RUSH: Steven in Newington, Connecticut. Thank you, sir. You’re up first today. It’s great to have you. Hi.

CALLER: It’s a privilege to talk to you, Rush, a privilege to be first.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: My question is simple. If Trump is able to pull off the nomination — and I’m a Cruz supporter — do you think that they could possibly make amends where Cruz could take Scalia’s place, which would be a logical transition for Cruz. Your thoughts on that and, you know, would that change the power of the Senate and the whole picture if that did happen? And would McConnell actually invoke the nuclear option in order to get him through the Senate committee?

RUSH: Let’s take the first thing first here, and that is Cruz agreeing to drop out in exchange for a promise by Trump to name him to the Supreme Court, fill the Scalia vacancy. That has been —

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: I saw that speculated upon last night. There’s some people actually hoping that happens. Not Cruz fans. There’s some people hoping it happens because they don’t think Cruz is gonna win and they want Cruz involved, think he’d be great up there. The answer to the question is, I mean, Trump doubled down today on Cruz. You know, Cruz had to fire Rick Tyler. Well, he fired Rick Tyler. Whether he had to or not, that’s even up for debate, but Tyler, you know what happened on this — and this is really crazy. You talk about a dirty trick. And this is one that Cruz guys fell for.

Apparently in a hotel lobby Cruz’s dad and some people are sitting around and Rubio goes walking by and sees that they’re reading a Bible. Somebody’s videoing this. And they close caption it before they circulate the video saying that Rubio, pointing out at the Bible, said, “You won’t find any answers in there.” And Rick Tyler was presented that video (imitating Tyler), “Oh, my God, God, it’s a gold mine, it’s a godsend,” and went with it. And it turned out to be a setup, that Rubio had not said that. In fact, he had said the exact opposite.

He’d said: “All the answers are in there,” and then even quoted a chapter and verse. And then the news went out that Tyler, communications director for Cruz, had run the video and had to apologize for it. Cruz asked for his resignation. Even if it had happened the way it was presented to Tyler, Cruz says we wouldn’t do anything like that, that’s not who we are. So Tyler, who was good, Tyler is a good communications guy, been watching him on TV, does good things for Cruz, he’s gone.

And Trump, who has just been nailing Cruz unmercifully, every day Cruz is a worse liar than he was the day before. He’s a nasty, nasty guy. He’s a liar. This guy, he holds the Bible up when he lies. I’ve never met a guy lying like that. And then with this incident he’s now all over Cruz for scapegoating his poor communications director. Trump’s out there saying essentially this is Cruz’s fault. That’s the people he’s got working for him. It’s his mistake. He stupidly fell for this trick and now he’s blaming his guy, making his guy fall on the sword.

My point to you is, Steven, Trump has gone so far in insulting Cruz in terms of his integrity and character. I don’t know how he turns around and nominates him for the Supreme Court. Now, I know that it’s politics and stranger things have happened and it probably wouldn’t be much to mend the fences, you know, mutual acknowledgments that might have been comments that went beyond the pale, but we all know what was going on, it wasn’t meant personally.

I guess it could happen, but, boy, it would be a huge, huge turnaround. But beyond that Cruz is not gonna get out of this race and he’s certainly not gonna get out of the race on a promise that he’s gonna be a Supreme Court nominee. So he’s gonna play this out. He’s still got Texas and the rest of SEC and Super Tuesday to go and thinks that there’s still a chance. So it’s one of these ideas that pops up as the intelligentsia in politics starts filling what I call downtime or blank time between primaries, between elections. By the way, the Nevada caucus for the Republicans is today, and you can’t find this in the news.