Rush Limbaugh praises the president for being “clever” in sharing conspiracy theories
Limbaugh: “Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames”
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From the May 27, 2020, edition of Premiere Radio Network's The Rush Limbaugh Show
RUSH LIMBAUGH: So Trump goes out there and starts tweeting about Jeff Sessions, and then he starts tweeting about [MSNBC host Joe] Scarborough perhaps being a murderer, which I explained yesterday. Trump is Trump. It’s not hard to understand him. But people make it a major chore. It’s easy to understand Donald Trump if you try. A lot of people just don’t want to.
“Why would he do that, Rush? Why would he call attention to himself that way and start accusing Scarborough of -- ” I don’t know, folks, but have you ever tried to imagine what the last four years or three and a half years have been like for Donald Trump? And don’t tell me, “Well, yeah, but, Rush, he’s president. He’s the most powerful man in the world. He ought to know he’s going to get treatment like that, and he ought to be able to let it roll off his back.”
He’s a human being, number one. Number two, he’s very proud of what he did, winning in 2016, as any of us would be. And he had -- first, he had to deal with Scarborough as a sycophant. Scarborough and Mika would show up at Mar-a-Lago and beg to get in, even though they’re not members. They’d beg to get in on New Year’s Eve after Trump won the election the preceding November, and they’d want to be seated with Trump at dinner. They’d want to get all the photos taken — and want to put those photos on where? Twitter. And then [they'd] talk about it on their MSNBC show. And all the while they were helping promote Trump. And they made it look for a while like they were all in favor of him.
And then all of a sudden, Scarborough does a 180 and starts spreading these lies of Trump being a traitor, a Russian agent — you know, the whole collusion lie — and gets guests on his show to spread the lie. None of it was true. And Trump believes that Scarborough knows it’s not true, and yet Scarborough participated in what? Three years of daily, never-ending, libelous, slanderous, false accusations — stealing the election, being a traitor, treasonous behavior, a Russian agent.
And so, OK. “Joe, you know what? I think I’m going to run around saying you murdered that girl. How’s it feel?”
“It’s ridiculous. What is Trump --” Why isn’t anybody saying that it’s ridiculous what has been said about Trump? To this day, the Russian scandal lives in the American media. To this day, the Russian hoax and scandal lives. The Steele dossier lives. That really happened in [Rep.] Adam Schiff’s world, in [House Majority Leader Nancy] Pelosi’s world.
It has got to be beyond frustrating. Now I understand, you'd say, “He’s got to get past it, Rush. He’s got to get past it. If he would simply ignore it, get past it, they’d stop.” No, they won’t. They’re building it up again to try to make it a factor in the 2020 election.
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But the thing here is when you get to Trump and his conspiracy theories, he does it in a really clever way. And this is where people don’t get the subtlety of Trump because they don’t think he has the ability to be subtle. Trump never says that he believes these conspiracy theories that he touts. He’s simply passing them on.
Like during the campaign of 2016, I -- folks, I ran the gamut of emotions on this. When Trump said that he had seen a picture of Ted Cruz’s dad standing next to Lee Harvey Oswald, I said, “What the hell is this?” And I thought he's going to have to walk this back. Ted Cruz’s dad had something to do with the assassination of JFK? He never walked it back. But more importantly, he never asserted it himself.
He simply said it was out there and that people ought to know — and with virtually every conspiracy theory that Trump touts, he doesn’t actually tout them himself. He spreads them and he -- under the guise of people need to know about this, and it’s his way of jamming them up. It’s his way of teasing him. It’s his way of getting these conspiracy theories out there.
For example, as a way of illustrating, do you think -- Mr. Snerdley, do you think Trump cares whether Scarborough murdered anybody or not? No, of course he doesn’t care. So why is he tweeting it? Well, because it’s out there. He didn’t make it up. It’s long been out there that this death has something suspicious about it.
So Trump is just throwing gasoline on a fire here, and he’s having fun watching the flames — and he’s having fun watching these holier-than-thou leftist journalists react like their moral sensibilities have been forever rocked and can never recover.