RUSH: Here’s Trump on the riots. This was CNN’s New Day. This was yesterday morning. Chris Cuomo, son of Mario “The Pious,” was interviewing Trump. He said, “Look, if you don’t get to 1,237, you don’t get that many delegates, but you’re close, what is your plan to bring people together at the convention? What’s your plan to get as many people as possible who don’t want you to get the nomination, what’s your plan to change their minds and have the whole party rally around you?”

TRUMP: I think there really is a natural healing process and I think it will happen again. And I believe it will. Now, if it doesn’t, it doesn’t. If we’re 20 votes short or if we’re, you know, a hundred short and we’re at 1,100 and somebody else is at 500 or 400 ’cause we’re way ahead of everybody, I don’t think you can say that we don’t get it automatically. I think you’d have riots. I think you’d have riots. You would have problems like you’ve never seen before. I think bad things would happen. I really do. I believe that. I wouldn’t lead it, but I think bad things would happen.

RUSH: Now we have a montage of a whole bunch of Drive-By Media types saying that Trump is calling for riots.

DAVID MUIR: Donald Trump fresh off major victories overnight now warning of riots if the Republicans try to stop him at a contested convention.

DON DAHLER: Trump is warning of riots.

MEGYN KELLY: Trump says there will be riots.

ROBIN ROBERTS: Trump warning of riots if his party tries to stop him.

PETER ALEXANDER: Trump warned bad things would happen.

LARRY SABATO: Trump is saying that there will be riots in the streets.

MAJOR GARRETT: The GOP front-runner issued this menacing prediction.

WOLF BLITZER: Trump actually warned that there could be riots. Riots. He used the word twice.

JEFFERY TOOBIN: Here is a candidate whose rallies have been full of violence, and here he is predicting riots if he is not nominated. It’s completely outrageous.

RUSH: Okay. It’s totally out of control here. This is exactly how this kind of stuff happens in the Drive-Bys. By the way, this is no defense of Trump. This is standing up for the whole concept that words mean things. All Trump did was suggest that there would be riots. He didn’t call for them. In fact, he said he hoped there wouldn’t be.

But all he had to do was predict that there might be and here comes everybody claiming that he’s calling for them, that he’s warning that there will be, like he’s trying to scare people into signing up with him or else. In the meantime, all these people are craving riots because of the media attention they would draw. That’s the hypocrisy.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Dan Rather, CNN Tonight, last night, with Don Lemon. Rather has a show somewhere? Is that right? Have you ever heard of the AXS network? That’s where Rather has a show there. It’s called The Big Interview. I’ve never heard of the AXS network. And, look, I’m a broadcast media specialist, and I never heard of this. I mean, I don’t mean that to be necessarily cutting of Rather. I’m just observing that he’s a big name. He was the former anchor of the CBS Evening News, the Tiffany network.

Well, anyway, he’s over at CNN. He’s talking to Don Lemon, who says (paraphrasing), “These riots and this Trump stuff and Trump warning of riots,” and I’m just gonna say it the way the media is saying it. “These riots that Trump is predicting, these riots that Trump’s warning, these riots that Trump says, what do you think about that, Dan? I mean, this is really bad, right? Does this remind you any way of Chicago ’68, Democrat convention. You were roughed up at that convention, right, Dan?”

RATHER: Yes. It has that potential. The ’68 Democratic convention where, yes, I was roughed up inside and there was violence inside and outside can be instructive for this year. When people talk about a brokered convention and a convention maybe “taking it away from Trump,” quote unquote, and Trump talks about also a riot, that could lead to a situation where you have good television, if you want to call it that, a very contentious reporter’s journalist’s dream of a convention, but terrible for the party.

RUSH: What about for the country, Dan? What about riots at the Republican convention, why, it’d be great for the networks, it would be great for TV. There you have, if any of you keep asking, why so much coverage of Trump? It isn’t bias in this case. I mean, most of the Drive-Bys, actually none of ’em are gonna vote for Trump. Most of the Drive-Bys you know are in the tank for Hillary. I would venture to say that most of the Drive-Bys are of the school of thought that Trump will lose in a landslide.

I think people that live and work in what we call the Washington/New York corridor, the media capital power corridor, they all groupthink. I mean, the thinking is identical. The reporting on all the networks is identical. That’s why I always say, if you miss CBS Evening News, watch the ABC World News tonight. Miss that, watch the NBC Nightly News. Miss that, turn on CNN, and go on down the line. But if you miss this show, there’s nowhere else to get what happens on this program. But they can’t say that. They are uniformly identical. And not only in the way they report, but the way they think. I’m telling you, there may be a couple stragglers, but they all think that Hillary is going to just clean up if Trump is the nominee.
But, by the same token, the reason they’re giving Trump all this attention is not because they’re pro-Trump. It’s because the guy can carry an hour of television by himself and get better ratings than the original programming these networks are offering. Have you ever stopped to look at it that way? Let’s say you’re watching Fox. Pick any hour in the daytime. And all of a sudden a Trump rally. They will bump out of it and they will go to the Trump rally, and, in many cases up to now, they have stayed with it for the full hour. CNN does the same thing.
I guess they do it at MSNBC; I never have them on.

And the reason they do is because it generators ratings, it elevates attention. They’re able to elevate advertising revenues for that period of time. It’s business. But it’s also programming. I mean, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that is a lot of material you have to come up with to fill. You have a lot of producers, a lot of writers, you got reporters, you got camera people out there collecting the data, video, audio, editing it, producing it and all that. With Trump you just got a turn the camera on and let him go. Easy. Everybody gets a break, a little time out, a little one hour coffee break while they go do what they do and watch Trump. And then the added benefit is that Trump is gonna make news 10 or 12 times in that hour by virtue of what he says or how he says it.

There isn’t any other candidate in this race even going back to the days when there were 17 candidates that has anywhere near that ability. And don’t get mad at me. Folks, I have attempted in I don’t know how many ways, patiently and in in great detail, attempted to explain it to anybody who’s curious about it and doesn’t understand it. I’ve explained it from the standpoint of why the media is fascinated. I’ve explained it from the standpoint of why Trump’s supporters are Trump supporters. What is it about Trump that glues his supporters to him where other candidates don’t have that kind of attachment, their voters are highly excited, of course supportive, but they don’t have a connection like Trump does with as many people.

I’ve gone out of my try to trying to explain and even today, as I said at the top of the program, the conservative intelligentsia is still pulling its hair out trying to explain it to themselves. They are writing pieces at their various publications. You’ll see pieces in the New York Post, you’ll see a piece in Commentary, a piece in the Weekly Standard, every one of the blogs, every day, somebody will do a deep analytical piece trying to explain Trump.

Well, I’ve done it. I’ve explained it to you every which way from Sunday from the perspective of my understanding. So it’s not a mystery to me in any way, shape, manner, or form. And it doesn’t threaten me. This is another key, folks. You would not believe the number of people not even in politics who are threatened by this thing Trump is doing. Naturally people in politics feel threatened by it at every level and for all kinds of reasons, but there are people in media who feel threatened by this.

Trump is showing he’s better than practically anybody in media in attracting an audience, in holding an audience, and he doesn’t need a producer and he doesn’t need a writer or writers and he doesn’t need a director. There’s a whole lot of people threatened by this on a whole lot of different levels. Like I discussed yesterday, Donald Trump has turned the standard operating political formula upside down. There’s a formula in professional politics about how you get elected.

You have to hire a consultant. You have to hire pollsters. You have to hire data analytics people. You have to hire spokesmen. You have to hire get-out-the-vote people. I mean, you have to hire, hire, hire, hire, and then you have to get the best who do what they do, and you have to listen to them. You have to plan to the Nth detail every minute of the day, every appearance. Trump’s done none of it and has, in the process, illustrated that may — if I were in the professional politics business, I would feel so threatened right now because I’m looking at somebody who has demonstrated that my expertise isn’t necessary.

I would think, if I’m a consultant, if I’m a spokesman, if I’m a policy analyst, I’d look at this whole Trump phenomenon and go, “I’m not needed. People are gonna realize it. People are gonna realize I’m not needed.” Let’s say you’re a foreign policy advisor for candidate X. Trump doesn’t have any. He’s leading the pack. So it’s no wonder he’s gonna be criticized for everything he’s doing. People have turf to be protected here, folks. This is huge, what’s happening here, in all kinds of ways.

So explaining the anger, the envy, the resentment, the jealousy, the fear, I mean, it’s all there. People are afraid of Trump, people are envious, people are jealous, people are frightened, people are fearful, people are threatened. It depends on where you go, but all those facets are accurate, and it’s upsetting and unnerving, which is why so many of these people are hoping and praying that Trump implodes. They are hoping and praying that Trump loses in a landslide.

They are hoping that disaster comes to Trump, because if disaster comes to Trump in one way or another they will be validated as still necessary. They’ll be able to say, “Trump, he tried to do it without us. He tried to do it without a consultant. See what happens to you? He tried to do it without a good spokesman. See what happens you? He tried to do it without a foreign policy. See what happens to you? He tried to do it without the pollsters.” That’s what they want to be able to say down the road.

Here’s another thing that scares them. Trump is improv. (interruption) What are you whispering about in there? What are you whispering about in there? No, I’m serious. He is improv. There is no speechwriter. That’s another group of people that aren’t employed by the Trump campaign. There’s no writer. And have you noticed other campaigns where there are speechwriters, have you noticed no matter when the candidate speaks, it’s the same speech? It’s called the stump speech. And have you noticed that it’s practically word-for-word at every stop.

Every election night, whoever wins goes out and says whatever they said the last time they won. If they didn’t win, they go out and say what they said the last time they came in second place, third place. Nothing changes. ‘Cause everything’s so tightly scripted, everybody is scripted in a way so as not to say something that could be damaging so you pull back and you don’t say anything.

Meanwhile, Trump has no boundaries. Like my old necktie line, No Boundaries. It’s improv, say whatever you want. This is not supposed to be happening. This is threatening on so many levels. So they’re all hoping for disaster. They’re all predicting it. They want the riots. They want Trump to be responsible for the riots. There’s a whole lot of livelihoods that have nothing to do with who wins the election riding on this, folks, a whole lot.