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BUCK: Gonna dive into the Afghanistan testimony on Capitol Hill, and what I think is the most interesting moment which is actually not what I’m seeing… Everybody’s talk about Biden contradicted by the generals or the generals contradicting Biden. Yes, that’s true. Something else though that I want to get to I think is far more concerning in many ways.

And later on this hour also, in Virginia, Clay’s buddy and mine, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire, had quite a 60-second speech at a hearing of the school board. Loudoun County, as many of you know, in Virginia is kind of the front line in some ways of anti-CRT, anti-far left/woke the LGBTQ+ trans stuff going on for the kids, and parents are involved, and they’re fired up.

We’ll talk about that coming up in just a little bit. Oh, in the third hour we got Senator Marsha Blackburn and Governor Abbott of Texas. So big guests, great guests in the third hour of the show. We’ll get there. Afghanistan, though, first. Here’s the big take-away that everyone’s thrown out there, as I said.

“Oh, gosh! What was Biden told and what did he decide to do?” I thought that this was a more concerning moment in many ways, or perhaps more important for our understanding of the Democrat Party and Democrat leadership going forward. Here is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley talking about a phone call he had back in the day. On January 8th, okay, January 8th when Trump’s leaving office, Nancy Pelosi called Milley and by Milley’s account under oath here to Congress, here’s what he said.

MILLEY: On 8 January, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi called me to inquire about the president’s ability to launch nuclear weapons. I sought to assure her that nuclear launch is governed by a very specific and deliberate process. She was concerned, and made various personal references characterizing the president.

I explained to her that the president is the sole nuclear launch authority, but he doesn’t launch them alone, and that I am not qualified to determine the mental health of the president of the United States. There are processes, protocols, and procedures in place, and I repeatedly assured her there was no chance of an illegal, unauthorized, or accidental launch of nuclear weapons.

BUCK: Can I just say, Clay, this is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff saying that Nancy Pelosi wanted reassurance that Trump basically — in a fit of rage — wasn’t about to nuke China. I mean, this is the Speaker of the House now, folks! This is Nancy Pelosi wanting that assurance. I don’t think the person we had to worry about being crazy was Trump, my friends. I think we all know that.

CLAY: Well, and this is strange. And I don’t know. You may have some understanding of it, Buck. How often is a call like this happening —

BUCK: Never.

CLAY: — with an opposition member of different political party for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to even take that call? Seems very strange to me. The same way that we talked about Milley’s call — which has in many ways sort of gone under the radar, that call that he had with China, where it felt to me like he was engaging in a form of subterfuge about American interests. Taking phone calls from opposition party leadership when you are serving the president of the United States seems to me to be a super-strange activity to be undertaking as well.

BUCK: Well, she’s speaker. She’s member of Congress, Speaker of the House. The same way that they’ll use process to justify a lot of this stuff, they’ll say this isn’t that out of the ordinary. Clay, the part of this that — ’cause there’s been a lot of focus on Milley and what seemed to be his concern that Trump might do something and had to reassure China.

But really in the chain of transmission here what you see is that Nancy Pelosi was acting like a lunatic basically, that Donald Trump was going to order a nuclear first strike on some country because he’s in a bad mood because of the election? She really believed that? She needed reassurance? That’s “put her in a room with padded walls” time.

CLAY: Well, that’s why I would actually be curious to hear from Nancy Pelosi what she was basing that call on. Presumably somebody talked to Nancy Pelosi, and certainly it was in the Orange Man Bad vernacular, but who convinced Nancy Pelosi that the president was a clear and present danger to potentially be launching a nuclear attack on China?

And why did she take it seriously enough that she’s calling the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to expresses that concern? And again, a call like this seems so wildly out of sorts and out of normal policy to be occurring… Imagine just, Buck, imagine the reaction from Democrats if Kevin McCarthy — or Jim Jordan, who we had on rodeo — called the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and said:

“Hey, I’m concerned Joe Biden’s mental faculties are so bad that he is going to accidentally trigger World War III. Can you assure me you will keep that from happening?” Democrats would lose their mind. They would say that we were trying — that the Republican Party was trying — to subvert democracy. They would throw all of those attacks, and I think there would be some legitimacy to them because it would be a crazy thing to do.

BUCK: Exactly. I had a lot of criticisms of the Obama administration for eight years. I was in government at one point during the Obama administration and I left and was able to be public about it but I never thought that Obama was about to nuke a country because he was in a bad mood. You say these things out loud, but it sounds so stupid, how can we even be talking about this?

The point is that Nancy Pelosi, that there are prominent Democrats who — in the same way that they could delude themselves into thinking that Trump worked with the Kremlin in some nefarious plot to steal the 2016 election and Russia was really behind the whole thing — would believe that after Trump was leaving office, he was going to start a nuclear war.

And let’s remind ourselves, Trump is the only president in my lifetime who has not started a war, in fact. Biden’s only one year into it, but he’s the only one you could think of who you could him accuse of being a warmonger, and yet that was what the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Nancy Pelosi were talking about? Clay, it’s like these people live on another planet. But we can’t just mock them and ignore them, because they have a lot of power and they’re scary with how deluded they are.

CLAY: Imagine what things are gonna be look like, Buck, if as you and I both believe is likely Trump announces that he’s going to run for president in 2024, sometime after the midterms in 2022, although he’s hinted he may announce earlier than that. Democrats are going to lose their minds anew for two straight years. All of 2023, all of 2024 at the fear that he may get reelected in 2024.

I’m just saying, imagine. As crazy as they got in the first term, if their bogeyman rises up again and is looking like he’s going to be the Republican Party nominee — which, again, I think he’s gonna run. And based on the trajectory of the country right now, I think he has a very good chance of winning if he’s running against Biden or he’s running against Kamala.

I don’t know who the Democrats could put forward that would be a candidate who could beat Trump. It feels… This is what I was saying yesterday, Buck. It feels to me in some ways like as Biden descends and falls into increasing ineptitude every single day, that Trump may be a bit helped by just not being Biden, right? Because Biden’s entire campaign was “I’m not Donald Trump,” right? That’s basically it.

BUCK: You don’t want Trump to bail out a floundering Biden administration by giving them a narrative that they can use as, “Oh, my gosh. There’s the bogeyman again!” And to your point about Trump running again, I think that’s absolutely true and how the leftist mind will think of it. You have to remember, I was working at CNN for the 2016 election as a conservative political analyst, right, and they sidelined me as it got closer. “Oh, my God. Trump might actually win!”

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: But they really assumed all along that Trump was not —

CLAY: He was a carnival barker sideshow.

BUCK: He was a carnival sideshow that got them ratings but wasn’t a serious threat. So there was a shock when he came into office. This time around, the way that they will get the machinery of fear and despair going for liberals is gonna be like somebody’s walked into a cafe unvaccinated without a mask on in Williamsburg, New York, or something. I mean, they’re gonna completely lose their mind.

CLAY: But my point on it, Buck, is, are they going to be having more difficulty because he’s banned from social media? Think about how often the shrieking and the running for the hills came out of a Trump tweet or a Trump —

BUCK: Yeah, but don’t you think it was a net positive for him, Clay, to have 80 million, something like that, Twitter followers to take his message directly to his people? I feel like, yeah, like, the media would flip out about his tweets. But he had a direct line of communication. I think if you asked Trump, he would say he would want his account access back, if he could.

CLAY: Oh, I think he certainly would say it. But I’m wondering whether –because everybody has an opinion of Trump now. You know, it’s harder to attack him. It’s hard to build him up. He is a known quantity. And I feel like not having the daily drumbeat of tweets for the people who will decide this election — suburban women, suburban men — I feel like it may actually work in Trump’s favor.

And also there’s probably a lot of people out there who would say, “Hey, remember when mean tweets were the things we worried about, instead of inflation, of the border being open, of massive budget deficits over covid craziness, Afghanistan failure?” Mean tweets seem like a pretty minor thing on the flowchart of concern now that the Biden administration is here.

BUCK: Also, some of the tweets they said were mean were actually just hilarious. That’s a whole other thing. There’s a comedy that’s missing in our politics now because we don’t have Trump on center stage. He was hilarious. He’s great with the one-liners; we all know it.

CLAY: CNN is the biggest loser because nobody watches CNN now.

BUCK: Yeah, that’s true.