RUSH: Here’s Dennis in Columbia, Missouri. Great to have you, sir, on Open Line Friday. Hello.

CALLER: Yes, sir. Dittos.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Yeah. I was calling about the distinctions that we need to make between the different kinds of Republicans that we have. We’ve heard that there are establishment Republicans, RINO Republicans, right-wing or moderate Republicans. But we had four to five million Republicans that didn’t vote in the last election, the 2012 presidential election. And, you know, we’ve heard also that in the eighties there were Reagan Democrats. But we never heard that there were Carter Republicans.

We never heard that there were Clinton Republicans or Obama Republicans. But those four to five million Republicans who didn’t vote in the last presidential election made themselves in effects Democrats. And what is their symbol? It’s a donkey, or a jackass. So those Republicans who didn’t vote are what I would call “Jackass Republicans,” and we’ve got a lot of stuff going on with all the Republicans who are running for president. And I’ve got my own preferences, my own predictions about what I would like to see. But no matter who we nominate, if we don’t get behind and rally behind the nominee, a bunch of Jackass Republicans are going to cost us this election.

RUSH: Wait. What does that mean? You mean if the party insiders nominate another moderate wimp, are you saying we gotta bite the bullet and get behind the guy anyway for party…? Let me ask you this. Do you think if Trump is…? This is the real question, Dennis, old buddy, old pal. Let’s just say, for example, if Trump gets the nomination. Is it incumbent on George Will to support him? Is it incumbent on Dr. Krauthammer to support him? Is it incumbent on Boehner and McConnell to say that they will support Trump? All this talk about if Trump doesn’t get the nomination and goes third party, what if he does? They’re always telling us, “You gotta support the nominee! Romney, McCain, you gotta support ’em.” Well, what if Trump gets it? Or what if Cruz gets it? Or what if Ben Carson gets it? What if one of these conservatives does get it?

CALLER: Actually, I hope Cruz does get it.

RUSH: You think these guys have a duty to support the nominee, too?

CALLER: I think they do, because we’re a party of conservatives. If they don’t, we run the risk of having another Obama or another Hillary or somebody worse like Sanders. We’ve got to get behind our nominee. Like I said I’ve got my own preferences. I know what I want to be nominated.

RUSH: Wait a minute. There’s no… One thing here, and then I gotta take a break. There’s nobody on that side worse than Hillary, other than Obama, and they’re identical. Sanders is not worse. Do not make that mistake.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: If you go to Las Vegas and you want to make a wager on who the two party nominees are, you know what Vegas thinks it’s gonna be? Jeb-Hillary. Smart money, Jeb-Hillary. When this is all said and done, that’s who smart money people think are gonna have sewn up the nomination. And they make that prediction, by the way, based on money. I mean, the Jeb Bush strategy is entirely based on out-raising everybody.

You remember at the outset of this Jeb made one of these statements that he wanted to be one of the first candidates to win the Republican Party nomination without needing the base. There’s only one way you can do that, and that is soak up all the money, deny enough money to everybody else, either in total or aggregate, and just eliminate anybody else from having a chance. The theory being money is the primary determining factor of who wins in politics.

The same thing on the Democrat side. Hillary has the fundraising apparatus. It’s been in place for years. Who knows how much of it she even really has and where it’s all come from. It’s been the Jeb Bush political team strategy from the get-go. And in fact the Jeb Bush strategy put together with the aid of the Chamber of Commerce and the Republican establishment encourages a whole lot of Republican nominees — well, candidates, a whole bunch of people, as many as possible divvying up the money, dividing the vote. Get a bunch of Tea Party people in there. Then get some other mainstream conservatives, get some moderates in, whatever it takes to split it all up, the more the merrier, because eventually they’re all gonna drop out. Some are gonna drop out before the primaries, just don’t have the money, where are their voters gonna go? That becomes then where the Bush campaign is theorizing they will Hoover them up.

Now, the one thing that wasn’t factored in all this was Trump. Back when they put this strategy together, I mean, nobody was factoring Trump. And even if they had, “Well, let’s run a couple models here if Trump runs,” but nobody in any model had Trump doing what he’s doing and performing the way he’s performing, either in the polls or in terms of electrifying and exciting the base.

But the Bush team, best I’ve been able to tell, is not even nervous yet. I mean, some of them are, but overall they still think their strategy of owning all the state apparatuses and therefore controlling the delegates and all of the power that has been built up over all of these decades by the Bush political apparatus is simply unbeatable, and that all of this is just a show that is going on. It explains Jeb’s temperament of pretty much flatline, not up or down. I’ve even had people say, “You know, Rush, I don’t even think Bush wants to run in this race. Jeb Bush doesn’t even strike me as somebody that’s excited. He certainly doesn’t look like he’s having fun.”

I’ve had some smart people, “You know what, Rush, I think somebody made him run. I think whoever runs that whole apparatus, whoever really wants to get their power back in Washington, Jeb’s the one that they chose to get it back for ’em. But I don’t think his heart’s in it, Rush.” I’m hearing — you wouldn’t believe — you probably would believe it. You probably hear much the same thing, depending on who you talk to. But despite whatever the plans are, nobody factored Trump. Nobody could have. And they are bamboozled by that.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Jason in Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Glad you waited. You’re up next, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Yeah, hello, Rush. Longtime listener, first-time caller. I’ve been going ecstatic over, like, how all the Republicans in the establishment are bleeding blue over Trump. Like case in point. Up in New Hampshire where Jeb Bush was crying about why’s everybody going after him, I’ve been a conservative forever. They don’t get it.

RUSH: Uh, are you asking me why that is?

CALLER: What’s your thoughts on that?

RUSH: On what specifically?

CALLER: Well, like the disconnect between the establishment and Republican Party, ’cause they assume that everyone who likes Trump is a low-info voter.

RUSH: Well, this attitude of the elites — the inside-the-Beltway establishment, ruling class, or whatever name you want to use for ’em — precedes Trump. Now, in my 27 years of doing this… I was thinking about this the other day. Has this changed and I’m just late to the party in seeing it…? Let me rephrase. Has this always been the way it is, or am I just late to the party in seeing this, or is this something new? Is this divide…?

Well, the reason I ask it this way is I know full well that back during the eighties the establishment of the Republican Party despised Reagan, before he was elected and even afterwards. They were embarrassed of him. I mean, they quietly supported him. You know, human nature is that everybody wants to bask in the glowing light of victory. So Reagan had his suck-ups.

And he had his groupies that were — some of them — members of the establishment and so forth. But they couldn’t wait to get to his second term and take over. So it’s not new in that sense. But what aspects of it are worse than they’ve been since I have been paying attention in that focused way? And I think it is different and worse. Let me explain what I mean when we get back.

Don’t go away, folks.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Look, here’s the bottom line. In the 27 years that I’ve been doing this program, I have never seen the Republican Party — the establishment itself, I mean, the RNC — more hostile to its base. And that’s saying something. It was hostile to its base in 2010. It’s been hostile to its base a lot. It was hostile to the base back in the eighties with Ronald Reagan. But you go back to 1992, ’93, that campaign where the Republicans won the House for the first time in 40 years. Was that the Republican base that pulled that off?

It was not. It was Newt Gingrich. He was a back bencher. He was part of the Republican minority, obviously, in the House. And he was part of the Bob Michel minority. Newt’s day is go back to when the Republicans couldn’t even count 200 members. I mean, they had barely 150 at times. It was a monumental achievement. It was aided of course by dramatic shifts in the media and a bunch of Democrat scandals like the House Bank and the House Post Office. But it wasn’t long after that freshman class…

Who’s still there from that freshman class, for example? I mean, Boehner, John Kasich, Dick Armey. All these names that you knew, look at what became of them. As they were there, they moderated. They became less and less conservative as time went on, because they lived inside the Beltway, worked inside the Beltway, and no matter what else you want to say, the establishments and primarily the liberal establishment run that town.

But the hostility that exists today I think is more open than I’ve ever seen it, and I have never — until recently — believed that the Republican Party would actually favor losing and define it as winning as I think they do today. I think the Republican Party would be happy to lose, even a couple of elections, if they could you didn’t find what is now known as the conservative base. Now, explaining why?

You know, that’s such a violation of common sense. Why in the world would a party want to wash its hands of the people who secure it victory? Well, I’m sorry, this is above my pay grade. I can give you some reasons, but none of them make any sense to me, until you start talking about attitudes. “Who’s elite and who’s not, who embarrasses us and who does not, who do we want in our club and who do we not want in the club?” and why don’t we want them in the club and this kind of thing.

Money has always been a determining factor in politics. Money has always been the mother’s milk of politics. I’m asking myself, “The pursuit of money, personal money — personal enrichment — seems to be the primary objective of people.” The pattern is, you run for office, you get elected. You serve. But who do you serve? You end up serving so that you’re either taken care of while in office or you have a very, very cushy job with a lot of big salary and perks and benefits when you leave.

And that would be K Street and lobbying.

So in that case, who are you serving? How do people who arrive in Washington penniless end up leaving multimillionaires? While they are in office they are accruing all this. The fact that the Treasury of the United States is in Washington and there are trillions of dollars there is a huge drawing card for why people want to go, and it’s clear that the Republican Party now has turned over its policies and its future to donors.

The donors even have a name now: The Donor Class. You have the Donor Class, you have the base, you have the Pundit Class. There’s various divisions of the Republican Party. I never see this taking place on the Democrat side, though, is the thing. It may exist, but I never see the Democrat Party act like or look like it’s embarrassed of its base. I would be embarrassed of that base if I were a Democrat.

I never see the Democrat Party make a single move to wash their hands of any element of the coalition that votes for them. I just don’t see it. It may happen. It may happen behind the scenes. But I don’t see it. I see a party that does everything it can to get votes from virtually every place it can, and those people that they have decided they’ll never get they seek to destroy — and that would be us, conservatives.

I mean it when I say I think the Democrat Party considers their greatest enemy to be us. Not ISIS, not terrorism, not a genuine foreign threat. It’s us. They see us as the real threat to their power, and I think the Republican establishment sees us the same way. We’re the threat to their power. Not ISIS, not terrorists. We are. And, as such, we’re the ones that have to be attacked and impugned daily, discredited or what have you.

I think more and more people are waking up to it now and seeing it for what it is. And I think the elites have always had a belief that everybody wants to be like them. Everybody wants to be in their club, and so everybody did things to try to curry favor with the people in the elites, the ruling class or whatever. That’s changed now. There is disdain for it, and I don’t think they quite know how to deal with it. So they’re in a state of denial about it.

There’s a Peggy Noonan column today. I wasn’t gonna mention this for a host of reasons, but I’m gonna go ahead and mention it here because it helps to answer the question. Peggy Noonan, for lack of a better way of mentioning it, is part of this ruling class in Washington. That is her world, and it always has been. When I first met Peggy Noonan, she said, “Oh, you’re the guy that has all the truck drivers in his audience, right?”

I’d never heard that one before. Truck drivers? By the way, “truck drivers in your audience” was a put-down. So Peggy left Washington recently. She’s been out there talking to you, people like you, and she has been shocked at what she found. And she’s now a believer. She thinks what’s happening outside Washington’s real. The way she describes it today is, “America is in play,” meaning all of this support for Trump.

But more than that, all of this opposition to the fixtures of Washington is real. It’s not fringe. It’s not tiny. It’s not made up of kooks. It is more and more mainstream, and she has been stunned! She writes that she’s stunned to learn that there are Hispanics that feel this way and that there are African-Americans who feel this way, and that there are blacks and Latinos and Asians and you name it.

In other words: Inside the Beltway they think all of this anti-Washington stuff is a bunch of conservative fringe kooks. Peggy went out there — she’s been talking to people, she’s traveled the country — and she’s found out that every demographic under the sun is represented by these people who are unhappy with the leadership that they’re getting in all of Washington. Not just Republicans, not just Democrats, but the whole shebang.

She writes as though she’s made a discovery, that her eyes are open to this now, and she thinks it’s real. That means that a lot of other people inside-the-Beltway probably think so, too. So guy’s question was about Jeb. “Hey, you know, I’m a conservative, too!” The Jeb campaign is not gonna react to any of this. They’re simply relying on the fact that all of this is what has to play out in order for Jeb to get the nomination based on he’s gonna have all the money. That’s their thinking; that’s their strategy.

Oh, Peggy was also shocked to learn that this opposition to Washington isn’t based on issues. It’s based on attitude. It’s not based on specifics. You know, the inside-the-Beltway crowd says, “Come on, Trump! Tell us your specifics!” Peggy was shocked to learn they don’t matter. It’s gone beyond specifics. It’s gone beyond policy. It’s much greater than that. It’s much more important than that. It’s much more important than just attitudinal.

There is a genuine fear that we are losing the country, and the people inside the Beltway? The furthest thing from their mind is that we’re losing the country. They think that’s the silliest thing they’ve ever heard. “What do you mean, ‘losing the country’? We’ve had the national debt for as long as we’ve had a nation and it hasn’t hurt anything. Don’t sweat it! What deficits? Doesn’t matter! We’ve got it under control. Don’t worry about it.”

They do not understand, and if you look at the life circumstances, the economy inside the Beltway, what’s the unemployment rate, 3% there? What’s the average salary there? I guarantee you it’s much higher than it is outside the Beltway. The exact opposite of what the founders intended has happened. A great divide has been created now, and the people leading and running the country really don’t have much in common with the people voting for them.

And some in the Beltway are starting to figure it out. Some when they figure it out say, “Well, screw them! It’s not my job to make them understand what I’m doing. They’re not capable of it anyway,” and people are aware of this, and the anger is genuine, and it’s real. And it does span parties, and it does span ideologies, and it is all demographics. How big it is remains to be seen.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Open Line Friday, Rush Limbaugh. I’ll give you an example. There’s a story that Peggy Noonan tells in her column, and the point of the story is that she learns that a bunch of Latinos actually like Trump, and she can’t believe it. She’s shocked and stunned, as are some of the Latinos that she’s talking to. They don’t believe it.

You see, the Republican Party, stupidly, you talk about inexplicable things, the Republican Party literally to this day still believes the reason it’s not winning the presidency is because it’s not getting enough of the Hispanic vote. And for that reason alone they keep saying we need to do amnesty, and all they’re doing is guaranteeing that the Democrat Party is gonna own this country. It’s a Democrat Party voter registration drive and for the life of me, I’m telling you, they don’t see that.

The Chamber sees a bunch of low-wage workers, Chamber of Commerce and that bunch, but the Republicans actually that they need Hispanic votes if they’re gonna win the presidency. It’s the biggest disconnect. So when they run into Latinos, Hispanic people who support Trump, their world is literally turned upside down. That just does not compute. They think every Hispanic hates conservatives, conservatism and would probably hate Trump. They do not, I’m telling you, they do not understand.

Now, how they got off the deep end like this, I haven’t the slightest — well, I think they’re falling for Democrat media tricks that have been played perpetually for decades, for years, it’s just become conventional wisdom. It’s one of the most amazing political tricks the Democrats have played, and if it’s not that, then the Republicans are not really Republicans, they just call themselves that. That’s the only other way to explain this. And I don’t think that’s the case. I wish I had a couple more hours on this today because we can go as deep in this as you want it to go but time is gonna prevent that.