people who voted for Trump. The real hatred among Never Trumpers — among leftists, Washington establishmentarians, the elites, the people that think they’re better and smarter than everybody else, and particularly the great unwashed, the hoi polloi who elected Trump.
“If not for them, then we wouldn’t be going through this nightmare!” They see these people as stupid! “You fell for it! You fell for this charlatan. You fell for the guy with orange hair! You fell for the guy who didn’t even intend to win the election.” He was doing it for TV ratings or some such same thing in their minds. When you get right down to it, their resentment is for you, and it always has been.
The elites have always had a condescending, almost contemptuous attitude toward people they view as average people, the non-famous. The people that make the country work that nobody’s ever heard of; nobody knows. They’re judged to be not very bright, very easily fooled as evidenced by Trump. So when there is a Trump rally — and there are Trump rallies four times a week now, and they were frequent during the campaign — the anger and the rage just compounded among the media and among the intelligentsia and the Never Trumpers.
It’s one thing for Trump to go out there and do what he’s doing. It’s quite another for so many millions of people to love it and to adore it. That’s what’s scary to Jim Acosta because Jim Acosta has spent, along with everybody else in the Drive-By Media, the last two years trying to make you not want to go to a Trump rally! Jim Acosta and his buddies in the media have spent the last 2/1-2/three years trying to make you hate Donald Trump the way they do! They’ve tried to make you afraid of Donald Trump!
They have done everything they can, everything they know, everything that’s always worked in the past to get you to abandon Donald Trump. And what do you do? Why, you just attach yourself even tighter to Trump and his presidency and his campaigns. And they are livid. They’re livid at their inability to influence you. So what they do is tell you themselves you’re too stupid to know what’s good for you, which is how the left looks at the body politic in general.
It’s how the left, it’s how Obama, it’s how Hillary Clinton… The deplorables. Like Hillary Clinton can says (summarized), “Well, incivility is warranted until we get our power back. Things will get civil again when everything is made normal with us back in power.” They’ve done everything they can — everything that’s always worked to destroy Republicans in the past and to make you abandon them! They’ve got it down pat.
They’ve perfected the various attack plans, the various schemes to make you distrust. And, by the way, Republicans in the past have kind of helped out in that regard by campaigning on the promise to do this that or the other. They get into office; they do just the exact opposite. So it’s been a perfect storm if the media. They’ve had Republicans who are elected, properly intimidated. They’ve been able to persuade you that various Republicans stink, not worth your support.
They’ve able to get rid of pretty much whoever they wanted to. There’s Jim Acosta in Houston, Texas, last night, 25,000 people outside, 17,000 people inside — just roaring and cheering and having the best time they’ve had in a week or longer — and he can’t stand it. After all his hard work trying to get you to hate Trump?
After all of his hard work trying to get you to abandon Trump, to see the truth about Trump, and you keep falling for the lies, and you keep falling for the hate? Yeah, you’re the problem. Jeff Flake was also at the CNN event yesterday. The Citizen CNN conference. It was just Wolf Blitzer’s afternoon show at some convention setting in New York City, and here’s Jeff Flake weighing in on this.
FLAKE: To me now, it’s just gone so far beyond. You’re not expecting the president to pivot anymore. But what is troubling is to look behind him and see the reaction of people to what he says. And that’s what’s more troubling to me now is — is who believes this. And he does it, I think, because it still works. It still riles people up. It divides up horribly.
RUSH: Yeah, oh it’s just… It’s very, very dangerous. It’s very bad out there. Trump’s spreading lies, stoking fear ahead of the election. There’s Jeff Flake — who himself has been rejected by people like you in Arizona, voters in Arizona. He couldn’t get reelected. So he now says, “What’s really troubling is to look behind Trump and see the reaction of people to what he says, and that’s what’s more troubling me now: Who believes this.
“He does it, I think, because it still works.” See, Trump, he’s pretty smart. Trump knows that you’re idiots and Trump knows that you’re fools and Trump knows that you’ll fall for anything. And so Trump is working his Svengali like magic on you, and people like Jeff Flake and the Washington establishment Never Trumpers, they resent the hell out of Trump ’cause Trump knows what he’s doing. So I guess Trump’s not so stupid now. You are.
Which takes me to a piece that I had ready to go yesterday but didn’t get to it. David Gelernter. He’s a brilliant, brilliant, brilliant professor at Yale. His specialty is computer science. But we have cited his work countless times on this program over the past 20 years. We’ve even interviewed him for The Limbaugh Letter way back then.
He’s a computer science professor at Yale, chief scientist at Detach LLC. His most recent book: The Tides of Mind. His piece yesterday was, “The Real Reason They Hate Trump,” and let me give you some pull quotes from this piece. “Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong.
“In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared. The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says ‘Empty.’
“The left is beaten,” and this is so right on the money. They now have to resort to these charades and really devastating tricks like this caravan. The whole Kavanaugh episode of the intellectually bankrupt, it was morally bankrupt, it was politically bankrupt, and yet they persisted with it — even to the point of caring not that they were destroying an American life, an American family, an American career, and an American future.
They couldn’t have cared less.
This is the bankruptcy of decency and the Democrat Party has none left. Now, as Mr. Gelernter says, “This has happened before, in the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s, but then the financial crisis arrived to save liberalism from certain destruction. Today leftists pray that Robert Mueller will put on his Superman outfit and save them again. For now, though, the left’s only issue is ‘We hate Trump.’
“This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful.” (repeating) “This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America,” and hate America it does, folks. “Not that every leftist hates America. But the leftists I know,” writes Gelernter at Yale, “do hate Mr. Trump…”
They hate his “vulgarity.” They hate “his unwillingness to walk away from a fight.” They hate “his bluntness.” They hate “his certainty that America is exceptional.” They hate “his mistrust of intellectuals.” They hate “his love of simple ideas that work.” They hate “his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable. Worst of all, he has no ideology except getting the job done. His goals are to do the task before him, not be pushed around, and otherwise to enjoy life.
“In short, he is a typical American — except exaggerated, because he has no constraints to cramp his style except the ones he himself invents” and uses. I’ll tell you, folks, this is a heck of a paragraph. It is instructive itself. They “hate Mr. Trump’s vulgarity,” and yet, they are the kings of vulgarity! The Democrat Party and the American people left are synonymous with vulgarity today, but they sit there and hypocritically claim to despise Trump’s.
They hate that he won’t walk away from a fight. They hate that he is blunt. They hate his certainty that America is decent and exception. They hate certainty. That’s what I have found over the years that people that have had serious problems with me. I was able to boil it down. They hated the fact I was so certain, that I didn’t have any doubts about what I believe.
I’ve had so many people say, “It’s not right! Everybody has doubts! You — you — you just sound way too sure. Nobody can be that confident.” “Oh, but I am. I know you’re full of it, I know you’re wrong, and I know you haven’t even thought halfway about this or you’d be doing the right thing.” They can’t stand that. They love equivocation. They love people who see the both sides of things. They see reaching out with the heart.
They hate certainty, except when it conflicts with their own. Now back to Trump. He “lacks constraints” that the left hates him for “because he is filthy rich and always has been and, unlike other rich men, he revels in wealth and feels no need to apologize — ever. He never learned to keep his real opinions to himself because he never had to. He never learned to be embarrassed that he is male, with ordinary male proclivities.”
The guy wants women; doesn’t see the need to apologize for it.
“Sometimes he has treated women disgracefully, for which Americans, left and right, are ashamed of him — as they are of JFK and Bill Clinton. But,” Gelernter says, “my job as a voter is to choose the candidate who will do best for America. I am sorry about the coarseness of the unconstrained average American that Mr. Trump conveys. That coarseness is unpresidential and makes us look bad to other nations.
“On the other hand, many of his opponents worry too much about what other people think. I would love the esteem of France, Germany and Japan. But I don’t find myself losing sleep over it. The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him — whether they love or merely tolerate him — comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife.
“The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.” That’s true, and that’s a large group of people to hate. That’s a large group of people to dislike. But, by the way, this Sinema babe, this candidate running for the Senate in Arizona against Martha McSally? She is running around…
We’ve dredged up sound of her back some years ago claiming that housewives are just leeches, that women who are housewives and stay home and raise their kids are just leeching off their husbands. This is the kind of thing Gelernter is talking about here, that the left Americans who find a way to be happy in life, even if it violates what the left thinks people should be doing. “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins.
“They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of. They skip Davos every year and watch Fox News. Not even the very best [of these people] has the dazzling brilliance of a Chuck Schumer, not to mention a Michelle Obama. In truth they are dumb as sheep.
“Mr. Trump reminds us who the average American really is. Not the average male American, or the average white American. We know for sure that, come 2020, intellectuals will be dumbfounded at the number of women and blacks who will vote for Mr. Trump. He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones.”
hHe goes on with more description to detail, that average people are exactly the problem. You. Jim Acosta nailed it. (paraphrased) “I hate seeing these people cheer! I hate it!” Jeff Flake (paraphrased): “The problem with Trump is the people that follow him, the people that believe him.” That would be you. This is what it really boils down to, folks. The Never Trumpers, the elitists in Washington, their real problem is you! And their real problem is elections that you get to participate in! That’s the big threat, as far as they’re concerned. Do not doubt me on this.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Mr. Gelernter with one final point here. He observes, “Many left-wing intellectuals are counting on technology to do away with the jobs” that I just went through “that sustain all those old-fashioned truck-driver-type people…” They are looking forward to you people being robot’d out of jobs. “[B]ut,” he says, “they are laughably wide of the mark. It is impossible to transport food and clothing, or hug your wife or girl or child, or sit silently with your best friend, over the internet.”
You can’t do many of these jobs over the internet!
“Perhaps that’s obvious, but to be an intellectual means nothing is obvious. Mr. Trump is no genius, but if you have mastered the obvious and add common sense, you are nine-tenths of the way home. (Scholarship is fine, but the typical modern intellectual cheapens his learning with politics, and is proud to vary his teaching with broken-down left-wing junk.)” David Gelernter, computer science professor at Yale, basically saying the real problem…
The real problem is all of you people voted for Trump, you continue to ignore your betters. You’re ignoring the Democrats. You’re ignoring the Never Trumpers. You’re ignoring the media who trying to warn you, but you persist in going to Trump rallies. They can’t stand it. It’s why they make up these stories about gigantic blue waves sweeping you out of the way, sweeping your candidates out of the way! They can’t wait for you to be gone!
Except they’re the ones that are losing elections! Donald Trump was elected president by a significant Electoral College margin! They can’t win these elections that they’ve been hoping and praying to win ever since all these special elections, now the midterms coming up. Look at how they’re lying to themselves about the future. They’re gonna win back control of the House, and what are they gonna do with it?
They’re gonna investigate Trump! Nancy Pelosi can’t help herself. She’s braggin’ and talkin’ about the subpoena power. Is that really what the American people want? They want Donald Trump and the people that work for him brought up under investigation for two years? Instead of real life on the ground improving the way it is? Is this what the Democrats and media really think?
Is this what their left-wing candidates really believe, that the American people are so filled with rage at Donald Trump and his administration? They want all of them investigated, they want all of them put in jail, they want the truth to come out that Trump cheated against Hillary with Russia? They’re sill obsessed with this stuff. They’re obsessed with the fact that this election was theirs, stolen from them — and now it’s time to make it all right.
They’re convinced that you want Trump investigated too, and they’re just fit to be tied they haven’t persuaded you to join them. So now you’re part of the problem, and so the American left and the media are actually trying to create a nation that consists all of majority of angry, deranged, lunatics in order to get what they (the media and the Democrats) want. That’s what they’re trying to create right in front of our eyes.