Friday on his radio show, conservative talker Rush Limbaugh offered his analysis on why supporters of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump tend to overlook his past liberal positions.
According to Limbaugh, seven years of liberalism led by President Barack Obama and the seeming unwillingness of Republicans in Congress to take on Obama with their legislative powers are in part why Trump has this diehard support.
Transcript as follows:
So here’s Dana Bash on CNN last night, and she’s saying Trump was outspokenly pro-choice. He has been outspoken in his history in a book that he published, wanting single payer universal health care system, and much of the conservative base, they know it, they just don’t care. It’s not that they don’t know. They just don’t care. Trump was, as I understand it — this dates back to 2000, the year 2000, he’s toying around with the Reform Party ticket. There have been 16, 15 years go by. A lot more is known about it. Trump’s not talking about it now.
But beyond that, the Republican Party nominated somebody that essentially gave us Obamacare. You know, you can sit there and say, “But Trump is for single payer!” Well, the Republican Party didn’t stop Obama from doing Obamacare. I mean, what are these people supposed to do? Yeah, in the first term they didn’t have the votes to stop Obama, but then they ran for office in 2010, they ran for office in 2014 promising us that they would use the power of the purse, they would defund it, they would try to repeal it, and every effort they made was phony.
These people are not stupid. Why continue to invest in a Republican Party which has openly said it’s not gonna stop Obama? You can talk about Trump all you want. It’s not Trump that’s sidling up with the Democrats on amnesty. And if you don’t think that’s the number one issue that’s animating all of this, then you’ve got something really big to learn. That issue pretty much encompasses everything else people are supporting in Trump. It defines the massive change, the rejection of the two party status quo on all of this.
So at this stage, you know, whether somebody’s conservative or not conservative enough, we’re so far beyond that right now. I’m talking about Trump’s supporters. I’ve got my analyst hat here on, folks. I could be wrong. But this is what fascinates me, trying to understand why people do what they do. My whole career has been devoted to understanding the left and telling you who they are and passing it on to you so you’ll recognize it, be able to stop it. I have said for I don’t know how long, I don’t know how many years I’ve been saying, the single best thing we could do is educate everybody to ideology so they can spot liberalism ’cause it’s openly destructive.
We’re living seven years of the destruction of liberalism, undiluted, concentrated liberal destruction. We don’t have to speak theoretically. We don’t have to issue warnings. All we’ve got to do is explain to people why they can’t get a job, explain to people why open borders are happening, explain to people why the Iranians are getting a nuke, explain to people why 94 million Americans are not working and can’t find a job. There are demonstrative reasons, and you can trace every damn one of them to the Democrat Party and the American left, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, John Kerry, all of them. And we don’t get one syllable of that from the Republican Party.
So what are these people supposed to do? They understand immigration; it’s not hard. It’s called the law and people are breaking it, and the people breaking it are being rewarded and given things that the people who are not breaking the law are having to pay for. It’s not hard to understand this. “But Donald Trump, Donald Trump, he wants single payer.” Sorry, we’ve already got it, if you haven’t noticed. We’ve got Obamacare, and we’re heading down that road already. And who gave it to us? Barack Hussein Obama and the Democrats, not Donald Trump. And who didn’t try to singularly stop it or repeal it when they told us they would? GOP. What are people supposed to do?
“Well, Trump’s not a conservative. I don’t know.” They’re not even thinking about that. This is serious stuff to these people. In addition to their livelihood and their careers being destroyed, they’re being blamed for everything because they’re racist. They’re being told they’re bigots. They’re being told they’re sexists. They’re being told that they are the problem. They are being told by the Democrat Party and the American media that they have been the problem since the founding of this country, and they are openly told, “We’re taking it back from you. We’re taking it away from you.”
And so college educations are being perverted with this wacko studies and that wacko studies. This has been, for seven years, a sitting duck of an opponent waiting to be blown to smithereens for all time. American and worldwide liberalism. We’re living it. We don’t have to warn people. We don’t have to say: “if you’re not careful, we’re gonna end up,” ’cause it’s happening. So somebody comes along, gonna put the brakes on all of it or seems to, and massive change in direction. It’s not hard to understand this. But if your livelihood depends on — ah, never mind.
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