RUSH: Farmington, Missouri, next. This is Chris. Great to have you here. Hey, Chris, when I was growing up, Farmington had a home for the criminally insane. Is it still there?

CALLER: We still have the mental hospital here, yes. Right next to our state prison.

RUSH: No kidding. Well, I just wanted to make sure. Nice to know it’s still the way it was at home.

CALLER: Yes.

RUSH: Thanks, Chris, for the call. What’s up?

CALLER: My thought is that the establishment is desperate. They have hit their last chance to kill Trump’s campaign. They had Bush; he crashed and burned. They started edging up to Rubio. He’s going down in flames. The only way to kill Trump’s campaign is they have to endorse Donald Trump.

RUSH: (laughing) That’s —

CALLER: They are so hated, they need to take advantage of this. If they truly want to kill Donald Trump’s “trump,” they don’t have to endorse him.

RUSH: You don’t seriously think that would happen? It is a clever thing to say, but you really don’t think that would be the result, if the establishment endorsed Trump, that that would be the end of Trump?

CALLER: No, I think —

RUSH: If that happened, tonight on TV Trump would do a two-hour press conference claiming it only took one day to unify the party after his Trump steaks, Trump vodka, Trump wine, and Trump water show, that he was able to unify the party in one press conference. That’s what would happen. And then the establishment guys, doing it as a trick, hoping it would destroy Trump, would blow it sky-high by getting mad as hell when it didn’t work and they would abandon Trump again.

CALLER: But they’re desperate. They have no other choice.

RUSH: Yes, they do. They still have a — not a choice. They have an opportunity. In their minds. And that’s the convention. They run the convention. They can change the rules of their convention by virtue of the rules they’ve written. The governing rules of the Republican convention right now were written in 2012, and they were written to handle circumstances they anticipated happening this year. The circumstances they anticipated have not happened.

Who could have anticipated Trump?

What they wrote the rules to head off in this year, they wrote the rules assuming Romney would be elected. Romney would be president right now, we’re going into the Republican primary, they wrote the rules that exist today to deny Rand Paul and Ron Paul a shot at winning the Republican nomination either in the primaries, at the convention. And it’s all there in rule 40. Rule 40, as constituted at present, says that even in an open convention, no candidate can receive the nomination unless he or she has received a majority of delegates in eight states. Can somebody tell me, does anybody other than Trump right now qualify under rule 40? Has Cruz won a majority of delegates in eight states? Well, we know that Rubio hasn’t, and we know that Kasich hasn’t, and we know none of the others have.

So they’re gonna have to change that rule right away. And the Republicans are having a meeting in April. And I guarantee you that rule 40 and that eight-state requirement is going to be redone to like one state (laughing) or two states or who knows whatever other rules they write in this thing. And the way the rule is written, they can change the rule the day before the convention. You know what? It’s a long document. It’s found on the Amazon servers where it’s stored. I could link to it maybe. It’s a slog getting through this thing, and rule 40 is really where the gold is.

But my point is they run the convention. Trump is not gonna run the convention. The Republican Party, the RNC and related figures run the convention. And that is going to be their last-gasp effort. Now, we’ve been through this, if Trump wins a majority of delegates, a plurality, but doesn’t get to 1,237 — I’m getting too much in the weeds. I don’t have time to go there. But let me put one thought in your head. The first ballot delegates are pledged to vote for the candidate who won those states. So let’s use Florida. Florida is a winner-take-all, it’s next Tuesday, 99 delegates. So in the first ballot all those 99 delegates, those delegates chosen by the state, they’re not chosen by Trump people, they’re delegates to the convention from the state. They have to vote the way the people of Florida voted on the first ballot.

But if the first ballot doesn’t get them a nominee and it goes second or third ballots, then hello, that’s what they call brokered or open or what have you. Well, what happens if in those 99 delegates 80 of them are Rule for Rubio in their personal preference? Which, in the second ballot, they can vote. Or what if 85 of ’em are favoring Cruz? The first ballot they are pledged to vote the way the people voted. After that, they can be bribed, they can be bullied, they can be bought. I’m being facetious. That’s where the horse trading begins. That’s what the party has remaining to it, in terms of options.

We’ll know a week from today, you know, when Florida and Ohio are — we’re gonna know whether first ballot we have a winner or not. And if we do, if Trump gets over 1,237, time to go to convention, all this that we’re talking about is academic, it doesn’t happen, unless they change the rules some way. If they do that to deny Trump even after he’s won it, then they can create total chaos, they can cause the whole party and everything else to blow up. You know, and if some of these people out there promising to vote Hillary — you gotta be very concerned here that there are some Republicans who might totally lose control. This is going to be fascinating to watch all the way through the process. Make no mistake about.