RUSH: So now the Drive-Bys are upset at “rhetoric.” Trump is out there saying that a couple of maniacs kind of interrupted his momentum, but he got it back, and he’s talking about the pipe bomber and the synagogue shootings. The Drive-Bys are just livid that Trump is talking about ’em this way, that they interrupted his election momentum. Now, the latest theory is from the Drive-Bys that Trump knows the House is gone.

Trump knows he’s too toxic. He knows that they hate him out there. He’s just tries to shore up the Senate to make sure that the Democrats, when they run the House, cannot get rid of him. Trump is also now calling for limits on asylum claims. He’s really making a beeline for immigration issues. That issue does happen to flip suburban women from Democrat to Republican. At least it has in recent elections. So, you know, I love as the conventional wisdom changes…

“As the Conventional Wisdom Changes” actually would be a great title for the daily Washington soap opera that is scripted by the Drive-By Media. Once again, it is that Trump knows the House is gone. In fact, Trump knows he’s probably responsible for losing the House because of his toxic rhetoric and his tweets. He can’t save it, but he can save the Senate. It looks like he might save the Senate. He wants to save the Senate and have the Senate made up of people like him on immigration.

And he wants to have a Senate majority so that whatever the Democrats in the House do, they can’t get rid of him. That is the conventional wisdom — the House is gone — and that’s what they’re going with. They’ve been on this case for the past, well, you know, since last December. “There’s gonna be a blue wave!” Grab sound bite No. 4. I was watching Fox this morning, and Ed Rollins was on. This was Bill Hemmer and Sandra Smith, and every now and then…

They’ve got three hours that they fill now from nine to noon on Fox, and they have a roundtable that comes in every so often for discussion of the news. On one of the roundtables was Ed Rollins. Ed Rollins was one of the chief campaign strategerists for Ronaldus Magnus, and he is a Washington establishment type who goes back many, many, many years. The subject of the House and the midterm elections, of course, came up, and Bill Hemmer said to Ed Rollins:

“Ed, I want to talk to you about the latest report from Charlie Cook.” Now, we mentioned this to you yesterday. Charlie Cook, latest report, said the Democrats are gonna pick up anywhere from, what is it, 30 to 40 seats? Let me double check. Is it 40 to 50 or 30 to 40? Thirty to 40 seats. It used to be 20 to 30. Now it’s 30 to 40 seats guaranteed. Democrats need 23. So Charlie Cook says the Democrats winning are a slam dunk, and Bill Hemmer wanted to know what Ed Rollins thought about that.

Now, when I first heard this go by, Ed Rollins was kind of mumbling and speaking under his breath and I have a natural hearing problem. The closed-captioning wasn’t keeping up with him. So I was trying to rewind in these 10-seconds increments and I had the wrong app up there. I’m watching on Apple TV, and the DirecTV Now app, when you’re watching live news, doesn’t have the 10-second rewind feature. So I fired up PlayStation Vue, which does have it, but I missed it.

So it’s on here in the sound bites. So I finally now… This happened (let’s see) three hours ago. Now, I misunderstood what Rollins said. I thought Rollins was disagreeing with Cook, which I didn’t believe. I thought Rollins was saying that the Democrats were in trouble in some of their districts. But that’s not what he was saying. He was saying the exact opposite. Here is Rollins’ reaction to the Charlie Cook Report. By the way, there’s a mutual-love society here, apparently.

ROLLINS: (muttering) I’m a big believer in Cook. Charlie Cook’s been a friend of mine for 40, 50 years. Uh, it’s the first thing I grab when I go study these things and I’ve been studying this for a long time. Here’s the consequences that we have. Let me just quickly run through these. Five states that are Democrat-solid states. New Jersey, California, Illinois, Virginia, New York. New Jersey has five congressional seats that are Republican, four of them under fire. California has 14 Republican seats, eight of them are trouble seats. Illinois has seven; four of them are trouble seats. Virginia has seven; four of them are in trouble. New York has nine; five of them… So out of the 42 seats, 25 of them are in trouble in Democrat states.

RUSH: So that’s what I heard. That last line is the only one I was able to hear when I watched this live. I mean, I could hear everything, but in terms of being able to comprehend the speech, that last line… So I thought, “Holy smokes, he’s disagreeing with Charlie Cook!” I said, “That can’t be!” I said to myself, “I have to run this done down. It can’t be. He loves Charlie Cook. Charlie Cook’s the guru. Nobody in Washington disagrees with Charlie Cook and has a career after they do it.”

So I said, “This can’t be.” Well, it turns out my suspicion was warranted, because now that I have the transcript, what Rollins was saying is… Actually, it’s a follow-on so what Dan Senor in the previous bite that he with played just before the end of the previous hour. Dan Senor was talking about the Republicans have a good chance they’re gonna lose the House, and they’re gonna lose districts in New York state, in New Jersey, California, suburban Virginia.

So this guy has been reading The Cook Report too, and he said, “In these districts, talking about a chaotic executive order to unearth a constitutional guarantee about birthright citizenship does not play well.” See, one thing that irritates me about these guys, they just assume the 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship to anybody born here. It was never intended. This is why Trump has such support.

Here you have a bunch of Republicans not even willing to fight on this, even after Trump does the heavy lifting of starting the conversation! The 14th Amendment, it is perfectly clear, was never intended to grant citizenship to even Native Americans! They were living under a different jurisdiction. It was never meant to grant citizenship to anybody but slaves and their descendants. That was it, and it was made abundantly clear.

We are being overrun in this country. Whether you want to call it an invasion or not, we have minimum 12 million illegal aliens. We have sanctuary cities. We have an untenable situation. We cannot maintain our culture. We cannot be and remain the leaders of Western Civilization if this doesn’t stop! And it’s not because there’s any hatred for people. It’s because of self-preservation and a duty that America has to protect and sustain itself for the good of everybody!

So Trump tries to start a conversation on it, and we don’t even have a single Republican, apparently, willing to even pick up the ball and join the fight, much less start it. So what Mr. Senor here is telling us along with Paul Ryan is they’re not even gonna take this on after Trump (again, this is very important) does the heavy lifting. Trump is taking the arrows.

Trump gets the conversation started, like my old buddy Andy McCarthy said the other day: Sometimes you need somebody who’s gonna break the furniture if you are a gonna get the remodeling started. Well, here we go. These guys are demonstrate that go they’re not even willing to join the fight ’cause they don’t like Trump’s tweets. So Senor just acknowledges that the idea that the 14th Amendment doesn’t grant birthright citizenship to anybody wants it?

(paraphrased) “Why, that’s just…” So Trump’s an idiot Trump’s a fool, and he goes on to say that that effort to redefine birthright citizenship back to the original intent, the people that wrote the amendment, is gonna lose us congressional seats in Democrat districts that Paul Ryan was out trying to save. “Yeah. Paul Ryan, he’s campaigning. He’s trying to save some of these Republican seats in Democrat districts and that idiot, buffoon Trump comes along and starts talking about birthright citizenship, making Ryan’s project next to impossible.

“Oh, woe is us. I wish Trump would stop tweeting! By 8:30 every day, I’m worn out,” quote-unquote, Dan Senor. So now we come back to Ed Rollins. Same theory. What he’s really saying here is… Let me run through these again. We’ve got five states that are solid Democrat: New Jersey, California, Illinois, Virginia, New York. New Jersey has five congressional seats that are Republican; four of them are under fire.

California has 14 Republican seats; eight of them are in trouble. Illinois had seven Republican seats; four of them are in trouble. Virginia has seven Republican seats; and four of them are in trouble. New York has nine; five of them… So Rollins says 42 seats held by Republicans in Democrat states, and 25 of them are in trouble. (paraphrased) “Hence, Charlie Cook’s a brilliant genius. Charlie Cook’s figured out there’s 25 seats; we’ve lost right there, just in five states.

“See? That’s how the House is gonna flip from Republican to Democrat.” Okay, fine. This is what they think. And Trump’s responsible. How long is it gonna…? Mr. Snerdley, just think: How long is it gonna be before people remember the old theory we had about a year and a half ago that Trump wants to lose the House so that he will not get the blame for his agenda being stopped? Remember that theory that was…?

How long is gonna be before we hear that? I’ll betcha before the weekend is out somebody revives that one because Trump has so botched this, Trump has made such a miss, Trump’s blown it so bad, he’s guaranteed the Republicans gonna lose the House. Well, let’s go back, 2016, just a couple years ago. October 21st, 2016, Meet the Press Daily, PMSNBC. The host, F. Chuck Todd is talking to Charlie Cook of the Cook Report.

F. Chuck Todd says, Charlie Cook of The Cook Report, “You wrote Republicans will now have four years to think about they did to themselves this year. Plenty of time to contemplate the consequences of handing over their party’s keys to the Tea Party movement and watching as the quintessential Tea Partier, Donald Trump, drove the Republican car off a cliff. Now, I don’t want to get into the debate about whether Trump’s a real Tea Partier or not, but he certainly was driving the car. So your point here: Trump is destroying the Republican Party and they’re gonna have four years to try to figure out why.”

COOK: And it certainly is the cliff!

TODD: So it’s off the cliff. You think it’s over? You’re done?

COOK: Oh, yeah. Yeah! Yeah!

TODD: This is baked, done.

COOK: Yeah, if this were a two or three or four, that’d be different. But we’re talking six, seven, eight, and, uhh, your poll had 11. You know, this is — and the well is just poisoned.

RUSH: Those numbers are polling numbers. So F. Chuck Todd is telling Charlie Cook, “So this is baked. It’s done! Trump’s driving the car over the hood. Hillary’s gonna be president.” Cook says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. If it were just two or three or four points, ahhhhh, it’s be little bit different. But we’re not talking two.

“We’re talking Hillary up by six, seven, eight, points — and F. Chuck, your poll at NBC has her up 11. So, I mean, the well is just poisoned and Trump is the poison.” But they weren’t through. Same date, same show, F. Chuck Todd then says to Charlie Cook, “So I guess now, Charlie Cook, the question is, ‘All right, is it gonna be a wave or not? Is Hillary gonna bring when her a gigantic blue wave?’ I mean, the ingredients for a wave are what?”

COOK: To me, if Republicans lose their Senate majority, it’s gonna because they had 24 seats up, only 10 for Democrats and seven seats up in Obama states.

TODD: Mmm-hmm!

COOK: The thing is the path for Republicans to win a majority is just getting narrower and narrower and narrower now that we know that Democrats only need four. And the recipe has always been for Republicans minus four, plus one.

TODD: Mmm-hmm!

COOK: They can’t lose more than four of their own seats and they gotta win Nevada.

TODD: (excitedly) Mmm-hmm! Mmm-hmm!

COOK: Annnnnnnd this path is getting narrower and narrower.

RUSH: So let’s review. In 2016, Charlie Cook and F. Chuck Todd had agreed that Trump was gonna lose. He was gonna take the GOP Senate majority with him. He was gonna destroy the Tea Party. He was gonna drive the Republican Party — Tea Party, every bit of it — over the cliff, and that they were gonna have such a Humpty-Dumpty job. Four years to figure out what went wrong and to put it back together — and damned if they aren’t saying the same thing again right now.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: So I just got a note here, an interesting email from a good buddy who said, “You may not know this, you may forgot it. Ed Rollins had the same exact theory in 1994 when the Republicans won the House. Ed Rollins using the same theory that you just played didn’t think the Republicans had a chance of winning the House in 1994.” Now, to be fair, there weren’t a whole lot of people that did. I remember the Robert Novak, the prince — the lovable prince — of darkness.

I mean, he predicted it to within one or two seats. I think he predicted 56. But her point is — my friend’s point is — that these guys, these establishment Republican guys are traditionally negative, and they just like to chat past each other, and they don’t really look at the data. They just follow the gurus and echo it and so forth. So we’ll see. I’m just sharing with you all the stuff that is out there. What amazes me about it is that all of these people who think they’re on the cusp of reclaiming their precious capital.

They’re on the cusp of getting it back from the clutches of Donald Trump and they just don’t seem all that happy. They seem mad. And they’re really criticizing the way Trump is campaigning. If Trump were blowing it this bad, they would be encouraging him to keep blowing it. If talking about immigration was a wrong thing to do, then they would be praising Trump, they’d be talking about how brilliant the campaign is.

That he had be egging him on because they think he’s an egomaniac and they think that Trump believes the last person that he talks to, Trump is so stupid, he can’t make up his own mind, you know. They really believe the last person Trump talks to, that’s what he thinks. So they would be encouraging all of these mistakes. They would be encouraging Trump to go down these wrong roads. Instead, they’re acting mad about it.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Grab sound bite No. 29 and then we’ll get back to the phones. Interestingly here, Charlie Cook of the Cook political report, the guru who is leading everybody in the Washington establishment except maybe Nate Silver (and he may be chiming in, too), with the idea that the Democrats retake the House with as many as 40 seats. Charlie Cook was speaking at the American Academy of Actuaries’ annual meeting, and this is just a 27 second little sound bite of his speech.

COOK: I probably shouldn’t do this but I’ll just use a family example. We could have an unemployment rate of zero. We could have the GDP at twice the rate it is, and, you know what? My wife and daughter are still going to really, really, really dislike President Trump and hold that against anybody wearing his color jersey. So it’s not always, always the economy.

RUSH: And there you have it, my friends, that’s why the economy doesn’t matter. That’s why a good economy doesn’t mean anything! It doesn’t count! Because Trump is so hated by smart women, the kind married and born to Charlie Cook. The Washington establishment hate Trump so much that we could be living in utopia and they would hate Trump, and they wouldn’t support him. You want people like that running things?

They’re no different than the Never Trumpers. Yeah. Everything they believed in is being implemented, working, triumphing. They oppose it. Maybe they never did really believe it.