from The Conservative Treehouse:

Earlier today President Trump called in to the Rush Limbaugh show for an interview about current political events.  [Transcript Below]

RUSH: Welcome back the EIB Network, and Rush Limbaugh back at it after a couple of weeks off for Christmas. Not much happening. We are happy to have here with us the president of the United States, Donald Trump. It’s so great to have you back here, sir. Thank you for joining us.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Rush, very much.

RUSH: Okay. I have had a lot of people say to me — they’re reacting to the media reaction of the action we took, that you took against the Quds Force commander in Iran. Mr. President, people are being scared to death, their kids are being scared to death out of their minds that somehow this is gonna start World War III, that we are now more unsafe than we have ever been. Could you explain to people why what you’ve done here makes us safer, why it was necessary, and why what we did was right.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, this should have been done for the last 15 to 20 years, him in particular. He was their real military leader. He’s a terrorist. He was designated a terrorist by President Obama, and then Obama did nothing about it except give them $150 billion and — even more incredibly — $1.8 billion in cash. You hear me talking about that all the time, and you talk about it all the time. He gave them all this money. He never wanted to do anything about it. President Bush should have taken him out. He’s responsible for the IEDs.

Those are the roadside bombs and the bombs that blow up all over the place — and then the sister, which is the big one, the big version, that actually knocks out tanks and kills everybody within earshot. A really horrible weapon. He’s responsible for all those incredible young people over at Walter Reed — where they do such a great job, by the way — where they lose their arms and their legs and all. He gave so much of that technology. Much of that stuff was made in Iran. And he should have been taken out a long time ago. And we had a shot at it, and we took him out. And we’re a lot safer now because of it. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see what the response is, if any. But you’ve seen what I said our response will be.

RUSH: Well, yeah.

THE PRESIDENT: Our country is a lot safer, Rush.

RUSH: They said they’ve got 21 targets they’re looking at, and you came back and said, “Fine. I’ve got 52 of yours.” I don’t think that they are accustomed to a president like you, sir. I mean, you just mentioned it. Obama basically appeased them. Obama worked with this guy on the Iranian nuclear deal. What…? A lot of things had to surprise you when you assumed office and found out some things that had been done previously in policy. What was the purpose of American policy with Iran prior to your presidency?

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t think they had a purpose. I don’t think they knew what was happening. Why did he give them $150 billion, much of it going back into terror? If you look at what’s happening…

When I first came into office, I went to the Pentagon, and they showed me 18 “sites of confliction,” meaning conflict, over there. And every one of them was started by Iran, either their soldiers or they paid for soldiers, soldiers for hire. I have no idea what they tried to do with appeasement.

And I can tell you, the Logan Act… If there was ever an act that should have been used, they should look at the Obama administration and John Kerry, the Logan Act, because what he was doing with Iran and the relationship that they built up and the things that he said, I would certainly love to see that be looked at because I think John Kerry was… Personally, I think he was advising them. I think that the Obama administration was just letting them get away with murder — in the true sense murder.

And, you know, right after they made the deal, it wasn’t like they were respected. They treated the United States worse than ever before. In fact, I said, “At least give him a little respect,” because they treated… They got worse. They actually got more hostile. They took the $150 billion and they took the $1.8 billion in cash, and they got worse. And if you remember, right before the payment was made, they took 10 sailors.

And they humiliated those sailors, and they humiliated our country with the sailors down on their knees. And the only reason they released them was they wanted their first payment. It was just before the payment. If they had taken them after they got the money, they would have never released them. They’d be there now. Well, they would be there now with me. But they would be there for a long period of time. But you remember the 10 sailors that were —

RUSH: Yeah.

THE PRESIDENT: — 15 feet across the line, probably they weren’t. They don’t even know if they were in Iranian waters. But they said they were slightly in Iranian waters. So they humiliated them. But they released them because the money was due the following day, and they said, “Oh, we don’t want to…” Hey, why should they turn down $150 billion over the 10 sailors? But they humiliated those sailors and our country.

RUSH: Well, he also lifted sanctions on Soleimani as part of the Iran deal. And it looks like, to me, anyway, that Obama looked and that administration looked at building Iran up as some way stabilizing the region. As though Israel’s not the good guys, as though we’re not the good guys, that Iran needs to be made stronger — this is what they believed — otherwise that whole region is kind of a tinderbox. But the thing that really is true about this is the Middle East has changed in priority. Because of the massive improvements made in domestic energy in the United States, we’re no longer dependent on that region.

THE PRESIDENT: Right. Right. Well, it’s right, and one of the things that changed… I know you talk about it. If you go back 10 years or eight years or maybe even five years, Israel was the king of the Congress, right? Our Congress protected Israel and fought for Israel. Now you look at the way the Democrats in Congress are treating them, where you have AOC and you have Tlaib and you have Omar, and they are actually, you know, anti-Semitic. They are totally against Israel. The things that they’ve said…

You go back to the past and you look at the things that they’ve said about Israel and Jewish people, it’s incredible. Ten years ago, that would have been unacceptable. It would have been… It would have been… Nobody could have even believed it. I still can’t believe it! You know, I’m a little bit old-fashioned, right, in that sense, ’cause I’ve grown up and there was always great protection and reverence for Israel, and now it’s the opposite. In the Democrats, it’s almost… It’s almost a negative. They’re going out and what they do for Tlaib and what they do for Omar — Representative Omar, Minnesota — and AOC, I think it’s incredible the way they talk about Israel. It just was unthinkable to do that 10 years ago and sooner.

RUSH: I actually think that you’ve had a role in driving them even more insane than they were. Let me give you some evidence. Let’s go back to the day you came down the escalator and announced your candidacy. You announced the slogan Make America Great Again, and all of a sudden, Make America Great Again becomes some wildly controversial prospect. And I’m asking myself, “What in the world is controversial at all? How can anybody disagree with America being great, becoming great, remaining great?” and yet it was. How do you explain that?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, you know, politics has changed a lot over the last couple of years. For instance, I want low taxes. They want to raise your taxes. How do you think that works? I couldn’t win as a politician. I don’t think Abe Lincoln could win as a politician. Borders. They want open borders. When you see the people that we’re sending back and we’re capturing now at record levels, in many cases they’re murderers and they’re people, they’re drug dealers, and it’s incredible. They want open borders. That means all of these people are gonna be pouring in.

And, of course, good ones will come in too. But you have tremendous numbers of really bad people, including murderers and rapists and others. They want open borders. They want sanctuary cities. They don’t want a strong military based on everything — I mean, we have to fight like crazy to get the strong military, and we have to give up things that we wouldn’t give up if we had the House, as an example, if we were able to have enough. You know, we’ve always needed their vote because it was always very close.

In fact, the first two years we had a very, you know, tiny majority, so we always needed their votes. But when you see they want higher taxes, right? They want much more regulation. You know, I cut regulations more than any president in history by far, even though they were there for four and eight years and in one case more than that, we’ve got the all-time record, that was probably as important or more important as the tax cuts, the biggest — including Ronald Reagan, the biggest tax cut we’ve ever had.

And we’re actually taking in more revenue now than we did when we had the higher taxes because the economy’s doing so well. But, you know, when you see them with open borders, Rush, you say — and sanctuary cities and all of these other things, you say, “Where are they coming from?” Well, Israel is sort of the same. I put that in that same category. As far as I’m concerned, they’re anti-Israel, totally anti-Israel.

RUSH: Well, it’s always perplexed me that you have drawn them out. They have now — with Twitter in the past two or three days since the attack on Soleimani, you literally have the Democrat Party and elements of that party openly supporting Iran, an enemy of the United States, openly supporting the terrorist actions of that country, and this is a country that beheads homosexuals and transgenders –

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.

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