Thursday on his nationally syndicated radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh reacted to the last night’s news that President Donald Trump had struck a deal with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy.
Included in the deal according to some reports was Trump backing away from his pledge to build a border wall. While the reports have been mixed on the specifics of the meeting, Limbaugh suggests the rush to get the story out there could have been motivated by Democrats and the media seeking to drive a wedge between Trump and his supporters.
Partial transcript as follows (courtesy of RushLimbaugh.com):
RUSH: So I went to bed last night at about 11 o’clock out here on the Left Coast. That’s two o’clock eastern. Everything was quiet, and I stayed up an additional half hour waiting to see if there was any breaking news. I mean, 10:30 West Coast time is 1:30 East Coast time, and there was nothing. I woke up… I went to bed and it was very, very peaceful. I wake up to all hell breaking loose! I said, “Is this is ever gonna end? Is there ever gonna be a normal day again?” (interruption) No, no, no. I’m not talking about the hurricane. That’s actually going well.
Did you see that they have restored 1.4 million people back to power last night? FPL apparently is making great progress in restoring power. Remember they said it was gonna be out maybe for months? I know. You know why they do that? They do it on purpose. They get it back on in weeks and people say, “Wow,” just like they’re doing now. But here they are. That’s fantastic. There’s still 2.6 million still out of power out of a little over six million, so we’re really moving fast.
Trump did an appearance there today. I think he flew down to Fort Myers. He’s meeting victims and governor… I mean, everybody down there is just really doing a bang-up job. There were trucks, power people, contractors, tree and landscapers just waiting for this storm to get out of there and drive south into south Florida — and they’ve arrived, and they have begun their work. And that’s up. I mean, that’s an upper. That’s a positive thing. Thanks to all of those people that are — and they’re gonna get paid. I mean, this is commerce at work, here.
Pelosi calls it “triple” down.
Anyway, so I wake up today, and all hell is breaking loose — and, you know, I wade through it. I do not knee-jerk react to anything, particularly when the Drive-By Media is involved. When the Drive-By Media and the Democrat Party are involved in setting a narrative every day, writing the script for the soap opera, I’m sorry, folks: I am immediately suspicious. I am not fatalistic. I am not pessimistic by nature except in a few things, and I’m not gonna tell you what those are. But certainly not this.
So I hustled and got out of the hotel, and I raced in here to start trying to make sense of things. So when I got up, the news was that Trump had caved on the wall, that Trump at dinner with Chuck and Nancy last night had caved on the wall. And then I saw that a lot of people, Trump voters, Trump supporters, believed it! They were saying, “That didn’t take long. It’s not even October, and Trump has already sold us out.” I understand people have been sold out so many times voting for Republicans that they’re conditioned to be sold out.
So they just figured this Trump thing may be too good to be true. Chuck and Nancy, first they make a deal on the debt ceiling and spending, and Trump’s praising them and praising it. Mitch and Paul are over there fuming that they’ve been sold out and then thrown under the bus. And now this thing comes along, and everybody’s just fatalistic about it and thinking that it’s over. But I stop and I ask myself: Would Trump really do this?
Does Trump not know how he would blow up the entire support base he has by making a deal with Chuck and Nancy, and taking the wall off the table while granting amnesty to anybody? I don’t care if it’s children, if it’s seasoned citizens. I’m asking myself: Would Trump really do that? Is he that…? Fill in the blank. But a lot of people do think it, a lot of people did think it, and right there pushing that narrative is the Drive-By Media — and certain Republicans are helping that narrative be pushed.They think that Trump caved to Chuck and Nancy on the wall. So I came in here and I started digging deep, and I said to myself: “Don’t get caught up in this. What you need to do is just chill.” So I started looking into things. And we’ve got, I mean, a mountain of things to go through. But I’m gonna tell you what Trump just said a few moments ago on the tarmac in Florida when he and Melania and his team landed in Florida. It’s a tweet: “We have to have the wall. If we don’t have the wall, we’re doing nothing.”
And then a tweet came 25 minutes later from Fox Business: “The wealthy Americans are not my priority. My priority are people in the middle class and that’s where we’re giving the big tax reduction.” That’s another thing that blew up yesterday. When I got… (chuckling) You know, I got back to the hotel after the program yesterday and I’m deluged with messages from people, “Well, we were played. We were played! Trump’s talking about raising taxes on the rich now, and that’s the only reason I voted for him.” I mean, deluged.
I had more people reacting to that than I have people reacting to me, anyway, on this Chuck and Nancy deal with the wall. So that’s something we’ll put off to the side. We’ll come back to the tax business, because that’s the fundamental issue as well. There is a pretty good summary of events here that goes like this: Chuck and Nancy claimed after a dinner at the White House with the president that a deal had been done on granting amnesty to the DACA kids, the DREAMers. (They’re not kids anymore, not all of them. Thirty percent of them have reportedly committed criminal acts, some felonies.)
Chuck and Nancy said that Trump had agreed to enshrine protections for 800,000 illegal immigrants, the DREAMers, “in a border security package excluding the wall.” Remember something, folks: The media’s primary task since the inauguration has been to separate you, if you are a Trump supporter, from Trump. That has been their objective. They’re smart enough to know that if they can’t destroy Trump, that only Trump can. Where have we heard that before? Only Trump can destroy Trump. They can’t. They’ve been trying.
They know they can’t. So they’ve been trying to drive a wedge between you — Trump supporters — and Trump. So if Chuck and Nancy come out and say, “We got a deal! We got a deal! Amnesty for the kids and Trump said to hell with the wall” and media reports it, all hell breaks loose. Meanwhile, Trump’s in the White House doing whatever he’s doing, not even aware this guy going on until after the fact. The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, said there was no agreement on the wall during the meeting, which puts the ball back in the court for Chuck and Nancy, who said not only was there a deal but that Trump had thrown in the bonus that he doesn’t care about the wall right now.
Huckabee Sanders said: Nope, no agreement. Trump said the same thing in his tweets this morning: “No deal was made last night on DACA. Massive border security would have to be agreed to in exchange for consent. Would be subject to vote.” He then tweeted a follow-up message: “The WALL, which is already under construction in the form of new renovation of old and existing fences and walls, will continue to be built.” And then Trump pushed Congress to pass legislation protecting the immigrants but said he wanted big — that’s in all caps: “BIG border security.”
As he left the White House to go out to the helicopter to chopper to go to Air Force One to go down to Florida, Trump admitted that he was fairly close to reaching a deal with Chuck and Nancy that excluded the wall and that the Republican leaders are on board. Chuck and Nancy then released a statement around the same saying the president’s tweets were “not inconsistent” with what they said. So Chuck and Nancy are backin’ off a little bit from the original statement.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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