RUSH: This is John. Brooksville, Florida. I’m glad you waited, sir. Hi.

CALLER: Thank you. Well worth the wait. I talked to you before, had the pleasure before. Alls I gotta say, that lady’s crazy. But, anyway, what I called about, I was listening to your show when you were talking about Mr. Cohen and Omarosa and Manafort and all the baggage that was known about and any prosecutor could go after them, it begs the question: Why in the world would Trump have anybody with that kind of background get anywhere close to him just for the reason that he’s dealing with now? Can you comment on that?

RUSH: Yeah, I can. Let me repeat something that I said early on about this because some of the early staffing moves really puzzled me. I’ll just be honest, I have no idea what in the name of Sam Hill Omarosa was doing in Trump’s administration. I couldn’t get the commingling of stars from The Apprentice with — not the campaign. I’m talking the administration.

Now, Manafort and Cohen and some of these, they were never part of Trump’s administration. This is something to keep in mind. They were part of the campaign. Cohen never was. Cohen was never part of anything. Manafort was for just a little over three months, for, like, a hundred days. But there were some other staffing decisions that Trump made. I don’t want to name any names. They’re gone now.

But I ask you to think of something. And I’ll run this by you again, John. Imagine you, you run for president, and you win. It’s pretty much what Trump did. Trump does not come from a political career or lifestyle. Over the course of his life, the greatest contact Trump has had with politicians is donating to them. But his circle of friends does not include people that went to Ivy League schools that have been trained to be diplomats and bureaucrats. So he’s like you or me.

I’ll use myself. If I ran for president — and I know millions of you think I should — if I’m elected, the night that I’m elected, I can tell you honestly I do not know enough people to fill out my cabinet. I do not know enough people personally that I think would be qualified to be put in the cabinet. I’d have to ask for advice. This is where I would need advisers.

You’re frowning at me. You think I’m wrong about — (interruption) Well, okay. Look, I could put my childhood friends in Cape Girardeau in charge of the agriculture department, right, because we had to drive through farms to go to school, okay? I’m trying to be honest with you. I do not know — like George H. W. Bush, he knew all those guys. He knew Mosbacher at Commerce. He knew James A. Baker. He’d spent his life at the CIA, the United Nations. He was an establishment guy. Those people all know each other. I wouldn’t — attorney general? Who am I gonna go get? Who do I know that could be attorney general? My brother. Okay, put my brother in there. Maybe I’ll hire Mark Levin. He’d be good. He’d be a good attorney general.

Now, you go down the list, I’m just trying to tell you that most of us, if we were elected president as outsiders, not denizens of the Washington establishment, you and I do not know people — maybe you do, but I’m just trying to tell you, when it comes to filling out — and that’s just the cabinet. Let’s go to national security adviser now and let’s go over to all these other administration executive branch appointed positions.

Now let’s pick some ambassadors. I, frankly, do not know enough people to fill out an administration. But everybody in the swamp does, because they all know each other. And that’s why it’s a revolving door and incestuous. Well, Trump I believe is closer to you and me than he is to one of these inside the Beltway people who would understand and have personal relationships with hundreds of people who might qualify for various cabinet posts.

He didn’t know Tillerson, for example. He met Tillerson and decided on the spot that Tillerson would be good. So Trump has to have, during the campaign — here’s another thing you need to know. During the campaign, Trump didn’t have a whole lot of advisers. He’s running a self-contained campaign. His issues are his campaign. His agenda is his campaign. But the media demands to know who your foreign policy advisers.

Think back to the George W. Bush campaign in 2000. He went through the same deal. Who are your foreign policy — ? So they go and tap Condoleezza Rice, and Condoleezza Rice becomes his spokesman on foreign policy. And then remember the kerfuffle that came up that Bush didn’t know that India was called the subcontinent. And they had to trot Condoleezza Rice out to assure everybody that he did know that India was the subcontinent. Then Bush started using the subcontinent every other sentence when talking about that part of the world.

The media demands to know who’s gonna be your national security adviser. And the media then wants to know who’s advising you in the campaign on economics? Who’s advising you on the Fed? Who is advising. And as a candidate you have to have these answers.

So Trump’s picking names. That’s how Papadopoulos ended up as a foreign policy adviser. Trump never met him. They just had to fill out, they had to put some bodies in there because everybody’s running around, hey, it’s a presidential campaign. And no president knows everything, gotta have advisers. Trump is an outsider, who the hell are his advisers, who are they?

So Trump and his team start hustling around and picking people and throwing ’em in these positions, and they never once advise Trump. He didn’t need it! His agenda was his campaign. His issues were his campaign. So he picks Omarosa. He knows her. He creates a special office for her, Oval Office director of liaison to the south wing, whatever it was. Just to get her in there, because he trusted her.

The first thing you need is people — (interruption) I know. I know. This is my point. Well, in Trump’s view, he made her a star. In Trump’s view, he made her everything. She would be loyal, and maybe up to that point she had been. Who knows. The point I’m trying to make is I don’t think anybody knows enough people to fill out all of these advisory positions in a campaign or what have you.

And I don’t think Trump cared that much. He was the campaign. He was the candidate. He made it plain on the campaign trail that he didn’t need advisers. And he didn’t. He didn’t need people telling him what he thought. He might have needed people telling him how to say what he intended to do with foreign policy. And then when the allegations come up he’s starting to collude with Russia, yeah, needs some help there.

But he trusted Comey, for example, to start. Comey was the current sitting FBI director. Trump made the mistake of assuming that everybody’d be glad to see him, the newly elected president. It took him awhile to get the lay of the land up there. Why did he use Cohen as a personal — ’cause Cohen wasn’t a lawyer. Cohen was a fixer. In Trump’s world, Michael Cohens are everywhere. And everybody that’s like Trump in his world has one of them, at least one.

And because Cohen was around for a long, long time, it’s just easier to hold on to that guy. You know, I’m surmising here, but I think it’s a valid question. I myself, as I say, was really shocked when I saw some of the people that Trump named in his campaign as high-ranking here, there, and then I finally figured out why some of those people were named. It’s because people that were donating to Trump demanded it. That’s a whole ‘nother thing we haven’t even talked about.

Most of these candidates exist for donor money. If without donor money they don’t exist. And the donors expect something for it. And not just dinner in the Oval Office. They want policy considerations. They want to be named to the administration. They want ambassadorships. They want people that work for them in key administration positions.

So if you have a big donor here who wants somebody in Trump’s close orbit, the donor to discuss Trump, “I need you to hire this guy that’s a strategist or adviser here doing this or that.” So donors have a role in who these people pick. But even there, Trump did not have a lot of donors.

Trump’s campaign and his administration are really, really unique and shockingly different. And this is another reason why he has to go, folks. The swamp just cannot allow for some guy to succeed who does it so unlike it has always been done. They just can’t. Now the security clearances and how much money they’re worth and Trump’s just threatening to yank ’em away from people that have had ’em for years.

I think it’s impossible to know hundreds and hundreds of people of impeccable character and great expertise in every walk of life to populate an administration with. You’ve got to get advice from people. You have to get some people suggesting names to you and vouching for people; so at some point along the way you’ve gotta trust somebody to tell you, “No. You don’t want that person. You really want that person.”

How did Flynn get hired as the national security director? It’s very simple: loyalty. Flynn came to the Defense Intelligence Agency. Obama hated him. He was as loyal as anybody in the campaign was to Donald Trump. His foreign policy mirrored Trump’s in terms of trade and military. And maybe he wasn’t suited for a national security adviser position, given the relationship he would have to maintain, but Trump was, I think, rewarding loyalty. I think loyalty is such a big deal to a guy like Trump, and a lot of people can’t really get their arms around how important it is. But I think it is to him.