RUSH: There’s a new CNN poll out that shows Trump with a 20-point lead now, and Ted Cruz is in second place. And the Republican establishment is barely keeping its grip. They’re about to lose their grip on sanity. Because what they’ve figured out is that, okay, let’s say that Trump does implode like they think he’s going to, or let’s say that Trump quits, like they think he’s going to, or let’s say that something happens and Trump isn’t there, who’s in second place now? Somebody they hate more! (laughing) Ted Cruz!

Establishment Republican candidates can barely be seen in this poll. The top three are candidates Trump, Cruz, Carson, who are most anti-establishment. And the establishment refuses to get the message. Both parties. But the Republican establishment in particular refuses to see, just as they can’t see the handwriting on the wall right in front of them, the entire Washington political class and establishment cannot see Islamic terrorism when it happens. Well, they actually do see it. They just don’t want to call it that, and they don’t want anybody else calling it that. Trump is out there taking the occasion here of the San Bernardino attack to brag that it’s even gonna increase his popularity. And the thing is he’s right, it will.

I’m watching Republican consultants actually lose it on TV. They’re actually losing it. You should have heard what I was accused of this morning. Not by name, by the way. Are you ready for this? I was accused of wanting the Clintons back in the White House because that’s when I really hit it big back in the nineties, that’s when I had two books, that’s when I got rich and I want to do it again. And that’s why I am refusing to denounce Trump because I don’t care what happens to the country, I’m in it for me. My name is right-wing media. My name was not used. So from now on when you hear them go off on right-wing media, that’s me.

They are losing it. The secret memo that I promised yesterday to hold over to today, Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee, what they’re gonna do. If anybody’s afraid of losing what they’ve got, it’s them. They’re worried to death that a Trump nomination will end their precious committee chairmanships. They’re worried that Hillary’s an automatic lock to win the White House. They’re worried they’re gonna lose their precious Senate seats or what have you. They don’t have the slightest idea what to do to hold on. They do not get that the Republican base and probably many other voters as well look at them as the problem, not Trump. What is so hard to figure out about that?

Whether you agree with them or not, let’s say you’re a Republican establishment type, and you’re watching all this happening, and you’re just beside yourself because you think that these people supporting Trump are gonna guarantee defeat for the Republicans, gonna guarantee a victory for Hillary. Why don’t you do something? Instead, why does the party adopt this posture and policy that says, “We’re gonna win the nomination without the base.” At some at some point you have to assess the lay of the land and assess where you are in it. And if you want to win, you gotta make some adaptations. You have to make some adjustments. And they’re just unwilling to do so.

Oh, they demand that we make adjustments all the time: pay higher taxes, sign on to Obamacare, we have to adapt all the time to what they do. But when it comes time for them to adapt to the changing seas of reality in American politics, it’s inflexible and rigid on their part.

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RUSH: Colorado Springs again. Mark, it’s great to have you. Thank you for waiting, and hello.

CALLER: Oh, mega dittos from the foot of America’s mountain, Pikes Peak in beautiful Colorado Springs.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: An honor to speak to you today.

RUSH: Appreciate that.

CALLER: I was reading our paper yesterday and there was an article about a Republican strategist who was concerned that Trump might actually win. And the quote out of his mouth was actually something to the nature of the problem with Trump is that he says whatever comes out of his mouth, and I’m thinking, Rush is right again. There it is. Everything that you’ve been talking about is there. And my one question to you, sir, is do you ever get tired of being right?

RUSH: You know, when I play golf with people that play it well, hit the ball straight every time, I ask ’em, “Does it ever get boring?” And they say, “Never. I love being able to play this game well.”

CALLER: I wish I could play like that. Hey, I saw Bush this morning on Fox, and just as this guy Ward was sitting on his little shoulder, he was talking about how he’s the adult in the room. And the words that came out of his mouth just astounded me. He says, “Well, to be honest with you,” and I thought, there it is! There it is! There’s one time you’re gonna be honest with me, and the rest of the time you’ve been lying to me.

RUSH: Well, no, I wouldn’t go that far. That’s politician-speak. They say “clearly.” “Let me be really honest with you here.” Some people think that’s an admission that they’re lying some of the time. I’ll give the benefit of the doubt here, I think it’s just a figure of speech that says, “Look, I really want you to hear this. I mean, this is important to me.” I don’t think it means that they’re lying most of the time. See? I could be a charitable, nice guy here. But he brought up the memo that I’ve been — there’s actually, two of them, the Senatorial Campaign Committee and the RNC memo, both of them written in panic over what to do because it looks like there’s no stopping Trump.

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RUSH: I alluded to this yesterday. I’m not sure I’m gonna get to it today. I thought I would be able to, but I may have to save this ’til Monday, but I’m gonna give you a little heads-up. There are many reasons why the Republican establishment hates Donald Trump, and some of them are legitimate. I mean, a lot of people have sensible reasons for be being afraid of Trump — Republicans, conservatives.

But I think that there is, in addition to all of the specific things that Trump says that irritate people — and I’m speaking exclusively here of Republicans, ’cause I don’t think the Democrats… I don’t think he’s on their radar yet. They’ve got their own focus with Hillary and whatever her problems are. So the Trump phenomenon is something that’s, ah, for the most part localized in the Republican Party. But the Trump phenomenon is a phenomenon in one area at least. Trump is doing something that has, in my lifetime, never been done.

He’s pulled something off that I have never seen pulled off. And it is, I think, at the root of the frustration that Republican consultants and the Republican establishment and anybody else in the Republican Party has that is anti-Trump, and that is: Donald Trump owns the media.

The media have literally no negative effect on Donald Trump. No matter what he says, no matter how he says what he says, no matter what he does, it gets covered. When there is any criticism of Trump, what does he do?

He doubles down, and that gets covered.

Donald Trump has the media wrapped around his little finger. And this is a contributing factor to why so many people are bothered and upset, because even in the Republican establishment, the media is looked at as a legitimate player in the power arrangement of politics. You and I make the mistake of assuming that the Republican Party doesn’t like the media. You and I make the mistake of assuming the Republican Party is as suspicious and distrustful of the media as you and I are, but they’re not.

The Republican establishment, the Democrat establishment agree and accept that the media is an equal player in the ruling class. Trump has blown all of that out the window. As such, the normal ways that people in politics are controlled, the normal way that people are contained — the ways people are promoted, punished, destroyed, what have you — are all out the window where Trump is concerned. And therefore the media is considered by the ruling class to be one of the great leveling factors.

But none of that is in play with Trump. Trump has his own audience, which is in many cases as big as or bigger than the media covering him. He doesn’t need the media. He enjoys them being around. He likes toying with them. He likes being provocative around them. To him, the media is a plaything. To the Republican and Democrat establishments, the media holds coequal position in the entire power structure of the ruling class. Put simply, the media can’t take Trump out, and that scares the heck out of everybody, particularly in the Republican side.

Not only can the media not take Trump out, the media can’t even hurt him. And when they try, he gets even more powerful, or more popular. And this fact, this phenomenon of a single presidential candidate owning and controlling the media is one of the greatest upsetting, out-of-balance aspects of this whole campaign that the entire establishment is having a hell of a time coming to grips with. They can’t explain it. They envy it and are jealous of it.

And because of all this, it just adds to the animosity that they feel. He’s breaking every rule and getting away with it. He’s breaking every rule and getting more popular. He rises in the polls with every rule break that he engages in. As such, there is a growing, gnawing feeling in the establishment that there’s nothing they can do. The media is the great middleman. Trump doesn’t need a middleman to get his message out. Trump’s crowds are five blocks long.

Trump doesn’t need to spend a dime to get his message out. They do. Trump doesn’t have to run an ad. Trump doesn’t have to run a series. He doesn’t have to pay people to show up. He doesn’t have to buy TV advertising, because he gets more coverage than the combined advertising the rest of the Republicans could buy. And aside from the overwhelming, significant upset that is, the very fact of all that ticks them off. Donald Trump has direct access to his supporters. And you know who gives it to him?

The media.

They can’t not cover him.

They would love to be able to ignore him, but they don’t dare. He draws too big a crowd. They’ve done everything they can that they usually do when they try to take a candidate out, or anybody else they want to take out. None of it works. And make no mistake, the Republican establishment has been relying on the media to be a premier agent in destroying Trump. And they can’t. Ergo, there’s panic. Have you noticed that there is a…? What you would you call it? It’s a belief, but it’s a…

I’m having a mental block on the word I want to use to describe it, but there is a belief throughout the Republican Party — it’s a given — that Trump guarantees the election of Hillary Clinton. (interruption) Oh, it’s more than a consensus, but, yeah. It’s a consensus that Trump, as the nominee, guarantees the election of Hillary Clinton. I’ll guarantee you there’s not a single Donald Trump supporter who thinks that. Donald Trump supporters are as opposed to Hillary Clinton and probably more so than the Republican Party establishment is.

In these two memos I’ve got, we’ve got elected senators and others in the RNC both on record saying they would vote Hillary if Trump is the nominee. But, ladies and gentlemen, it isn’t just Trump that has them upset. I played you the sound bite moments ago. The Republican consultant criticizing me, claiming that I have been a fraud for all these years. I’ve never really been a conservative. I’ve never really been a Republican, never been any of that. I’ve only been in it for me. And proof of that is that I will not denounce Trump.

Why?

Because I secretly want Hillary back in.

Why?

Because that’s where I made my fortune, writing anti-Clinton books.

But these same Republicans criticizing me are also saying Ted Cruz will not get their support, either. They’re saying the same thing about Cruz they say about Trump: “If Trump’s the nominee, it guarantees the election to Hillary,” and then they say, “And if it’s Cruz, we’re even worse off.” If there’s one candidate of all that I have actually quote/unquote “promoted,” it would be Cruz, not Trump. I don’t know if this consultant that lost it on CNN today knows that or not. But I haven’t, and I have also noticed that these same Republican establishment types and these consultants, it’s not just Trump they don’t want; they don’t want any part of Ted Cruz, either.

They’ve got themselves believing that it’s either Trump or Cruz and it’s guaranteed to elect Hillary. When you ask me, the Republican establishment has more experience electing Democrats than I do. They’ve shown they know how to do it, in presidential races. And you know what’s even more frustrating when you add this to it? Look at all these midterm elections where the Republicans have just smoked the Democrats. The Democrats are now down 1,000 seats from statehouses and governorships to US Congress and Senate seats all the way down to local town council seats.

The Democrats have lost a thousand electoral seats in this country in midterm elections, 2010, 2014. The people of this country are clearly willing to vote against Democrats. They are clearly willing to vote for Republicans. But when you get to the presidential election, it better be somebody that’s not just part of the establishment. That’s the message, and that’s what they’re not getting.

You ought to read this Republican senatorial campaign memo. They talk about losing their chairmanships and they talk about Trump’s a misguided missile. Trump is subject to farcical fits. We don’t want to reengage the War on Women fight. So they isolate Trump on this issue by offering a quick condemnation, all these things. What they don’t understand, have they not taken the time to understand why Trump has so much support? They couldn’t have, otherwise they wouldn’t be writing these secret memos that say what they say.

If they were being honest with themselves about why Trump has such broad-based support, and it is broad, most of Trump’s support is not the conservative base. It’s all over the spectrum. He’s got support from women, Hispanics, blue-collar Democrats, the old Reagan Democrats. The demographic support that Trump has is what the Republican Party claims it wants. Meanwhile, the Republican Party is running around saying they want to win the nomination without the conservative base, without the pro-lifers, without the social issues crowd. Well, that’s Trump.

But the memo goes on to say what’s gonna happen if Trump is the nominee. They do not appear to have even taken the time to understand why Trump’s as big as he is. Well, I’ll be glad to tell ’em right now. It’s no great secret. You know it as well as I do. You probably know it better than I do ’cause you’re out there making it happen. Trump is popular, Trump is big precisely because Republican voters are angry at establishment Republicans. And establishment Republicans keep giving these people reason to be mad by continuing to insult them, and by appearing to agree with Democrats on key issues a majority of Americans disagree with, from amnesty to whatever, economics, Obamacare, take your pick.

Anyway, a little long here. Let me take a brief time-out. I need to really develop this Trump phenomenon vis-a-vis owning the media and the impact this is happening, because it’s every bit as important in understanding this Trump phenomenon as Trump’s persona and appearances as well, so sit tight, much more straight ahead.