RUSH: I want to go to the audio sound bites. I need to straighten something out. I guess it was last week sometime (it might have been earlier this week; it’s already Wednesday), I made a reference to what would happen at the convention if Trump gets close and whatever games are played to deny him the nomination, even if it’s this delegate mechanism that Cruz is using. I made an observation that’s true.

And that is, if the nomination is denied Trump, Trump supporters are gonna go nuts. Now, it has been suggested that I was advocating or acknowledging that there’s going to be a riot. That’s not what I meant. Nor am I trying to further some sort of Trump talking point. I’m simply talking about human nature. The Trump campaign is made up of people that are… We have discussed over the course of this campaign that the bond Trump supporters have with him is unbreakable; it’s deep.

There isn’t any other candidate in this race who has anything like it, folks. Not Hillary, not nobody. Nobody has had it. Only Trump has this this special bond. The media can’t break it. They didn’t make it happen. It’s a unique thing. It’s a special thing. It doesn’t happen to everybody. Even successful people in media sometimes do not have this kind of a bond with their audience. I’ll give you an example of what I’m talking about.

Back in the nineties before cable TV fractured news, the nightly newscasts on ABC, CBS, NBC, had phenomenal numbers, huge numbers in terms of ratings. And you had the anchors. They were Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather. And, of course, millions of people were watching. But the audiences did not have connections with those anchors; they just knew them. I mean, they were celebrities. I came back from the Houston convention in 1992, and I was on a plane with Peter Jennings and Ed Bradley.

And we’re at baggage claim, and I had all kinds of people coming up and saying hello to me and saying complimentary things. Nice things, what have you. Nobody approached Ed Bradley. Nobody approached Jennings. Everybody knew who they were and people stared at them and they pointed at them, but, you know, they didn’t have connection. If Trump shows up at baggage claim, he’d be swarmed. It’s that kind of connection that Trump has and nobody else in this political season has had it.

And my only point is with that connection being as deep as it is and the Trump people already thinking that behind the scenes tricks are being played to steal the nomination from him, they don’t understand this delegate business at all, and they don’t understand how Cruz is not winning a thing and is still getting all these delegates. It doesn’t make sense to ’em. So if a contested convention occurred and if Cruz did happen to win the nomination on a second ballot, there would be hell to pay.

And I’m not talking about riots. I’m just talking about people, Trump supporters would be fit to be tied. They would leave convention. They would walk out. They would leave the party. They wouldn’t vote. It would be a mess. Speaking of which, Steve Hayes of the Weekly Standard — we got the sound bite coming up — says that the Republican Party even now is planning on a third-party candidate if Trump is the nominee. They are just that panicked about it, and they just can’t abide it. There’s no way they can get behind it, the Trump campaign.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, I want to get back to this this business here at the convention of what would happen here if they go contested and Trump is denied. You can’t take things out of context. You have to put them in context when analyzing this. So on one hand you have Cruz who is brilliantly putting together this delegate plan of his.

Now, I don’t care how many of you in the Trump camp think it’s cheating. It isn’t. I don’t care how many think it’s a violation of the democrat process. It isn’t. Everything Cruz is doing candidates have done for time immemorial. They have to do it even in non-contested conventions, they have to get the delegates, and those delegates are acquired in a number of ways. One is via primary vote; the other is at state conventions.

So Cruz is brilliantly working these state conventions, and he is securing much delegate support on the second and third ballot, but there’s a problem here and that is Cruz isn’t winning elections anywhere. That has nothing to do with whether he’s getting delegates or not. That has to do with, in a contested convention, if Cruz were to somehow pull off the nomination by securing 1,237 votes from delegates on a second or third ballot, the backlash would be overwhelming because there hasn’t been an accompanying series of election wins in these primaries that would make the delegate sweep make sense.

Whether people understood it or not, it would not be seen as valid or proper. But it’s the only route that Cruz has open to him, and him and his supporters would face a phenomenal backlash if he wins the nomination by winning delegates but not getting the votes. So if that were to happen, the only point that I’m making is that Trump supporters, whether they’re right or wrong in their assessment of what happened and how it happened, would simply be fit to be tied.

I’m not talking about riots. I’m not talking about burning anything down. I’m saying they would be fit to be tied. They would look at this as having been stolen from them. They’d walk out. The Republican Party would have — I mean, they can’t win, the Republican Party cannot win without Trump’s voters; it just can’t happen. Well, my making this observation has been seen in some quarters as my suggesting that there would be riots and that this is something that Trump has forecast and that somehow I am carrying a Trump message. And I’m not doing anything of the sort.

I’m not even thinking of riots when I think people would be upset, angry, and would protest a result like this. If Cruz had been winning primaries and succeeds with a delegate challenge, that’s a little bit different picture. Anyway, I’m leading up to the fact that they discussed this on The Five, my contention here that there would be hell to pay from the from the Trump supporters. It was on yesterday’s program, and they started out playing this clip of what I said.

RUSH ARCHIVE: I don’t think anybody understands the blowback that would happen from the Trumpists. If that ever happens, we are gonna see a nuclear explosion like you’ve never seen before. Holy smokes, the blowback that will happen then, the backlash, that will be the end of the Republican Party.

RUSH: And I did say that it would make what happened at Watts and the Rodney King situation look like Romper Room, but I wasn’t talking about riots, and I certainly was not advocating them. I’m just was reacting to Trump callers that I’ve been taking for the past two weeks who are fit to be tied over this whole delegate thing, don’t understand it, think it’s rigged, think it’s cheating, think it’s not the democrat process, and if it actually happened that their guy was denied on this basis, look out. That’s all I said. I just wanted to clarify this. I’m kind of ticked off that I have to, but nevertheless I’ll be glad I’ve got the opportunity to do it. Here’s some of the reaction starting with Kimberly Guilfoyle at Fox News on The Five.

GUILFOYLE: Ay, caramba! I don’t think it’s implausible to say that there would be chaos or there would be backlash or there would be some kind of uproar or disappointment. People certainly have been passionate that are big supporters of Donald Trump, to come out to hear him speak, waiting in long lines, sifting through protestors to be able to get into whatever event space that he has at the time.

RUSH: Right, and here’s Greg Gutfeld with his reaction to it.

GUTFELD: If you believe that he is going to lose and that Hillary will be the nominee and the president and put in four Supreme Court justices, your conclusion is, do you let it happen or do you do everything possible to stop it and incur the wrath at the convention from — is the wrath that you get from the Trumpists, as Rush says, worth it to save a massacre in November?

RUSH: He’s basically asking if it’s worth enduring the wrath of the Trumpists to nominate somebody who in the eyes of the anti-Trump crowd can’t defeat Hillary? And, you know, we’ll let events answer that question. I think it’s going a little bit far here. I just wanted to clarify my characterization of the reaction of Trump supporters should this delegate strategy of Cruz’s actually manifest and pay off and he gets the nomination, especially now.

You put the context of what happened yesterday in those five states, again, every county Trump wins, winning 59% of the vote, 62% of the vote, 54% of the vote, it would be a tough sell, even though it would all be legal. Nobody would have time for that, though, because it would appear to be a violation of the expressed will of the majority as having occurred in actual elections. And in terms of that, they’d have a point.