Charlie Sykes: Rush Limbaugh Was an ‘Entertainer,’ ‘Laid Groundwork For Donald Trump’

EXCERPT:

SYKES: “But you can’t overstate Rush Limbaugh’s role in basically building up the entertainment wing of the GOP to be absolutely dominant. So it’s a little bit painful, you know, talking about it the day on the that he dies, because I’ve been working on a piece for Dana's newspaper in which I argue that right now we are all living in the world of Rush Limbaugh made in his own image, when you think about what he did and the influence that he had. He was an entertainer. He was not a deep thinker. He was not a thought leader. But he shaped so much of the way the right wing transformed itself over the last few years. He popularized what — you know, he popularized conservative ideas, but he also played a very central role in the derangement of it. So his legacy is a conservative movement that is, in fact, more dishonest, more open to dishonesty, crueler, dumber than it was before. And you can’t understand Donald Trump without understanding that Rush Limbaugh was in many ways not just the guy that laid the groundwork for him, but in many ways a role model in the way that you could twist truth, the way that you could use insults and ad hominem attacks instead of actually dealing with ideas. Because, you know, the bottom line, dirty secret about Rush Limbaugh is he was utterly uninterested in ideas.”