RUSH: We’ve got Romney, I’m convinced, trying to freeze any positive, continued or up-yard movement toward Trump with the allegation here that Trump’s got questionable taxes. Trump, of course, responded. “Well, this is typical…” I’m paraphrasing. “Here’s a guy who lost — a lousy, lousy candidate. He had his taxes examined last campaign and didn’t do it right or some such thing.” He was not moved by Romney’s threats. But the Washington Post and The Politico today both have, essentially, editorials.

The Washington Post is an editorial, and they’re scared. The headline to this thing is: “GOP Leaders, You Must Do Everything in Your Power to Stop Trump.” Washington Post. Now, I want you to stop and think about something for a second. I’m gonna give you details of this of what they say, but you stop and think here of the premise and think about the polling data that we have that’s out there, that says what it says. Most of the polling data. There are just a couple that don’t say this.

Most polls indicate that Hillary Clinton would beat Trump in the general election, and most of the polls that say that Hillary would beat Trump say it would be easy, that it would not be much of a contest. Additionally there is another poll out today, and it’s a combination of polls and exit polls, and I forget off the top of my head the source of it, but we’ll get to it as the program unfolds, and it’s new information on Hispanics that 75 to 80% of Hispanics disapprove and dislike Trump nationwide. Seventy, 80% dislike Trump. So you have that.

You have the polls that say that Hillary would beat Trump.

And there are a couple that say the opposite. So the question is, if beating Trump is foregone conclusion if Trump’s the nominee — if you’re sitting out there and you’re a liberal, you’re in the Drive-By Media, you’re a Democrat, and you’ve got this polling data says Hillary Clinton beats Trump — why wouldn’t you want him to be the nominee? The logical thing seems to me to be that if you are dead set on Hillary Clinton being the next president and you’ve got polling data suggesting that she would allies defeat Trump, why wouldn’t you be trying to encourage that outcome?

And yet what we have here is the Washington Post: “GOP Leaders, You Must Do Everything in Your Power to Stop Trump.” Let me give you some excerpts. “The unthinkable is starting to look like the inevitable: Absent an extraordinary effort from people who understand the menace he represents, Donald Trump is likely to be the presidential nominee of the Republican Party. At this stage, even an extraordinary effort might fall short. But history will not look kindly on GOP leaders who fail to do everything in their power to prevent a bullying demagogue from becoming their standard-bearer.”

Now, again, why do they care? They’re not Republicans. The Washington Post editorial board is not going to vote for a Republican no matter who it is. They’re in the tank for Hillary. They have polling data suggesting Hillary will win easily over Trump, most of the polls. Again, there are a couple that say every Republican, by the way, beats Hillary. Trump, by the smallest margin, but still beats her. I can’t think of the poll off the top of my head. The poll I’m thinking of, though, says that Rubio beats Hillary the best or the easiest.

But that they all do, but Trump just barely. So we have here a full-court onslaught against Trump. We have The Politico with a similar piece to this today. The Politico piece headline: “Is Trump Making the GOP Greater Again? — coalition is a lot broader — and more diverse — than is often assumed.” This kind of echoes one of my frequently made points here. But the Washington Post, back to their editorial here. “[W]inning would not erase the bigotry and ugliness of Mr. Trump’s campaign, nor remove the dangers of a Trump presidency. …

“A political party, after all, isn’t meant to be merely a collection of consultants, lobbyists and functionaries angling for jobs.” Exactly right, and that’s exactly what most of the rest of everybody running has. The fact of the matter is, political parties have become a collection of consultants who in many cases run the whole damn campaign. Next come the lobbyists, and then the functionaries angling for jobs, and then the suck-ups and the front-runner suck-ups who I described yesterday. And then the people who want a slice of the money, which is also some of the consultants.

The Washington Post says, “It is supposed to have principles,” political party, “in the Republican case, at least as we have always understood it, to include a commitment to efficient government, free markets and open debate.” Soooooooooo! We’re learning the Washington Post actually knows what we stand for; they choose to distort it. They know what we stand for: Efficient government, free markets, open debate, and more. But now with Trump coming along here and in the leadership position, they’re scared.

My only question is: Why are they so scared? What does it matter to them? He’s not a Democrat! He’s not going to beat Hillary in the primary; he’s not running against Hillary in the primary. The polling data suggests he will not beat Hillary in the general, so what do they care? Oh, no, there is an answer to all these questions I’m asking. I’m just asking them rhetorically for now. So here we have the Washington Post — and I find this kind of interesting — calling on the leaders of Republican Party to destroy a candidate who says he’s committed to stopping illegal immigration and preventing amnesty.

Which will spell the end of the Republican Party if it’s not stopped. I mean, if the Republican Party goes along with this Democrat Party “immigration reform,” it’s the end of the Republican Party. Need I remind people of this again? If amnesty happens… I understand amnesty, by the way, is becoming a word that’s been so overused that it no longer has any impact. Let me just put it this way: If the Republican Party goes ahead and helps the Democrats get what they want on immigration, it’s the end of the Republican Party.

And there are two Republicans in this race standing up and saying they’re not gonna let it happen. One’s Trump and the other is Ted Cruz. And here comes the Washington Post. I thought the Washington Post had the power to destroy candidates! I thought the Washington Post could make or break everybody. I thought all they need to do was editorialize, stack the news coverage, be a little biased here and there. It’s interesting; all these different news outlets are essentially admitting they can’t do anything about Trump themselves.

They can’t stop Trump.

So now they gotta turn to the Republican Party to stop him. But why do they want him stopped? If they believe their own polls and he can’t beat Hillary, wouldn’t they want him to win? In their worldview, doesn’t Trump make the Republican Party look odd? Doesn’t Trump make the Republican Party have an image problem? Doesn’t Trump do everything they would love to happen to the Republican Party? So why are they urging Republicans to take him out? Why such dire warnings in a major newspaper editorial?

Here’s the next paragraph in this editorial against Trump: “He wants the United States to commit war crimes, including torture and the murder of innocent relatives of suspected terrorists. He admires Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and sees no difference between Mr. Putin’s victims and people killed in the defense of the United States. He would round up and deport 11 million people, a forced movement on a scale not attempted since Stalin or perhaps Pol Pot.”

Well, that’s a crock. Eisenhower deported six million Americans back in the day. “He has, during the course of his campaign, denigrated women, Jews, Muslims, Mexicans, people with disabilities and many more. He routinely trades in wild falsehoods and doubles down when his lies are exposed.” Wow. They’re really frustrated here, and they’re members of a quite large group of people who are frustrated.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Here’s the final paragraph of that Washington Post editorial demanding the Republican Party stop Trump. “If Mr. Trump is to be stopped, now is the time for leaders of conscience to say they will not and cannot support him and to do what they can to stop him. We understand that Mr. Trump would seek to use this to his benefit,” meaning this editorial, “and that he might succeed. But what is the choice? Is the Republican Party truly not going to resist its own debasement?”

What do they care?

They are out to destroy the Republican Party! Actually, they’re not out to destroy it. They need the Republican Party as a bumbling fool bunch of foils. As long as the Republican Party wouldn’t win anything, they wouldn’t mind it being around. This editorial doesn’t make any sense. If Trump is gonna destroy the Republican Party and ensure Hillary Clinton’s election, then this editorial doesn’t make any sense. There has to be something else going on here, and you and I know there is.

Let me start on this on the phones. Hayden, Ohio, this is Greg. It’s great to have you, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Hello, Rush. It’s good to talk with you again, and I certainly have an opinion on what I think the answer is. It’s not just the Washington Post. It’s also Fox News. And so I was asking myself, why are —

RUSH: No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait. Hold it. Now, let’s not… Fox News has not published anything like this, and nobody at Fox News — speaking for Rupert Murdoch or Fox News — has ever said anything like this. Now, you might have a couple commentators on Fox News who think this. But Fox News — Twentieth Century Fox as an entity — has not done this.

CALLER: That’s true but most of the commentators you see — ’cause I watch Hannity; I watch, you know, The Kelly File. And all of them, and most of the commentators are in an all-out panic this week trying to tell Rubio and Cruz what they need to do to stop Trump. So what I think’s happening, Rush, is for the first time certainly in my lifetime, both sides — and they’re actually members of the same, big, elitist club. They realize that the unclean masses might actually determine who’s gonna be president. And neither side can handle this.

RUSH: Interesting. So you think what’s at the root of the Washington Post’s editorial is that the serfs, the hoi polloi, the rabble, the great unwashed, the human debris of our country are actually going to determine who gets the power to run the country, and it isn’t going to be anybody from their club, and that is what they are worried about. Is that pretty close to what you think?

CALLER: (crosstalk) … but boy, oh, boy let somebody diss that high school or college, and they unite together. And I think what happened is Trump didn’t go to that high school, and they’re in a panic because he’s created this way. If you look at the voter turnout in the primaries and caucuses so far, these people are turning out and they’re setting records on the Republican side. And those polls don’t matter if the record turnout favors Trump. And that’s what they’re afraid of is actually the unclean masses, people who have never voted are gonna come out and put this guy in, and then he’s not gonna be beholden to anybody.

RUSH: Okay.

CALLER: (crosstalk)

RUSH: Well, we’re talking across each other. See, he can’t hear me when he’s talking, so he didn’t hear what I just said. He was talking the whole time I was talking ’cause he can’t hear me. That’s our state-of-the-art phone system. But pretty much we’re saying the same things in different ways. What he’s saying is that people from outside the club, people that would never be admitted in the club — you, the great unwashed — are gonna put in some lunk head (who they also wouldn’t let in the club) ahead of everything. And they’re trying to protect the club. They’re protecting the ruling class, they’re protecting their own elite status, and the Republicans are on the verge here of blowing it for every elite if they let Trump in the tent.

That’s the theory.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I think it would help you to understand that the Democrat Party needs the Republican Party like the Harlem Globetrotters needed the Washington Generals. It’s akin to the Road Runner needing that bumbling fool Wile E. Coyote or there would not have been a cartoon show. I mean, the Coyote lost every damn show, but if he wasn’t showing up in every show, there wouldn’t have been a show. That’s one way of looking at this.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Now, back to this Washington Post editorial. I think there’s a little more going on here than — and I’m not denying that this is a factor. I mean, we had a caller who claims that what the Washington Post is doing here is they’re scared to death of average Americans choosing somebody not from the ruling class to be president. They’re paranoid. They’re scared to death of it. They don’t want anybody getting in that club that they don’t let in.

And they don’t want anybody from outside that club being elected president or having any official position of power anywhere else, and therefore it’s up to the Republican Party to stop this guy. The Washington Post editorial admits that they know this editorial’s probably gonna help Trump. But they had to say it anyway. Now, there’s more going on here than what meets the eye. There always is. The easy answer is, “Well, they’re scared to death of the average American. They’re scared to death that the ruling class is gonna be aced out. They’ll lose…”

That’s easy to assume, as well as the thing that really makes this curious, folks. Really, do not overlook this. The Washington Post wants Hillary Clinton to be president, more than anything. The Democrat Party has been invested in this since the nineties when Bill Clinton left. Making Hillary the president after Bill Clinton has always been at the top of the agenda of many of the powerbrokers in the Democrat Party, their media allies and everywhere. And they were foiled in 2008. It was okay. They got an historical replacement and so forth.

But they have been committed to Hillary Clinton. Now, given that, all of the polling data… I think it’s just a USA Today poll. I’m not sure. Again, I’m having a mental block. There’s just one poll that shows every Republican beating Hillary. Every other poll shows her wiping the floor with every one of them, but especially Trump. I would say 95% of the general election polling data shows Hillary Clinton beating Trump easily because his negatives are off-the-chart high, overwhelmingly high unfavorables.

Negatives that are not a factor in the primaries but once we get to the general. Polling data says all that stuff’s gonna come home to roost and Trump is gonna be beaten in a humiliating, embarrassing landslide. About 95% of the polling says that, which is exactly what the Washington Post and everybody else in Democrat Party wants. So the real question here is, if Trump being nominated guarantees them — as close as you can gets to guarantee in politics — what they want, why are they so afraid of it?

Now, the obvious answer we’ve discussed, but there’s more to it. There has to be more to it because they ought to be encouraging Republicans it vote for Trump. They ought to be doing editorials talking about how revolutionary he is. One of the reasons they probably don’t? You know what I really think they’re afraid of? I think they’re afraid of states they own in the Electoral College all of a sudden becoming toss-ups. I think that’s what they’re afraid of with Trump. Whether they’re right or wrong, I’m not commenting on.

These people are, in many ways, creatures of conventional wisdom. There’s not a whole lot of unique, independent thought. I mean, prove that to yourself. The New York Times, the Washington Post, have virtually same stories with the same tilt. You know, different writers, but the same importance. What’s on the front page of one is generally on the front page of the other. LA Times, USA Today, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, they’re all the same. They end up usually using the same words to describe people, like “gravitas” for Cheney. We’ve illustrated all this with our montages.

So if one of them gets the idea, just one of them, and writes about it, that Trump could upend the Electoral College by actually putting in play states Democrats own, then it blows that polling data all out of the water. And it may be that they’re afraid of their own polling data that shows Hillary mops the floor with Trump, because they also have to know what a bad candidate she is. They have to know how inept and incompetent she is.

They’re also worried about these coughing spasms that she has, and she’s out there barking like a dog now and then, and she’s now starting to imitate dialects where she goes. I am here to tell you that in the Democrat Party salons and in the deep, dark crevices of their secret headquarters there is genuine fear that something’s not all there with Hillary, and they’ve got no backstop. They’ve got no bench. Bernie Sanders isn’t it. Hillary has to be able to take this all the way.

And what they’ve been able to rely on is that she’s got a capital D next to her name. That guarantees them New York, it guarantees them Pennsylvania, guarantees them California, guarantees them Michigan — and, it guarantees them 200 electoral votes. But if anything happens to blow that up, Hillary Clinton, on her own, as a candidate, does not have the connection with people. She does not have the gravitas. She doesn’t have the talent, the skill. She’s not good at this. They have seen it.

She can’t draw a crowd even to staged book signings. So I think they write an editorial here all worried, trying to make it look like Trump is going to do great damage to the great old GOP, and the GOP can’t permit this to happen. “They’ve gotta move in and they’ve gotta stop this guy ’cause he’s just… My God, look at what he stands for! He stands for torture. He’s profane, all this stuff.” But they are any able to escape self-interest. They’re writing an editorial here to make it look like they have all of this concern for things that are not them, that that’s how big they are.

They’re such wonderful people, that they are concerned not just for self-interest and selfish things, but they’re very, very concerned about institutions that maybe they’re not part of that they know must be maintained — and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They’re not that. They are totally absorbed in Hillary. So whatever this is about, it’s about them and winning or losing. They don’t care about the Republican Party. It’s no different than when you have people like Harry Reid or Schumer running around saying, “You know, we’re really worried about the Republicans.

“If they ever want to win the White House again, they’re going to have to join us in comprehensive immigration reform.” And I say, “Are you telling me you really want them to win the White House again, Chuck? You really, really so respect the Republican Party that you are really worried they’re never gonna win the White House again, and you’re here to help them?” What a crock! I don’t believe that, and I don’t believe the Washington Post is trying to save the Republican Party from itself with this.

People on the left are totally absorbed by their own self-interest, and that’s what this is about. And it’s not just about the self-interest of preserving the ruling class or the elites. They’ve got a very… Democrats have a really, really great rigged game going on here, folks. They could nominate Wile E. Coyote, and he would get 200 electoral votes if there’s a D next to his name. There needs to be a Republican on the ballot. If there’s not a Republican on the ballot, then there’s a problem. It has to be a Republican.

There has to be a villain.

There has to be a racist. There has to be a sexist. There has to be a homophobe!

There has to be somebody who opposes civil rights, human rights, equality. There has to be somebody who’s a racist, a bigot. That’s why they need the Republican Party. They need a Republican Party that is all of that evil that they can continue to point to and suggest that anything’s okay in destroying them. Anything they do, anything they say. And therefore any candidate they put up is much preferable to any of those Republican reprobates.

You’re saying, “Yeah, but, they would say, ‘Trump’s the biggest reprobate of all.'” They haven’t been able to sell Trump is a racist. They haven’t been able to sell Trump as a bigot. They haven’t been able to convince people that Trump is your “average Republican” in that regard. They haven’t been able to convince people… Look at how easily they were able to destroy Sarah Palin. You remember that dinner party at my own house I walked out of? I’ll refresh your memory on this. I had a couple guys in there who were guests of guests, who are telling me we had to throw Sarah Palin over.

“Get rid of her. The media destroyed her. She has no chance of ever winning anything.”

I got mad. “You guys, you let the media choose our candidates?”

“Well, I don’t care. She’s destroyed, Rush. Can’t rehab her.”

They haven’t been able to do that. They have not been able to turn Trump into Sarah Palin. They have not been able to make Trump into the average, ordinary, everyday Republican that they have convinced everybody we are. That’s what I think they’re really worried about, and that throws open their rigged game of the Electoral College and so forth. But I would also say this: I don’t think it’s just Trump that does this. You know, back to our caller. What was his name? Doesn’t matter. The first and the only caller that we had.

He made it sound like the only candidate here that has supporters from outside the ruling class and outside the club is Trump, and that Trump’s the only guy that’s got the guts to take ’em on. That isn’t true.
Ted Cruz has been taking ’em on longer than Trump has. And Ted Cruz has been taking them on face-to-face on the floor of the Senate. Ted Cruz has been fighting these guys. Some of these guys in the establishment, Donald Trump actually donated to over the course of his life.

Ted Cruz has fought these guys every day that he’s been in Washington. And for a lot of reasons, that doesn’t register. When we start talking about outsiders, people not in the club, people are gonna come in and destroy the club and Cruz gets left out of that. But he and Trump both own titles to that characteristic. They’re both outsiders. They’re both taking on the establishment. And Cruz, as I say, actually has done so. But then again, you look at the primary results. Trump’s won everything except one, and Cruz won that one.