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Clay and Buck

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Trump: I’ll Decide on 2024 After 2022

29 Jun 2021

CLAY: The number-one question we are getting as people are listening to you talk, is, “When will Trump let us know whether he’s going to run again? Is there a date in your mind where you need to make that decision?”

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, the most logical date would be right after 2022. Right? You try and win the Senate, which is hard because McConnell should have never lost the two seats, and they should have never lost the two seats in Georgia. But you want to win the Senate. You want to win the House — very, very great chance in the House.

You know, I made 56 phone calls — they’re called teleconference calls — that had thousands of people. They were supposed to lose 25 seats in the House, and they lost none. They gained 16. That’s some difference. All because of those calls, and, you know, you’d have 15, 20,000 people on some of those calls, and that would be in a district where somebody’s running for Congress.

Every single call I made they won. Every single call. It was sort of an interesting phenomena, which not easy to do, either. They take 11 minutes, and, you know, when you’re screaming into a piece-of-plastic telephone, it’s not the easiest thing to do. But that was very effective. And the same with senators. I mean, I helped a lot of senators.

I believe you’d be at 60-40 Democrats’ favor had I not campaigned for certain senators. I don’t have to tell you the states. You know the states. But there were senators that were in big trouble had I not campaigned for them. In some cases I did rallies, in some cases I did robocalls, and very importantly I did the town hall calls, where a lot of people get on from the state. But I think you’d be at 60-40. Nobody marks that down, nobody says that, but you’d be at 60-40 or maybe a couple short of that.

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Trump: Herschel’s Running in Georgia

29 Jun 2021

CLAY: Talking about senators, I know a friend of yours, Mr. President, Herschel Walker

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Right.

CLAY: — has been hinting that he might run for the Senate in Georgia.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Right.

CLAY: Should he run? Do you think he will?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, he told me he’s going to, and I think he will. I had dinner with him a week ago. He’s a great guy. He’s a patriot, and he’s a very loyal person. He’s a very strong person. They love him in Georgia. I’ll tell you, he was the greatest running back in the history of the state, but he was, you know, one of the best in the history of the country.

I mean, in college there was nobody like him. He went to the NFL, by the way. He has great records in the NFL. He is a fantastic guy, and they love him. So, I think he’d win. I think it would be very, very hard to beat Herschel. I mean, they have the ballads. (chuckles) They made ballads to Herschel. They sing ’em all the time. They still sing ’em. So, I think beating him would be very tough, and I think he’s going to run.

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Trump: China Should Pay Us $10 Trillion in Reparations

29 Jun 2021

CLAY: Mr. President, you got criticized for many things, but one of the things you got most vociferously criticized for was saying that you thought covid had come from a Chinese lab.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah.

CLAY: Now, all of a sudden, everybody is circling back and saying, “Oh, maybe this did happen,” but all of these different tech platforms disallowed the conversation and debate to actually take place.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Right.

CLAY: Are you still as confident now as you were last year when you made those allegations that covid came from a Chinese lab? And what should the consequences be for China for the lies that they spread about where covid came from and allowing this to spread around the world as opposed to being transparent with everybody from the get-go?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Probably more confident. And, you know, I felt very confident last time, but I would say even more now in retrospect. Because a lot of the phony things that they were saying about, you know, it came from here, it came from a thousand miles away, from a bat colony a thousand miles away. Much of that has really been disproven. And I would say more confident. And it was amazing ’cause that was another one.

You know, I talk about when I said, “They’re spying on my campaign,” the place went nuts. When I said that it came from the lab in Wuhan, people went crazy. Now, it could be… It’s probably that I said it. In other words, if somebody else… I said hydroxychloroquine and people went crazy. If I would have said, “Do not under any circumstances take hydroxychloroquine,” probably they would have said, “Oh, that’s terrible. Let’s take it,” right?

CLAY: (laughing)

PRESIDENT TRUMP: You know, it’s one of those things. So they like to go had to explain, ’cause they think it’s good politically. I actually don’t. But now almost all of those things, maybe all of them I’ve been proven correct on. I think they have now a list of 18 different items. It was 10 two or three weeks ago, but they found other ones.

You know, they just go against — and no matter what you do, they want to go against. These people, I don’t believe they love our country. I’ll be honest with you. But with the lab and Wuhan — and, frankly, even if you didn’t or weren’t sure, why would they be so vociferous? You remember, they went crazy when I said that, and they tried to…

Now, they’re all saying that I was right. But they’ve said that about a lot of things. Almost all of the things that I said, I was right. When I said that terrorists caused such-and-such an attack — and I said it early, like about two seconds after the attack, right? They’d said, “This is terrible.” Well, I’m 18-0 on those attacks, you know.

It’s like, they would take a little bit longer. In many cases, they wouldn’t want to say it. And in many cases, they didn’t say it. But they do have a tendency. And I guess they think it’s good politics. You know, I don’t see why it’s good politics. As far as China is concerned, they should pay us reparations. They should pay us for the damage that they’ve caused. And, frankly, the damage they’ve caused to the world.

Now, they don’t have enough money to do that. They don’t have nearly enough money to pay for the damages. But they should pay us $10 trillion. They should pay the world a lot. But, you know, we took a tremendous hit. And because of what we did and because I came up with the vaccine in nine months instead of…

I did it in less than nine months. It was supposed to be… Buck, you knew this. It was supposed to be five years, three years, but it will never happen. By that time every would have been dead. This would have been… If I didn’t do that, this would have been another Spanish flu of 1917 where perhaps a hundred million people died.

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Trump: Border Crisis Is the Worst in History

29 Jun 2021

BUCK: I just want to know, we had Kamala just barely beat you to the border. Now, she’s the border czar. You’re not the border czar right now. We want to know how you think the border situation is unfolding. Is it the worst it’s ever been? Is that fair to say?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: In history, absolutely. You know, they were saying it’s the worst in 20 years. I say (laughing), “What are you talking about, 20 years? It’s by far the worst in history.” And seven months ago, it was the best in history. It was the best we’ve ever had. That included drugs. That included human trafficking where we had it very strongly stopped.

You know, you’re never gonna make it perfect. It’s a big, long border. But we had it stopped. The wall. We built, you know, almost 500 miles of it and this guy stopped the final little portion of it, and, “You can’t do that!” And now they want to build it, I understand.

They want to build it and they’re having a hard time with the contractors ’cause the contractors say, “Well, you told us to stop. So give us five times more money than we would have gotten had we just completed it.” So, it was — and, you know, the reason that frankly it took 2-1/2 years is because I had to win all these court cases.

We won, I think, 11 court cases to build it, many of them brought on by Congress. So, you know, we had the best border we’d ever had, as you know. I mean, you just look at those numbers. We had the best border we ever had, and we now have by far, by far the worst border. And giving up “stay in Mexico” is catastrophic. Catch-and-release!

Giving that up… You know, you catch the people… They can be murderers, they could be anything. You catch ’em, you take their name and you release ’em into our country never to be seen again. They’re supposed to come back. But they never do come back. They’re supposed to come back for a trial. But they never come back.

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Trump: Hunter Biden Used the N-Word

29 Jun 2021

CLAY: Mr. President, you got treated differently, there’s no doubt, than Joe Biden has been treated by the media.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah.

CLAY: But so did your family. Hunter Biden. I’m sure you’ve seen some of the stories coming out about Hunter Biden using racial slurs, all sorts of stuff continuing to come out about the laptop. How do you think your sons would have been treated if they had done what Hunter Biden appears to have done?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, in business what he did is just terrible. I mean, just terrible, and I was never pushing… Some phony stories came out I was never pushing ’cause I think it’s sad. Terrible. But now things about the N-word and using it on a regular basis and other things? If that were my children, first of all, they wouldn’t do it.

Second of all, I wouldn’t allow ’em to do it. But it would be bedlam in this country. Bedlam. It’s incredible. The press doesn’t even report it. They don’t want to report it, and other things. But that word in particular, where it was used frequently and, you know, and they don’t want to report it.

We don’t have a free press anymore. We don’t have free press. We have a press that’s unbelievably corrupt, and if you look at their approval rating… You know, when I ran, the approval rating of the press was very, very high. And now it’s at the lowest it’s ever been.

But it’s lower than institutions that are horrendous, that are thought of very badly. So, you know, it’s unfortunate. Well, when you say CNN is down 75 or 79%, when you see some of the shows that they have on CNN… I mean, nobody’s ever heard of numbers like that. Because that’s because they’ve lost credibility.

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Trump Rips RINOs on Infrastructure Deal

29 Jun 2021

BUCK: Infrastructure, sir, something you know a heck of a lot about.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah.

BUCK: Where are we here with the Republicans negotiating over this? Are they getting fooled, are they getting swindled by giving this a bipartisan cover in this recent Senate announcement that they had a deal?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah.

BUCK: Looks like Biden was for it, then against it, then for it, then who knows. What do you make of all this with infrastructure?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, it’s the same people, and some are RINOs to the Nth degree, and they keep walking over there, and they get taken to the cleaners, and then they get used and they say that we have a deal, and then we don’t have a deal. Because when they go back to the cabal, they say, “You gotta be crazy to have made that deal.” So, Biden changed the deal a couple of times.

And, you know, the Republicans are being used, the Republican senators. Now, some of the senators wouldn’t do that. I know plenty of them are great. But they seem to be… They’re used. They’re being used by the Democrats. They want to make it sound bipartisan. But there’s nothing bipartisan when you spent most of your infrastructure money on the Green New Deal stuff, and that stuff is like throwing the money out of the window. And it’s gonna cause big problems in the future.

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Trump: I Believe Tucker Carlson Is Being Spied On

29 Jun 2021

BUCK: What was your thought when you heard Tucker Carlson say that he thinks he’s being spied on?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: I think it’s true. It’s totally unbelievable. If you look at the whole thing with what’s gone on and what’s going on right now, no, I think it’s true. They’re trying to suppress the vote. They’re trying to suppress going into elections to find voter fraud. They want those people suppressed. They don’t want anything to do with that because the election was totally fraudulent.

So, the people that are investigating the election — and there are a lot of them all over the country now. The people that are — and finding things that you see come out now, you see it’s coming out now. But wait ’til you see when the results come out, they don’t want anything to do… In fact, when they talk about silencing, “Let’s silence everybody,” the thing they want to silence?

They don’t want people looking into the election because they’ve been caught. Election was fake. And those states, those so-called states that we lost, we won. And we won ’em big. We won ’em big. And that stuff is starting to come out now, and that’s the thing they don’t want. That’s what they really want silenced.

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Trump: Biden Can’t Pass a Cognitive Test

29 Jun 2021

CLAY: You got criticized to the Nth degree for every press conference you did. Media talked about the 25th Amendment. You got Joe Biden now traveling around trying to negotiate deals, and I’m sure you’ve watched some of his press conferences. Do you feel like he’s going to be able to finish his term? Do you think Kamala Harris might end up president before we even get to 2024?

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah, I have to be fair. I don’t think I got criticized. I think they thought certain things, but they didn’t think he was a dummy, meaning your friend Trump. They never said that, and the 25th… You know, I did something that I noticed a lot of people are recommending. I took a test, a cognitive test — which they say is pretty tough — and I aced the test. And they put it out, and I never heard…

It was actually a great thing, I did it. And it was risky ’cause if you do badly it gets reported, okay? You know, there are numerous doctors watching, and it’s at a certain hospital that’s very public. So, if you do badly… But I did it, and I did it very well — I did, I think, perfectly — and a lot of people are suggesting that he do that. He would not pass it. He would not do well on it.

But a lot of people are suggesting that he do that. And look. I watch and you watch and we see the same things and you don’t want to talk about it. But the rest of the world, if they don’t respect your president, you have a problem. And they had a lot respect for our country six months ago and before.

They had a lot of respect. You wouldn’t have seen missiles flying all over the place into Israel. You wouldn’t have seen even China talking the way they spoke to our people, our representatives in Alaska. They never spoke to us that way.

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Clay and Buck Recap Their Trump-A-Thon

29 Jun 2021

BUCK: Welcome back, everybody, to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. I’m Buck. My man Clay right here with me. And wow. We just had Trump Power Hour, a Trump-a-thon for the middle of the show, and we were honored and privileged to have it. What a great conversation covering so many topics, from Biden’s cognition to the policies of Kamala, to the border, to: Should Herschel Walker run for Senate? By the way, I think kind of a “get” there. He’s saying he’s running.

CLAY: He said he’s running.

BUCK: Yeah, he said he’s gonna do it.

CLAY: Which would be a big deal. He mentioned the situation in Georgia, which obviously got us to 50-50. And Warnock, for people out there who have not done the math or paid a lot of attention to it, was running to fill not a full term yet. So he will have to rerun in 2022. So, in theory, you could have Herschel Walker going up against the Reverend Raphael Warnock in Georgia to potentially decide who’s going to have control of the U.S. Senate.

BUCK: And that will be a big national level, attention-getting kind of Senate race for sure, if, in fact, that is the lineup. We want to know what you think, ’cause we just had former president Trump on for a full hour here on radio. Just thoughts about it. You know, I feel like for a lot of you — look, it felt this way for me — it’s a voice that it’s just good to hear these days because we don’t have him around the same way we did before.

I don’t just mean because he’s not in the Oval Office right now. He’s been shut down. He’s been treated like a cancel culture target, and social media’s kicked him off. I would tell you, “I miss the Trump tweets,” and I was a frequent retweetee of President Trump. So I used to love when Trump would get fired up on Twitter and do things.

And it was always a good experience to see what your timeline, so to speak, looked like after Trump had decided that a tweet would go to his 80 million followers, right? You’d see a lot related to the commentary. But here, we just want to make sure everyone knows.

We want you to react. 800-282-2882. 800-282-2882, plus you’ll have clips from that interview, if you want to listen on demand at ClayandBuck.com. If you’re not already, please follow us on social media: @ClayandBuck are the Twitter and Facebook handles, and then the Clay and Buck podcast, which I think we’re now Top 10 for politics, but come on.

CLAY: (chuckling) We should be number one.

BUCK: We should be at the number-one spot.

CLAY: I want you guys to drive us to number one. A couple things, Buck. I mean, first of all, that was, I think, a sign of how much Trump wants to talk to his audience, because, as you mentioned, the scary nature of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. All of them simultaneously, in collusive conjunction, banning Donald Trump simultaneously, to me was the ultimate crescendo of cancel culture.

Because if they can ban the democratically elected president of the United States from their platforms, then people like you and me, Buck, who have decent size audiences — but also everybody out there who’s listening to us — have no real ability to stand and go toe-to-toe with Big Tech right now. He said a lot of interesting things. This is the first time that I’ve heard him say definitively when he would be making a decision, right after 2022, on whether or not to run for reelection.

A lot can happen between now and then. He said, Buck, that he didn’t think… He talked about the cognitive test that he took when everybody was talking about the 25th Amendment. He said he didn’t think that Joe Biden could pass a cognitive test right now, which I thought was also significant. He seemed to take some joy in the CNN collapsed ratings, which is pretty funny.

BUCK: Well, they absolutely did rely on him.

CLAY: Oh, no doubt.

BUCK: If you go back to the 2016 election and you remember what happened there. CNN thought that they could have these incredible ratings by putting on the Trump rally, and I was a political analyst at CNN at the time, as a conservative. I mean, they would always put, you know, “conservative political analyst,” which is like putting a target on you and saying, “Throw tomatoes” if you’re at CNN.

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: But I was a conservative political analyst there, and so I knew people internally. They thought — and I mean, Jeff Zucker all the way on down — that by putting Trump on their air, they were getting both great ratings and it was like a laugh line. “Ha-ha! Look at this guy. Look at this Republican.” By the time they figured out that he actually was a political phenomenon, they had given him — I think there were actual analyses done — over a billion dollars of free media.

CLAY: Oh, there’s no doubt.

BUCK: It was a crazy number. So he got the last laugh on that one.

CLAY: And I do think that’s a really interesting question, because who is going to be — and you asked him this. Who right now that is in elective office is someone who can go toe-to-toe with Joe Biden and the Democrats, considering they have control of the Senate and control of the House?

And I think one of the real difficulties associated with this is you know that if Trump were not in office, he would be throwing punches all the time on social media. There isn’t really anybody. Like, who would you even point to right now as the guy or the girl that you say, “Oh, this is the person who’s kind of in the ring throwing punches on a day-to-day basis and having responses that they would give”?

BUCK: Oh, he was Maximus in the arena of social media.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You know? He was.

CLAY: Are you not entertained?

BUCK: Not only was he able to defeat all those who came at him on social media and in a way that was just often hilarious, but that, then, I think, Clay, really he was leading by showing people that by punching back, the left is… They’re bullies. They don’t like it when people call them out.

They don’t like it when they have those on our side, on the conservative side who will stand up to them and say that this is crazy or what you’re doing is wrong. They’re used to just getting away with it. So, because Trump was able to do it successfully, I think there were a lot of other people who really punched it up a lot on social and realized they could get into the fight too.

It was like he was first into the MAGA breach, so to speak. You know, he went through the crumbling outer walls of leftism. And you had so many others that were following him in, saying, “Wow. We have a brawler.” I mean, conservatives were not used to having a brawler on their side.

Somebody who no matter how things got in that bar fight, you knew that he was gonna be the guy you wanted to have close at your side. There’s nobody else who’s been able to fill in that space yet. That’s where we are. No one else yet. And that’s why I think the possibility… He’s leaving it open. We all know he would be formidable. It’s just a question of, “Does he want to do it?” You know, that’s where this is.

CLAY: And how would he feel at 78 years old? That’s how old Joe Biden is right now. Does he want to be sort of the godfather candidate who gives his support behind somebody maybe younger who is deciding to run, or does he think this is his race to go out and run?

And I think the other question is, I think everyone out there who’s listening to us right now would presume that Kamala Harris is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2024, maybe even running as the incumbent, depending on whether or not Joe Biden is able to finish his term.

BUCK: So I think that’s such an interesting analysis of it, because Trump running against Kamala has gotta feel like Trump’s gonna win that one, right? Because the whole pitch with Biden was, “Oh, it’s normalcy and unity,” right? That was really what was behind it. “He’s not Trump. Normal, unifying, old.”

CLAY: Unthreatening, old, white guy.

BUCK: Exactly. Now we see he’s really just a Trojan horse candidate for the left. He’s essentially like a pass-through. He’s a figurehead for the more AOC-like policies. He hasn’t gone totally AOC-Bernie, but he’s certainly pushed much more in that direction — or the people around him are pushing much more in that direction — than what was promised. But, I mean, a Trump-Kamala showdown would be pretty amazing.

CLAY: And that’s assuming… Again, my assumption is that there’s no way that the Democratic Party — which right now is founded basically on everything is racist and everything is sexist and, oh, by the way, everything is also homophobic. If they didn’t run Kamala Harris, by their own definition, it would be racist and sexist to not give a minority woman their nomination if she were to run.

Now, she ain’t a good candidate. So I really wonder, as we start to look towards what might happen in the future, will there be other candidates willing to step to Kamala Harris and try to win that Democratic nomination, or is everyone cowed into submission such that she basically gets a free ride to that nomination?

BUCK: And we’re gonna be right back into the cycle here. That’s what everyone has to know.

CLAY: Oh, quickly.

BUCK: You know, the summer is gonna fly by — we all know that — and then as soon as the fall hits, it’s midterm season, everybody. That’s when we start looking down the political side, and Trump is clearly going to be a really powerful voice on the campaign trail for the Republican Party and pushing for candidates.

And he was saying — and, by the way, I think he does deserve credit. One fascinating and very clear difference between Obamaism and Trumpism — and I know there are a lot of things we could talk about. But one difference in their political skill set, their political abilities was Obama’s popularity among Democrats never translated into wins for other Democrats.

CLAY: True.

BUCK: Obama did very well individually among the left, but he never was able to be a kingmaker. Donald Trump’s popularity does actually get transferred onto people that he believes in. When Donald Trump calls on behalf of or shows up on behalf of a candidate, it is a game-changer.

He’s absolutely right when he says that. So we know that will be a part of this. It’s really just a question of… Well, we all know the question: Is he gonna be the guy leading the charge, or is he gonna be, you know, Obi-Wan Kenobi teaching next generation of Jedi to go fight for the principles that he believes in?

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Obama Goes After Trump on 2020 Election

29 Jun 2021

CLAY: Yesterday, President Obama, former President Obama went after Donald Trump and his questioning of the 2020 election results. Here is what Obama said.

OBAMA: In this election, what we saw was my successor, the former president, violate that core tenet that (snickers) you would count the votes and then declare a winner and — and fabricate and make up a whole bunch of hooey so that, as bad as January 6th was, if we had a repeat in future elections in which, let’s say the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature decided, “We’re not gonna certify all those votes coming out of Philadelphia because we think that those urban votes are shady,” imagine what would have happened. We would have had a worse constitutional crisis than we did.

CLAY: We had a constitutional crisis for four years. It was called the Russia collusion hoax. This is what fires me up in a big way about these allegations about Trump and the election. Stacey Abrams, Buck, refused to concede in the state of Georgia despite losing by 50,000 votes and became a hero of the Democratic Party such that she’s now branding everything Jim Crow 2.0.

She’s never conceded. We never saw an acknowledgment from the Democratic Party which investigated for four years and argued that Trump was an illegitimate president and that he didn’t actually win — or that, if he did win, it was because of Vladimir Putin and Russia.

When all of the Russia collusion hoax exploded in the Mueller report and we found out there was no basis to it, none of the Democrat Party came back and said, “Oh, our bad. We definitely subordinated the legitimacy of democracy for four years.” Yet a few, what, thousand people stormed the Capitol on January 6th because they’re fired up, and that’s an insurrection that threatens the foundation of our democracy? I don’t buy it.

BUCK: It’s not new for Democrats to reject election results, either. You mentioned Russia collusion. That was just using the deep state apparatus of the federal government as a weapon — and, unfortunately, a pretty successful one. Even though we weren’t able to get Trump out of office, they certainly made things much more tense and difficult in his White House.

And they were able to go after some of the top people around him, in some cases on just — pardon the expression — trumped-up charges. It was unfair. It was wrong, and it certainly undermined the first Trump term. And I’ve gotta say, they did this with George W. Bush back in 2000 as well. They said that that was illegitimate.

You could go on the Bill Maher show, or you could go on MSNBC or wherever and call George W. Bush an illegitimate president, a stolen election. There was an HBO movie, for heaven’s sakes, Recount, where they made the whole thing look like Republicans stole the election. Democrats actually tried to steal Florida in 2000, were unsuccessful, and cried about it for eight years.

This is the old playbook for them. They get special counsels against Republicans. They say election results for Republicans, when they win, that those don’t count. And now they want to lecture us. And, of course, if you’re looking for a lecture, Obama’s always got one for you. That’s one thing he’s always ready to do.

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