RUSH: The postmortems at the Republican establishment actually have already begun. You ever go to a party and later that night or the next day get together with other people that attended it and you rehash it? It’s the postmortem, and sometimes the postmortem is often more fun than the party. That’s where you go and you rip everybody that you didn’t like at the party. You make fun of everybody for what they did stupid. Well, those things are called postmortems.

And the postmortem of the Republican consultant class has already begun as people are starting to point fingers of blame at each other to explain why Trump was able to come in and hijack this campaign from them, ’cause the consultants, along with the lobbyists and the donors… I mean, they really think… The candidates are just commodities, folks. I wish I could make this understandable. Not that I can’t. It’s just that it’s gonna be foreign.

Most people think that the candidate is the ironclad, iron-fisted decision-maker, and everything is the candidate and the candidate’s vision and the candidate’s ideas that drive the whole train, and it’s not the case in many campaigns. In many cases, the candidate will do nothing without being told what to do every day by somebody. A candidate would be nothing without a teleprompter, a candidate will be nothing without this and that. And so the consultants and the donors and the lobbyists actually think they run the show and that the candidate…

This not all cases, but the candidate is just a commodity. Have you ever heard these guys talk, “Yeah, he was a good candidate.” What the hell does that mean, “good candidate”? He follows directions; he didn’t go off message. You know, you and I would think a “good candidate” is somebody that can articulate what they believe with passion and could get elected. Likability, all those things. The consultants — many of them, not all — look at candidates as Ken dolls to be molded and shape and presented.

And this is why they’re not allowed to speak other than what’s on the prompter. Everybody’s afraid the candidate is gonna go out there and say something that’s gonna blow everything to smithereens — like, for example, saying that Ted Cruz’s dad met with Lee Harvey Oswald before the JFK assassination. Consultants live in mortal fear of things like that. So Mike Murphy — who’s the consultant-in-chief for the GOP — weighed in on the Today show today about what went wrong.

MURPHY: Trump is selling what the grievance half of the party wants. The big donors, they don’t like Trump, but they don’t want Cruz, either. You know, it’s like, “Give me $3 million to switch from one kind of unpopular outcome to another,” hasn’t been a good pitch.

RUSH: So you see the problem. It’s that half of the party that is the grievance half. That would be you: The grievance party. You got grievances. You got problems with the Republicans. But that’s not the problem. The problem is the donors. The donors don’t know what to do, you see?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Josh in Powell, New Jersey, you’re next, sir. Hello.

CALLER: Yes, hello, Rush. Thank you for taking my call.

RUSH: Yes, sir.

CALLER: You mentioned you… Let me get straight to my point. You mentioned that the establishment wants Ted Cruz to lose. That way they can say conservatism is dead. Let’s take the flip side. I think the establishment knows that either Trump or Cruz will win and they’re deathly scared of Cruz, and that was the comment that you mentioned with Boehner this weekend. Because if Trump wins, it might be four years, it might be eight years; the establishment will still be there.

RUSH: You know, that’s an interesting point. I don’t mean to be rude, I just misjudged the clock. I thought I had 90 seconds and I had 45 when I looked, but you have a fascinating point here. The conventional wisdom is that the establishment fears that either one of these guys is gonna lose in a landslide, and so what’s the best loss? They have concluded Cruz. But a lot of people think that Trump can beat Hillary in a matchup. A lot of people think either one of them can, and your theory is that the establishment does, too, that the establishment is really afraid that either one of them will win. That is a… We need to talk about that more.