RUSH: Last night on Special Report with Bret Baier during the All-Star Panel, one of the all-stars, one of the Fox all-stars last night was Jonah Goldberg of National Review. He’s one of the senior editors. They were talking about what’s gone on here in the Republican Party and trying to figure out how this all happened. How did this guy Trump come from nowhere, why has Trump got so much support, what in the world’s going on? Bret Baier said to Jonah Goldberg: “Ted Cruz says that he had to consolidate his support before he could take on Trump. That’s why he delayed taking on Trump. Jonah, what do you think about what Cruz said there?”

GOLDBERG: It’s a theory. Look, I mean, at the end of the day the amount of blame to be distributed across the landscape, from the mainstream media to various people in talk radio, to the Republican establishment and the counter-establishment, you’d have to set up FEMA tents to distribute all of the blame that deserves to go around, and Ted Cruz certainly deserves some. And he picked a strategy that backfired on him because he did not expect that Donald Trump would eat so much of his base, which is a lot of what we saw on Super Tuesday.

RUSH: The question there was why didn’t Cruz start firing back at Trump sooner, why didn’t Rubio. And I have already explained that. Everybody in the Republican race thought Trump was gonna bomb out at some point. They thought one of three things: Trump’s gonna quit, he’s gonna have had his thrills and go; he’s gonna say something so over the top that he’s gonna have to resign in embarrassment; or his people just gonna abandon him.

And whatever the reason, either Cruz nor Rubio nor anybody else wanted to tick off Trump supporters ’cause they wanted them when Trump left the campaign. That’s why. That’s why they didn’t go after Trump. There’s another reason, too. You go after Trump, he comes after you. And I think that might have been a factor. So Mr. Goldberg here is casting a wide net for blame, essentially, why did Trump happen, who’s responsible for it. He goes through the whole gamut. Various people in talk radio, the mainstream media, Republican establishment, counter-establishment. You need FEMA tents to be able to handle all the people blamed for this whole circumstance.

I have to remind everybody, there are a lot of us here that are not surprised. If it wasn’t Trump, it was gonna be something. You cannot have two landslide elections — 2010, 2014 — midterm elections where the Republican base gives the Republicans the Senate, gives them the House, and nothing changes, nothing happens. I mean, the Republican Party itself brought this on. The Republican itself set the table, established the circumstances where an outsider, be it Cruz or Trump, was going to come in and captivate the imagination of voters, because the Republican Party had let them down.