Rush Limbaugh Responds to Trump's Accusation That Ted Cruz's Superior Delegate Operation is "Unfair:" "He's Not Cheating, He's Winning"

Yes, I agree, but then Limbaugh keeps talking about "the establishment" knowing how to play this game, and "the establishment" being determined that no one is going to take their stuff.

Note to Rush: Ted Cruz is not "the establishment" on any planet, especially the one we're actually on.

Quotes and audio here.

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....

It could be [Trump] had nobody on his staff that really knows how this works....

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.

Establishment politics? Note: JJ Sefton heard this segment and says Limbaugh was more clear in saying Cruz was not "the establishment" than is evident in this excerpt.

Well, as AllahPundit notes, there's some truth in this: The game was set up to favor Establishment picks in Colorado. The problem is, no establishment candidate actually survived to this point, except for the deeply weird and unthinkable John Kasich.

So yes, the rules were set up -- long ago -- to favor an Establishment choice. But none showed up for the big dance, so Ted Cruz waltzed out with the prize.

This exposes Trump in major ways, beyond the fact that he's lost Colorado.

"[T]wo key Trump claims have fallen apart thanks to his inability to fight for delegates properly," writes Ben Shapiro: "[H]e's not a great dealmaker, and he doesn't hire all the very best people."

...

If anything, in fact, the delegate-wrangling process should be a godsend for Trump. It moves the race out of the ballot box, where he's vulnerable to a surge of #NeverTrump votes as the primaries near their conclusion, to the backroom, where he can work his fatcat dealmaking magic. In practice, Cruz is beating the pants off of him, something that should never happen per the mystique that surrounds Trump of being a master negotiator. Noah Rothman claimed this morning that the fact that two of Trump's kids failed to register in New York as Republicans in time to vote in this year's primary is a microcosm of Trump's disorganization generally, which is fair enough. But I'd add to that that him getting consistently beaten by Cruz at the delegate level is a microcosm of how Trump's image as wheeler-dealer extraordinaire is oversold. An ingenious salesman should not be at this sort of chronic disadvantage against a guy who’s not very personally likable, whose methods are loathed by the establishmentarians who "rigged" the system, and who’s operating at a financial handicap compared to Trump. But he is. How come?

Trump's sales pitch has been -- implicitly -- "Sure, I've done a lot of shady deals and exploited the US bankruptcy laws for my advantage, but now I'm offering to bring my high level of caginess, toughness, and smarts and use them on behalf of you, the Republican Primary Voter."

Okay, sounds good.

What happens when Trump turns out to not be particularly cagey, tough, and smart?

The rules of the game were laid out from the start: A real #Winner should be exploiting the rules for his own advantage, not reduced to whining, essentially, "The other guys is better at this game than me and it's not fair."

I hear that a lot from a lot of people, and "#Winners" is not a word I'd associate with them.

Trump, meanwhile, continues at what he's best at, hurling unsubstantiated personal attacks at adversaries. See downpage, for example, Trump insisting, with no citation or evidence whatsoever, that Ted Cruz is basically bribing delegates.

posted by Ace at 05:47 PM

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