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.

RUSH: — and has no human rights for the very constituency the Democrat Party claims to represent. Yet here they are tweeting their support for these people –

THE PRESIDENT: Right.

RUSH: — simply in opposition to you.

THE PRESIDENT: That’s amazing. Like, as an example, take the wall. They were always for the wall. And then I wanted it, and they went against it. In fact, I said if I had it to do again, I would have come out totally against the wall and I would have gotten their votes. Okay? All I had to do was come out against the wall. “I am opposed to building the wall.” And we would have gotten all the votes we needed.

No, it’s almost like they’ll try and do whatever is the opposite. I think they’ve lost their minds, you want to know the truth. I really do. It’s a terrible thing to say. Nobody’s ever seen anything like it. Like even impeachment hoax, you take a look at that, and they have nothing, they have nothing. With one of the biggest investigations in history, they found nothing, the Mueller report, they found absolutely — think of it — they spent $45 million, two years, it’s a hoax.

They spent all of that time, all of that money, had brilliant people that happened to be, you know, very, very — they were crazed — they were crazed. I mean, these people were dying to find something on Trump. They found nothing. I think there’s very few people that you’ve ever met who could have had that. They had so many investigators, they were calling people that I haven’t seen in years, and they got nothing.

Think of that, nothing. Very few people — and, by the way, I’m sure they looked at my taxes, they looked at everything you had to look at, they looked at everything. And $45 million, and much more than that in the true sense, you know, the real sense, it was much more than that. And they had 18 — I used to call them 13 angry Democrats, but they increased it to 18 angry Democrats –

RUSH: Full party.

THE PRESIDENT: — and very smart. Many were tied up with Clinton. They were involved with Clinton. But these people couldn’t find anything on Trump. They would have loved — if I had a parking ticket, it would have been a major story. They found nothing. Even I was very impressed with how clean I am, Rush.

RUSH: You ought to be. You may be cleaner than any previous president that we could think of. Anyway, I gotta take a quick time-out. We have President Trump with us for the remaining part of the program, the last of the half hour, and we’ll continue with him right after this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: And we are back with President Trump. You mentioned the impeachment hoax. Nancy Pelosi has not delivered these two articles of impeachment that are, frankly, both of them are jokes. What do you suspect is happening here with this? What is the politics of this? What are they trying to achieve here? I mean, I know throw you out of office and all, but what’s the point here, not sending these articles over?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I think what they’re trying to do is affect the election illegally. That’s what they’re trying to do. But the reason that they’re not sending it because they’re — they are a joke. They are not crimes. There is nothing there. They found nothing. We went through two years of a Mueller report, you know that better than anybody, nobody covered it better. And we went through two years —

RUSH: I think I’m more frustrated by it than you are. You’ve had to deal with it. But it makes a lot of us livid —

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.

RUSH: — because there’s nothing, everything to this has been made up. It’s worse than a hoax, the first part of it was a coup, and this is just the continuation of it.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, it’s so sad for our country. I mean, think of it. We’re fighting with Iran, we’re fighting with all of these different places, and in many cases doing great, making trade deals, doing so good, our country is doing so good, but I have to spend and my team has to spend time on this stuff. They found nothing. Just think of that. For two years an unlimited budget, unlimited talent and they found nothing, and they came up with two articles that aren’t even a crime.

RUSH: Well, there was nothing to find. It was all made up. I mean, that’s the frustrating thing here. It was all made up. There was nothing to find. There was nothing to investigate.

THE PRESIDENT: They created a situation that was false, that was fraudulent, and then they investigated the false, fraudulent situation, and they found nothing. It’s hard to believe. The whole thing’s hard to believe. And now on top of it, they come up with two articles and they put it before — now, what happened is she doesn’t want to get a vote because how can anybody possibly — it’s totally partisan. You know, this is not what they had in mind as they call them the founders, right, they keep saying the founders, founders, but the founders didn’t have this in mind. You understand, it’s like I’ve never heard the word “founders” so much in my life.

RUSH: They don’t have anything in common with the founders anyway.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah. We got I guess 196 or 197 to nothing with the Republican Party, plus we had three Democrat votes, and one person actually left the Democratic — the Democrat Party over it and joined the Republican Party, as you know.

RUSH: Speaking of which, the Republican Party hasn’t been this unified in I don’t know how long.

THE PRESIDENT: Never. It’s never — they say maybe never. And one thing I gave the Democrats credit for, they’ve always been very vicious, and they — and that’s not necessarily a good thing, but what is a good thing is they always stuck together. And here the Republicans stuck together even better than the Democrats. So we had, like, 196 or 197 to nothing. It’s unheard of. You know that because they’re always breaking off and — I don’t know — and this is really for 70 years, 80 years, you know, for some reason it’s in the DNA, they just don’t seem — and in this case they have been so good. And I think the Senate will be the same way ’cause the Senate knows it’s a hoax. Everybody knows it’s a hoax.

RUSH: The Republican Party’s now the party of Trump, I mean, there’s no question about it.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I just think it’s the party of common sense. You know, I view it — somebody said, “Are you conservative?” Well, I’m conservative, but I think it’s common sense. It was — like what we did two days ago with this horrible terrorist. He was a terrorist, you know, they don’t want to call him a terrorist. Now the Democrats are trying to make him sound like he was this wonderful human being.

RUSH: He was a poet. Yeah, he was a poet.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah, he’s a poet.

RUSH: He’s reading poetry out there.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, when you read the New York Times and you read the Washington Post, that are totally fake newspapers, by the way, that would have both been out of business except I won, I wonder what happens in — hopefully in five years, right? Hopefully in five years. But I wonder what happens to those newspapers. Who knows. But they do well now, although if you look at the unfunded liability probably they don’t do so well.

But you look at what they write, it’s so fake, it’s so phony, and now they’re trying to build him just like they did al-Baghdadi. Al-Baghdadi was the number one terrorist in the world. We got him. They wrote very little about it, relatively speaking. That story disappeared very quickly, as you know. But they tried to build him up into a relatively wonderful man. He was a total bad guy –

RUSH: Yeah.

THE PRESIDENT: He founded ISIS. He was doing it again. He was trying to do it again. You know, I wiped out ISIS. During our administration, we wiped out the entire caliphate — a hundred percent of the caliphate — and we wiped him out and, you know, got little credit. But our people know that we did it, Rush, because of people like you and Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and so many others. Your friends at Fox & Friends in the morning are so good. You know, people are getting it. They really get it. And because of social media and my Twitter. Without Twitter, I think we’d be lost. We wouldn’t be able to get the truth out.

RUSH: Yeah, that’s a good point. People still say to me, “You need to ask him to stop tweeting so much.” I tell ’em, “Look, it’s the only way he can get his message out, and it’s not a negative at all.” People say, “He needs to dial back the drama, needs to dial back the chaos.” I disagree with that talk.

THE PRESIDENT: Yeah.

RUSH: I think you’re doing exactly what you have to do, given the circumstances presented to you.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I wish I didn’t have to do it. I wish we had legitimate newspapers and legitimate media. We don’t. I mean, it’s… Much of it is really… I call it corrupt. It’s the corrupt media. It’s — and, you know, it’s very interesting. You understand this better than anybody. If they do a story on me, I immediately know if it’s false or not false — and I don’t mind a bad story if it’s right. But I know. A person reading the story doesn’t know that it’s false, so I’m able to tell ’em through social media.

RUSH: Right.

THE PRESIDENT: I don’t even call it Twitter. I call it social media, ’cause it goes to everything. You know, it goes to Facebook, it goes to Instagram, and we have hundreds of millions of people. You know, we have a tremendous amount of people. Just on one site I’m up to, I guess, close to 70 million people.

RUSH: Yeah, they’re jealous as they can be of that too.

THE PRESIDENT: Now, for Facebook, I had dinner —

RUSH: Of course they want you to stop.

THE PRESIDENT: I had dinner with Mark Zuckerberg the other day, and he said, “I’d like to congratulate you,” in front of a large group of people. So I’m not… (chuckles) But he said, “I’d like to congratulate you, you’re number one on Facebook,” and, you know, it’s incredible, and that’s —

RUSH: Wait a minute! Wait a minute. You had dinner with Zuckerberg?

THE PRESIDENT: I did. I did. I had dinner with him.

RUSH: Oh-ho! Wait ’til the world finds out about that.

THE PRESDIENT: Oh, I know.

RUSH: I guess they just did.

THE PRESIDENT: You have semi-breaking news. I guess a couple of people might have reported it but they’re not like you. So I just got a list, the TSL Power 50. The number one show on radio has a guy named Rush Limbaugh. Did you ever hear of him, Rush Limbaugh?

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: Number 1. Have you? This is the 50 “most influential and listened to streaming talk show[s] in the country,” Rush Limbaugh number 1. So I hope you saw that. But now we’ve just made your interview.

RUSH: (laughing)

THE PRESIDENT: But your viewers have to know that. Your listeners have to know that. Number 1. Great job.

RUSH: Thank you, sir. You know, your timing is impeccable. You’re a broadcast specialist from The Apprentice and so forth, and you’ve gotten right up to the break here. I can’t thank you enough for this. I wish we had even more time. People love you, sir —

THE PRESIDENT: Well —

RUSH: — and they are grateful, and they know that you still are focused on them —

THE PRESIDENT: I love ’em.

RUSH: — that you’re still implementing the agenda that you ran on.

THE PRESIDENT: I love ’em. I love ’em, Rush.

RUSH: They know that too. Thank you so much for your time and have a great, great rest of this day and year.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you. Thank you.

RUSH: I hope it’s the greatest year of your life, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you very much, Rush, and thank you for everything, and congratulations on your incredible success. I really… It’s so important for this country what you do. Thank you very much, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

THE PRESIDENT: Thanks. Bye.