SEN. TOM COTTON: His White House seems to be treating this like it’s just a bad news story after a gaffe on the campaign trail and they can grit it out and turn the page and headlines will change in a few days. And the headlines they want back in the news is what Nancy Pelosi was talking about this week, their reckless $3.5 trillion taxing-and-spending bill.

But when our troops are gone Tuesday, if we stick to that deadline, and there are hundreds, if not thousands of not only American citizens but green card holders — and who only knows how many Afghans who risked their life to fight alongside us who have been approved by our government, vetted for security reasons to get a visa and come here — it’s not gonna be a bad news story that you can just walk away from. It’s gonna be an ongoing catastrophe.

BUCK: Perhaps the biggest hostage crisis the United States government has ever faced, depending on the next few days goes. Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. This is Buck, and there you had Senator Cotton describing that the Biden administration, which a couple of days ago — and Clay and I have been discussing this off air in you shouldn’t say true astonishment, because we know they’ll say anything.

But it is so galling, the gaslighting that is going on here where a day or two ago we’re hearing from the Biden White House, “Oh, it’s the biggest airlift in history,” as though that’s some kind of a success to be proud of. It’s a bit like saying after the Titanic hits the iceberg, “Well, we got to the lifeboats so fast; so you can’t be mad at us for steering into that big piece of ice!”

Clay, the entire Biden presidency… I think anyone who’s being honest right now. For all of the folks out there, just to be clear, we want every American out, single most important thing, the single focus of our efforts to talk to people on the ground, get the word out. I’m speaking to different organizations who specialize in just that, who are right now — and, you know, they want to talk a little bit about what they’re doing.

But they also don’t want to give away any operational security components ’cause that’s what we’re coming down to now. “Can you sneak around the Taliban checkpoints? Can you avoid the deployment now of suicide bombers? Can you get through the U.S. bureaucracy and get on a plane?” Clay, any Democrat who’s being honest has to look at this and say, the Biden presidency could very well be written in a way that is unchangeable. The epitaph, in a sense, of the Biden presidency could happen in the next 72 hours.

CLAY: Not only that — and I think that’s well said — what about the sheer absence of the Biden administration as all of this is playing out? I know a lot of people were upset that Donald Trump was arguably too reachable. And, by the way, we should mention that the president, Trump, is going to be on Tuesday of next week with us. We have him scheduled on the day when Afghanistan, Joe Biden is trying to pull everybody out.

BUCK: Technically the former president, but yes.

CLAY: I’m always gonna call him the president (laughing), ’cause I think he’s gonna run again, I think he’s gonna be president again.

BUCK: I know he is a president, technically former.

CLAY: I’m gonna stick with “President Trump.” He’s gonna join us on Tuesday. And you could criticize and certainly I don’t know there’s ever been a president more criticized than Trump was. But imagine that this situation was going on while he was president. He would have… I know people got mad about it, but he would have been tweeting like crazy. And people can say, “Well, the tweeting was, you know, outlandish and at times it was frustrating.”

But also it was useful because it helped to put people on notice that he would rain down holy hell on them. And certainly, he did that, if you look at what happens to Soleimani in Iran. Do you get the sense, Buck, that anybody in Afghanistan is in any way worried about the Biden administration or what they may do? The clear answer is, they aren’t — and that absence of communication.

Joe Biden can’t communicate. He can barely talk. They’re having to write whatever he’s gonna read off the teleprompter right now. Jen Psaki is lying like crazy every time she talks to the American people. And yet they’re still not communicating at all. There’s an absence, a void that is being filled by terrorists. And I don’t know that Biden has any ability to punch back. To your point, Buck, in 72 hours, his presidency’s gonna be defined. My concern is his presidency’s already defined, and it’s the worst presidency that any of us living right now have ever seen.

BUCK: It’s all going to depend on whether continuous violence breaks out at the airport and the scene of carnage from earlier today is replicated, which very well could happen. God forbid. But it could happen based on the security considerations on the ground. And then what is the circumstance of Americans that have been left to this point to their own devices to find their way to Kabul International Airport? Are there Americans left behind on this battlefield, American civilians left behind on this Afghanistan battlefield?

The Biden administration’s not gonna be able to walk away from that without paying a heavy political price, and also just a price in honor from this country. I mean, we don’t leave our people behind, and I worry that with Blinken and Psaki and Milley and some of the people we’re hearing from on this one, the Taliban’s not worried. That much, I’m quite confident in, unfortunately.

CLAY: Yeah, and Sean Parnell just told us a 100% chance he thinks we’ll be leaving people behind.