In ’92 he was on Phil Donahue to pump his new TV show, produced by Donahue’s parent company. There’s the liberal TV icon of the era fitfully obliged to interview the new conservative comer Limbaugh, who’s launching his own TV show. Donahue palpably disliked Limbaugh but kept it fairly civil— “fairly” being still arbitrated by liberal gatekeepers, though Ronnie Reagan rid the airwaves of the Fairness Doctrine five years earlier.
Goggle-eyed Donahue hadn’t a clue what was down that pike while self-assured Rush was already cannily exploiting this new liberty to just make shit up.
Alas, Rush’s TV show bombed. But blubbery Rush turned the negative visual thing to his advantage. He made his aural relationship psychologically intimate, probing his audience’s every personal crevice and grievance, painting scenarios of liberal excess and outrage and excising them with jaunty jingo soundbites to accompany his imaginings. He artfully and gleefully enraged listeners every day, for decades.
Rush paved America’s neural pathways for Donald Trump, who would never have remotely occurred to us without Rush. Rush couldn’t take the ball over the line himself. Trump could. Trump did TV. The conservative virtual presidency had lurched from twinkly cinema cowboy Reagan to Trump’s carny Rainmaker roadshow.
A Fox TV host claimed Limbaugh was “on loan from God.”
The loan department at God Inc. is mum on this.
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