Biden Bumbles Through Asia, Europe Feeds America’s Babies

CLAY: We are off and running with incompetence in the Biden administration continuing to build on virtually every front wherever you look. I just came back from filling up my gas tank, and prices are so high now at my local gas station that they won’t even allow you to spend more than a hundred dollars, and I can’t even fill up my gas tank — because of the price of gas — with a hundred dollars.

I’m guessing this is some sort of fail-safe they put on back in the Trump days or basically the days of any other president when they thought to themselves, “There’s no way it’s gonna cost someone over a hundred dollars to fill up their gas tank.” Well, welcome to the Biden administration. I want to hit on two different failures — one domestic, one foreign — that to me epitomize how bad the Biden administration is on all fronts right now.

First of all, in Taiwan and the discussions surrounding Taiwan, we have a policy of strategic ambiguity. That means that we never really let it be known whether or not we will provide military aid and defense to Taiwan in the event that China invades. This has become a bigger and bigger story, certainly, as everyone has seen what happened with Russia and Ukraine. Many people, certainly Buck and I on this show, have suggested that China is using invasion of Ukraine by Russia as a proxy of sorts for what might happen in the rest of the world if they were to decide to invade Taiwan.

Joe Biden was asked directly about that during his trip to Asia, and this is what he said. They’ve already, by the way — as we play it — had to clean this statement up because he is an utter embarrassment and a mess, and he can’t even speak in cogent and intelligent fashion. Listen to this.

BUCK: Clay, can I just remind everybody of some of the…? You already said, he had to walk it back. That is a huge, huge no-no.

CLAY: He’s done this multiple times now, about this specific issue!

BUCK: Yeah. He’s walking around, and he’s reckless, and… It’s hard to get that mad at him because we also sit here and say, “Gosh, he’s declining. Like, this is… They’ve put somebody who should be out there spending time with family and maybe feeding the squirrels in the backyard,” and he’s the commander-in-chief, and that’s not what he should be doing right now.

Just some headlines, Clay, just to give everyone a little reminder about the kind of things that when Trump would tweet anything about North Korea, “Trump flirted with nuclear war with North Korea,” the Intercept. “Trump almost started nuclear war via Twitter.” “What war with North Korea would look like.” That was Vox. “Trump tweets about nuclear war with North Korea.” You know, all this, you go back and look at this.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: They were threatening… Trump wanted to talk to Kim Jong-un, and they acted like we are gonna be in nuclear war at any moment. China is a much bigger concern for us than North Korea is, and yet one of these instances — one of these presidents — they would talk about the 25th Amendment, it’s elsewhere. “We’re approaching nuclear holocaust unless we take him out of office!” But Joe Biden they go, “Yeah, no, don’t worry, Karine Jean-Pierre is gonna clean up the mess.” Really? That’s what we’re dealing with now?

CLAY: Yes, and this is probably the single most important question he could be asked in Asia. So of all the things you would want him to get right and be able to answer in an intelligent, forthright manner, this is probably the most important question, one that everybody knew was coming. And, Buck, the message of incompetence was set. I’m sure you saw this video.

When he landed in South Korea, Biden sort of wobbly came down the steps of Air Force One with a mask on. He’s walking down the steps by himself with no one else around wearing a mask and the stupid aviator shades that he’s constantly wearing too; so he basically has his entire face covered. As he gets down to where he is greeting all of the dignitaries that are arriving there in South Korea, he immediately takes his mask off and shakes all their hands and speaks as close as you possibly can to the faces of all the South Koreans.

Now, I don’t know that you can better epitomize the incompetence of an administration arriving for a foreign event and looking that incompetent. And as if that were not enough… So that’s foreign affairs where he is bombing on the world stage, unable to answer the most competent and important question in an intelligent fashion, dealing with whether or not we would go to war with China, effectively, in the event they decide to invade Taiwan, and look.

The White House, of course, like, this is the third or fourth time they’ve had to correct him on this Taiwan-related issue. You would think that he would manage some form of competence at some point to get the answer right. We’ve got baby formula. We are in such disastrous, dire straits as it pertains to children in this country. There are babies being hospitalized, Buck, because they cannot get — their parents cannot get — the right baby formula. Abbott Labs is out there apologizing right now because of these hospitalizations of babies that are going on. We’re having to fly in baby formula from Europe.

BUCK: On military transport. It’s like we’re doing a reverse Berlin airlift of baby formula right now.

CLAY: Think about how bad this is. Our administration, the Biden administration, is so bad right now that Europe is having to feed our babies. That’s where we are. You could have never made any sort of argument that this could ever have occurred.

BUCK: And if you just look at the scope of the baby formula argument specifically over the last… Call it last month or so, do you remember early on, first of all, it was a right-wing meme, it wasn’t true. That was what the blue checks on Twitter were saying.

CLAY: When we started talking about this on this show, they said this is not happening. This is a made-up controversy; it doesn’t really exist.

BUCK: The whole thing. So that’s what they were saying and then it transitioned because it became clear because people all over the country were saying, “I can’t get baby formula. This is freaking me out.” You know, parents were understandably very upset. We could have taken calls for a whole show for three hours just on parents outraged all over the country.

CLAY: We had grandparents calling saying they were trying to help their grandchildren and their own children by searching for baby formula for them as well.

BUCK: But the Biden administration argument initially was, “Hey, like, not really our thing here, you know, the market, man. Whatever,” and then when they realized that wasn’t gonna fly, especially when people are realizing their groceries are all more expensive, the money in their bank accounts is worse less with each passing month, you just said, the gas situation —

CLAY: Can’t even fill up your car for a hundred bucks now.

BUCK: So then they said, “Oh, okay. I guess maybe we should do something about the baby formula shortage,” and so now they’re working with companies and literally flying it in from Europe, as you said. And now they want a pat on the back? I mean, this is remarkable for the Biden administration.” Look at the great job we’re doing now that we can actually get some baby formula in here,” and if you even look at the origins of the shortage crisis, it ties to the FDA — apparently wrongly — shutting down that Abbott lab.

They did a full spectrum investigation of whether or not there was a bacterial poisoning of two babies, which obviously horrible tragedy. But it turns out doesn’t seem like it actually came from that lab, and our own federal government I believe has some tariffs in place that make baby formula from… We don’t really have the supply chain for the rest of the world, because there’s a tariff that we have which we don’t often think about that makes at any time economically competitive to bring baby formula into the country until now, obviously. Things have changed.

So regulation, FDA incompetence, slow Biden administration, babies don’t have the food they need. This is just an encapsulation of the level of incompetence we are dealing with. And I do think a big part of the problem is that we have a media that was so complicit, Clay, in elevating this guy and acting like, “Yeah, Joe Biden is gonna unify the country and the adults are in charge!”

I was just thinking about this this morning. Remember his primary talking point, really, was, “I’m not gonna shut down the economy. I’m gonna shut down the virus.” Now we’re 18 months in. Oh, he’s shutting down parts of the economy all right. He’s messing things up there royally, and he definitely did not shut down the virus as we have a hundred thousand cases a day still after force vaccination, et cetera, et cetera. This is a disaster.

CLAY: No doubt. And we’ve also managed to be shipping baby formula to border for illegal immigrants that are coming across. They have stacks and stacks of it there. It’s so bad — and to me, I don’t know how you overcome this if you’re the Biden administration, because the baby formula having to be shipped in from Europe in order to feed babies in the United States is such a level of incompetence that it’s hard to get past for many people. I think it crystallizes the Biden administration’s failures on virtually every front. And it’s so bad that even our good friend Brian Stelter at CNN is acknowledging how bad this is making the Democrats and Joe Biden look.

BUCK: That’s really bad, Clay. It’s really bad.

CLAY: You know it’s bad when Mr. CNN+ has to acknowledge how bad the Biden administration is doing. Listen to this.

STELTER: You saw those pictures on the corner of the screen a few moments ago. The first military flight carrying in emergency supply of baby formula has just landed near Indianapolis, Indiana. Baby formula flown in on a military plane! This was part of the Biden administration’s Operation Fly Formula, as Americans are coping with a nationwide shortage.

The pallets of baby formula were flown here from Germany. Uh, the staff — uh, the master sergeant overseeing the shipment telling his staff, quote, “We are literally saving babies.” But this is both a failure as well as a success. The existence of this plane is a failure of the government and a failure of corporations as well, even though these pictures today are meant to symbolize a success by the Biden administration.

BUCK: If you ignore the boiling water on the stove to the point where the whole kitchen catches fire, now you’ve gotta call the fire department, you don’t get to actually pat yourself on the back for calling the fire department, you know what I mean? We’re not doing this thing here where, “Oh, look at Joe Biden!”

CLAY: That’s what they’re trying to do.

BUCK: Of course ’cause what else are they gonna do? Otherwise, people are realizing they’re looking at this and, Clay, in the background of the shortage we have in baby formula, Elizabeth Warren and other Democrats are talking about passing new bills. They’re gonna call it anti-greed bills or anti-price gouging. They’re putting price controls in place.

CLAY: They’re trying it. I’m not exaggerating when I say the idiots that rule over you right now, folks, in the Democrat Party do not understand basic supply and demand. They do not understand how the market functions.

CLAY: Which is why every time we have a senator on this show one of the questions I want to ask and do ask is, “Can you guys run out the clock?” Because as bad as things are in the Biden administration so far, he’s actually being protected from his worst ideas and the worst ideas of the party by Joe Manchin, by the courts, by people who are not allowing him to implement his policies.

Things are so bad that the single most important thing that should be on the shelves for anyone when you walk into a grocery store — the single most important thing — baby formula, because you can’t replace it easily with anything else. If they’re out of orange juice, all right. Buy apple juice. If they’re out of bananas, you can buy oranges, whatever. Your favorite beer is not there, you can find another type of beer.

You can’t replace baby formula. That’s what babies eat at young ages, and there are babies hospitalized, Buck, right now because their parents can’t find baby formula to feed them. I don’t know that it’s possible to have any more crystal clear example of Joe Biden’s failures than those airplanes arriving — military transports — from Europe to feed our babies.

BUCK: Let’s just be clear. It’s not as if it’s possible to find it. There’s a shortage, meaning if it doesn’t exist within driving distance or you can’t get it delivered to you in a timely enough fashion online, you can’t get it, right? This is what those parents are facing right now, and I want everyone listening I should say to remember, a month ago the Biden administration was like, “Eh, it’s not us, don’t worry.”

CLAY: Made up.

BUCK: Not a big deal.

CLAY: Those right-wing media people like Clay Travis and Buck Sexton they’re just making up this story even though I was hearing from so many of you out there and we were hearing from so many of you we opened up phone lines, this was exactly what’s going on. The Biden administration finally catches up and decides they have to bring in military transport planes. I hope this takes care of it ’cause now FedEx is trying to distribute some of the baby formula out there to places that are most in need of it. But the fact that we even got here is an utter indictment of the Biden administration, and yet more evidence of why a red wave must happen in six months.