CLAY: Here is Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin as he tries to argue how heroic this ending in Afghanistan really was.

AUSTIN: Now, we have just concluded the largest air evacuation of civilians in American history. It was heroic. It was historic! And I hope all Americans will unite to thank our service members for their courage and their compassion. They were operating in an immensely dangerous and dynamic environment. Our troops were tireless, fearless, and selfless.

Our commanders never flinched, and our allies and partners were extraordinary. The United States evacuated some 6,000 American citizens and a total of more than 124,000 civilians, and we did it all in the midst of a pandemic, and in the face of grave and growing threats! I’m incredibly proud of those who made it happen, and they made it happen with grit and skill and humanity.

BUCK: We’ll analyze that, in just a moment. The celebration of the evacuation. That’s now the talking point.

BEAK TRANSCRIPT

PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, it would have been the exact opposite, because, frankly, we were in perfect shape. Abdul, he’s now the head guy. That was the one I was dealing with, and he understood exactly what I was saying. I said, “There will be hell to pay if you touch any American soldiers or any Americans.” And even Biden said the other day — I think probably mistakenly from his standpoint, because they don’t usually do this.

But he came out and said, “Well, no American soldier was killed since the previous administration came to that agreement,” which is true. We had many other conditions, and they were strong conditions. And they didn’t meet some of them and we bombed the hell out of them. And they would have met them all. And we would have been out.

We would have had all of our people out. We would have had all of our equipment. I said, “Every nail! I want every nail, every screw, every tank, every plane,” and those planes are in very good working order. You look at Apaches. They cost a fortune, tens of millions of dollars, and they were flying them yesterday. They were having a good time flying our Apache helicopters. And they have, whether it’s 73, 83 or $85 billion worth of equipment — thousands of trucks, hundreds of tanks and other kinds of military gear — and it’s just disgraceful what happened. I think it’s the greatest embarrassment in the history of our country.

BUCK: That was President Trump yesterday on our show. We just wanted to share that with you again. We thought his analysis was so prescient, and it’s so important to hear, how it would have been different. Because right now, the storyline — and welcome back to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, to all of you.

Because the story is that this would have been the case no matter who was president was. This is what the Democrats are saying. They’re actually saying this. I’m not interpreting it. They’re saying, “Yeah, this was as good as it could have been. Actually, it was a good thing how it went down overall.” This is the Democrat line.

It’s crazy, but we predicted it, because it’s obvious this is where they were going to go. Accountability, Clay. Is there going to be any under the circumstances that we have here? Lindsey Graham was on the Hannity Show last night on Fox, and he was asked the question: Is this an impeachable offense?

GRAHAM: Yeah, I think so. I think it’s dereliction of duty. He knew that we were going to leave Americans behind. And I think he lied to us, because there’s no way… I don’t believe this 10% crap. I think there’s hundreds if not thousands of Americans left behind, tens of thousands of Afghans. So the Biden administration is lying to us, about the threats we face from Afghanistan, about what they knew and when they knew it. And they’re trying to blame everybody but themselves. If you want to blame somebody, President Biden, look in the mirror.

CLAY: Twenty-four kids out of California — I’m surprised this isn’t a bigger story in terms of the media attention — are still stuck there. Yesterday, we played a clip from Clarissa Ward at CNN, Buck, that a family of four from Houston had been unable to get out. We started off the show with Joe Biden bragging that 90% of the people had been removed from Afghanistan who were American citizens, despite the fact that just two weeks ago he told George Stephanopoulos that everybody was going to get out.

Now, I think Lindsey Graham, from the perspective of what should happen, if the standard of impeachment — which, by the way, I don’t agree with. But if the standard for impeachment was a phone call that Donald Trump made with the Ukrainian president — and if the standard for impeachment was a riot, an issue, however you want to classify it on January 6th — this is much worse.

BUCK: Or alleged intervention, by the way, in the Russia collusion investigation that never should have happened in the first place that was all based on fabric restrictions and lies but they tried to take down a presidency with? Sorry.

CLAY: That’s the standard, right? And that’s unfortunate, because I do think in general all of this is a sideshow. Because the idea that that you’re going to get 64 senators who are going to vote for a president to be removed is a laughing stock, right? And we haven’t seen — and we didn’t have it with Bill Clinton. We didn’t have it with Donald Trump. If there were an impeachment with Joe Biden, the consistency of the standard would at least be being applied. But the result would be the same. We would spend months arguing and then nothing would change.

BUCK: Isn’t it amazing that on the issue of resignation — you know, because you’re right. Look, Biden is not going to be impeached and removed from office. We all know. The guy could pull off his head and we find out he’s actually a member of an alien species of lizards or something, and you would have MSNBC saying, “Look, he’s doing a great job.”

CLAY: Yes. Right.

BUCK: They wouldn’t care, right? It wouldn’t matter. There’s nothing he could do, that would make the Democrats want him to be gone or that they would take him — you know, take him out of office voluntarily. But as for the resignation point, we have these generals: the chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Milley; the secretary of defense, former four-star General Lloyd Austin, who I remember actually briefing in Iraq a long time ago.

CLAY: Yeah, we talked about that.

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: You remember him. You don’t think he remembers you.

BUCK: Oh, no, no, no. I was just another guy wearing a T-shirt with some sunglasses on who is like, “Hello, sir. My name is (beep).”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Can’t say what my name is.

CLAY: He might know you now.

BUCK: Well, they could know me now.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: That’s true. That’s true. But anyway, I’m just kidding about this, of course. They could know my name. I’m an American citizen, and they were cleared for everything. But it was supposed to be a spy joke. Anyway, point being, Clay: Resignations. What do you resign for in this country? What are you forced to resign for?

Not sending senior citizens in the nursing homes to die by the thousands. That’s not why Governor Cuomo resigned. For sexually inappropriate comments and some alleged touching of subordinates. That’s what you resign for. What do you resign for in the military? Speaking out against the chain of command, as we know, not presiding over a massive blunder.

And this goes to, you know, what in our culture will people be able to get away with and what they can’t, what bureaucratically is defensible and what is not. In the way things go right now, it feels like there’s no accountability, because a lot of people, don’t care about the big things. They care about the hashtags. They care about what will get them love on social media from their friends.

CLAY: Yeah. And there’s no chance, that Biden is going to be forced out of office over this. And, by the way, we polled this last week, and 74% of our audience would rather have Joe Biden in office right now than they would Kamala Harris. So even if that were going to occur. But I think the dishonesty of the media, is being put to the forefront here.

Because there’s no demand for consequences. There’s no head on a platter, that can forced to be brought to bear and take the blame for what happened in Afghanistan. And that’s not even being discussed in any kind of significant fashion. Instead, you have Joe Biden just being able to lie. Same thing going with Defense Secretary Austin, with Milley, everybody else. They’re trying to focus on this and argue that it’s a success, which is a blatant lie.

BUCK: Right, but that goes to the resignation point, because how could you be arguing, as they are, that this is a big success, and people resigning over it? Soo it just turns into… I always say the CIA, the Intel community was a giant self-licking ice cream cone. Right?

CLAY: (chuckling) Yeah.

BUCK: It always took care of itself. Always first and foremost issued in its prerogatives, what it’s doing. Its pay and its perks. And what you see here, is that the narrative requires, for this White House no resignations. Because how could you resign over a catastrophic success, Clay. Because I guess that’s what this is.

CLAY: It’s funny. That’s a great phrase. Because Biden tried to in his address yesterday simultaneously say he had no options because of the deal that Donald Trump had made and so his hands were tied. And then also, claimed success for the plan! Did you notice that? Like, he was arguing two different things simultaneously.

If the plan was so bad, and you had no other options, why should you get to claim the success for it? And, by the way, we all know, because he did 100 executive orders or whatever else. The moment Biden walked into the White House, he started reversing many of the decisions that had been made by Donald Trump. He had plenty of time to change this outcome if he didn’t want to follow it. Instead, he wants to be able to blame Trump while simultaneously taking credit for the success.

BUCK: Right. Biden wants to have his ice cream and eat it too. We know this, in general. Certainly on this issue, he’s telling us that if we didn’t draw down in this way — if we didn’t have the exit, Clay — we faced a Taliban military onslaught that would have forced U.S. troops to go into the front lines and be fighting again, just like our Marines did in Helmand, just like our soldiers and airmen have been doing in Afghanistan for 20 years on and off, depending on the time period.

But then he also says that it’s Trump’s fault for putting us on this. So which is it? Was the Taliban ascendant to the point where you couldn’t stay without an escalation into a major war, or was it that Joe Biden…? It’s all self-contradictory. But they’re hoping to obscure things enough that the takeaway will be, “Okay, the war is over, so nothing matters about how it happened,” and then Joe Biden’s poll numbers start to go up again.

CLAY: I don’t know that Biden is even smart enough or functionally cognizant enough to recognize all of those conflicts.