CLAY: We got Joe Biden. Asked about whether he’s going to run in 2024 or not by David Muir of ABC News in last night’s sit down that they aired and also about whether he would like to run against Donald Trump, this is what Biden had to say.

MUIR: You said you would absolutely serve eight years, if elected. Do you plan to run for reelection?

BIDEN: Yes. But look. I’m a great respecter of fate. Fate has intervened in my life many, many times. If I’m in the health I’m in now, I’m in good health, then in fact, I would run again.

REPORTER: And if that means a rematch against Donald Trump?

BIDEN: You’re trying to tempt me now. Sure. Why would I not run against Donald Trump if he’s the nominee? That would increase the prospect of running.

CLAY: So Biden says he would welcome a competition again in 2024 against Donald Trump.

Now, there’s lots of things that can happen between now and 2024. I’m gonna talk about Kamala Harris and the difficulty that she potentially adds to this equation in the next segment. But if you start to break this down, I think it’s such an incredibly fascinating situation that we’re going to find ourselves in.

Obviously the midterms have to happen first. And if you read the tea leaves, if you look at the all the polling data, if you analyze even the number of Democratic congressmen and women who are deciding not to run again, — I should knock on wood here ’cause there’s still a long time to go, but it’s virtually impossible for me to see how the Republicans don’t end up winning back the House.

Something truly cataclysmic, probably, would have to happen in order to upset that because the House is so tight. Now, the Senate is a bit more complicated. There are a lot of moving parts. I do think the Republicans will take back the Senate as well. But that’s 2022.

As you look forward, as soon as we get the results from 2022 and probably even a little bit about that but certainly by the time you get that, you will have a lot of people start to announce officially that they are running for president early in 2023, to get ready for the primary season which begins in 2024 for who the nominee is going to be. And the first question that I have is not even directly attributable to the Biden side, because I think it’s increasingly likely that Democrats recognize that they’re in a tough spot associated with Kamala and whether she could actually be the standard-bearer for the Democratic Party. And so they’re gonna try to drag Joe Biden across the finish line, as I’ve been saying, Weekend at Bernie’s II style. And that’s gonna be the Democratic play. ‘Cause I think they’re so desperate and recognize how weak their bench is outside of Joe Biden that they’re gonna do whatever they can to ride the power of incumbency, to try to argue that Biden has done a good job even though the evidence obviously reflects that he has not.

Maybe he could even be helped a bit by a Republican Senate and a Republican House which would require him theoretically to be more moderate, because remember Bill Clinton got absolutely destroyed in 1994, and Barack Obama got absolutely destroyed in 2010, and both of those guys found ways in ’96 and in 2012 P.O. box reelected. Partly that’s a function of having to get more moderate. So Biden would potentially have that option.

When we come back I want to talk about this ’cause I think it’s a big question and a bigger question than even when the Democrats are going to do. What’s gonna happen on the Republican side? Ted Cruz hinted in an interview recently that he was really interested in running in 2024. We know that Chris Christie, for instance, is going to run, and there will be somebody who hates Trump like Liz Cheney that will try to run, and get smoked.

But what’s going to happen with Trump and how many people if Trump decides to run would actually be willing to step in the ring against him? What would that potential primary campaign look like?

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: You know how sometimes the end of the year is a good time for reflection to think about what was but also what’s coming and with the David Muir interview that he did with Joe Biden where Joe Biden effectively said, hey, I’d love to run against Trump again, “assuming that I have good health” — and, by the way, the idea that Joe Biden is in good health right now may be of all the crazy lies that they’re telling the biggest lie because we’ve got a couple of cuts that we’ll play during the course of this show that just further demonstrate that Joe Biden isn’t at the peak, to the extent that the peak was very high in the first place, of his intellectual capacity, nowhere near it. And with the stress and overwhelming nature of being president, his performance is likely to decline precipitously, unfortunately, over the next few years.

So I don’t really think his mental faculties or even his health matter that much. Democrats are gonna do whatever they can to retain power because Biden is a Trojan horse candidate. They’re able to get inside the wall with him and then undertake anything. There, my college Iliad teacher is gonna be really impressed with that analogy. But let’s kind of break this down in general.

Biden, the idea was, when he ran in 2020, implicit was I’m only gonna be a one-term guy because Joe Biden was 78 at election, he’s gonna be 82 when he’s running in 2024, and the idea was, first of all, Biden told us I’m gonna pick a woman. Remember that? It doesn’t get discussed very much, but he said right out of the gate, I’m limiting who my vice presidential candidate is going to be. Only women are in play. And really it ultimately came down that it was only minority women that were in play, and he picked Kamala Harris.

And the idea — and I think I thought it; I think a lot of you out there probably thought it — was, this was an opportunity for Joe Biden to pass the proverbial baton to Kamala Harris. Maybe he would even step down before his term was even over and allow her to potentially run as an incumbent. At worse he would not run for reelection and Kamala Harris would be the Democratic standard-bearer.

Well, she has been so bad, she has been such a disaster as vice president — remember, she dropped out of the Democratic primaries before there was even a vote taken and she was polling at virtually zero because Democrats didn’t like her, either. And now she’s saying, “Well, here’s the deal. Here’s the deal. The reason why my…” — told New York Times this, New York Times is a big profile, you know, the Washington Post had a bill profile that nailed her, CNN had a big profile that absolutely walloped her and now the New York Times has a profile. And her defense is: “The reason why the media is being so tough on me is ’cause I’m a black woman”. That’s all she’s got.

Now, of course the reality is, Kamala Harris got the vice presidential nod in the first place because she’s a black woman. So she’s able to use her race and gender to get to the vice presidency, a heartbeat away from the presidency, but as soon as anybody criticizes her, she says, oh, the reason I’m getting criticized ’cause I’m a black woman. Well, it would be certainly, I would imagine, pretty entertaining to Donald Trump ’cause Kamala Harris said, “Well, if I were a white guy, I wouldn’t be getting anywhere near the same amount of criticism. Donald Trump’s a white guy, and he’s the most criticized president in any of our lives.

Nobody has gotten worse media than Donald Trump did. That is true across the board, even if you’re a die-hard partisan Democrat you would have say, you know what? Nobody ever got savaged like Donald Trump did. The media had a field day. The Washington flipping Post put at the top of their newspaper, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” when Donald Trump was elected. The New York Times put their entire franchise, their entire existence as a newspaper behind the subscription model, and the subscription model was fundamentally funded by we’re going to attack Donald Trump as a part of the resistance. MSNBC, CNN, their entire reason for existence was to attack Donald Trump.

So pardon me when Kamala Harris says. “The media’s being really tough on me because I’m a black woman.” That ain’t true. Okay? It’s not remotely accurate. The media, first of all, isn’t even being that hard on you. Because the media is never that hard on Democrats in a general context. But you are saying and doing stupid things that allow yourself to be ridiculed.

Lester Holt was there to do a soft focus interview with you, and you claim that you had been to the border which wasn’t true and he had to correct you on it. Charlamagne tha God was there to do a soft interview on you and you lost your mind when he asked whether Joe Manchin or Joe Biden was the president of the United States.

The Wall Street Journal was there and they were doing a profile on you and the whole story of the Wall Street Journal profile was that you and Joe Biden hadn’t talked about whether you were going to run together in 2024. Remember when she did the press conference down in Central America when she made the trip down there to try to figure out — remember how many times she used the phrase “root causes”? Kamala Harris has created virtually every aspect of her negative publicity by being incompetent, by being artificial, by being not very well versed in the questions that she’s going to be asked even when they’re readily predictable and, and she wasn’t very likable when she was actually running for president and Democrats got a chance to watch her too.

It isn’t a story that the media is being tough on her. It’s that Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and the media all, when they are confronted by Kamala Harris, come away profoundly unimpressed by her. And her race and her gender, if anything, actually helped her because people are afraid that if they’re too critical of Kamala Harris, they’ll get called racist, they’ll get called sexist. That’s the reality.

The race and the gender, far from being a method of attack, is actually a shield for Kamala Harris because so many people in media and elsewhere are afraid of being called racist and sexist if they actually attack Kamala Harris. But her failure as vice president has made 2024 far more interesting. Right now if I were betting I would say that 2024 is likely to be a rematch between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. And I believe Donald Trump would win that election.

I mean, there are a lot of people who are really frustrated with Joe Biden pink that’s particularly pronounced in states like Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, that were close in 2020 that I believe that Trump would win now in 2024 and I think Trump would flip Nevada, I think he could flip New Mexico, I think there are multiple states out there that were relatively close that Trump almost won in 2020 that would swing back to Trump in 2024. But the really interesting question here, to me, is not will Biden try to get dragged across the finish line, as we look forward and finish off 2021, it’s this angle of the debate: Is there someone out there that is a top candidate that will challenge Donald Trump, or are we gonna see Trump against Chris Christie and Liz Cheney and that ilk, such that Trump is the default nominee photo Republican Party no matter what? And, what does the larger Republican Party want?

Do we want a coronation, or do we want another battle. Remember, there were 17 or 19 or whatever the heck there were Republican candidates when Donald Trump became the nominee. Are we going to see something somewhat similar? Ron DeSantis get in, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley? Or will they all step back, allow Trump to run again and wait for 2028. It’s an interesting question.