Whoa.

This morning talk show host Hugh Hewitt called for the GOP convention to change the rules to allow for an alternative candidate to be selected. (Full disclosure, Hewitt is affiliated with Salem Media Group which owns RedState.)

Via Mediaite:

Conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt argued Wednesday morning that the Republican Party should make an unprecedented effort to change the Republican National Convention rules to allow them to dump Donald Trump as their nominee.

“It’s like ignoring stage-four cancer. You can’t do it, you gotta go attack it,” Hewitt said. “And right now the Republican Party is facing — the plane is headed towards the mountain after the last 72 hours.”

Hewitt said he disagreed with Republican senators like Lindsey Graham and Mark Kirk who said they could not vote for their party’s nominee. “I wanna support the nominee of the party, but I think the party ought to change the nominee. Because we’re going to get killed with this nominee.”
…
“They ought to get together and let the convention decide,” he concluded. “And if Donald Trump pulls over a makeover in the next 4 to 5 weeks, great, they can keep him. It would be better if he had done so 5 weeks ago.”

For the record, Hewitt has never been a real Trump fan and there have been insults directed at him by Trump:

“A year ago you told me on my radio show — the audio and transcript are out there on YouTube — that you would release your tax returns,” offered Hewitt.

At the debate to counter Hewitt’s move, Trump preemptively blurted out, “First of all, very few people listen to your radio show. That’s the good news. Let me just tell you — which happens to be true. Check out the ratings.”

This is not the first time that a Trump-Hewitt interaction has turned sour; in September, the GOP candidate lashed out against Hewitt after a “gotcha” question on The Hugh Hewitt Show (the same one that “very few people listen to”) regarding the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. The exchange called into question Trump’s readiness on foreign policy, and left the candidate scrambling on the campaign trail for several weeks afterwards.

Even so, this is pretty incredible. For all of Hewitt’s strengths, his weakness has always been, in my view that he’s the consummate company man. The party insider. The guy the “important” people go to get their message out. Throughout the Bush administration, Hewitt manfully bought whatever the Bush Administration was selling, no matter how it transparently bad it was, like the Harriet Miers nomination. To see Hewitt actually advocate removing Trump as a candidate is truly amazing.