Caller: When Will People Wake Up?

RUSH: Here is Wendy in Houston. Wendy, you lead off today. Great to have you with us on the program.

CALLER: Oh, my goodness. It is such an honor to talk to you. Thank you so much for everything that you do.

CALLER: Thank you so much, and my children love your books, so thank you, thank you. Start with that.

CALLER: So thank you. Huge honor. I just want to call, because I'm listening to this, and I am a huge anti-establishment, cannot stand all of that, but yet I still don't get it with the Trump thing because he doesn't stand for our conservative beliefs and values, whereas there is a candidate who does. Cruz stands up for what we believe in, and he is anti-establishment. So I don't understand how Trump can continue to say these things, especially have the audacity to support Planned Parenthood and all that he did on Saturday, and still the people won't leave him who consider themselves to be conservative when there's a very viable option. So I'm hoping you can help me understand.

RUSH: Look, I'll say this again, and I need you to hear me this time. The majority of Trump's support base is not the Republican base.

RUSH: The majority of Trump's support base is not conservative. There are quite a few, but I don't think they're the majority. And if they are the majority of the Trump support base, it's a very, very tiny majority. His coalition -- it's really ironic -- the coalition that Trump has put together is exactly what the Republican Party has been telling us conservatives they need to do to win.

RUSH: While they have been blowing us off, while they have been lying to us, they've been saying, "No, no, we can't win with just you guys. We need to go out and get these --" Well, Trump's doing it, and they don't want any part of it. In the second place, remember Jeb Bush said that he was gonna win the nomination without the base. Guess who's doing it? Trump.

CALLER: Exactly. But then Trump, I don't understand why people don't get more fired up against him, why people are not standing up against him and going with Cruz, who is standing up against the establishment, plus the values. What are your thoughts there?

RUSH: My theories are probably just the same as yours. You know, you've got any number of alternatives to Trump.

RUSH: He's tied at 18% in South Carolina. But he's outperforming. In every election he outperforms what the polling says. I think Cruz is the -- ah, what's the term? He's the sleeper out there. It's Cruz that's sneaking up on everybody. Everybody's focusing on Trump.

CALLER: So what is it gonna take to wake everyone up to cross that line? If Trump comes in and makes it big in South Carolina in this primary, then what is it gonna take? Is it just a done deal? What do you think it's gonna take?

RUSH: This is what you gotta come to terms -- everybody's awake. And there are a lot of people -- you're putting me in a very difficult position here.

RUSH: No, no, no. I'm not complaining to you. You don't know, 'cause I don't wear my blood on my sleeve. You know, I don't bleed and whine and moan and complain to the audience about things that happen to me because I'm bigger than that. But you would not believe the number of people that are coming at me as though all of this is my fault, that I could have stopped this way back when if I would have just been a leader, if I would have just done this or that.

I have been sitting around observing. I have been a conservative all my life. I've been doing this radio program as a conservative for 27 years. There is no doubt anywhere all across this country who I am and what I stand for. There's no misunderstanding. Well, there might be some misunderstandings among people that doesn't listen, but there's no misunderstanding that I am a conservative and that -- well, arguably, the Mister Big of the vast right-wing conspiracy. It's a challenging position I'm in here because there's some things I probably shouldn't say.

I've got two responsibilities here, folks. I've got my responsibility to you, the audience, which I put at number one. My responsibility to this program, my career, my job, not my career, but this is the thing I've chosen to do. There are all kinds of people who depend on me doing it and doing it well. That's my number one focus. I'm not the leader of the conservative movement. I've never sought that. I'm not denying any -- already right there, "Wait a minute. You mean you've been lying to us?" No, I haven't been lying to you. It's not my job to get votes for people, damn it! It's theirs! What more do you want me to do?

RUSH: The best thing I could tell you, folks, I guess, as I assess all this, is this is not an election, with a competition of philosophies. We're way beyond that. People are not gonna rely on philosophy to accomplish anything. You can have the best philosophy in the world, I don't care what you call it, and it's not gonna mean anything if you're up against somebody who succeeds at making people think he's gonna break balls, kick butts, take names, put people in prison, fix the country, make the country great again, whatever the hell that means to people. You can philosophize all day long in competition against it, and we'll see you in the rearview mirror.

“Rush called Rubio a â€œFull Throated Conservativeâ€, thatâ€™s all you need to know about Rush.”

Yes, let’s throw Rush on the bonfire. The one guy who has fought hardest and most effectively for conservatism for a quarter century. Instead, let’s follow Donald Trump, who has mostly been voting as a Democrat and showed up on the political scene just a year ago. Oh, and let’s vilify, Ted Cruz and Mark Levin and anyone else who stands in the way of Trump’s power, no matter what their honest objections to jumping off a cliff might be.

I just hope all the Trump supporters will be happy when it becomes their turn to be called slimy, sleazy, idiot, low energy, ugly, nasty, losers because you know that is coming.

The caller heard Trump supports PP but did not hear that Trump is against abortion.

Now it’s true that 85%+ of PP’s business is abortion, but Trump wants to assure women that he is FOR their specialized health concerns which are considerable.

PP clinics were built with federal dollars and many of them are multi-multi-million dollar state of the art facilities. There is no reason why they can’t be revamped to be women’s health facilities under a different name minus any business of abortion.

Trump needs to clarify what will happen when he works with Congress to defund abortion on demand which will result in cutting 85%+ funds for PP.

So the caller who gasped and was awestruck to be on Rush’s show should know Trump is NOT for abortion.

As for Rush pushing that Trump supporters are not the base, excuse me but that’s a cutout of a larger picture which he conveniently crops out. Of course there are substantial and significant numbers of conservatives for Trump, but he does appeal to other demographics which Ted is not attracting.

What Rush misses, where he has a big blindspot, is that the last popular conservative we had in the White House was Ronald Reagan. Since Reagan left office, the conservative brand has been soiled so much that the electorate is not rushing to admit they are associated with it.

Paul Ryan calls himself conservative, John Boehner called himself conservative, Mitch McConnell calls himself conservative. Conservatism among these types of ‘conservatives’ is a joke, a fraud.

What Rush misses is that the electorate were young kids and teenagers when Reagan left office. They never saw how wonderful Reagan was and how he made Americans proud to be American again. They have only seen the a-holes that have soiled the brand.

There’s a new electorate out there.

Rush doesn’t acknowledge it.

When RR ran in 1980, he wasn’t elected because he was a conservative. He was elected because he was viewed as a hardliner against the Soviets and terrorists, and because the electorate was embarrassingly ashamed of Carter and his awful performance.

It was until well into 1983 that the electorate fell in love with RR and realized what a classy eloquent president he was and now the rest of the world realized that America was coming back under a class-act president. And then everyone wanted to be like Ronald, they wanted to be conservative, to talk conservatism, to call themselves conservative. But this all stemmed from love of Reagan first.

Now Ted Cruz is a class-act (save for the scumbags he’s hired to do his campaign) to conservatives like me because he’s running like Reagan and he’s brilliant and well-spoken. But his mistake is he’s running with the Reagan playbook of 1984 when Reagan was loved. Ted needs to understand he should be running with the playbook of 1980 when Reagan was viewed as dangerous and not smart (it was found later by MSM reporters that RR was indeed much smarter than they ever figured). RR campaigned in 1980 against the horrible economy, the weakness of the military, the great loss of prestige around the world.

Bu Ted’s out there trying to revive the Reagan coalition when in fact it’s not really much there anymore. What’s there is a new electorate that sees that Americans are not being put first, who see the economy collapsing, job leaving, political correctness run amok. Donald Trump is addressing all these things in a much more powerful fashion than Ted Cruz. This is why Donald leads Ted by 15% to 20%. It’s not because the base is not with Trump. It’s because Trump is in tune with the electorate.

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