CLAY: What we are seeing right now in Ukraine is an explosion, even more tremendous of an explosion of the Russian collusion narrative than we have seen to this point, because Vladimir Putin — despite the fact that Donald Trump was supposed to be in cahoots with him for years, if you listen to the mainstream media — the CNNs, the MSNBCs, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Blue Check Brigade members obsessively on Twitter who were a part of the resistance, they believe that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were in cahoots, were colluding for five years or more, that Vladimir Putin delivered the 2016 election to Donald Trump and that Trump, according to some of them, was even a “strategic Russian asset.”

That has all blown up in their faces now, and they don’t even really know what to argue at this point, Buck, because a little over a year after Joe Biden becomes president — after the feckless and incompetent withdrawal of Afghanistan, after the continued destruction of America’s overall goodwill and legacy around the world due to weak and vapid leadership — we are seeing, I believe, Vladimir Putin strike. And the bigger concern I have than even what’s now going on in Ukraine is, Buck — I know you saw it, too — early this morning China put out a statement reiterating that Taiwan was a part of its territory, that its situation was different than Ukraine.

I really do feel as if China may make a move on Taiwan simultaneously. No one believes that Biden has any spine at all. They don’t think that he has mental cognition or wherewithal to be able to stand up to either Russia or China, and both of them are going to take advantage of this. Donald Trump told us as much in our interview on Tuesday. He was even giving credit to Chuck Todd for noting that Putin didn’t invade while he was in office. Listen to this.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, even “Sleepy Eyes” Chuck Todd said this weekend during his show — I was watching it for a change, and he said — (summarized), “How come there’s been no invasion during the period of time that the Trump administration was there, but they did invade — very severely invade — with Obama and then they waited and then they invaded?” This would never have happened if we were there. But he did. Chuck Todd asked that question. How come there was none of this happening during the Trump administration? … I think he sees this opportunity. I knew that he always wanted Ukraine. I used to talk to him about it. I said, “You can’t do it. You’re not gonna do it.” But I could see that he wanted it.

BUCK: Clay, we were —

CLAY: It’s a great question, right? Why did this not happen before now?

BUCK: And just so everyone understands what’s going on right now, this is the Russian blitzkrieg that we have been talking about as a possibility for weeks. This is a three-pronged, simultaneous assault using sea, land, and air assets from one of the most capable and fearsome military machines in the world today. Really the only military that could go toe-to-toe with Russia are our own and the Chinese. After that, I think they could take any European power pretty handily on their own, not all at once.

But this is major, Clay. There are air strikes going on around the capital city of Kiev right now as we sit here talking to everybody across the country. There are helicopters, transport helicopters that have already launched major paratrooper invasions of airfields in and around the primary cities. There’s Kharkiv, which is close to Russia, which has been a site of a lot of fighting. There’s also some places along the coastline that have seen amphibious assaults. This is right now, for this stage, a worst-case scenario.

Now, that’s not the worst-case scenario for the entire conflict. I don’t even want to think about where that could go. But for this phase of where we are, this is a larger scale incursion right now than most analysts, most people were anticipating even a few days ago. The Russians are going in, they’ve gone in, and they’ve gone in heavy. And this now raises a lot of questions because if the objective here — a couple days ago, was the objective the separatist enclaves? Clearly, that was just the beachhead.

We discussed this, whether it was the beachhead for further invasion or was that going to be enough to satiate the Russian bear, so to speak, for a while? Now the question becomes, is this about toppling the regime? You’ve already had a lot of strikes on military and government arguments, critical infrastructure, cyberattacks going on. Is this about getting rid of the Ukrainian power structure, and then just replacing if with something that’s essentially a Russian puppet government, Clay?

Or is this the Russian Federation flags are gonna be hanging from every government building in just a matter of weeks or months before that occurs, which would mean you’re talking now about full-scale occupation, the insurgency that the Ukrainians would be waging against Russian troops — which, remember, insurgencies are very bloody and vicious. So is the Russian military. So, we just simply at this stage, it’s hard to know what the full impact of this is going to be.

No one knows what the full impact will be — not even Vladimir Putin, by the way. He doesn’t know. They’ve already lost some helicopters shot out of the sky. You know, this could be a dynamic, fluid battle space situation that changes before we could even see it coming, and that’s what I worry about: Miscalculation, overreach, an incident that makes this go far beyond what we’re hoping it could be limited to now which is a toppling of the regime in Ukraine.

CLAY: My concern is Taiwan, and we started talking about this early on. We’ve got jets that are now being scrambled and penetrating the airspace of Taiwan, according to reports. Fox News: “Taiwan scrambled its Air Force Thursday as nine Chinese aircraft have entered the island’s Air Defense Zone, the Taiwan Ministry of Defense announced. A small fleet of eight J-16 fighters and a technical reconnaissance aircraft breached the airspace.” It seems quite clear to me that there is major danger.

Maybe the largest danger there has ever been in most of our lives of not only a European war, but also an Asian war happening simultaneously, that much derided and feared two-front war. This would be the time. If China really holds any aspirations — which they certainly do, but any true plans — to make a move, this is the time to do it because the United States is captured by everything going on in Ukraine. I don’t think… It’s so overwhelming in many ways, but do you feel like Joe Biden can muster a response to Taiwan, either? I think it would fall rapidly with almost no response from the United States.

BUCK: Let’s just recall for a moment, Clay, that Biden promised not only a return to normalcy, which we know was really the opposite of what he did when all of a sudden it was even more restriction, more trampling on basic freedoms, more lies about what works and what doesn’t from a covid perspective, all of that. Put that aside for a minute. He’s supposed to be… He was brought in as Obama’s vice president because Democrats pretended that longevity in foreign policy is the same thing as wisdom!

That itself was a monstrous lie because Joe Biden is a guy who gets it wrong every time. Joe Biden is a third-tier student and a fourth-tier intellect. This is not someone who you want making important decisions, and personality matters. The individual, the leadership in a situation like this matters. Notice how much they’ll analyze Putin, Putin, Putin. It’s all about his personality, what he thinks should be done, his strategy.

And then with Joe Biden we start to hear about, “Well, he has many steady hands in national security around him.” These are the announce-their-pronouns-in-emails national security people, folks. These are the oat milk latte drinkers of the national security world that Biden has picked to be making decisions about war and peace. Now, this is not yet our war, thankfully. It should not become — and we must fight against it becoming — our war in Ukraine.

But, Clay, with these individuals in charge and with the possibility much a rapidly escalation beyond what we’ve already seen in Ukraine, there’s always the unknown unknown that can come up in a situation like this, which is why leadership matters. How do they handle that? Neither you nor I can tell this audience that they should have any faith in the primary decision-makers in the United States government. Yeah, it’s not our war but with the most powerful military, most powerful country in the world; leadership matters from the White House, and we don’t have it right now.

CLAY: Not only does leadership matter, Buck, but this is why — whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an independent — you don’t want an incompetent leadership group, right, because the weakness will be taken advantage of by autocrats. And listen to this. Talk a lot about big lies. It’s one of the favorite things of the blue checks to run around talking about. Here’s the big lie: Joe Biden saying he’ll stand up to Vladimir Putin. This was an ad from his presidential campaign in 2019. Listen to this.

Biden, 2019: Putin “doesn’t want me to be president.”pic.twitter.com/GoajoExV3Z

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) February 24, 2022

BIDEN: Putin knows if I am president of the United States, his days of tyranny and trying to intimidate the United States and those in Eastern Europe are over. I’m gonna stand up to him. He’s a bully, just like the president, and I know he doesn’t want me to be president, but I’ll tell you what: When I’m president, things are gonna change.

BUCK: Well, they changed all right. (laughs) That’s for sure, Clay. Look, we’re gonna be very calculating and calm, folks, as we continue to look at this issue, and we’re gonna always try to separate out what’s happening in Ukraine from the political debate that’s happening in this country, ’cause this is not our war. It is, obviously, a very important news story — the biggest news story in the world right now. It’s very troubling. There are serious implications from it. But we’re not gonna do the hyperbole thing.

We’re not gonna blame everything on some Democrat or blame everything on the narrative the media has created. That all said, this is a reminder of what many of us were warning about, Clay, from the beginning, which is that it’s not just that we disagree with the things that Joe Biden said he wanted to implement. It was that elevating this guy to the role of commander-in-chief at this stage of his life, with the track record he had specifically on security issues — with the judgment, the temperament that he had — was reckless.

And I worry now we may still pay a much higher price for it than we realize. We’re certainly gonna be paying higher price at the pump and for everything that everyone listening to this right now is going to purchase over the three to six to maybe 12 months. That’s a reality right now.