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March 31, 2016 - Rush Limbaugh Program
33:42
March 31, 2016, Thursday, Hour #3
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And isn't that interesting?
Look at that.
Right now, as we speak, you don't need to watch it.
I'll tell you everything you need to know about it.
Karl Rove is on Fox talking to Gretchen Carlson, explaining the GOP has just launched a website to explain a potential contested convention.
You want me to translate that for you?
The GOP has just launched a website to explain to you how it is possible that Jeb Bush could be the nominee.
Or how it's possible that Paul Ryan could be the nominee.
Or how it's possible that anybody not running in the primary right now could be the nominee.
Now, this is the first I'm heard of, I'm hearing of this.
I did not know it until I just saw the graphic on Fox.
So I am kind of guessing here, educated guess.
But I think what this is about, because Rove is holding up his little whiteboard right now with the number 1237 on it.
So let me, what I think is going to happen here, I basically I'm going to be right.
They're going to explain to you on this website how, if nobody gets to 1,237, that it's wide open.
They're going to explain how, hey, in a contested convention, if neither of the candidates in the primary process gets to 1,237, essentially, those candidates could effectively be considered as losers already.
They have been rejected by voters since none of them, neither of them, whatever, got to 1,237.
We could interpret this as the voters having spoken in a Democratic fashion and telling us that they don't want any of them.
Look at, it's not hard to figure out.
These are the people they own this institution.
The GOP, they own the convention and they own their position in the establishment.
And I guarantee this little thing that happened with Trump last night, they decided, oh, this is big.
This couldn't have been better timed.
This abortion and Chris Matthews.
You might think the GOP establishment, oh, no, oh, no, they're going to get.
No, no, they're not looking at it that way at all.
They're going, right on, right on.
They think it's going to disqualify Trump and make it easier to deny him the nomination if he doesn't get to 1237.
Don't doubt me on this stuff.
Again, I'm just educated guessing.
Here's another tech CEOs and top Republicans plot to stop Trump at secretive meeting.
Well, we know that happened.
The New York Times had a story on that meeting.
That strategy, that secret strategy to deny Trump actually starts with the Wisconsin primary.
It's a 100-day plan.
I read about it.
I saw it in the New York Times.
That's like seeing it on TV.
Speaking of which, from the Wisconsin State Journal, Texas Senator Ted Cruz has leaped ahead of Donald Trump in Wisconsin, while Bernie Sanders has an edge over Hillary Clinton, according to the latest Marquette Law School poll.
It was released yesterday.
The poll comes less than a week after Wisconsin's presidential primary, less than a week before it.
957 likely voters.
Cruz is at 40%.
Trump is at 30%.
Kasich is at 21%.
And Bernie Sanders held a 49 to 45 lead over Hillary among likely Democrat voters.
This poll was conducted March 24th to 28th.
Again, 957 likely voters, not registered, but likely.
That means people will give it a lot of weight.
Now, the last Marquette Law School poll in February showed Trump with a double-digit lead in Wisconsin.
But the landscape has changed immensely since then.
The poll was taken before Marco Rubio and Ben Carson dropped out of the race.
Now, in the days before the poll was taken, Trump and Cruz engaged in a pitched battle involving the physical appearance of their wives.
I'm just reading this to you from the Wisconsin newspaper.
Other polls out in the past week show a tightening race, though, unlike the Marquette poll, they use automated calls and don't attempt to call cell phones, according to Marquette poll director Charles Franklin.
The anti-Trump forces are pulling out all the stops.
That's not a statement of support or condemnation either.
I'm just reading a sentence to you.
And on the Democrat side, of course, it's much closer.
Now, how many expected Trump to win Wisconsin?
If Trump wins Wisconsin, you could make a mathematical case that he would get to 1237.
But if he doesn't win Wisconsin, it's going to get harder to get to 1237.
And who knows whether incidents like last night with Chris Matthews are going to dampen support from Trumpists for Trump.
I ran a little market survey.
I know some Trumpists.
And I asked him today, I said, this thing bother you last night.
Nah.
Nah.
Doesn't matter.
It doesn't?
Nah, it doesn't matter.
What about it's not looking good in Wisconsin?
I mean, you guys had a double-digit lead in Wisconsin.
Now you're down-doubled it.
We were never going to win Wisconsin.
Yes, you were.
You had a double-digit lead in Wisconsin, I told them.
Well, no, no, we're not going to win Wisconsin.
Well, how are you going to get to 1237?
Well, you wait and see what we do in New York.
This is a very important outcome in Wisconsin for getting to 1237 because I'm here to tell you, I don't care who you're for, if you're for Trump, if you're Kasich, if you're for Cruz, the establishment is trying to assemble a mechanism here where none of those three end up being the nominee, folks.
So if you're a cruiser and you are happy today thinking your chances have been reinvigorated because of Trump having stepped in it on abortion last night, you got to get to 1237 to stop whatever the establishment's going to pull at the convention.
And by the way, have you heard this statistic being bandied about?
Try this.
See if you've heard this.
A bunch of pro-contested convention people are running around pointing out.
We even had this stat, I think, yesterday or the day before.
In the last 10 contested conventions, the nominee only came from the list of candidates in the primaries in three of them.
In other words, seven of the last 10 contested conventions chose somebody who had not run.
And they're out there using that stat, the pro-contested convention crowd, in order to give them support and to tell you, hey, it's not unusual what we're plotting here.
Hey, it's happened before.
Hey, don't sweat it.
wouldn't be anything extraordinary out of the normal if somebody that didn't run was chosen as the nominee.
The Associated Press has a story here that frustrated Republicans grappled with new fears about Donald Trump's impact on their party Wednesday as the billionaire businessman's campaign rivals, targeted his punitive plan for fighting abortion and extraordinary defense of his campaign manager, who police say assaulted a female reporter.
Concern rippled through Republican circles nationwide, yet few dared criticize Trump directly when asked to, leery of confronting the man who may well lead their election ticket in November.
So this story from the AP is about all of these Republicans out there who are supposedly petrified over what happened to Trump in this abortion fiasco on MSNBC.
And they're very, very worried now that their nominee may be forever tainted, but they don't have the guts to say so because they're afraid of what Trump will do to them if they criticize him.
And that's not what they're thinking.
I'm telling you, they're privately gleeful.
They're not worried because they don't think Trump's going to be the nominee.
They really don't.
I'm telling you right here, the establishment boys, and I say that generically, the establishment gang, I think is pretty confident within themselves that Trump's not going to be the nominee.
I think they're telling themselves that nobody's going to get to 1237.
Now, I know you've probably heard people say, well, it doesn't matter, Rush.
It's going to be Trump or Cruz.
I mean, they're two top vote getters.
It's got to be Trump or Cruz, even if neither of them gets 1237.
No, no, no, no.
It doesn't have to be Trump or Cruz.
Just listen to these contested convention guys talk.
They don't include Cruz in any of their plans, and Cruz is the number two guy.
If Trump doesn't get to 1237, it's tough for Cruz to, although his supporters think that there is a path for him to do it.
It would require Kasich maybe exiting.
But the point is, when you listen to contested convention crowd in the Republican Party talk about what would happen, they don't include Cruz in their list of that because they don't.
That's why I am pretty confident in believing that their intention is to choose somebody that has either already lost and exited the primaries or somebody who never got in them, a la Paul Ryan.
But if the news is that you're a Republican establishment guy and you really hate Trump, you're just worried as how Trump's going to destroy the party.
Trump's this, Trump's that, can't have Trump.
Trump's horrible.
And it looks like Trump's not going to get there.
Then you go, wow, KK, that means crucible.
No.
No, they don't want Cruz either.
And they don't include Cruz's name in any of these lists of potential nominees if they go the contested route.
A group of female, mostly conservative members of the media, have signed on to a letter calling on Donald Trump to fire campaign manager Corey Lewandowski.
You ever notice the drive-by media only call conservative pundits members of the media when they're attacking Republicans or conservatives?
Just a little side observation there.
And then it lists the names of a bunch of conservative members of the media.
Megan McCain, Katie Pavlich, Dana Lesch, S.E. Cup, Mary Catherine Ham, among the 16 who signed the letter.
The letter says the press is to have an adversarial yet civil approach to those in or running for elected office.
Never in this line of work is it acceptable to respond to a reasonable and legitimate question with the use of physical force.
And so they are calling for Trump to fire Lewandowski.
Donald Trump should immediately remove Lewandowski from his campaign.
The Trump campaign stated Lewandowski will not be fired even if convicted.
However, unlike the Trump campaign, we believe in making a statement on the record to clearly highlight the difference between right and wrong.
And so conservative female members of the media are demanding that a candidate fire a campaign manager.
And on that, we'll take a brief time out.
We'll come back and resume with your mostly friendly phone calls right after this.
By the way, as we speak, Donald Trump meeting with members of the Republican National Committee, their headquarters in Washington, the agenda not yet known.
Trump was scheduled to be in Washington to meet with his foreign policy team, but his appearance over the RNC came as a surprise today.
Well, I wonder why.
And I need to correct something on Kasich.
I said that he came to Washington with the Republican freshman class in 1994.
Turns out that's not right.
Kasich was elected to Congress in 1983.
January 3rd.
So he's sworn in January 3rd, 1983.
I did not know that.
All this time, I thought Kasich, well, that's because that's when I met him.
That's when he.
No, I don't mean anything else by it.
I just correcting the record.
I actually thought he was a member of the GOP freshman class in 1994.
Here's Nancy in Petuski, Michigan.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
Hey.
Thanks for taking my call.
You bet.
Great to have you here.
Longtime listener.
Thank you for what you do.
My comment is this.
Donald Trump had that interview with Chris Matthews last night.
He was kind of pounded on it, and he ended up saying something to the effect that he believes women should be accountable for having an abortion and should be, you know, not jailed for it, but held accountable.
And there was a big backlash, not only from Ted Cruz and John Kasich, but from everyone.
My feeling is this.
If abortion is considered to be illegal, assuming that's the situation, if a woman has an abortion, chooses to have an abortion, why shouldn't she be held accountable?
Why shouldn't she?
See, you're being literal here, and that's not what's being called for.
You're right.
Matthews created a hypothetical, and the premise was when he asked Trump, would you punish if abortion's illegal?
What he meant, if you Republicans, if you dastardly, if you wicked Republicans, if you ever succeed in making abortion illegal, okay, abortion is illegal, and a woman has an abortion.
What do you want?
You want to punish a woman?
That was the premise of the question.
So your literal interpretation is exactly right.
Right.
And so your point is, hey, if...
My point is, why would he walk it back?
He was given that premise.
I think he did the right thing.
It really made me think about it.
I never thought about it.
You assume the woman is always the innocent victim?
The woman is always.
The woman is always.
An abortion.
The baby's the victim, though.
No.
No, the baby's not viable tissue mask.
The woman is a victim.
Pregnancy is an illness, whatever it has to be.
I'm not trying to be funny, and I'm not exaggerating.
This is the politics of it.
You're right.
I mean, if you want to get straight down common sense brass tacks, yeah.
If we ever come to the point where abortion is illegal, and Trump walked it back because the woman in when abortion, the woman politically cannot be responsible.
The woman cannot be punished.
That is the equivalent of male-dominated chauvinism, sexism, whatever.
The woman never.
So Trump walked it back and then tried to say the abortion doctor would then be held accountable for this.
But when as a society, are we going to step up and say it's the innocent baby who's being victimized the most if you have to determine what sort of degree?
There are some organizations that attempt it.
Catholic Church attempts that.
But in a purely biological sense, you're absolutely right.
But politically, that's a non-starter.
When abortion is being discussed in a political context, which it always is now, nobody's ever going to score points by applying the logic that you have applied here.
But do you think he did the right thing in walking it back?
No.
I think he did the predictable thing.
I don't think Trump spends two seconds thinking about any of this.
This is not, but he has to because he's in politics now.
He's seeking the presidency.
These are things that the Democrat Party is always going to try to use to define their enemy, their opponents, and to categorize them as demons and villains.
So he's got to be prepared for it.
In the real world, I don't think he probably is pro-life, but it's look at this is not something that occupies a lot of his attention during the day.
He's focused on different things.
He's an outsider.
I mean, I would think people who support him for being an outsider would fall back on that.
You know, this argument you're making, you know, where it really comes to a heads in a case of rape or incest.
Even in that circumstance, it isn't the baby's fault, right?
But you don't dare say that.
Not politically.
You can't survive saying that in the political context of the subject today.
Anyway, I appreciate that, Nancy, very much.
We'll be back.
Don't go away.
You're a guiding light through times of trouble, confusion, murkiness, tumult, chaos.
Rush Limbaugh behind the golden EIB microphone.
Another thing about Kasich, if there's been a governor that has helped expand Obamacare, it's Kasich by just going all in hog wild on Medicare expansion in Ohio.
And he did it happily.
He embraced it.
And it's just Kasich believes in an active, engaged executive, a governor, a president, and large government involving itself for the good of society, using the goodness of the executive, the morality, the whatever of the executive to shape the.
I mean, he's a government activist.
He's not somebody who believes in limited government, getting things out of the way.
Loves process.
Like Dukakis did.
Dukakis loved the process of having meetings with bureaucrats to discuss policy to make people's lives better.
And it just, it's the antithesis of the conservative, essential conservative belief of limited government.
Here's Dennis in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
We stick with the phones.
Great to have you, Dennis.
Welcome.
Oh, Rush, I got to tell you.
I've listened to you for so many years, I lost count.
And this is the first time that I couldn't believe it.
I dialed the number and it rang.
I said, oh, my gosh, I'm going to get through and talk to the legend.
Well, I can't believe it.
But the last caller you had, Nancy, she pretty much said something that I was going to say, but a little differently.
You know, when Trump answered that question, you know how fast Chris Matthew answers.
He'll hit you with one question and then another question, and he just pounds you, you know.
And I, I thought that Trump did great.
You know why?
Because he realized it was a hypothetical question.
What if abortions were illegal?
And right away, he didn't hesitate.
He said, well, yeah, then she should be punished.
In other words, he didn't say what the punishment should be, but the point was, he didn't have to.
I know.
I know.
He was being consistent on the law and order thing that he has established with his position on immigration.
I know, flashing through his head was, I got to be consistent, got to be consistent.
So he breaks the law, I got to say we're going to punish him.
Otherwise, what I'm saying about immigration, they're going to blow up.
So I know how this happens.
I know exactly what the instantaneous brain firing going on in Trump's skull was.
I know exactly what happened in there.
What he didn't realize was he was being set up.
Hell yeah, because it didn't, after a while, the question was forgotten.
You know, it's like, well, yeah.
I talked to a few people who are Trump supporters, and they all felt the same way.
I said, well, it was a hypothetical set if it was illegal.
Well, what part of illegal don't they understand?
But the point is, I think.
No, no, it didn't.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait.
See, this is the point.
It got way beyond illegal.
It got all of a sudden now.
We're talking about murder and death and killing and all the things nobody wants to talk about when they talk about abortion.
It's just, and that's where Matthews took it.
Yeah.
Well, I'm a great.
The woman's going to be murder, right?
She's going to murder you.
You got to punish, right?
You got to do something.
You got to punish.
You got to punish right.
What do you?
Well, I know I haven't decided.
How come you haven't decided?
You can't illegal.
You're against murder, right?
You haven't decided.
Well, I'm going to tell you, you and I are wearing a safe pace for almost everything.
And I, well, matter of fact, I can't remember all these, but I just wanted to throw that out to people thinking about it.
Say, listen, he answered a question really quick, considering what the question was.
And I think that people underestimate Donald Trump.
They really do.
And I think that I believe he's going to get the nomination, but whether he does or not, I've been impressed with how he does things because he's his own man.
And that's what I wanted to say to you.
You are too.
And I just can't believe I got through today.
Well, you did, sir, and I'm so glad that you did.
I thank you profoundly, very much.
Grab sound bite number eight.
This is CBS this morning.
John Heilman has his own show with Mark Halperin on Bloomberg, is being interviewed here by Charlie Rose.
And Charlie Rose says to Hyland, okay, Trump is already behind by about 10 points in Wisconsin to Ted Cruz.
And then this abortion thing happened, this controversy last night, John, with Trump and Matthews.
What impact do you think that's going to have on Trump?
It comes at the end of a bad week for Trump, about as bad a week as he's had in a long time.
If you think about this controversy coming on the heels of the Corey Lewandowski arrest for battery, coming on the heels of the fight that Trump and Ted Cruz were in, where many people thought Trump went over the line in terms of criticizing Ted Cruz's wife in a kind of unpleasant way.
It's the most sustained, kind of bad set of news cycles that Trump has had in a while.
You pointed out that Marquette Paul has Trump down 10 to Ted Cruz.
That was all before Scott Walker endorsed Ted Cruz.
So it looks right now like Donald Trump could be headed for not just a defeat, but a pretty definitive or clear defeat at the hands of Ted Cruz in a week.
And it's, I think, significant.
You know, Wisconsin, within the context of getting to 1,237, it's already iffy.
I mean, you need what's Trump needs 53, 55% of the delegates remaining.
And Wisconsin, he was leading up there by you.
I've talked to Trump.
I said, hey, why is he going to win Wisconsin?
Cruz was always going to win.
No, he wasn't.
A couple of weeks ago, Trump was up by double digits in Wisconsin.
Well, it wasn't going to hold up.
It's always going to be Trump's state.
Cruz's state.
No, it wasn't always going to be Cruz's date.
And now it is.
I don't know how much weight the Walker endorsement has.
It can't hurt, obviously.
Anyway, after Heileman said, you don't want this bad week for Trump.
Maybe the worst week that Trump's ever had.
He said it happily, said it with a lot of glee.
Gail King, the Oprah's BFF, then chimed in with this.
Well, what do you think makes it different this time, John?
Because every time he says something controversial, his numbers seem to go up.
So why won't that happen this time, John?
Why not?
Why not?
It's an interesting, unusual situation here in Wisconsin where all the focus is on this state, and this state has the confluence of talk radio.
Conservative talk radio here is anti-Trump.
That's unusual.
The Republican establishment is firmly anti-Trump.
And you've got this huge core of suburban Republican women who seem to not be reacting well to some of the particular nature of these controversies that Trump has gotten into in the last week.
And that confluence of things is putting him in a pretty vulnerable situation, to say the least.
I think there's a lot of people.
Look, this is a surprise.
Trump was going to win Wisconsin.
At this point in the campaign, this was the, I don't know, the dotting of the I, the crossing of the T. This was the final march where nobody left had a prayer.
Cruz needs 80%.
Kasich is just there to whatever.
So this was, and there might have been some overconfidence.
I don't know.
There might have been some assumption that they were infallible at the Trump campaign.
But this, Heilman's right, this has not been a good week.
And at some point, these things that don't affect Trump, at some point, they're going to.
Law of averages, Moore's Law.
I mean, at some point, it is going to matter.
And there's another thing that you have to, if you want to look at this honestly, there is not, you know, Cruz, somebody go at it this way: Cruz always said that if it was just a two-man race, you get all these other guys out of there, just leave it Cruz versus Trump,
that Cruz would win everyone, maybe not New York, but when everyone, simply on the basis of numbers, because the anti-Trump vote in every primary has been larger than the pro-Trump vote.
Now, it's been divvied up.
Cruz got some, Rubio got some, Jeb got some, Dr. Carson got some.
So the Cruz theory has been the majority, when those guys get out, the majority of people voting for them will vote for me.
And in every one of these primaries, I will dwarf Trump.
And some political professionals, that's not what's going to happen.
What's going to happen is that the party, Republican primary voters, are going to realize that Trump's a nominee, and they're going to coalesce behind him in a show of unity.
And everybody's going to get with the winner, and the wind is going to be at their backs, and they're just going to sail right into the nomination.
That's not happening.
At least not in Wisconsin.
Snerdley, tell me, how many people do you really think ever thought Cruz would be up double digits in Wisconsin at any point?
Yesterday, last week, a month ago, because there was it started.
That's right.
That's when the Trump began to lose the double-digit lead in Wisconsin last, predating all of this stuff that's happened this week.
Nobody thought Cruz had a chance in Wisconsin.
Wisconsin, especially, given the liberal makeup, even though there's a Republican governor there and Paul Ryan is there, but it's establishment.
Establishment is not pro-Cruz.
I mean, they be lining up behind him now, but that's not because they want him to get nomination.
That's hopefully so we can stop Trump.
Pure and simple.
Brief timeout.
We've got more, folks.
Always have more.
We'll be back with it after this.
Hey, we got a new poll for Wisconsin.
It's from Public Policy Polling.
It's a left-wing group.
They are out of North Carolina.
And their poll has Trump and Cruz in a statistical dead heat.
The Marquette University Law School poll, which that's a new one to me, is the one that has Cruz up 10.
But public policy polling has them at a dead heat.
numbers.
Well, depending.
PPP has a good track record, depending.
Let me read through a paragraph here.
What are the numbers?
Cruz 38.
Trump 37.
John Kasich at 17.
Margin of error, of course, 3837.
Now, in a head-to-head matchup with Trump, if Kasich's out of there, which isn't going to happen, this is just a note of interest here.
If it's just Cruz and Trump, Cruz would lead 49 to 41.
The poll found that 51% of Kasich voters would support Cruz if he left the race.
19% of Kasich voters would move to Trump.
So that last part's irrelevant because Kasich isn't going anywhere.
Kasich still thinks he's going to be the nominee or somebody's vice president or postmaster general, something.
So you have to go with the first result, which is, again, Cruz 38, Trump 37.
And what is the other poll?
There was a poll of 3635.
That's California.
It's Cruz 3635 or Trump 3635.
Margin of Error again.
And I think that's the field poll in the LA Times.
Here's Mary Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.
Great to have you on the program.
Hello.
Hi, Rush.
I am livid over these comments of Trump.
Not from Trump, but the news media who has turned all Republicans, all pro-white, into these crazy zealots.
When over 40 years now, we have had Roe versus Wade.
We have spent millions of dollars in birth control and sex education.
We have birth control ads all over.
Why is abortion still an issue today?
Because I don't think it has anything to do about women's choice, but value of human life.
Oh, well, you know what?
You have really swerved into something here because you're exactly right.
We've got abortion legal since 1973.
We've got contraception available on a street corner for crying out loud.
And yet, look at what happened in this interview last night.
In this interview last night, who ends up being tagged as the bad guy and the murderer?
Trump.
Because he's asked a hypothetical, if abortion is made illegal, should you punish the woman that has an abortion?
Trump goes, yeah, broke the law.
Yeah, yeah.
And in the liberal world, it's perfectly fine.
Look, there's no other way to say this.
In the liberal world, it's perfectly fine to abort, kill a baby in the womb.
But you don't call it that.
You don't get anywhere near calling that.
No, what happens instead, you take the opponents of that who consider that to be a crime and you impugn them.
And you call them people that want to violate human rights and violate freedom and violate civil rights.
It's the most backwards concoction.
It's a great, great point, Mary, and I have to go back after this, folks.
Yeah, I got to revise that stat on Kasich and contested conventions.
I didn't remember that correctly, and I don't have time to fix it.
It's not exactly what I said.
I'll fix it tomorrow.
It's not that far off.
And the thrust of the point's still there.
Just the numbers and the statistic don't hold up.
But we'll see you tomorrow, folks.
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