Frustrating and Unfair Debate: Trump vs. Wallace/Biden
Sep 30, 2020
RUSH: The only word I have for it is frustrating. So frustrating. We had a moderator last night who everybody knows that I like and everybody knows that I respect and a moderator that treats me fairly whenever I appear on his program, Chris Wallace. But he said before the debate last night that the best measure of his performance, of his job, would be if he ended up being invisible. Well, no. There was no way. He ended up being part of the debate staff. It was Trump versus two people last night.
And it was unfair. All this white supremacist stuff being dredged up, but there wasn’t one mention of Joe Biden out there saying, “If you ain’t voting for me, you ain’t black.†I get so sick and tired this white supremacist allegation that Trump has refuted, he didn’t do it, he didn’t say it, and yet they keep dredging it up.
Greetings, folks. Great to have you. Rush Limbaugh, the EIB Network and the Limbaugh Institute.
I’m gonna do my best here to try to remain somewhat facile, cogent, and organized. But man, oh, man. So much about last night, it’s just so frustrating. Trump desperately wanted to debate last night. It was obvious and clear. I thought the first five minutes of this debate last night, I thought it was gonna end up being a grand-slam home run. Trump came ready. He was loaded. He knew what the strategy was. Now, you can disagree with the strategy. I think the strategy was to try to rattle Biden and to facilitate whatever they thought might happen with the mental deficiencies that the candidate has exhibited. The effort was to try to hasten that.
And the frustrating thing is that Biden was demonstrating that, and Trump interrupted him rather than let it happen a number of times. That is because Trump desperately wanted to debate. The moderator kept interrupting. The moderator and the questions. And just — get out of the way. You got a debate starting. You got a debate raging. Let them go at it.
This is not a question of is the moderator gonna be elected president or is the moderator’s job performance gonna matter a hill of beans in terms of the future of the country. Let the candidates engage. Let the audience decide who’s more in command of facts and more in command of the stage. Instead of this silly attempt to enforce a bunch of rules. Let the candidates enforce the rules. Let’s find out who can stand up for themselves and who can’t.
Trump, I don’t think, lost a single vote from his base last night. The question is whether any undecideds were moved. CNN has pointed out: hey, hey, don’t get excited out there since Trump lost every debate in 2016, they think. And they also point out that incumbent presidents never have first debates that are any good. Even though the Drive-Bys might think that Biden was a slam dunk winner just ’cause he lasted 90 minutes, they are not at all confident of that.
And now these demands on Biden that he not do the other two debates. Those are demands coming from the Drive-By Media ’cause they think he can only do damage. He showed that he can handle himself for 90 minutes and he could withstand whatever Trump threw at him. No need to do this anymore. Biden’s out there saying, “Can’t wait. I want to bring on those other two debates.†Bring ’em on. But there has to be some clarification of the rules.
It was rather obvious to me that Biden did not want to debate. He wanted to mumble a bunch of facts he wrote down and he wanted to make sure he articulated them before he forgot ’em. But Trump wanted a vigorous exchange. He was thwarted every time a debate nearly broke out. You know, part of a free flowing debate is to measure strength and tenacity, assertiveness. Those are all Trump strengths, as well as his record and his accomplishment.
But there was micromanagement of this debate going on, as though the questions mattered more than what the candidates were naturally evolving in and to as the debate unfolded. And excuse me, but it seemed like a number of times, it looked like somebody thought that Biden needed to be rescued. And so the life raft was thrown. But the audience last night was denied the ability to judge the candidates in a meaningful way because they were interrupted.
And I don’t know. It’s hard for me to relate because I put myself in the position all a moderator, and my ego would tell me I’m not the reason anybody’s here tonight as the moderator. I’m not the reason this is happening tonight. I’m not what people are tuning in to see. The people are not tuning in to see who stays closest to the rules. People are not tuning in tonight hoping the moderator does a great job enforcing the rules. That’s not why people watch these things. And they’re not gonna judge a debate like last night on the basis of who appeared to be more acquiescent to the moderator. That’s not what was at stake.
Now, I realize a lot of people think that Trump could have brought a different attitude and it would have been better, that he could have brought the Trump of the rallies, that he could have brought… Oh, I don’t think the word they don’t want to say but what they mean is “likability.†You gotta understand — and I think a lot of people do — this is ball game.
We’re going up for an election here whereas — as Trump made it abundantly clear last night — the future of the country and what kind of country we are going to have is what is up for grabs. That’s what’s at stake, not listening to a debate between the moderator and the president of the United States on climate change. We don’t want moderators who are control freaks.
If the candidates are control freaks, let’s see it. Let us judge. We don’t need the participants of a debate treated like this is Romper Room and they are violating some of the school rules and they’re gonna be punished by being sent to the corner. Trump wanted to debate. He desperately wanted to debate. Instead we got a scolding, “Tsk-tsk-tsk, you’re not listening to the questions,†moderated kind of debate, and it was just frustrating.
It was frustrating all the way around. I really thought, folks, after five minutes… I thought Trump was gonna blow Biden away. I thought Trump was calm, he was informed, he was tough. And then it turned into this circus as if Trump didn’t really think or wasn’t aware beforehand what he was up against. I don’t know. It looked to me like Trump wasn’t prepared for the kind of moderator that he got last night.
I mean, he adapted after a while, but it looked like he was… I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. It looked like he was a little taken aback. He seemed surprised that Biden would slander him. He seemed surprised that Biden would lie. I can’t believe he was surprised by it, but the way things changed after the first five minutes I just had to wonder — and I had some regrets too.
You know, Biden was in the process a number of times of melting down. He was in the process of forgetting what he was saying. He was in the process of losing his place in his mind, his train of thought, and Trump saved him. And the reason Trump saved him was Trump has got so frustrated over the lies that Biden was saying that he just couldn’t resist jumping in and correcting what Biden was saying, which stopped Biden’s meltdowns dead in their tracks.
The latest Hillary Clinton scandal — and it’s a doozy, and it’s something that we’ve known for I don’t know how long. Hillary Clinton was the behind all of this that was the Russian scandal. You know, I remember, ladies and gentlemen, I went back and looked, because I had a distinct memory of the way I dealt with this. I went back to my own program; I looked up a transcript of my own show, a transcript of me, April 22, 2019.
That day, the New York Times ran their story on how the dossier may not be true. April 22, 2019, the New York Times with a story reporting that the dossier may be Russian disinformation. They knew that even before Trump was inaugurated. The question I asked back then: Hillary Clinton spent $10 million on that dossier. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC spend $10 million on that dossier.
That dossier was a pack of lies. Everybody knew it was a pack of lies, and do you know the one thing that didn’t happen? Hillary Clinton and the Democrats did not act upset that they got ripped off. Here they supposedly go out and they hire a guy, Christopher Steele, and they pay him $10 million to come up with this dossier of data on Trump that they can use as opposition research.
It turns out to be not only Russian disinformation. It’s double-down Russian information. We now know that the primary sub-source — meaning the guy that fed the data to Steele — was a Russian agent working for the Brookings Institution in Washington, living in suburban Washington and Virginia. The guy was a Russian agent, a spy. He was KGB.
Hillary Clinton not one time acted like she got ripped off. She didn’t and neither did the DNC. Why wasn’t she mad? She could have even acted mad. To carry out this hoax, to continue this BS that the dossier was true, the dossier was — or that they thought it was — she could have at least acted like she was upset that she had just wasted $10 million.
She spent $10 million; she got a pack of lies. Why wasn’t she angry? Why wasn’t the DNC angry over the fact that that $10 million investment ended up not being worth anything? They couldn’t use it. She paid for fake October Surprises, fake news. Well, the fact that she didn’t get mad, the fact that she did not act ripped off is further evidence that she knew exactly what it was. It was designed to be a pack of lies.
Anyway, that doesn’t come up. None of that comes up. No! You know what comes up? Charlottesville and a bunch of lies. We’re gonna go through the debate at that point. I’ve got a transcript here of this exchange between Debater Number 1 (the moderator), Debater Number 2 (the president), and Debater Number 3 (Biden) over this whole mess that somehow Trump is a white supremacist and to this day has not denounced it, which he has over and over and over again.
And it was dredged up by the moderator. But what was not dredged up? What Biden told my old Buddy Charlamagne tha God, “Hey! Hey! If you ain’t voting for me, you ain’t black.†That didn’t come up, and then we had to listen to the moderator lecturing Trump on butting in. We had to listen to the moderator lecturing Trump on interrupting. But Biden didn’t get lectured for interrupting.
Biden wasn’t lectured for calling Trump names. That’s the one thing that Trump did not do. Trump did not engage any personal attacks last night, unless you want to say that it was a personal attack to say, “Joe you and the word ‘smart’ don’t go together in the same sentence.†But Biden was the one with mean-spirited personal attacks. They weren’t called out.
The moderator never said that there was a violation of rules going on there. So now the thinking is that Team Biden will say, “We don’t need to do any more debates. America cannot endure another circus like last night, and so we are bowing out.†The problem is that Biden has already said he can’t wait for the next two. Of course, that might have been planned anyway, should it have gone the way it did. Now, I know a lot of people…
For example, I know a lot of Millennial women are made nervous by behavior such as that last night, by both sides. They’re made nervous by confidence, made nervous by assuredness — and I’m sure that many people last night thought Trump was a bully. So you could look at what people might think this election is gonna be.
Is this — oops. I just saw the clock. I got take a break. It’s a good thing that I didn’t really get started in this and is V to interrupt myself. We’ll resume when I get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: All right. Now, so Donald Trump was told that he had to denounce white supremacists. He had to denounce the Backstreet Boys. He had to denounce Charlottesville. He had to denounce all this stuff. He’s already done that. Meanwhile, Joe Biden was never asked to denounce Antifa. In fact, Antifa was mischaracterized.
“Antifa’s not an organization. It’s an idea.†BS! It’s not just an idea. It is an organization of anti-capitalists and anarchists, and it’s got real people in it. Black Lives Matter is a Marxist/communist organization. It has nothing to do with civil rights. Biden was not asked to denounce them.
No, it was only Trump who was told that he had to denounce, and you should have heard it. Biden and the moderator ganging up on Trump. “Will you do it? Do it! Say it! You better do it! Say it!†Both of them ganging up on Trump. I can understand why Trump’s losing his mind here. I just… All this stuff, you know going in, and for some reason, expect it to be different.
