JASON: I do want to talk about this Michael Gerson character. This guy — it’s hard to talk about this without getting into a larger picture of where the Republican Party is right now. I lived and breathed the metamorphosis from Wall Street, country club Republicanism to working class Trumpism. And the people that are screaming the loudest against it are not, believe it or not, Democrats. It’s Republicans. It is the Never Trump Republicans at the Lincoln Project, and Never Trump Republicans who hate Trump, and Never Trump Republicans who opposed me in my race for the House, which I won in ’16, and then worked against me in the 2020 race for the Senate, which I did not prevail.

These are the people who are preventing the Republican Party from being a majority party. We ought to kick their ass right out the door and say good riddance, join the Democrat Party. They are hangers-on trying to disrupt the transformation that must occur, with Trump or without him, into a working class party representing, not international elites, not private equity, not trade with China, not globalism, not intervention and endless war, but an American-first party that puts Americans at the head of the table. After all, without America, where does the world stand? But that’s not the reason to do it. The reason to do it is, countries defend their own. Empires crumble.

So, Michael Gerson is a classic Never Trumper. He was the precursor to the Lincoln Project. They got their inspiration from this clown. And remember when Rush used to rail against John McCain and, oh, so many, so many traditional, mainstream Republicans were aghast. Well, let me tell you why he did so. When some of us in the House stuck our neck out on real health care reform because we thought it was the right thing to do, McCain gave a thumbs-down — when 30 minutes, an hour before, he said he would vote in the affirmative. But above and beyond that, John McCain always cared more about what the New York Times said about him than he did about free minds and free markets and shrinking government. And he’s not alone. Mitt Romney’s the same way. And Gerson represents that group of Bush-McCain Republicans that doesn’t want the party to transform.

So, he wrote this scathing op-ed, scathing op-ed yesterday blasting anybody that is promoting this vile, fabulist theory of the Chinese and their nefarious leaking of the Wuhan virus in a gain-of-function scheme. Well, Michael Gerson, Steve Schmidt, Bill Kristol, you know them all, you know them all, Rick Wilson, Reed Galen, George Conway, Stuart Stevens, these are the people that are doing the Democrats’ bidding and yet they’re still in the Republican Party, and I wonder why.

Rush saw it for what it was. Here’s what he had to say about Gerson years ago.

RUSH: You just don’t like the front-runner in this race and you resent had you seen success or what have you, I’m telling you, folks, within the Republican establishment all areas under, a lot of people deathly afraid of what a Trump victory would mean for their and their lifestyles. This guy Michael Gerson, former George W. Bush speechwriter and columnist at the Washington Post. He had a very, very caustic piece about me recently.

Apparently, what really ticked him off is when I opined that one of the reasons establishment people so feel threatened by Trump is that they might lose their standard of living, because they might lose their position in the power structure, which might… He really took offense that I was in any way saying that their virtuous attitude about Trump was in any way related to personal wealth or money. And I’m telling you, when they tell you it’s not the money, it’s the money. It’s the money for everybody.

The people that are voting Trump, many of them… Not all, by the way. It’s impossible to typecast the Trump supporter. They come from too many different places. They’re not all monolithic, just like most constituencies aren’t. But to go down this pathway claiming that these people who haven’t had a raise in 15 years just ’cause of their own incompetence, their own inability to modernize, their own inability to get with it? They deserve to be sitting there in poverty if they’re gonna be that stupid.

These are people that have voted Republican time and time again. These same people probably voted for McCain. They probably voted for Romney. Some of them, they probably voted for George W. Bush. Some of them probably subscribe to some of these websites and magazines now where they’re being insulted. So there’s a lot of people who are very personally frightened by what’s happening. And I’ve been making the point from the get-go.

JASON: Amen to that, Rush. I mean, the fact is that when Rush was railing against McCain, as I mentioned earlier, he saw the whole establishment for what it was, because guess what McCain adviser Steve Schmidt went on to do? Found the scurrilous and disgraced Lincoln Project, with Rick Wilson, who’s the hack of all hacks, George Conway, Stuart Stevens, all of these people. You know what? They all worked against me when I ran for Congress and ran for the Senate, along with former Republican governor Arne Carlson, former Republican senator David Durenberger right here in Minnesota, and a gang down at the state capitol, the establishment, the swamp, they all worked against real change in the Republican Party, and the party needs to wake up about that.