Limbaugh: Democrats who set up George W. Bush to go to war with Iraq now organizing ‘silent coup’ against Trump

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Friday wagged his finger at Democrats and U.S. intelligence agencies, arguing they tricked former President George W. Bush into the Iraq War and are now trying to do the same to President Trump.

“Now Bush, as a Republican, probably not popular with the deep state, particularly after how he was elected,” Limbaugh said on his radio show. “A lot of Democrats, a lot of deep staters think that [Al] Gore should have been president.”

“I think there was as much resentment in the deep state — we just didn’t call it that then — for George W. Bush as there is today for Donald Trump, and if not the same, it’s close,” he added.

The deep state, Limbaugh asserted, planted fake evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) to push Bush into the Iraq War and is now “making up evidence” of Russian ties to Trump.

“I have seen what this bunch of people in the intelligence community are capable of. What they’ve tried with Trump here, this whole Russia meddling, Trump colluding? This whole thing is a gigantic lie, a totally bogus hoax, a silent coup. That’s when I began to think the weapons of mass destruction thing was a setup against Bush, too,” Limbaugh said.

“Why should we believe these people? They haven’t been right about anything in the last four years,” he added, referring to the U.S. intelligence community. “They were wrong about the weapons of mass destruction. They didn’t get Benghazi right.”

Nonprofit group On the Issues pointed out that the radio host, who recently received the Medal of Freedom from Trump, was a huge supporter of the Iraq War and the claims of WMDs as reasoning for the conflict.

“Limbaugh in 2006 announced his plan to ‘get out the truth on weapons of mass destruction,’ blaming ‘the obdurate stubbornness and blindness of the Democrats and the drive-by media,'” the group said on its website.

After Congress, in a bipartisan act, authorized the use of military force in October 2002, the Iraq War began in March 2003.

A drawn-out withdrawal of troops during the Obama administration ended with the last troops leaving Iraq in 2011; however, U.S. forces were redeployed in 2014.

In January 2019, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there were 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq.

Updated at 1:05 p.m.