RUSH: Now, there’s something else about these delegate fights that have taken place over the weekend where Cruz has just skunked Trump. It isn’t even a contest. It is fascinating to watch. And, of course, the Trump people think that games are being played and that tricks are being pulled. But that’s not happening. This is just somebody who understands the system using it. You know, we could go into a little discussion if you want about insider versus outsider, and I’ve tried to tell people: “These insiders are not just gonna let this stuff go, folks. They’re not just gonna sit idly by and let you take it away from ’em.”
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RUSH: This morning on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends, the guest, the Trumpster. During a discussion about Trump’s loss at the Colorado Republican convention, Ainsley Earhardt — by the way, congratulations to her for getting the gig. Did you hear about this, Brian? I know you’re a big Ainsley Earhardt fan. Mitzi should know. Just kidding.

Ainsley Earhardt started out at Fox doing little bits for Hannity, the news updates at the bottom of the hour, and now she is the female anchor of Fox & Friends. Anyway, they’re talking here to Trump, and Ainsley Earhardt says, “Over the weekend you lost the state of Colorado, and you tweeted about it. You said you were angry. You said it was unfair. Why do you think that?”

TRUMP: In the Denver area and Colorado itself they’re going absolutely crazy because they weren’t given a vote. It’s a crooked deal. And I see it. And honestly I see it with Bernie, too. I’ve gotten millions more votes, millions, not just a couple, millions more votes than Cruz. Now they’re trying to pick off those delegates one by one. That’s not the way democracy is supposed to work. You know, and they offer ’em trips, they offer ’em all sorts of things. What kind of a system is this? I’m an outsider and I came into the system and I’m winning the votes by millions of votes. But the system is rigged, it’s crooked. When you look, even at Bernie, I’m not a fan of Bernie, but every time I turn on your show, Bernie wins, Bernie wins, Bernie wins, but yet Bernie is not winning.

RUSH: That’s true. That’s true about Crazy Bernie. They have rigged it over to the Democrat side. They’re using their superdelegates. It’s not rigged on the Republican side. This is just the establishment taking advantage. You know, what they’ve done is fake everybody out here. And look, this is multileveled here, to get an idea of what’s going on. The establishment has had everybody looking at rule 40, for example. I mean, there have been all kinds of leaks in Politico. I mean, the last series of months we’ve had story after story about how supposedly the establishment is panicking, and the steps that they’re going to take to try to stop Trump. And we hear about maybe a third-party candidate that we’ve never heard of being nominated on the floor in a brokered convention. Everything.

But the one thing that nobody leaked, the one thing that nobody had a heads-up on was how Cruz was going to go into all of these states and arrange to get most of the delegates. We’re talking second and third ballot here. On the first ballot the delegates — for the most part; there are exceptions — are pledged to vote the way the people in their state voted. Pennsylvania, however, is different. Pennsylvania is coming up. You want to know about Pennsylvania? Only 17 out of Pennsylvania’s 70 some odd delegates vote the way voters in the primary go. Some 51, 54, I don’t have the number right in front of me, over 50 delegates in Pennsylvania are unbound, on the first ballot.

Just use an example. If Trump wins Pennsylvania by 75%, he likely will only get 17 of the 60 or 70 delegates, because only 17 are pledged and bound to whoever wins the state primary. Well, Trump has not been working any of these delegates. Why? Who knows. It could be that he didn’t think he had to. It could be he didn’t even know. It could be he had nobody on his staff that really knows how this works.

You do because you have been treated to in-depth explanations of how this whole delegate process works, particularly once we get to second and third ballots. And even I pointed out to you that it’s very possible — we won’t know actually ’til the convention starts — very possible that a lot of delegates that have to vote Trump on the first ballot don’t actually support him. And if we get to second or third ballot then they’ll abandon him and go for whoever. Right now Cruz is calling dibs.

Now, what happened in Colorado is, I’m sorry to say, it’s not a trick. What happened in Colorado is right out in the open. Everybody’s known how Colorado runs its affairs. Everybody has known. Nobody just chose to look at it. It’s no secret that Colorado was gonna have a convention and they’re gonna choose their delegates before the primary. It’s not a secret. It’s just nobody leaked it. Nobody talked about it. Nobody bragged about it. So it was left to be discovered by people who didn’t know. And it turns out that people on the Trump campaign didn’t know.

Now, I can understand how they might feel tricked here. I can understand how they might feel bugabooed because millions of votes, theoretically, are gonna happen that aren’t going to count. Hey, welcome to establishment politics. We have played for you the sound bites on this program of delegates — I’m sorry — of officials, rules committee officials. We played the sound bite of one of these guys that said, “Hey, what you all have to understand is the people don’t select our nominee; the delegates do, we do.” None of this is a mystery. This is the definition of insider versus outsider. This is a classic illustration of how an outsider has to learn the insider game to play it.

Every business has its rules and laws, bylaws, and specific ways that you have to climb the ladder of success. In addition to that, people that run the club — in this case, the Republican establishment — are not gonna sit idly by and let a bunch of outsiders, the peasants with pitch forks, however you want to visualize them, they’re just not gonna sit idly by and let people come in and take it. It’s too valuable. In most cases this is how all of these people value themselves. This is from which they derive their self-worth, is their membership in this club.

So I don’t see Ted Cruz lying and cheating his way to the convention. I see a lot of hard work. I see some people who know what they have to do, given where they are. They’re in second place in both the vote count and the delegate count. They’re serious about winning. The Cruz team is serious about winning. They have made themselves fully aware of how the process works, and they’ve been out working it for quite a while. They went into Louisiana where Trump scored a massive win but they’ve come out of there with many more delegates than, by appearances, they should have.

Ted Cruz had goals. He worked the problem ’til he got the result he wanted. What he’s demonstrating, folks, he’s demonstrating he knows how to work himself within this insider labyrinth. He knows how to navigate it. He knows how to work it. He knows how to turn it to his advantage. You have to look at this and say, “Okay, what does this tell us about Cruz, if he should become president?” No matter how enamored you are — and a lot of people are — no matter how enamored you are of the notion of a total outsider with no links to the establishment, no links to insider politics, nothing whatsoever, you’re fascinated by that happening, somebody coming in and just totally wrecking the castle, finding out that you can’t do that without getting inside the castle first. ‘Cause people inside the castle are not gonna let you crumble the walls.

You know, being an outsider, it has benefits, but it has drawbacks, too, and knowing the rules inside out and outworking the competition is not cheating. If you happen to be more knowledgeable of how things work and are able to work it to your advantage, that’s just hard work. That isn’t cheating. I think the entire lesson, if look at the Obama campaign and the Cruz campaign, organization matters, from the grassroots on up. Obama has charisma. Trump has loads of charisma. They connect with their audiences.

But I think what happened to Trump — and I’m just wild guessing here — I think the assumption was made at some point that our lead is so massive and that our love is so great and we’re just skunking everybody, if you go back to the early months of the primary, we’re skunking everything, we’re getting all that free media, we’re getting all these votes, we’re winning in every one of these primaries, most of ’em that count, losing some of the caucuses, but our poll numbers, we’re getting double-digit leads over people. And it was probably assumed that that would translate to delegates, and maybe even assumed it would translate to massive public and inside-the-party support. But of course it doesn’t.

People that don’t want Trump to win are going to get even more worked up about it and do what they can to stop it. And they’re gonna use the tools that they have available. And it happened to be the tools that they wrote. It happened to be the tools that they, who run the establishment, put in place. And every business has them, folks. Every business. Every career, every industry, no matter what, every organization, even Planned Parenthood, there is a way you get to the top in that crowd. At every homeless shelter there’s a structure. There’s a way you get to the top there. There’s a way you get to the top at Harvard. There’s a way you get to the top in a professional sports organization.

There’s a way you get to the top in politics. People who don’t like certain rules may call them loopholes and may say somebody’s cheating. But that’s just people using the rules as they have been written. Politico has a story: “Trump’s Saturday Delegate Disaster.” But it’s interesting; there’s no mention of Cruz in this story. That’s quite telling to me, because, remember, The Politico is the chosen receptacle for GOP establishment leaks. This is a long story, “Trump’s Saturday Delegate Disaster,” and there’s not a single mention of Ted Cruz.

Why is Trump having a delegate disaster? It’s Ted Cruz. It isn’t the establishment. And I’m gonna remind you again, I don’t know how many times, but I’ll say it again. If the establishment or Cruz succeed, if Trump doesn’t get his 1,237 before the convention, it may be over, the way this is going. Because what Cruz is sewing up is delegates on the second ballot.

But my humble belief is that if and after the powers that be dispatch Trump, they will then next seek to dispatch Cruz. Over there Paul Ryan’s running a campaign for something, and everybody’s marveling at it. He was just in Israel talking to Bibi Netanyahu. And there are people whispering Kasich, Kasich, Kasich. So this is by no means settled.

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RUSH: No, I don’t need to correct anything about Colorado. I said what I said and it’s right. I said everybody knew what Colorado did. They changed their procedure. They changed it in August. Everybody knew. This not sneak up on anybody. What happened was the Colorado Republican Party canceled the party’s presidential straw poll in August, purposely and specifically to avoid binding its delegates to a candidate who might not survive until the convention in July. So they purposely did this.

Now, they probably did it because of Trump. I have no doubt that they made this switch because of Trump. But they didn’t do it last night or Friday night. They did it back in August. They’re also shouting at me in Louisiana. “You really misstated what happened to Louisiana!” Okay, okay, okay. We have a statement here from the chairman the Republican Party of Louisiana. He said, “I want to assure everybody Trump received the number of delegates that he earned. Nothing unfair to him is occurring.

“In the Louisiana presidential preference primary, Trump got 40% of the vote and he gets about 40% of the delegates in Louisiana. Additionally, you could be confident that Senator Rubio was not awarded an excessive number of delegates. He got about 10% of the vote, 10% of the delegates. Louisiana is a proportional state.” So… All I said was that Cruz has gone in there and is attempting to work some magic with delegates second and third ballot and so forth. But everybody’s really sensitive about this. I understand it.

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RUSH: One more Trump before we go to the break. He was in Rochester, New York, on Sunday, at a campaign event really laying into the RNC.

TRUMP: We’ve got a corrupt system. It’s not right. We’re supposed to be a democracy. We’re supposed to be you vote and the vote means something. And I want to tell you, it’s a corrupt deal going on in this country, and it’s not good. It’s not good. And it’s not fair, and it’s not fair to you people. They’re taking your vote away. They’re disenfranchising people that want to see America be great again, and politicians will never do it. They don’t want to do it, they can’t do it because their lobbyists and special interests are saying, “We’re not gonna let you do it.” It’s no good. And we’ve gotta change the system. And it’s gotta change fast.

RUSH: And we gotta take a break. We’ll do that and be back and continue after this.

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RUSH: Here’s Rich in White Plains, New York. Great that you waited, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Thanks for taking my call.

RUSH: Yeah.

CALLER: Donald Trump is a whining, sniveling excuse-making crybaby who, by the way, says he’s gonna surround himself with all these experts that are gonna solve all of this country’s problems, but appears that Trump and his good brain wasn’t smart enough to hire anybody who knows the election process. And I guarantee you if this process were working in Trump’s favor, you know he’d be saying, “Well, the rules are the rules.” So Trump has adopted the Limbaugh Theorem. Nothing is ever his fault. He’s every bit the self-absorbed narcissist Obama is, and, like Obama, he has a generic slogan and the media behind him.

RUSH: Why do you think this has happened to Trump? Why do you think that he appears to have been so caught off guard or flat flooded in the delegate selection process that’s been going on the past weekend?

CALLER: There’s a lot of conspiracy theories out there that says he didn’t want to win to begin with, but here’s another thing, Rush. Trump says the system is corrupt. If it wasn’t for the system, he wouldn’t have as many delegates as he does now. If there were only three candidates from the beginning, more voters would have gravitated to Cruz instead of diluting the vote between all the other candidates, and no one brings that up.

RUSH: Actually, you know, you may have a point in a related way. NBC News has a story. I know, I know, NBC News. But their headline is this: “Despite Complaints, Delegate System Has Given Trump a 22 Percent Bonus.” And their point is that Trump leads with 756 delegates, or 45% of all delegates awarded, yet he’s won 37% of all votes. Meaning Trump’s delegate support is greater than his actual support from voters. As a matter of Republican Party math, Trump has been awarded a delegate bonus 22% above his raw support from voters.

So their point here is that even if you apply the same thinking to Cruz, you still end up with Trump has been awarded 8% more delegates than Cruz for the same rate of voter support. And they say Trump’s not factoring this in. They list the reasons why Trump has had a delegate bonus, if you will. Some of it benefits from crossover voters in open primary states. But their point here at NBC News — I know it’s NBC News — is that Trump really’s got nothing to complain about, because he has benefited from some of these very rules that have garnered him more delegates than the vote totals he’s amassed have actually earned him.

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RUSH: Here is Sean Spicer. He is the RNC, the Republican National Committee chief strategist and communications director. He’s a PR guy, essentially, and he was on CNN this afternoon. He was asked about what went on in Colorado with Trump calling it a rigged vote, other people calling it a rigged vote. Trump’s newly hired strategist Paul Manafort calling Cruz’s tactics “Gestapo tactics.” So they put this question to Spicer. “What did happen in Colorado? What’s going out there? What are you people in the party trying to do?”

SPICER: All of these states and territories submitted plans last year. Those plans were made available to every campaign starting last year. So candidates and campaigns shouldn’t be surprised. It’s up to them to both win a state and then go in and fight to have their slate or their delegates selected. In Colorado, they’ve talked about having a convention since last year. Everyone’s known that. The process by which our party is engaging in right now is something we’ve been engaging in for over a century in terms of each state deciding how they’re gonna select their delegates.

RUSH: That’s true. The delegate selection process does not determine the actual delegates. Who they are, the human beings, is not determined by the primary vote. The party figures that out. In some cases you run for election as a delegate, and it’s a big honor to be chosen delegate and go to convention. It’s a big deal. It’s also a hassle, ’cause it’s a pain in the butt sitting out there with 4,000 people at convention. But it’s still it’s an honor for people who are really into this stuff. In other instances, the bigwigs will call you and say, “We’d love for you to be a delegate.”

I know people have had that happen. But the party controls it is how that all can happen. And whoever… You know, whoever wins in the primary doesn’t determine who the delegates are. That’s why it’s entirely possible State A overwhelmingly votes for Trump in the primary but the delegates could be 75% for Cruz. On the first ballot, they gotta vote for Trump the way the people voted. On the second ballot, they can do whatever they want. You can wine ’em, you can dine ’em, you can take ’em to the Clinton private island in Panama, whatever you want to do to try to get them on your side.

Here’s Laura, Littleton, Colorado. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: Hey!

RUSH: Hey.

CALLER: I’m a disenfranchised Colorado voted who attended the non-caucus caucus.

RUSH: Yeah, how was it?

CALLER: It was a sham. (chuckles) There were a few people there, all Republican office people who wouldn’t even tell you who they were going to vote for as your delegate. So you had no idea.

RUSH: Wait, wait, wait. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! They wouldn’t tell you who they were gonna vote for as your delegate?

CALLER: Yes. We had to vote on delegates, but they would not announce who they were going to vote for as the delegate —

RUSH: So you were choosing delegates who would not tell you for whom they were going to support at the convention?

CALLER: That’s correct.

RUSH: Wow. Who was in charge of that, Ted Cruz?

CALLER: I have no idea. All I know —

RUSH: I’m just kidding! I’m sorry. Folks, I’m getting giddy here at the end of the program. I just made it up. I take it back. Who was in charge of making that decision?

CALLER: The Republican Party of Colorado. They don’t trust the voters. Last election we voted for Santorum, which they didn’t like, and the election before that we voted for Romney, who they didn’t want. They wanted McCain.

RUSH: You want to know something interesting? Folks, history — try this. See if any of this seems familiar. Mitt Romney, the 2012 nominee, did not clinch the number of delegates he needed, which was 1,144 back in 2012, he didn’t get to that number until May 29th. And that was with the establishment’s vigorous assistance. The establishment was all-in for Romney, and he didn’t get —

Santorum — people have forgotten this — Santorum was running away with this in the early stages. And there were people, what is going on? Rick Santorum? Romney didn’t nail it down until May 29th. There’s a Politico story about it. “Romney was always seen as the nominee in waiting, a cautious but inevitable front-runner for the GOP nod who was well positioned, but he has always been viewed with deep skepticism by the grassroots divide.”

So establishment-grassroots divide was blamed for Romney’s slow process. Meaning the establishment, they were all-in for Romney from day one. But it took him ’til May 29th. That meant there was a divided party that looked like it was a divided party all the way through June, practically. And the establishment blamed the grassroots for that, for not going along with who they wanted, Mittens.