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RUSH: Jackson, New Jersey. Lucy, you’re first. Thank you for calling. Great to have you here. Hi.

CALLER: Hi. Thank you for taking my question. Firstly, I think it will be fair to say that Hillary Clinton will be dangerous for all of us, Republicans and Democrats alike, if she were to become president. I think that’s really a given. But let me get to my question. Maybe it’s a very simplistic question. I just don’t understand why the Republican Party… Why don’t they just face reality? Instead of panicking, scaring everyone away from voting Republican, why don’t they just rally behind Trump and behind the scenes quietly and effectively be the brains behind him?


RUSH: Well, um… (sigh)

CALLER: Because I think that Trump has good intentions. I think that they would be able to work with him, as long as they just have a constant ego massager on board.

RUSH: Here’s my frustration here, Lucy. I can answer your question. I’ve answered this question. Do not… I’m not reacting negatively to you. Please don’t misunderstand me here. I’m not mad and I’m not frustrated with you at all. I have answered this question over and over again time and time and time again. I’m not could you give you of not listening. I’m just prefacing this. I’ve answered it all last fall starting in August after the first debate, right through February-March. Your question: Why do these various groups on the right — this conservative or that conservative, conservative movement here or the Republican Party, individual Republicans.

Why do they not just line up behind Trump and focus on Hillary as the as the enemy and be done with it? And let me see if there’s a brief way of rehashing what I have explained over and over again. I think what we’re witnessing: actually things I predicted last fall. Because this degree of panic, fright, fear, anger is so deep, it almost seems like the effect on these people is personal. And the reason they’re not lining up behind Trump is because Trump is blowing up the existing order. His victory — well, his assumed victory as the nominee — is blowing up the existing order.

And if he became president, it would blow it up even more, in these people’s minds. One example. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times, if not more. In the establishment, it’s basically a network. It’s a closed club. Think of it as a country club. Is there…? Where you live, is there a club that won’t let you in? Whether it’s a garden club, a country club, whatever, knitting club, I don’t care whatever club it is. Is there a club that won’t let you? And are the people in that club thinking they’re better than everybody else, and do the people in that club only hang around with each other?

And do the people of that club take care of each other, their kids, their families, and so forth? That’s what you’re dealing with here on a much, much bigger, bigger scale. It’s an entire political party and every apparatus involved in it from the lobbyists to the think tanks, some of them, to the actual elected officials, to the people that run the party at the RNC. Some of them. It is a very closed-knit circle, and its strength and power depends on the Republican Party in the hands of one of them.


The membership in the club is the insulation against the daily grind that a lot of other people face. It’s insulation, protection against perhaps economic downturns or a kid getting fired and needing to find a job real quick or just take any example you can where connections, as opposed to merit, determine your standard of living — the way you party, the way you spend your leisure time. Somebody comes along and upsets that and makes membership in that club not nearly as meaningful, ’cause he’s not in it?

It’s not nearly as powerful. If the most powerful Republican in the country doesn’t want to be in that club, well, he’s gonna have his own. And so there are lot of people personally threatened here. When you get to the “conservative movement,” so-called… I said the other day on this program, I’m not even sure there is one. But for the purposes of discussion here just to make myself understood — and I said all this before, too, and I really can’t believe I didn’t get any blowback on it. Maybe I did and I just didn’t run across it. You’ve had people, some of them very fine people…

But you’ve had people fundraising for longer than I’ve been around. They have been raising money, asking for donations, because they are laying the groundwork for conservatism in Washington. They have contacts with policymakers on Capitol Hill. And they are how conservatism will stay relevant and maybe even dominant in the Republican Party. But it all hinges on donors sending money to them. And their pitch has always been they are the personal guardians of conservatism. They are the ones you can trust to constantly protect it, defend it, and grow it.


Well, a guy like Trump coming along kind of threatens the whole deal, makes people start wondering, “Wait a minute. Why did I send you all that money?” I’m talking about people that didn’t vote for Trump, I’m talking about people who don’t like Trump. They’ve donated to these causes under the premise that what they believed in was being guarded, protected, advanced, multiplied, grown. And then in a couple of months, somebody a lot of people consider to be a gauche, coarse reprobate can come along and sweep everybody out of the way? It’s a threat, and so signing up with this guy, lining up with this guy…

I mean, they’re all out there saying (many of them), “He’s not a conservative! He’s not a conservative! He’s not a conservative! You can’t… You can’t go with Trump! He’s not a conservative.” Conservatism is the magnet, the sales pitch, whatever. Conservatism is the reason for existence. If it’s this fragile… I mean, if somebody like Trump can come along and swamp it and swarm it, well, a lot of people are afraid. “Oh, my gosh, some of our donors are gonna figure it out.”

Look, there are many offshoots of this, too, and in uttering this, I don’t want anybody to misunderstand. I’m not launching into any criticism of how anybody makes a living or anything. She asked me, “Why don’t people line up behind Trump?” and I’m telling you what I think, and there’s a whole thing more reasons than what I’ve given you be. But many of them are related. The more the vitriol, the more personal it seems to me to be. I could be wrong about that, too. But enough of that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, there’s one more answer to the question, “Why don’t people line up behind Trump?” And it’s this. There are some people who are true-blue, red, white, and blue, top-to-bottom, front-to-back, wall-to-wall, ceiling-to-floor conservatives. It’s the essence of their existence, and they are appalled by Trump. They don’t think he is. They are scared. They have devoted their lives to conservatism and promoting it, and they are in utter panic that somebody like Trump can come along and simply… Well, however they perceive whatever’s happened to happen.

Wipe it out, dominate it, trounce it, what have you. I mean, my point is that there’s some true believers in there, too, that really feel hurt and scared because they’ve poured everything they’ve got into it, and they’re scared to death. And it’s apparently so fragile that, in their minds, a carnival barker can come around and talk people out of what they have believed for ten years, 15, 20 years, whatever. And so it frightens them for the future of the movement that they so love, and it frightens them for the future of the country. I mean, you’ve got countless number of reasons to explain why people on the Republican side will not line up with Trump.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: James in Richmond. It’s great to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. How you doing? Trump may have rearranged the party recently, but it all started with Eric Cantor. I live in his district, and when we threw him out and elected [David] Brat, that was a major change that started this whole thing.

RUSH: What do you mean, “started what whole thing”?

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CALLER: I believe the way we feel, that we’re fed up with the Republicans in Washington, that we sent them there and they did nothing. They’ve done nothing. They haven’t gone up against the press; they haven’t gone up against Obama.

RUSH: No, no, I get that. But what did it start? Are you saying that was the first block to fall that led to Trump? Are you saying that…?

CALLER: No. I think it was the first incident that started, you know, what ended up with Trump, that the guy who was next in line for speaker was defeated in a primary, but somebody who had never been elected, beat him.

RUSH: That’s the thing. That… I’ll tell you, you’re right about that. That was momentous from the establishment perspective. They couldn’t believe it. Eric Cantor had raised, what? My memory says $6 million or something for his race, and he was. He was next in line to be speaker, and the establishment thought that Cantor’s district voters were impressed by that, that that was the kind of thing that voters voted on. That mattered that their guy — that their representative, their member of Congress — he was gonna be speaker someday. And he was dispatched! I don’t think they’ve yet gotten over that, to tell you the truth.

That began a, shall we say, attitudinal bitterness at the establishment level. Now, I don’t know to what degree that has any impact here on Trump. It might. It’s hard to take a single incident when there have been a whole lot of things happen cumulatively, that had a cumulative effect, impact on things. But clearly that was a shocker. And when that happened, the establishment, you know, they said, “Oh, yeah? All right! Then you think…?” They refused to get that message. They fought back against the message. I mean, their attitude of his defeat was, “Oh, yeah? You think that, you voters? Well, we’ll show you!” I mean, it was no way that the establishment was gonna, quote, “learn any lesson from that,” unquote.

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