RUSH: Madeleine in Melbourne, Florida, great to have you on the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Honor to speak with you again, sir.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: Okay. Carly Fiorina, to me she just reminds me of Hillary without a pantsuit.

RUSH: You need to slow down, Madeleine.

CALLER: Okay.

RUSH: Please, please, I’m not gonna be able to understand you if you don’t slow down.

CALLER: Okay, I got diarrhea of the mouth here I got so much to say. She reminds me of Hillary without the pantsuit. I just think she’s evil. She’ll do anything she can to get ahead, and I want to know why the media is hiding information on her, Fox, everybody. Her speech I dug of last night from 2001, pro-Islam speech, some business things she was doing. On my favorite site, Weasel Zippers, and I’m watching this video of her running for Senate mocking Barbara Boxer’s hair. You know, she keeps saying she’s an outsider. No, she’s not an outsider. I also read that she worked for McCain, Romney campaign, and then when mean old Ted Cruz was trying to shut down the government, she said she felt sorry for Boehner and she would not have supported that.

RUSH: I don’t mean to be rude, I just want everybody to know that I mentioned all of this yesterday. It’s okay that you bring it up again, that’s fine, but where are you ultimately heading? I want to focus you on your point here.

CALLER: My point is, like I said, why the media keeps hiding everything on her, and we are to supposed to be, you know, they started with —

RUSH: Because they want to get rid of Trump. It’s not that they like her. This is the mistake people are making. It’s not that they like Fiorina. They never liked McCain. They just made him think they did and everybody else. They don’t like any Republican. Do not mistake this. Look, this is very, very important for everybody to understand. And the reason it’s very, very important, is this is how they choose our nominees for us. This is how they choose our candidates for us, by making us think they like them.

There are way too many of us who are still dreaming of the day when the mainstream media takes our side. And so when they come out now and start acting like they love Fiorina, “Ah, there’s our ticket!” just like they did with McCain. And I’ll tell you how this works. Look, I don’t mean to sound like a broken record here, folks, but the examples really work. Dinner party in my own house I walked out of ’cause there were three guys who were just telling me that Palin was not worth supporting, she was an idiot. They just recounted everything the media said about her.

They told me things she said that she never said, that Tina Fey had said during comedy routines, and they said she could never win ’cause the media hates her. I said, “You don’t think that’s worth fighting? The media is lying about her.”

“Too late, Rush, too late, just too late. We can’t win when the media destroys these people.” Okay, so here comes — this is the first Republican since these debates began that the media actually looks like they enjoy, right? I mean, they haven’t promoted Jeb. They have treated Jeb as a fait accompli. They have reacted and treated Jeb as though he is the ordained front-runner, because he is the establishment’s candidate and they’ve been treating Jeb as the eventual nominee. But they haven’t been hyping him. They haven’t been hyping anybody, except now they’re hyping Fiorina.

After this performance they’re hyping Fiorina, for a whole host of reasons, primarily to get rid of Trump. But the media is not ever going to like any of our nominees, and they’re never going to support any of them in a presidential election. So it’s important to understand when you watch this, it’s not that they love Carly Fiorina. They love what supporting her now might enable to them to accomplish, and that is get rid of a Republican who can win. That’s what’s going on here. Not hard to see.

I don’t mean this to be insulting to Carly Fiorina. It’s not even in my mind. I’m not trying to cut her or be offensive or critical or any of that. I’m just analyzing for you why this is important. Do not make the mistake that all of this is happening because they all of a sudden fell in love with her after one debate. The woman came out against abortion. They are never gonna support this woman, I don’t care what they do and say now. Folks, I know you in this audience, for the most part, get it. You gotta spread the word.

You have got to convince people, the Drive-By Media, the mainstream media, is never going to support us, and if you continue to define political success as the media supporting us and not supporting a Democrat, you’re never gonna be happy, because that’s never going to happen. And if that remains your measure of success, then you’re gonna get fooled each and every time. Because after Fiorina they’ll come up with somebody else that they like all of a sudden, or make it look like they like.

And they’ll start touting and they’ll start highlighting, and they’ll start making it look like they’re really celebrating and promoting, and all of it is simply designed to end up with them once again picking our candidate. And right now what they’re trying to do is get rid of Trump. But, by the way, not just the media. The entire Washington establishment, which the media is a member of.

Remember, it is a club. It’s a very small club. Meritocracy has nothing to do with who gets in. It’s more who you are and where you come from and where you are employed.

The people who employ people in the club have amazing power. By getting hired in the media or in certain political arenas, areas in the establishment, that says a lot about you. That gets you admission. None of this is written down. There’s not a manual. There are no bylaws. There’s nothing written down that will ever define membership in this club.

But it is overwhelmingly small when compared to the population of the country. And they know it, and so they have to do things to make sure that they’re not overrun and thrown out. ‘Cause they’re vastly outnumbered. They’re overwhelming outnumbered by the rest of us. So how do they do that? They gain control of every apparatus in Washington. They then turn the Constitution upside down and act like the Constitution was written to protect them from us, not the other way around.

They act like the Constitution was written to protect government, to grow government, to insulate government, and so they pass laws, they pass regulations that, over time, severely limit liberty and freedom. And that is how they protect themselves. And then when threats to this come along, they have to be taken out somehow, but they can’t make it look like they’re being taken out by the establishment. It has to look like natural forces are at play here. Well, the natural force at play here is Carly Fiorina’s debate performance Wednesday.

So now they’re all circling the wagons. No matter where you go, no matter what network you turn on, doesn’t matter, Carly Fiorina is a heroine, and now with Trump and that audience member question and not correcting it, those two things together, and now Trump is in the crosshairs once again, which has been the objective since the day he announced. Maybe not that soon. After a couple times stepping in it and his numbers continue to go up and the club said, “Wait a minute, we can’t control this.” They have to get rid of anything they can’t control. How do they control it? Well, they threaten to kick you out of the club if you don’t play ball. You wonder why everybody in the club says and does and repeats the same stuff, that’s how you stay in the club. You never go off the reservation.

So that’s what’s at stake. That’s why I say it’s a trap that’s being set for Trump to backpedal, like he backpedaled in the debated by saying Carly Fiorina is beautiful and so forth. They’re trying to create another backpedal. You may not think that was a backpedal. Maybe not. Okay. But they’re looking for one here. They want him to correct that audience member, they want him to apologize to Obama, and that’s why it’s important for Trump to come back and say, “I’ll apologize when Obama apologizes for Reverend Wright.”

“I’ll apologize when Obama has the family of Kate Steinle to the White House. I’ll apologize when” whatever. You see how…? By the way, that might even be too risky. Jeb Bush committed a really — what’s the polite word here? — rookie error in the debate. The apology? You never make a demand you know is not going to be. It’s like a defense attorney with somebody granting immunity. You never grant ’em immunity ’til you know what they’re gonna say. You don’t put your client on the stand without knowing what they’re gonna say.

You don’t demand an apology from a guy knowing you’re not gonna get it. You just don’t do it. But there’s any number of ways to go after Hillary here, and there’s any number of ways to go after Obama/Reverend Wright, and if Trump does it, if Trump does… I’m just saying: If Trump comes out and fires right back at these people with all of the legitimate grounds he has to do it, he could skyrocket. He could get up to that 45 points that this woman on the phone last week said he should be at by now anyway.