RUSH: Now, Nikki Haley. Something interesting to observe about Nikki Haley as she is out on her book tour today — by the way, Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show today tore into her. And I asked a question yesterday about Nikki Haley. Did you tell Trump about Tillerson and Kelly? Did you tell Trump? She says, yeah, yeah, I did, but it’s very tepid sounding the way she claims that she told Trump that Kelly and Tillerson were trying to recruit her.
Tillerson has come out and flat-out denied it. He’s ticked off. He said it never happened. Has Kelly said anything about it? Have you seen? Haven’t seen anything from Kelly, either. But Tillerson made no bones about the fact that this is a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
But one of the things that — I asked the question last week, and I didn’t get any takers from any of you — oh, by the way, you know what else is happening out there today? What did I tell you yesterday? I told you that over the weekend everybody came up to me, all they wanted to know was my reaction to Bloomberg getting in, Bloomberg, Bloomberg. I said, “Why? What does it matter? What do you care?”
“He’s rich, Rush.” That’s it. That’s it. The guy’s also about 5-4. He couldn’t play third base ’cause he couldn’t see over the pitcher’s mound to make the throw to first. What do you mean he’s gonna be president? “He’s rich, Rush.” And people just I guess are drawn like flies to excrement when somebody’s rich. Because the assumption is they’re smart.
Well, I have been inundated with emails today, with people who think some of the biggest news of the day is — are you ready for this? What do you think it is? (interruption) No. No, it’s not Deval Patrick. It’s Mark Sanford has announced he’s giving up his two-month old presidential campaign. I’ve had so many people send me emails, “Rush, this is big news. Mark Sanford’s getting out.”
Why is that big news? He was never really in. Mark Sanford, president? Are you kidding? It was never real. So here he’s realized that it was never gonna be real and he’s canceling the campaign and it’s big news? A lot of people are telling me about it. But it helps me make the point that I was gonna make, because one of the questions I asked last week, and we didn’t get any takers on it, it was open line Thursday, Open Line Friday on Thursday, and I didn’t ask the question until about halfway through the program.
The question was, who will be or what kind of Republican will be the next Republican presidential nominee? And what I meant by that, will it be a party that just makes tracks as fast as they can away from what Donald Trump was, or will it be somebody attempting to build on what Donald Trump did? In other words, whose party is it? Is it Trump’s party now, or is it the RNC, the Republican establishment’s party and they’re just waiting in the wings to take it back when Trump’s gone?
And I think, folks, that we can get an early indication of the answer by Nikki Haley. Nikki Haley makes it clear to me that the Republican Party is Trump’s party. Nikki Haley’s change in tone and outright support for Trump is proving his impact on the party. Savannah Guthrie going after Nikki Haley as viciously, as only a woman can go after another woman, there is no way a guy reporter could have gone after Nikki Haley the way Savannah Guthrie did on the Today Show.
Women can be as mean and vicious as they want to other women
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RUSH: Now back to Nikki Haley. And I’m not drawing any comparisons here. I just want to get back to whose party is this. We got the sound bites here. Savannah Guthrie goes after Nikki Haley. There’s no gender unity here, either. I mean, you would think that Savannah Guthrie would be all-in for Nikki Haley ’cause she’s a woman. But no. She’s saying good things about Trump, so she is a b-i-itch who needs to be destroyed. It just establishes once again that #MeToo, the feminazis, just a bunch of liberals. They’re just another classification of the big leftist movements.
Anyway, the point here is, Nikki Haley’s change in tone and apparent outright support for Trump proves his impact on the Republican Party, because everybody thinks that she’s seeking the Republican nomination in 2024. She’s denying it, but that’s what you do in politics. When you want it, you deny that you want it, until you announce that you want it. And then you have to explain why you denied it, ’cause everybody does.
And as said yesterday, Nikki Haley is defending Trump. She’s out there saying (paraphrasing), “Look. This phone call, they got the aid. Ukraine got the aid. It doesn’t matter. There couldn’t have been a quid pro quo. There couldn’t have been any bribery. They got the aid, and there was no investigation of Biden. So what is all this about?” That’s what she’s essentially out there saying. That’s why Savannah Guthrie’s claws are out.
Oh. And Condoleezza Rice. She said that call is murky. No. No, Condi, what’s murky is the Bidens and Burisma and the ChiComs. That’s what’s murky, Condi. What’s murky is the Clintons. What’s murky is Hillary Clinton and her husband and the Bidens and this entire Obama Department of Justice apparatus. That’s what’s murky.
Donald Trump is an open book! Donald Trump spends more time being transparent than any president the press has ever had a chance to destroy. Trump doesn’t hide from them. He doesn’t mislead them. He hits them straight between the eyes. By the way, they’ve finally figured it out. They’re ticked off the way Trump has canceled press conferences now. They’re ticked off the way Trump uses them in the press gaggle on the White House lawn. They’re ticked off that they’re not getting face time on TV. They finally figured out how Trump’s been outsmarting them here for the past year and a half.
Here’s the bottom line. Nikki Haley makes — and, by the way, by the way, Sanford pulling out, all you people sending me this breaking news, what do you think that says? Sanford was gonna be the alt Trump. Sanford was gonna be everything but. He was gonna be polite, gonna be well-mannered, gonna be sophisticated. Sixty days and he cancels the campaign.
There is no immediate future in the Republican Party if you aren’t pro-Trump. And these Republicans on Capitol Hill had better figure this out today. They had better figure it out today before this show gets started tomorrow. There is no future in the party if you’re not pro-Trump. And if you don’t understand why Trump has 90-plus support in the Republican Party, you have zero chance of winning in 2024.
And this goes for you Never Trumper conservatives. This goes for all of you magazine and website elites who still believe that Trump is a disease or a disaster waiting to happen and you think the future is post-Trump. If you don’t understand — 90% support? That’s where your subscribers are, by the way, if you happen to be a conservative media entity. Trump has 90% support, unprecedented support among Republicans. And if the Republican Party doesn’t figure this out fast, then they’re not gonna have a chance in 2024.
Now, I don’t know Nikki Haley’s heart. I’ve never met her. I don’t know if she has evolved in her respect for Trump’s political acumen, implementation of conservatism in unconventional ways. And that’s what Trump is. He’s a nonideological implementation of conservatism. He’s not an ideologue. But he has a got a lot of common sense, which is what conservatism is.
Now, it could be that her support for Trump is contrived for her political future. Maybe not. But her current positive statements about Trump are smart politics for a Republican who has aspirations of being elected. Just ask Romney. You think Romney, the way he’s positioned himself, sets himself up to be the next Republican nominee? It ain’t happening, Mitt. Where you currently have staked out your position, you can forget winning the Republican nomination. ‘Cause this has come down to a matter of loyalty now. You’ve got the entire Washington state, apparatus and the Democrat Party totally aligned against Donald Trump.
Why do you think it’s 90% support for Trump? Because those people out there who are Republicans know full well what’s happening here. It’s not just Trump being attacked, it is them. It’s all of us. And so the loyalty to Trump is not just loyalty to Trump. It’s loyalty to us, ourselves and the party. And if Republicans don’t figure this out starting tonight and into tomorrow, it’s gonna be a long slog for many of them.
Trump isn’t going anywhere. I don’t care what Schiff’s dreams are, I don’t care what Pelosi’s dreams are, I don’t care what any of these leftist dreams are, Trump is not going anywhere, and Republicans with any political sense at all understand that.
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RUSH: All right. Let’s get to the Nikki Haley sound bites. First up, last night with Sean Hannity. She was asked the following question: “Did you at any point feel a need to tell President Trump that Tillerson and Kelly had asked you to join them in undermining him?”
HALEY: I did tell the president, and I did tell the national security adviser, H. R. McMaster. Keep in mind, I mean, what I have said is, this wasn’t that these guys thought this was a rogue president. This was that these guys disagreed with his policy. They disagreed with us getting out of the Paris climate agreement. They disagreed with us getting out of the Iran deal. They disagreed with moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. So when the president was charting a different course and really giving us a strong hand for America and for our friends, they just thought that he was going in the wrong direction.
RUSH: Now, stop and think about that, what she said here. They disagreed with his policy, disagreed getting out of the Paris climate agreement, disagreed getting us out of the Iran deal, disagreed with moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Okay, guess what happened? We got out of the Paris deal and we’ve made it official. We got out of the Iran deal. We moved the embassy. And these guys are gone. People who disagreed who Nikki Haley says were trying to sabotage all this, they are gone.
Now, Trump picked ’em. You remember when I told you early on in the Trump administration some of these staffing decisions puzzled me? A lot of ’em puzzled me. And I know why he did it. Trump made every effort to try to get along with this so-called establishment. Trump wanted to get along with these people. He wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. He wanted to believe that they actually believed also in the concept of making America great again.
I told you I met with him first time after the election was down here at Mar-a-Lago. It was in February. It was not even a month after he was inaugurated. And we were standing around talking, and I asked him — well, I forget what the exact question was, but he told me that he was surprised that the opposition was still so strident. That he thought that after he won and after a few days went by, that everybody would kind of put it all behind ’em and we’d unify.
And I looked at him. I’m sure I had a look of incredulity on my face. I said, “Mr. President, they are never gonna get behind you. They are never gonna support you.” And I meant the Democrats. I meant the left. I was not talking about any of his appointees. But that’s clearly what he hoped. And I think, frankly, folks, that that is a reasonable desire.
You’ve just been elected president. It’s a shock and it’s a surprise. And in the old days — and we’re not going back that far — in the old days there was no disrespect. The American people, in other words, were acknowledged, the will of the American people was acknowledged. If you lost a presidential election, you looked inward and tried to figure out what you had to do next time to win. Where did you go wrong with the people? It wasn’t that long ago that this was commonplace.
And I’m sure Trump thought that much the same kind of thing would happen, that after people got over the shock – I mean, who in the world could disagree with making America great again? Who could disagree with reviving the American economy? Who could possibly disagree with reviving American primacy in foreign policy? Who could possibly disagree with this?
It’s very common-sensical to think that Americans want their country to be great and want it to be the best. And it’s gotta be a shock when you find out that a hell of a lot of Americans don’t want that. So I think in the initial stages, Trump was attempting to meet some of these enemies of his, some of his opponents halfway. You might think that’s shortsighted. You might think it’s naive, and it may be both.
But I think if you understand Trump, Trump would much rather be leading a unified country down the path he’s taking it. Anybody would. And now we find out that his secretary of state, according to Nikki Haley, his secretary of state and chief of staff don’t believe a single thing that he’s trying to do. And, furthermore, are trying to undermine it. Well, they’re gone. They are history. And everything they supposedly tried to stop has happened.
So you people that voted for Donald Trump, you have a reason to continue to be confident, proud, happy, whatever, because he’s not buckling. Even though I am sure that he started out with a desire to meet these people halfway in an effort to win them over, when he found out that that wasn’t gonna happen, he doubled down on his agenda. He did not double down on making them happy. That is contrary to how every other Republican we can think of has operated. Every other Republican we can think of has sought to defang critics — the media, Democrats, has sought to get along with them. Not Trump.
So this vitriolic hatred for him is entirely understandable simply in a human behavioral and human nature way, before you even add the politics to it. Then when you add the politics to the hatred, it just doubles and triples and intensifies. And in the face of all of this, Trump hasn’t buckled. Now, he may not have moved as quickly on some things as you would like, but he’s not a king nor a dictator.
Anyway, she says that she did tell him. But my guess is she didn’t have to. He probably knew. He’s not an idiot. And I’m sure these two guys, Tillerson, who is denying it, by the way, and Kelly, they’re not the only ones. The entire national security apparatus, H. R. McMaster, everybody was in there trying to undermine Trump, Obama holdovers. They still are.
That’s why those of us who know full well what’s going on don’t want to give an inch. We don’t want to recognize the premise. We don’t want to acknowledge a premise. We don’t want legitimize it. We don’t want to meet them halfway on their terms whatsoever because their terms are bogus. Their efforts are bogus. They need to be defeated, not accommodated. And we need to stop being so damn reactive. That allows them to set the agenda all the time.
Now let’s get started, Savannah Guthrie with Nikki Haley today on the Today Show. This is Savannah Guthrie defending Kelly and Tillerson in her interview with Haley. First bite Guthrie is asking Haley about Kelly and Tillerson, and here’s the response.
GUTHRIE: You say in the book these were dangerous people. You write that in the book.
HALEY: I mean, I was a governor. And if people in my cabinet tried to undermine me, it’s very dangerous.
GUTHRIE: Did you say that right then and there to them, “Hey, guys, this is way out of line.”
HALEY: They totally knew that I was not gonna be with them because —
GUTHRIE: Did you say that?
HALEY: It was very aware.
GUTHRIE: And did you tell the president afterwards —
HALEY: I told them that if this is what the president wanted, and especially, we were talking about the issue of Palestinian aid, that we needed to do that.
GUTHRIE: Did you say to the president later, “Hey, you got two guys working against you.”
HALEY: The president was aware, yes.
GUTHRIE: You told him?
HALEY: Yes.
RUSH: Okay. So she’s mentioned it now twice, last night with Hannity, there with Savannah Guthrie, and this interview continued. Here’s the next bite.
GUTHRIE: I looked at what you’ve said about Tillerson and Kelly. I mean, you said they’re dangerous people. You said that they were pursuing a policy agenda, that they weren’t really trying to save the country. I think about General John Kelly. He spent more than four decades in uniform. He lost his son in battle, okay? You talk about — you write very dramatically. You say, “What is at stake is the U.S. Constitution itself. No disagreement with the president, no matter how heartfelt, justifies undermining the Constitution.” John Kelly lost his own son in battle. He knows what it is to take an oath to the Constitution. Does he deserve a better or more generous assessment from you?
HALEY: Well, first of all, I didn’t call them dangerous people. What I said is what they were trying to do was dangerous. I have always referred to John Kelly as a patriot. But to undermine a president because you think that you know better than him is wrong.
RUSH: Now notice that here’s Savannah Guthrie, despises Trump. But these two guys, when she learns that they’re trying to undermine him, she loves them. They’re great patriots, they’re great heroes, and they need to be defended. And how dare Nikki Haley attack somebody who lost a son in war. How dare you. And this is how they try to shame people. One thing has nothing to do with another. The two are irrelevant. One does not provide one cover to do whatever one wants to do, including insubordination.
You lose a son to war, you lose a son to an automobile accident does not give you license to subvert and undermine the president of the United States when you’re chief of staff. But according to Savannah Guthrie, well, maybe it’s a consideration. Who are you to go after these people? She’s making it very clear what she said and issue’s still being taken. Here’s the final sound bite of the three that we have here. Sound bite number 11.
GUTHRIE: Did you ever have any doubt about the fitness of this president?
HALEY: I never did.
GUTHRIE: Any doubt about his mental acuity?
HALEY: I never did.
GUTHRIE: Any question about his truthfulness, his ability to tell the truth?
HALEY: Savannah, I talk to him multiple times and when I had issues, he always heard me out. I never had any concern on whether he could handle the job, ever.
GUTHRIE: What about his truthfulness, did you think he was a truthful person?
HALEY: Yes. In every instance that I dealt with him, he was truthful, he listened, and he was great to work with.
RUSH: Since when do these people care about truthfulness? Ms. Guthrie, did you ever get Obama on your show to ask him about his promise to people they could keep their health care plan if they liked it and their doctor? Did you ever ask him, what happened to your promise that people’s insurance premiums are gonna go down by 12 or $1,500 a month?
What is this newfound curiosity with truthfulness? Did you ever ask Bill Clinton? Bill Clinton lied so much that you people in the media started doing stories on how little white lies were good things. They saved people from hurt feelings and so forth. So these people have a list of supposed objections to Donald Trump. He’s dishonest. He’s an ogre. He doesn’t speak right. He looks weird. He’s mean. He’s a bully. He’s a brute. He has lousy manners.
Since when did all of that matter? These are the people that have laughed at and joked about the entire concept of morality and good manners. Whenever right-to-lifers talk about it, whenever values voters bring these things up, these people like Savannah Guthrie are leading the parade and ripping them to shreds as a bunch of phonies. Now all of a sudden, all these things that they have laughed at and impugned and made fun of all these years, now they’re the coin of the realm, now they’re the gold standard?
They’ve got nothing on Donald Trump. The only thing is they hate him. They just despise him because he won. He beat them and he is not including them. He hasn’t invited Thomas Friedman to the White House to have a breakout session on full employment like Obama did. He hasn’t invited a bunch of worthless media people up to talk about national policy. And so Trump sucks.
It’s just a bunch of immature little high-schoolers here feeling upset at being left out of things when in the past they think they were instrumental in running everything. So for that we gotta get rid of Donald Trump. And no matter what they’ve tried has blown up in their face as though they are Wile E. Coyote. And the next thing that’s gonna blow up in their face is Schiff’s little show, his so-called grand jury impeachment inquiry.