RUSH: Here’s Brian in Augusta, Georgia. Hey, Brian. Glad you called, sir. Welcome to the EIB Network. Hello.

CALLER: Hey, Rush. Donald’s campaign manager must absolutely cringe every time he gets in front of a microphone. As I said to Mr. Snerdley, Hillary Clinton would eat Donald’s breakfast, lunch, and dinner and forgo the desert and leave a tip. You remember what she said in one of her campaign stumps? She said, “I look forward to debating Donald Trump.” So what’s the guy running against her?

RUSH: What’s the what?

CALLER: The guy running against her.

RUSH: That’d be Bernie Sanders, you mean?

CALLER: Bernie. So, Bernie, you can go sit down you and the good governor, you all can go sit down. You’ve made some noise, yes, and basically a total disavow for the rest of the Republican candidates.

RUSH: You know, I gotta take issue with you on this, Brian. You’re spouting the conventional wisdom that Hillary would mop the floor with Trump. But what does Hillary remind everybody of? Their first or second ex-wife. And how many of those does Trump have? He’s got experience dealing with those kinds of things. He’d be able to just wipe the floor with her. Seriously. Why do you think…? I know you’ve read it. But why do you personally think, Brian in Augusta, that Hillary would just cream Trump in a debate or in the election?

CALLER: Why? For one main reason. She is going to use Trump’s biggest enemy against him. That’s his own ego. She is… I’m glad you asked me that question. She’s gonna say, “Donald, was this you that said this about the Mexicans? Was this you who said, ‘Oh, I got plenty… I do good with the blacks’? Is this you?” She’s gonna… It’s gonna be a systematic killing —

RUSH: Wait a minute. Brian, are you thinking there are some people that don’t know what Trump said about Mexicans and that Hillary’s gonna embarrass him by exposing that to people that have never heard him say it?

CALLER: Rush, it’s not that they didn’t. He’s got… Whether they heard it or not, she’s gonna remind them of situation. She’s gonna make Trump look like this arrogant, corporate, macho, uncaring…. And you gotta remember, Rush: America is primed for its first woman… I wouldn’t vote for Hillary for two seconds and the presidency, by the way. But America’s primed for it. It doesn’t not necessarily have to be Hillary, but they’re primed for it.

RUSH: Who says?

CALLER: And let me say this: If the media — especially the elite liberal media — believed that Trump could beat Hillary, they would not lift him up the way they do every single week. “Trump, Trump, Trump.” But somebody realizes —

RUSH: Wait just a second, Brian. Wait just a minute. You’re watching a campaign that I’m not seeing. Are you telling me that the media is lifting Trump up and supporting Trump because they want Trump to get the nomination ’cause they’re confident Hillary is gonna wipe the floor with him?

CALLER: I could be wrong. As I said, the media elite —

RUSH: I think the media’s trying to destroy Trump and frustrated as hell that they haven’t been able to.

CALLER: Well, because he’s the one person she can beat because she’s gonna make him seem like such a radical, such a buffoon, she’s gonna (unintelligible) —

RUSH: I don’t think Hillary can avoid making herself look like a radical and a buffoon.

CALLER: I know, Rush, but you gotta remember, people who are dipped in the wool gung-ho Hillary voter, they don’t care, and I think you know that. She’s gonna speak to the heart. She’s gonna be, “Well, I’ve made my mistakes, but I care about this country. And the women, Donald, didn’t you say could do more for the women, can you explain?” She’s gonna twist all that. And, Rush, they only made her stronger with that hearing. If I could have asked her one question, it would have been, “Mrs. Clinton, let me ask you a question, can we agree that some people died at Benghazi? Can we at least agree on that?”

RUSH: No. She’s say, “What difference does it make now?”

CALLER: I would say to her then, “So do you say that your conscience is clear over that matter? Can you say right now on national television that your conscience — do you have a clear conscience on that?” And I would have left her alone. Rush, you got to see it. You’ve been around a long time —

RUSH: I know, but I’m telling you — Brian, unless I’m not following you here, and that’s possible because of my hearing, but I don’t think that anybody, by the time we get down to the presidential debates, is gonna remember Hillary’s hearing before the committee.

CALLER: But Rush, it only made her stronger. So I’m reading different articles that say the Republican candidates are gonna hold the Benghazi —

RUSH: Okay, let’s cut to the chase. Brian, let’s cut to the case here. I don’t have much time. Let’s cut to the chase. How do you beat her? That’s what you want to do, so how do you do it? Who can beat hear and how do we do it?

CALLER: It’s gonna have to be maybe Cruz, or Carson, vaguely I will say a Bush, but Cruz has a — and I like what he said, hey, he’d be the one to get rid of IRS, I did like that, he’s not as radical. Any of those three guys could beat Hillary but that’s why they’re not given that type of coverage on it, and they’ve got so show some uniformity. If they don’t Rush, if Trump gets this nomination — this is just my call here — the Republican Party is gonna —

RUSH: Look, you’re in the conventional wisdom. The conventional wisdom is that Trump doesn’t have a prayer in the general election. That is the CW. And we should probably get more people’s thoughts on that, if they agree or disagree and why. But I’ve gotta go now. Brian, I appreciate the call. Thanks much.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: You know, of equal interest to me is this conventional wisdom belief that Hillary Clinton’s gonna mop the floor with Trump or Cruz. If you think that, then you think that she’s gonna mop the floor with anybody. Sadly, way too many people do think that. I’m very much interested in people who think that. I just want to find out why you think it. I think the main reason to, if you want to use the word “fear,” Hillary Clinton is that there’s a D next to her name, and whoever running for president with a D next to their name is automatically gonna win New York and California and Massachusetts and get those electoral votes. No matter who or what, it could be Daffy Duck running, and if there’s a D next to Daffy Duck’s name, he’s gonna win New York; he’s gonna win California and gonna win Massachusetts and all the other states where Democrats have slam dunks.

And to credit Hillary Clinton as being some great — if she’s such a great campaigner, what happened to her in 2008? She’s not a great campaigner. The truth of the matter is that Hillary Clinton’s greatest liability is her own voice. The more she speaks, the worse her numbers get. That’s why there aren’t any Democrat debates, and the ones that are held are on Saturday when nobody watches. They all know it. She’s not this inevitable, unbeatable person that everybody or way too many people seem to think that she is.

Anyway, I mentioned Matthew Continetti. I’m gonna go through this somewhat quickly ’cause it’s an interesting theory. Matthew Continetti has a piece in the Washington Free Beacon, and he thinks that either nominating or not nominating Trump is going to reshape the Republican Party in potentially devastating ways. Now, the two ways are that Trump could win by assembling a majority of nontraditional Republican voters.

Now, the theory there is, if you have a Republican nominee who wins the nomination with a coalition of voters that are not typically Republican, somehow that’s a problem for the party. The thing that I have always wondered about here, where it comes to Trump, and I’m sorry for repeating this, I know regular listeners have heard this a lot, but remember, there’s a new tune-in factor each and every day and while you may have heard it five or six times, this is gonna be the first for many. If you look at the demographic ethnic make up of the Trump support group, it looks exactly like what the Republican Party claims it wants.

The Republican Party as constituted really is embarrassed of its base. They consider its base to be Southern, hayseed, pro-life, rednecks, and, by extension, not very bright. And that part of their base embarrasses them. I just shared with you an opinion piece by Kathleen Parker, supposed conservative columnistette last week who postulated she’s not alone, that, you know what, for the Republican long term, it may be the best thing to lose and get rid of this base and reconstitute the party with a different group of people comprising the base because this base is always gonna be a drag, and it’s always gonna be an embarrassment.

So the theory is losing with this base is proof that the party can never win with its current Tea Party oriented type base. And she’s not alone when I say that. People are coming along and saying if that happens, the Republican identity is gonna be shaken up in ways like it’s very seldom been. But it seems to me that the Republican Party would like a broad-based coalition. They would like having some independents. I mean, God, they talk about ’em enough. They would like having an additional influx of female voters. All of these people make up the Trump base. There are a lot of Hispanics in the Trump base. There are a lot of African-Americans in the Trump base. You’d be stunned at the number of African-Americans supporting Trump.

The other factor that Continetti, if I’m reading him right, seems concerned about is nationalism, that Trump is promoting a nationalism, and that that’s bad, because a nationalism is exclusionary and not inclusive and it’s, you know, too home-teamish and so forth. You know, I always thought that growing and expanding the party beyond where it is was an objective here. I also don’t understand what is so wrong with nationalism.

A good definition of nationalism, if you don’t know what it is, would be to look at what’s happening in France now with the conservative wing there. Le Pen, I don’t know how you pronounce it. Got her mother, Christine Le Pen or Marine Le Pen, it’s the daughter, a 26-year-old, that is running away with it in France, talking about we’ve gotta become France again. You know, we’ve gotta close our borders. We’ve gotta stop all this immigration. We’ve got to get reacquainted with who we are. We are the French, and we’ve gotta remain the French, and we gotta become the French again. And, of course, people are attacking her as being racist and all these other horrible things.

That’s another accusation being leveled here at Trump and if he gets the nomination or doesn’t that the Republican Party is going to be reconstituted on one of these two bases or both, and that it may not be the best thing. I’m not sure I agree with either side of those things. I mean, the Republican Party as it’s currently constituted, at least at the establishment level, is clearly incapable of winning with an agenda that is opposed to what the Democrats want to do significantly and that’s no good. That’s gotta stop.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: David in Albuquerque, New Mexico, thank you for your patience, and it’s great to have you here.

CALLER: Hi, Rush. It’s an honor to speak with you. Mega dittos.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I was raised in a real liberal home, and a friend of mine turned me on to your program. So everything I know about conservatism comes from you. I consider myself a neocon, and I’ve been supporting Rubio all along the way. So you had a caller earlier who said that he’s been supporting Cruz, and now he feels like Trump is being thrown under the bus. But I’ll tell you what: I will meet that type of person halfway and vote for Cruz, because there’s no way I’m gonna vote for Trump. I feel like he’s too much like Jesse “The Body” Ventura or Arnold Schwarzenegger.

RUSH: Well, now, wait. That’s interesting. He’s too much like…

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: Those are judged to be celebrity know-nothings at the moment of truth.

CALLER: That’s how I judge Trump. That’s how I see him. I’m sorry, I think his celebrity is the thing. I think there are enough people — I think the numbers are showing it — that they will not vote for him. Because our votes… At least to me, my vote is sacred. I don’t want to go to my grave knowing that I helped put somebody in the highest, most important, most powerful office in the world that was gonna be terrible, just terrible. And so I’m not gonna vote for him.

RUSH: Let me probe here for just a second. I just want to make sure I understand. You believe that Trump is similar to Jesse the Body —

CALLER: Yeah.

RUSH: — and Schwarzenegger, that when he gets into office, he’s gonna be overwhelmed, not really know what to do —

CALLER: Right.

RUSH: — and that everything that he said up until now, you don’t think it matters. You don’t think he really means… Let me put it this way: You don’t think people support him because of the substance of what he’s saying. You think they’re just dazzled by his celebrity and his personality.

CALLER: I think there’s a lot of that. I think there’s also a lot of people in the Hillary camp who want to run against him, and I think that people like Rubio are far better equipped for what’s going on right now with foreign policy, and this is a foreign policy election more than anything else, in my eyes.

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: I think he’s gonna be incapable. When Jesse Ventura got in or Schwarzenegger got in, it was a disaster. You know, Republican or not, independents or not, just incompetent. So I’m not gonna vote for him. I will meet in the middle and vote for Cruz. “I will meet you in the middle to vote for Cruz,” to that other caller.

RUSH: What do you like about Marco Rubio?

CALLER: Rubio seems to know foreign policy better than any of them and can speak so much clearer about it. I mean, look at Jeb Bush. He doesn’t have the fire in his belly, but Rubio is very fluent on it. I think if we had a ticket like Cruz-Rubio, with Cruz on top? We could have the White House for the next 16 years. That’s what I want to see. I don’t want to see us get in there with Trump and have him be impotent and useless and then lose in four years. And I don’t think he would even get in. So that’s… (chuckles) That’s my opinion, you know.

RUSH: You know, I… (sigh) This is interesting to me, this belief that the guy running away with it on the Republican side can’t win. He’s at 41% now in the Monmouth poll. Admittedly Cruz is way up in Iowa, although in Quinnipiac they’re tied. Look, no cold water here, folks. It’s just little truth about things. I think it’d be big if Cruz wins Iowa, for a whole host of reasons. I can imagine that day. I could imagine the day after the Hawkeye Cauci and Cruz is the winner. I can’t tell you how that’s gonna shake up the establishment. You’re not gonna believe it.

It’s gonna rattle them like you can’t believe, and it’s gonna energize Cruz and his campaign. Right now we’re just dealing with polls. There hasn’t been a vote cast. But you get to the actual first votes cast, it changes everything. It always does. By definition, it should. But here you have… One other thing about the Hawkeye Cauci. The last guy that won the Hawkeye Cauci was Rick Santorum in 2012, and he can’t get a cup of coffee right now. And before that in 2008 it was Huckabee. The Republican side in the Hawkeye Cauci tends toward evangelical.

Which is fine. There’s no criticism here. I don’t want anybody putting words in my mouth or assuming that I’m saying things I’m not. But it’s always been the case. You can lose Iowa and be damaged if you’re expected to win it like Howard Dean, but winning Iowa — whether you come out of nowhere or are expected to — does not necessarily… You know, New Hampshire’s next. Bill Clinton lost ’em both, for example, and that’s why he was called a comeback kid later on — way, way later that spring.

And then we have the SEC primary which comes right after South Carolina, and that’s gonna be big. South Carolina’s a greater indicator than either New Hampshire or Iowa. But I still find it… It’s just a curiosity to me that the leading Republican — and you have nothing to go by other than these polls. You’ve got Monmouth out here today with Trump at 41%, and there’s nobody in that poll that’s even close. And the conventional wisdom is, “He can’t beat Hillary.” So what does that say about these Republican primary voters, that they’re about to…?

At this point, their greatest enthusiasm is for somebody who can’t beat Hillary? I’d like to know the thinking on that. I’ll tell you where I come from on this. See, I think — and I could be way wrong. I’ve been wrong about Hillary so many times, but I’m sticking with my instincts ’cause at some point I’m gonna right. I think she’s defeatable! I think all it would take is somebody really trying, not being afraid, not being defensive, not being negative, not thinking, “Oh, I can’t.” Somebody unafraid to go after her because she’s a woman, somebody unafraid of whatever Mafia she has going after them, somebody willing to roll up the sleeve and tell the truth about this woman and her husband.

I don’t see the invincibility.

I never have. But you go to Washington, DC, or inside official political organizations and apparatusi, and I guarantee you they think she’s unbeatable. I have never understood it. I don’t understand it now. I can remember hosting parties at my house back in 2007, 2008, and a sense of gloom overtaking the dinner table when one of the guests said, “There’s a 75% chance that Hillary Clinton’s gonna be the next president.” It just brought the evening to a screeching halt ’til I rallied everybody with a speech on liberalism and conservatism and everybody running to the beach for a midnight swim in celebration.

But a pall came over the table, “75% chance Hillary Clinton’s gonna be the next president.” Why? Maybe I’m the dense one on this. Maybe there’s something about Hillary. I think it’s more the strength of the Democrats and their electoral votes in the states they get than it is Hillary. But time will tell. I just don’t understand. You think teams that line up to play, say, the New England Patriots, all week before the game go in saying, “We can’t win?” You think the coaches are telling the players, “Look, our objective here, we want to come out of here with a moral victory. We want to at least lose by no more than 10.” You think that happens? That may. Coaches may have to fire players up. Who knows. But I’ve never seen such defeatism disguised as brilliant prognostication when it comes to running against Hillary Clinton. I’ve never understood it, and I probably never will.