“This doesn’t surprise me in the least,” says Brian Rosenwald, author of Talk Radio’s America: How an Industry Took Over a Political Party That Took Over the United States. “This is the subtext to the whole conservative media thing. What creates a market for this is that there’s a lot of people in America who feel not just ignored by the media, but they’re condescended to—they’re treated like rubes.

“One reason they’re so attracted to Donald Trump is that he fights for them,” Rosenwald continued. “He has given them a warrior who isn’t going to let them get pushed around… And so it makes sense to me that this would be the framing Rush would use.”

Rosenwald says there is a “complicated dialectic between host and listener,” but my hunch—in this case, at least—is that Rush is carrying Trump’s water more than he is reflecting what he thinks his listeners want to hear.