RUSH: Dennis, Syracuse, New York. You’re next. Great to have you, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. How are you? It’s an honor.

RUSH: Good.

CALLER: You and I have been friends for over 30 years. You just didn’t know it until now.

RUSH: Ha-ha! Wow. I’m glad to know it.

CALLER: (chuckling) My concern is perception of the president, because nationally the only way anybody can like him or dislike him is by the snippets you see from questions he’s asked when he leaves the White House, the banter between Pelosi and Schumer. Two weeks ago, when he did the address from the Oval Office, I had more of my friends come up to me, Democrat and Republican, and say, “Why doesn’t he do that more often?

“I actually understood that. He seems believable.” So, remember Reagan used to do it? Why couldn’t the president address the nation more often? The wall is a great example. I mean, he can separate it. The president can separate the politics from a real national emergency that’s going on at the border. It just seems to me that he’s a lot more believable when he talks right to you rather than responding to all the BS that people ask him. What are your thoughts?

RUSH: Well, as I’m listening to you talk about that, I remember the initial reactions that I heard were not positive. “Man, he didn’t behave natural. Man, he looks stilted. Man, he didn’t stop sniffing. (sniff, sniff) Every sentence (sniff), he sniffled.” Then I heard that most of the networks didn’t even cover it. Oh, wait. No, no. That was the… No, no. They did cover that. It was a different one they didn’t cover, the speech that he gave announcing his deal with the Senate.

Only Fox News covered that. I can understand differing opinions on how the president comes off. I know. I’ve been dealing with this for a long time too, people on our side not liking our guys on TV. Nobody liked Bush on camera. (impression) “Rush, you gotta get to him! You gotta tell him to stop. He looks like a deer-in-the-headlight eyes. You gotta tell him to stop!” I kind of agreed with that a lot of times. But really, the big problem with Trump doing a series of those is they’re not gonna cover them.

So you’ll have to rely on other distribution for Trump speech. The networks — especially if Trump made them effective. Your overall point is that, in your opinion, Trump being Trump is bad, and Trump (serious voice) “being presidential and sitting in the Oval Office and reading off a teleprompter” is better, because you had anecdotal evidence. “Hey, that guy looked pretty good. I thought I understood this.” I find it interesting that your people, your crowd does not like the president responding to the media. I happen to love it.

You know, he’ll stop and talk to ’em for 20 minutes on the way to the helicopter. They’ll ask him stupid questions and he’ll tell ’em that they’re stupid! And then I have to remember: We have raised a generation of babies who are frightened by decisive people. We’ve raised a generation, maybe two, of people who are put off by confident people. Confident people, decisive people are seen as loud, bellicose, immovable and all that. It just focuses again the real challenge that communication is and how to get through to people — and basically if you can find a way to pierce through all the different prejudices that people have, then you can succeed.

Anyway, I appreciate the call.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Okay, I’m told that you can tweet live all you want on Twitter. You can tweet for an hour. There are people that do it out there. So fine and dandy. President Trump should tweet the State of the Union address. Fine.