RUSH: Yesterday I and a few others said, “Mr. Trump, I mean, we know you’re gonna criticize Cruz and all these other people. It’s a primary campaign.”

I can’t tell you how plainly (and multiple times) I made the point yesterday. It’s silly to expect that Trump and Cruz aren’t gonna be critical of each other. There’s no bromance going on here. There’s no united front where these two are not gonna criticize each other. That’s not how this works, ’cause only one of them’s gonna win. They both want to win. Criticism. Attacks. All of this is tactical and strategic. You plan it, you come out with the way — or up with the ways — you think will be most effective, and you target what you want to go after.

It’s like I say, I think Cruz first started out by saying that Trump’s not a genuine conservative, not a real conservative. And I think he’s gonna give that up. My guess. I’m wild guessing. I haven’t talked to anybody about it. I just think he’s gonna end up going after Trump’s populism. That’s Trump’s hook. That is Trump’s appeal. This is what confounds the GOP. You know, they’re sitting there thinking that conservatives in the Republican Party have all abandoned the party and have gone on over to Trump. That he isn’t it. How many times do we have to say this?

The Trump coalition’s made up a whole lot of people, not just conservatives. Twenty percent of it may be Democrat, and an increasing number just beyond that 20% may be Reagan blue-collar Democrat. Then you’ve got some Hispanics (unbelievably to people) and women. The demographics are all covered. The Republican Party’s sitting there thinking that Trump’s support base is all conservative, and it isn’t. So that’s why going after Trump as a legitimate conservative? I don’t think that’s gonna work because that’s not his appeal.

Trump’s not out there campaigning as a conservative. He’s campaigning out there as a populist. He’s campaigning out there as a guy who’s fed up with whoever it is that’s doing bad and making mistakes and ruining the country, whoever they happen to be and wherever they are. And his support base is made up of people who think, “Damn right! That’s exactly what’s happening.” It’s why I said yesterday, “You can have a lot of people who are not conservative supporting Trump’s position on immigration and so forth. It’s not uniquely a conservative position, opposition to amnesty.”

So I think Cruz recognizes this. Even if he doesn’t, even if he continues the attack on Trump is not a real conservative, that’s what they decide to do. But the point is these things are gonna happen. There are going to be serious efforts to take the other guy out. It’s politics. This is what happens. And the expectation these guys are joined at the hip here and united in purpose is a big mistake to make. That’s not how this works. There was an indication that that was the way they were behaving, up until Trump lost the lead in Iowa to Cruz.

That just changed everything about how both decided to conduct their campaigns.

Trump is focusing on the fact that everybody hates Cruz. So people came out and said, “You’re gonna lose some of the conservatives in your base if you go after Cruz that way, because they love Cruz.” What does Trump do? He doubles down on how much nastier Cruz has become and how many, many more hate Cruz. He’s not backing off from it at all, which ought to illustrate something else. And that’s for all of you people out there waiting for somebody either in the media or in talk radio or somewhere to take Trump out or to take Cruz out or whatever.

You’ve gotta get off this idea that people out there — voters — are unable to think for themselves. Most people are not sitting around waiting for marching orders. Some, yeah. But most people, at least in this audience, they’re intelligent. They are informed. They know what they think before they turn the radio on. They’re not turning the radio on here to find out what to think. They have their opinion of Trump. They have their opinion of Cruz. If they get mad at me, it’s may be I don’t agree with them. It’s not that I am somehow not being true to myself or whatever.

It’s personal. I’ve always respected the audience, you in this audience as intelligent and informed. I certainly don’t hold you in contempt. I certainly don’t look down on you like the Democrat Party does, or like most of the Washington establishment. So, you know, I’m not under the illusion here that any candidate wins or loses based on me telling you he should win or lose. Now, admittedly there are some people influenced. I’m not gonna deny that, but it’s by no means a majority. And the proof here is Trump. So Trump gets warned by powerful voices in the media.

What does he do?

He doubles down on it.

He doesn’t back off.

Although the media thinks he has. I read a couple stories: “Trump stopped mentioned Cruz’s name here ever since Limbaugh piped up!” Well, I don’t know. Washington Times: “Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is stepping up his attacks on [Ted Cruz] declaring on Monday: ‘Everybody hates Ted.’ ‘He’s very unpopular in Washington,’ Mr. Trump said on ‘Fox and Friends. When you have somebody that canÂ’t get along with anybody in Washington, youÂ’re not going to get deals done,’ Mr. Trump said. ‘I mean, you have to get deals done — we can’t always keep invoking executive orders like Obama does, [because] he can’t get deals.'”

No, that’s not why he does it. That’s not why Obama does executive orders. Well, he would love for the Congress to go along, but that’s not why he does it. He does it because he’s an Alinskyite. He’s an authoritarian who has been on a mission to transform this country for seven years. He’s got one year left. He’s not doing this ’cause he can’t make deals with anybody. He’s not doing it because people won’t cooperate. He’s doing it because this is what he wants to see happen in and to the country. And to hell if people don’t agree with him, even more so he’s gonna do it on his own or find a way.

I was reading my tech blogs last night. I always do this as an escape. It’s my hobby. I ran across a story that Trump is gonna make Apple stop making iPhones and iPads in China. “Yeah, we’re gonna make Apple make their damn computers in America.” And it was fascinating reading these little tech bloggers react to that. Most of them hate Trump because they think they should. Most of them chime in. I mean, you talk about a monolithic group of people. They’re all journalists, for one thing. They all think Trump’s a buffoon. They all think he’s insane, a lunatic. They can’t tell you why. They just think that he is.

So when Trump comes along and says he would make Apple manufacture products in the US, it totally escapes these guys that presidents don’t have that kind of power. It totally escapes them that that’s impossible. Trump cannot tell a company, he can’t tell Nabisco where to make Oreos. He can’t tell Ford where to make cars. He can’t tell Apple where to make computers or phones.

Now, he can come up with tax proposals, tariffs, any kind of incentive he might want, but he can’t order it like a king of America could. These guys actually started debating whether or not it’d be a good thing. (laughing) Maybe it would change their minds on supporting Trump ’cause wouldn’t it be great if Apple were indeed making phones in America. Just totally escapes them. This is the danger. I mean, with Obama doing what he’s doing, all these young acolytes of Obama think authoritarianism is great. Oh, yeah. If Obama was ordering Apple to make phones in America then they’d probably support that, too, but they don’t get that these things are not — And Trump knows it, too, if you read further in his comments, he lets it be known that he knows. It’s the way he communicates. It’s the way he sends the signal of what he thinks. He’s decisive and he’s not gonna take any guff.

Washington Post: “Why So Many Evangelicals Have Faith in Donald Trump.” Meanwhile, everybody in the media is trying to make fun of Trump ’cause they think he botched the biblical scripture yesterday at Liberty University.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Ted Cruz, for his part, punching back at Donald Trump.

“Ted Cruz is continuing to throw punches at GOP frontrunner Donald Trump, telling reporters in New Hampshire on Monday that Trump is different than President Ronald Reagan, but also adding that he wonÂ’t engage in attacks on the campaign trail. ‘Donald did an interview where he described that he thinks that heÂ’s bigger than Ronald Reagan — I think the American people will make that determination,’ Cruz reportedly told reporters while campaigning in New Hampshire on Monday.

“Cruz challenged: I would note that Ronald Reagan spent decades as a principled conservative, spent decades traveling the country sharing his conservative, free-market views [and] defending the Constitution. Ronald Reagan did not spend the first 60 years of his life supporting Democratic politicians, advocating for big government politics, supporting things like the big bank bailouts, supporting things like expanding Obamacare to turn it into socialized medicine.

‘ThatÂ’s not what Ronald Reagan did,’ Cruz stated. ‘Ronald Reagan was a voice of consistency, and IÂ’m pretty sure that Ronald Reagan didnÂ’t write checks and support Democratic politicians like Andrew Cuomo, like Anthony Weiner, like Hillary Clinton. IÂ’m pretty sure Ronald Reagan didnÂ’t write a huge check to Rahm Emanuel in December of 2010 after the big Tea Party wave.'” Which is all true. But the point that Cruz goes on to make is he says he thinks that Trump is rattled for the first time. He thinks that that Trump is very, very dismayed.

This is the message that Cruz is putting out, that Trump has had an unsurmountable lead for 95% of this campaign, that the presumed front-runner, Jeb Bush, hasn’t been able to get higher than 6%. Trump’s always been, depending on the poll, 28 to 35, 38, maybe 40 in one poll, until Ted Cruz came along and started getting serious, creeping up on the Iowa caucuses. And then all of a sudden Cruz’s point is Trump does not know how to deal with this adversity. He’s dismayed, he is rattled, and it’s forcing him to say some dumb and crazy, stupid things. This is the attack mode of Ted Cruz.

I mean, he mowed him down, or tried to, or immigration. Cruz going after the issue that put Trump on the map. He says, “I like Donald Trump. I respect him personally. And in this campaign he’s talked a lot about illegal immigration and amnesty.” Cruz goes on to describe how he was fighting this fight in the recent past, last two, three, four years, whenever the votes came up, it was Ted Cruz and some allies that were at war every day succeeding in stopping the Barack Obama and Republican-Democrat coalition and implementing amnesty. He goes on to talk about how many years, how hard everybody fought, how he was leading the fight, and then he wraps it by saying, “And during all this time, Donald Trump was nowhere to be found.”

So his contrast is himself, a guy who’s put everything on the line, who has been in the ring, gloves on and off, trying to stop amnesty. Trump comes along, announces his campaign, says that he’s gonna build a wall, immigration is it, and Cruz’s point is, yeah, okay, fine, I welcome him to the fight, but the fight’s three or four years old here in the modern era, and he wasn’t there during any of that.

So that’s the way Cruz is going after this. You can see here it’s getting, some might call it brutal. I just think it’s politics. You people have forgotten — and it’s understandable — South Carolina in 2000. McCain is still fuming over some of the things, some of the innuendo that he thinks the Bush camp put out there about illegitimate kids and affairs. He’s still fuming about it. I mean, this is the way it happens. And to expect — I don’t know if it’s part of the way education has been going the last 10, 15 years, and those kids get out of school, they become young adults now, conflict resolution 101 or whatever, and they, “Don’t criticize people like this. This makes me nervous. I don’t like the shouting, oh no!”

And for those of you who are reacting this, this is nothing. This campaign hasn’t even gotten up to medium heat yet, compared to where this is headed. You just have to sit back and listen.