By Rush Limbaugh, The Rush Limbaugh Show
RUSH: Look, folks, there’s a lot going on today, and there’s something that… I was talking about this before the program with Mr. Snerdley, and as I was pontificating and opining, he said, “Boy, I hope you remember what you’re saying. This is really right on the money.” It’s nothing I haven’t said before. But it was a reaction. John Bolton’s out there. He was down in Texas. He spoke at a private gathering for an investment firm in Austin, Texas and — you may have heard this — he defended several of the people who testified from ambassadorial corps and the civil service who testified before Schiff’s committee.
Lieutenant Colonel Vindman, William Taylor, Fiona Hill (she was the British-accented speaking lady), Tim Morrison, and the ambassador, Marie Yovanovitch. Bolton said, “All of them acted in the best interest of the country as they saw it and consistent to what they thought our policies were. The idea that somehow testifying to what you think is true is destructive to the system of government we have, I think, is very nearly the reverse — the exact reverse of the truth.”
Well, the key here, as far as I’m concerned — and he’s defending his people. Folks, it is crucially important to remember that none of these people have ever been elected to anything, and so their concerns do not take into account what the American people think. Because in their world, the American people are ignorant, don’t know anything about what they do, and so public opinion is irrelevant — including the public opinion that elected Donald Trump. Even that public opinion is rejected.
So in that way, their view of foreign policy and their view of American interests have nothing to do with the fact that Trump was elected. There are two things that we have — and I’m just setting the table. I’m gonna expand on this later. There are two things that we’ve always noted here in the era of Trump, and we noted them during the campaign when it became obvious that Trump was gonna get the Republican nomination, and this stunned and shocked everybody in both parties.
And then when Trump won the election, which… Look, I’ll admit that it surprised me, but it didn’t either. I predicted. I thought that he was gonna win for a host of reasons that I’ve explained previously. But if you recall, one of the big complaints that we had was that after and during the eight years of Obama, “Nobody in our party seems to understand the country in crisis the way we think it’s in crisis: losing our culture, losing our national identity, losing the foundations and the values of our founding.”
We thought all of that was under assault and has been for a while, and then we learned that most of our party doesn’t see that at all! They didn’t see illegal immigration as any kind of a problem. They saw it as an opportunity. We saw it as something that could destroy one of the key elements that defines the United States culturally, economically, and in terms of exceptionalism and greatness — and they didn’t!
They simply didn’t see it, and they don’t now. They don’t see it. As such, how can you…? How can you miss the magical transformation from this country from mediocrity to excellence in just the past three years? They don’t see it. To them, the country is not in crisis. All of that concern is paranoia; it’s conspiracy thinking — and there’s always been that disconnect. And part of that disconnect stems from the fact that when you boil all this down, the people we’re talking about in Washington really don’t care about public opinion.
And all this time we, voters, have thought they do. For example, a party loses an election. We’ve always been under the impression (when we were younger and naive) that the party that lost an election would realize, “Hey, maybe we’re losing touch with the people. The people are the ones who vote. The people are the ones that determine what kind of party, what kind of policies are gonna lead the country — and we’re maybe out of step. We’ve gotta do something to get back in step with the people.”
Well (chuckels), that doesn’t happen, and particularly on the Democrat side. On the Democrat side, there’s nothing but pure, raw resentment. What do the Democrats do? Let’s look at this. When we lost to Obama two elections ago, what’d we do? I spent those eight years doing everything I could to inform as many people as I could reach what I thought was wrong about Obama’s policies, how I thought they were damaging. In other words, I appealed to hearts and minds.
I did everything I could to persuade people, “You can’t just vote on racial matters. You’ve gotta vote on policy. This is horrible,” and I was borne out correct. But what did we not do? We didn’t try to kick Obama out of office, and we didn’t try to say that his election was illegitimate, and we didn’t start an eight-year process to disqualify him. Okay. We lost. Why? How did we lose? I asked myself, “Why did we lose? What did we miss? How did we not reach voters?
“How did we somehow not persuade people that voted for Obama that they were making a mistake?” To me, it’s an intellectual pursuit, it’s an emotional pursuit, and it’s a daily objective. But for these people that we’re up against? Look, they lose to Trump, and what have they done the past three years? You think they care what public opinion is? They have utter disdain for it. They’re doing everything they can to overturn the election results. They couldn’t care less!
In fact, these are the people out there running around trying to dismantle the Electoral College now. Well, I think when you get to the ambassadorial corps, the civil service corps, I think you find much the same thinking. These people never face voters. They never have to get elected. They’re appointed by people who win elections — and because they never face voters, they don’t have to concern themselves with public opinion, and they don’t.
So whereas the American people en masse, a vast majority (electorally, anyway), elect Donald Trump and then turn around and see his policies undermine by a bunch of people that we didn’t elect and then we have to hear, “Well, they’re doing what they think best.” They’re outside the bounds of propriety! They don’t get so set foreign policy, whatever their best interests may be. They don’t get to do it, and they don’t get to undermine a sitting president, particularly when a sitting president knows full well he’s being undermined.
So he ignores them, lets them go through the motions of producing their talking points and getting on the call and does his own thing — and these people want to ignore the expressed will of the people who elected Trump and disqualify him, throw him out of office, impeach him, or otherwise negate his election. It’s, to me, a very concerning thing that there is so much in Washington, so much literal disdain for the will of the people, the will of the voters.
Look, you’re never gonna win every time the will of the voters is expressed. But we’re in a new era now where when the will of the voters goes against the expressed wishes of the government, the Washington establishment, look what they do. They embark — and this is new. It used to be the losers would gather themselves and find out, “What happened? Where did they lose the people? What are we gonna have to do to get ’em back?” These people couldn’t care less why people voted for Trump!
All they want to do is make fun of and mock the people who voted for Trump, and try to take that election away from them and take the next election away from them. That’s one of things. So, take it back to Bolton here. He defends these people that essentially were trying to undermine Donald Trump, because they are from the world he occupies. “He defends several of the officials who testified in the impeachment hearings — Vindman, Taylor, Fiona Hill, Tim Morrison, Marie Yovanovitch.
“‘All of them acted in the best interests of the country as they saw it and consistent to what they thought our policies were.’” Okay. So he gives himself an out. “All of them act in the best interests of the country as they saw it…” If he would have just said, “All of them acted in the best interests of the country,” period, then he would have been saying, “These are the people we should be listening to and not Trump.” He didn’t say that. So he’s given himself an out.
He’s doing a Romney here.
Romney is trying to sidle up to the people that tried to destroy him. These people have hated John Bolton his entire career, and look who he now sidles up to and defends, because, nevertheless, he’s in their world. But right in the middle of this, for any of this to happen, there has to be a degree of apathy, maybe even a full-fledged wanton disregard for public opinion. Now, do not be confused. We are not a democracy, and I don’t want anybody to think that I think that the will of the people is what determines how things happen.
But when it comes to presidential elections, that’s why there’s the Electoral College. It’s not a direct democracy election. We are a representative republic, and the Electoral College is to make sure that everybody in the country has an equal representation in a presidential election. If there were no Electoral College, two states, maybe three would be the only places presidential candidates would campaign — New York, California, Texas — and everybody else in the rest of the country would never see a presidential candidate.
Because if you can win the presidency by getting the popular vote only, that’s all you’d have to do. Well, that’s why the Electoral College is set up, to make sure that massive population centers — big cities, collections of factions within them — do not have an outright, overly unfair advantage. It’s a brilliant setup. And right in the middle of it is public opinion. Public opinion is expressed by an election and as represented by the Electoral College vote.
So we really remain where we were when Trump was campaigning and when he won. There’s very little respect for the expression of the American people in a presidential election, as well as a very obvious opinion from the people who consider themselves our betters that this country’s not this crisis. “There’s no threat. There’s no abject danger being posed by, say, the policies of one particular party,” when we clearly think that there is.
And it is this wanton disrespect for Trump — which becomes a wanton disrespect for us — that has so many people so agitated and outraged, and the people in the Beltway don’t even see it. And if they do, they don’t even care. Anyway, I’ve got a limit here. I’ve gotta go to a break. But I want to expand on this a little bit more. I feel, even now, I haven’t really hit the bull’s-eye with this. That’s why there’s three hours here.
I have all the time I need to get it right.
