RUSH: A friend of mine sent me a note.  This is an excellent point, by the way.  Let’s take the isolated — the apparently isolated — incident here or isolated series of events that are being reported as, “The Trump campaign is imploding. The Republican Party is in panic. The Republican Party is terribly worried, terribly afraid.  The Republican Party is just in dire straits and everybody’s panicking over Trump making a mess of his campaign. 

“There’s a mutiny inside the Trump campaign. Uh, Trump is thinking of quitting! There’s an intervention being planned because Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, and a lot of Republicans are so fed up and so angry that they’re publicly signing on with Hillary Clinton.”  That’s a microcosm of what’s being reported here in the past three days, five days, past week.  Let me ask you a question: 

“Prior to July of 2015, when Donald Trump got into the presidential race, what was the status, what was the condition of the Republican Party?  It wasn’t held in high regard, was it?  I mean, if you think back to those days, Republican-conservative voters were fit to be tied.  They had given the Republicans the House in 2010, the Senate in 2014, and the Republicans were not stopping Obama, were not opposing the Democrats.  People were fit to be tied. 

So Trump comes along, gets in the race, and who was the establishment behind and who did the establishment think was going to be the nominee — and, by the way, was going to end up being the nominee by avoiding the base?  Was that none other than Jeb Bush?  It was.  And how many millions of dollars were raised to promote the Jeb Bush for President candidacy? Well, it was like $115 million, and they spent most of it.  They spent, I think, $100 million of the $115 million.  How many delegates did Jeb end up with, do you remember, Mr. Snerdley? (interruption)

Six.  You’re off by five.  It’s close. 

He got six delegates with $100 million.  Now, my point is: We’re hearing now that because of Trump the Republican Party is in a freefall.  It was in a freefall before all of this happened, which is why this is happening.  And the freefall that it was in is illustrated by the fact that Jeb’s $100 million didn’t get him the nomination.  Now, stop and think if you were part of that apparatus. You’ve gone out there and raised $100 million.

You had the best consultants.  You had the best advisors.  You had the best planners.  You had the best everything! What have you got to show for it?  Six delegates.  Over here, a guy you think is a buffoon, ran away with everything.  My point here, folks, is that the effort is underway to blame whatever is happening to the Republican Party on Trump, when in fact the Republican Party was in a bit of a tailspin — maybe a nosedive, even — before. 

I mean public opinion on the Republican side, the conservative/Tea Party side. They were fed up and they had had it with the Republican leadership in the House and the Senate.  And yet the effort underway now is to kind of make everybody think, “The Republican Party was strong and it was viable and it was succeeding and it had a good chance of beating Hillary and a good chance of winning the White House. The Republican Party was strong and it was invigorated! It was raising a lot of money and everybody was happy!”

But that wasn’t the case. 

But that’s what they’re trying to invent and make you think was the case, so they can end up blaming all of that on Trump.  Well, and others, too, but primarily Trump.  The point is the Republican Party was not on an upward trajectory as the Republican primaries began.  Most people that were prepared to vote Republican were not energized.  They were not thinking that whoever the nominee was was going to take on the Democrats — and they weren’t. 

The Republican Party was out there saying, “We stand for amnesty! We must reach out to the Hispanics.”  Don’t forget that.  Don’t fall for this ruse that everything was rosy.  “Everything was hunky-dory.  Everything was right on! Man, we were smoking ready.  We were ready to conquer the world.  We were going to take on everything — and then Trump came along and screwed everything up.”

But that’s not the way it was, because had it been that way, Trump would not have succeeded.  Had there been all that happiness, had there been all that loyalty and all this support for the party like they’re trying to make you think existed — and that Trump has somehow done the damage to the Republican Party? There’s a lot of damage that’s been done to the Republican Party, but you can’t say it began with Donald Trump.