RUSH: What, you hadn’t heard that? Holy smokes. It’s Philip Rucker and Robert Costa. Costa used to work at National Review. “Time for GOP Panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win.” They really thought Trump would be gone by now. What does this say? You have Rubio. You have Cruz. You have Christie. You have Fiorina. You have Huckabee. You have Kasich, to hell with philosophy. And you’ve got Jindal. You’ve got Santorum. You’ve got Scott Walker. You can go back to Scott Walker. You’ve got Rick Perry. You’ve got Pataki. Well, yeah, you do. You got Gilmore. You’ve got all these people that are still in the race, and what do you do? You want to go back and get somebody who’s already lost? You want to go back, the establishment wants to go back and get Romney.

Now, really, the headline of the story, “Time for GOP Panic? Establishment worried Carson or Trump might win.” You have to get to the end of the story before you find out the idea here is Romney. Here’s a very telling paragraph. “The party establishment is paralyzed. Big money is still on the sidelines. No consensus alternative to the outsiders has emerged from the pack of governors and senators running, and there is disagreement about how to prosecute the case against them. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.” Meaning, in all the things that Trump has said and done and places he’s been, there’s not one thing establishment focus groups say that you could point out about the guy that would make them abandon him.

Now, all of this happened, this story posted at 10:07 last night, so it was written all during the day yesterday. Most of it was written before the Trump tirade in Iowa against Carson and ISIS and Carly whatever her last name is, he said. And the Drive-Bys are looking at that, “What in the heck did we just see here? First place, Trump was 40 minutes late, his hair was disheveled and out of place. He seemed ticked off from the moment he got there. He started attacking Iowa voters for not making him number one in the polls. How could that possibly be?”

So the Drive-Bys are thinking, well, this is it. We’ve reached it, this is the tipping point. Trump is caving. Trump is imploding. Trump can’t deal with not being number one, this is it, the moment we’ve all been waiting for.

The problem with that is, let’s say it’s true, just for the sake of discussion. The problem with that is the establishment just blew themselves up by letting everyone know that if Trump doesn’t make it they’re not interested in Carson or anybody else. They want to go back and get Romney, which might say, “Well, we might have to overlook what Trump did here.” You never know. And, folks, you wait ’til we get to January and votes are right around the corner. If you think the fireworks are happening now, you just wait ’til after the holidays are over and everybody gets back to the new sense of normalcy following the holidays in January with the Hawkeye Cauci happening on February 1st, if you think it’s intense now.

I’ve even heard, a couple people say, “Okay, this confirms, Rush, what I –” they’re talking about themselves “– have known all along,” which, by the way, they never told me. I love people that do this, something happens, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been talking about this, thinking about this for two weeks.” Really? It’s first I’ve heard of it.

Yeah, the theory is Trump doesn’t want to win. This is Perot II. He doesn’t want to win. He’s very upset at being the top and he’s gotta sabotage himself. Since none of these other schlubs can overtake him, he’s gotta take himself out. He doesn’t really want to win, and doesn’t want to quit, Trump’s not a quitter, so he’s gotta make it look like he’s imploding and that kind of thing. That theory is floating around out there. I don’t know how widespread it is.