RUSH: San Diego next. San Diego, this is Tom. It’s greats to have you on the program, sir. Hello.

CALLER: First and foremost, Rush, I am honored to talk to the hands-down giant of talk radio without a doubt, and I appreciate you taking my call. I really appreciate your last segment, your last caller, but that’s not exactly why I’m calling, but real quick, to me, the party is all — you know, unification is already impossible, thanks to the never — and I call them the never-Trump babies. They have made it virtually impossible. I personally feel — and I’m a Trump supporter, and this is my opinion — we could crush Hillary with the entire Republican Party and everything else Trump brings in. First time voters, Democrats, and independents. We’d crush ’em. But I think that is probably not gonna happen.

But let me move to my point, Rush, that, unfortunately, the way I feel about you, I’m seeing a crack in something that bothers me. I have looked at this election as a monumental exposure of people’s true colors. I appreciate the way you have taken — I’m gonna use the analogy of you set boundaries for yourself, when it comes to individual campaigns and candidates, you’re not gonna, you know, obviously endorse and you try and stay in the middle and just explain things. And I appreciate that.

But I think you were going off the rails earlier when you were talking about what Cruz is doing with the delegates. I don’t mind having a discussion with people who don’t like Trump over specific issues, but the way you characterize what he’s doing as, you know, I believe the word was “ultraprofessional.” There’s no law broken. And I’m sure technically there isn’t a law broken. It’s all aboveboard, he’s killing it and all this. Let’s be honest. And this is what’s turned me off to a lot of other people I used to respect. Things that we as conservatives and Republicans think that normally bother us, all of a sudden we use those same tactics, those sleazy tactics the left does —

RUSH: Wait. Let’s stay focused. Tell me what it is that Cruz is doing —

CALLER: Here we go. Here we go. I’m gonna tell you exactly what it is. And I’m gonna it with a series of questions. Do you believe big donors buy political influence? To me, of course they do, and I think I know the answer that you would say, yes, they do. Okay? Is it legal? Technically that’s bribery and technically it’s not legal, but does it happen? Absolutely. All right, and let’s not kid around and say it doesn’t. To me that delegate —

RUSH: Wait a minute. Nobody ever has said that it doesn’t.

CALLER: Okay. But I equate that train of thought to your train of thought about the delegate process. Do you believe there’s any delegates out there that have been bought and paid for?

RUSH: It’s against the law. You’re not —

CALLER: Okay, yeah, of course it is. I know that.

RUSH: Is that what you think — I’m just trying to get to the nub — you think Cruz is going in and wining and dining these delegates and purchasing their loyalty?

CALLER: According to you, if Trump gets within a hundred, he can fly a hundred of them on his plane, the same thing, but you won’t say that with Cruz.

RUSH: It’s a joke. It’s a joke. He’s technically not allowed to do that, and I have not suggested that Cruz is going in there and buying loyalty from the delegates. I have suggested none of sort. He’s going in there and trying to win their support with the power of his personality and the issues.

CALLER: How? How do you win support, Rush, in politics?

RUSH: You’re thinking you buy it, are you telling me it has to be bought, that’s the only way people —

CALLER: Okay, case in point. Colorado GOP Twitter account: “We did it. Never-Trump.” Yeah. (crosstalk) Just stained that entire process.

RUSH: I saw that.

CALLER: And guess what their answer was, something that we laugh at when the left says it, “Somebody hacked in. We’re investigating.” Yeah, right. Okay? Do you really think that? The problem is, I don’t mind you saying Cruz is playing the game, but let’s be honest. He’s playing what I believe to be the game in the political system that we’re all sick of.

RUSH: Okay, I got it now. I finally understand what it is you all think Cruz is doing. I now get it. And I’ll address it when we get back.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I finally figured it out. I have been so crystal clear on what Cruz is doing with the delegates. And I have been beside myself trying to figure out how in the world can anybody disagree with this, and how can anybody see any illegality in it, and it took me three minutes, but I extracted it from the previous caller. And now I understand. You’re still all wet, but I at least now understand it, which I will explain in due course.

This is such a discovery. I feel like Columbus, except I know that I have landed in the West Indies and not America. Means I know where I am; he didn’t, but he thought he knew. I got it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

Okay. So, to spell this out for you, a party has its primary, a state as its primary. We’ll stick with South Carolina. Trump wins. Which means the delegates that he wins in South Carolina, who are not chosen at the time of the primary. Nobody knows who they are yet. But whoever they end up being are required to vote for Trump on the first ballot. Everybody knows, everybody agrees, no problem.

Some time after the primary the GOP in South Carolina has its convention where many things happen, including the selection of the delegates that go to the convention. The delegates can be inside party bigwigs, they can be people that run for election as delegates in their local precincts, counties or what have you, or they can be appointed by Republican Party bigwigs, or they can be elected Republicans themselves. It’s a mixture of all kinds of different people. You could have a guy on his farm out there, next to somebody that owns an automobile dealership. Could be any number of people. And on the first ballot they’re pledged to however the people voted in the state.

But in the second and third and fourth and whatever subsequent ballots, they’re free agents. They can vote however they wish. Ted Cruz has been going in, and Trump has not. Cruz has going into these states at the time they choose the delegates. He has tried to participate in which delegates get chosen by having delegates that support him be chosen as delegates. The delegates that are not pro-Cruz he then tries to persuade them to be for him on the second and third ballot. Sometimes he’ll succeed. Sometimes not. That’s it. It’s brilliant, it’s politics as it’s been for eons.

There’s nothing new about it. There’s no cheating. There’s no skullduggery. There’s nothing illegal, and yet I get all these people, “I can’t believe you’re falling for it.” And I didn’t know until just now that what Trump people think is happening is that Cruz is going in there and buying them. And the reason that’s bad is ’cause that’s how the establishment does it. And this is what I was missing. The Trump supporters think that Cruz is no different than your average lobbyist, walking up to Capitol Hill and buying off a member of Congress to support open borders.

Instead, it’s Cruz as the lobbyist who’s going to the state convention and paying for or wining and dining or bribing these delegates, because, after all, what delegate would support Cruz on his own, I guess is the assumption. And because I did not include in my explanation of this the possibility that Cruz might be wining and dining them, it means I was either lying or being fooled and being duped for not realizing what Cruz was really doing. But since this kind of thing is not allowed — and I know, go and chuckle if you want. Technically you can take ’em to dinner, but you can’t promise them this and that and all this talk about Trump flying them around on Trump Force One or putting them up at Mar-a-Lago, I’m joking. Look at the bylaws, it’s not permitted, but wink-wink, you say yes, we all know it happens.

As far as I know, Ted Cruz is going in there and selling himself and his conservatism, period. There’s nothing illegal about it. But apparently some of you Trump supporters think that Cruz is so reprehensive, so horrible, so rotten, the only way any delegate would support him is if he’s paying ’em off. And, I’m sorry, I didn’t include that in the possibility in the procedure. In some states — and this differs from state to state — in some states they are lobbying for Cruz supporters to be chosen as delegates, and it’s the lobbying that rubs people wrong, right? But it’s the way politics is. That kind of behavior is not exclusively establishment behavior.

So now I guess I understand why so many of you Trumpists think I’ve sat here and lost it or am blind to obvious cheating when I haven’t seen any, because that has not been part of what I think is going on. You may think I’m still being stupid and think that it is, but it’s not. Cruz doesn’t have the money and he doesn’t have the wherewithal to be buying enough of these delegates. It’s not how it’s done in this stage. I know you think it is and that’s what this election is all about, it’s ridding politics of all that establishment, insider stuff, and that Cruz is engaging in it and is rotten to the core.

Let me tell you what happened in Colorado. This is a lost cause, too. Colorado got screwed, in their minds, in 2012. The system in Colorado, they had a primary, and their first ballot delegates were pledged to the guy that won their state, who happened to be Santorum, who happened to not be there at the end. So Colorado’s delegation had to vote Santorum on the first ballot and they didn’t want to and they resented the rules that made them do it.

So they came up with new rules that would have all of their delegates unbound, every one of the 34 delegates in Colorado this year, by virtue of their rules change, could be unbound ’cause they didn’t like the fact that they were locked into somebody that didn’t get the nomination in 2012, which in effect made the Colorado delegation useless and pointless at the convention. And nobody wants to go there and not matter.

So they wrote rules suggesting that there wasn’t gonna be a primary and their delegates are gonna be chosen and they would be unbound from the get-go. Pennsylvania the same way, for different reasons. Blue in the face, 17 out of 71 delegates are pledged; the other 54 are free agents, up for grabs on the first ballot.

The automatic suspicion here of payoffs, bribery, cheating, lying, stealing, I guess people assume that’s going on, it’s what politics is, it’s what they hate about the establishment, and Trump of course clean and pure as the wind-driven snow is not doing any of that. He’s not messing with the delegates. He’s not denying anybody their precious vote, so Trump is holier than thou on this.

But Cruz, Kasich and all the rest of these guys are monkeying with Colorado, monkeying with people’s right to vote and taking their privilege away from them and disenfranchising them and selling their votes to the highest lobbyist bidder and so forth. I’m telling you that that’s not what Cruz is doing.

Trump could go into these state conventions and trying to get these delegates on his side the second, third ballot if he wanted to. He either… Another thing. I refuse to believe he doesn’t know the rules here. I think he’s made a decision that he wasn’t gonna need to do that. He was gonna win this going away a month ago. None of this was gonna be necessary. But now since it is, and they’re all gonna be gathered in a single place for four straight days, it’s much easier to have at them in Cleveland rather than travel all over the country — state after state, convention after convention, delegate selection process after delegate selection process.

Why waste your time doing that?

Why staff up for that when it isn’t gonna be necessary?

Why have a ground game?

Well, if you don’t think you’re gonna need a ground game, why have a ground game? Obviously he chose not to have a ground game for the longest time, and Cruz did. But you know what this adds up to? This just illustrates how there can’t be any unity. Like our previous caller, Eric, said: The never-Trumpers and never-Cruzers, how do you bring them all together after this? That’s his point. (interruption) I’m not accomplishing anything. Snerdley said, “You’re doing a great job by explaining.” I’m not accomplishing anything. Don’t you understand? I’m not accomplishing anything.

In fact, this is, what, my 23rd time explaining this and I still have to do it?

How much am I accomplishing here?