BUCK: Here’s one thing. I wrote about this at BuckSexton.com this morning, and the headline is pretty self-explanatory: “Everybody Knows Biden’s First Year Is a Disaster.” Even Democrats are waking up to this reality because he did not deliver for them. People keep saying, “No, Buck, he’s doing exactly what he wanted.” No, he’s actually bad at being bad, meaning you can’t even execute.

He can’t even lead on the Democrats’ wrong and dumb ideas, which is making people on obviously the left upset as well as those of us on the right who have known this guy was gonna be a buffoon the whole time and that there was something inherently reckless about putting him in the Oval Office, right? So whether it’s the border, the economy, inflation, Afghanistan. Look covid policy right now.

Look at covid policy and tell me that this is anything other than an abject failure, more people dying from covid under Biden’s time than Trump’s time. So, where does this leave us? Well, my main man Clay Travis sent this around to our EIB team a few moments ago, and it is certainly adding fuel to the fire of speculation. There’s gonna be a lot of this kind of speculation in the days and, really, months ahead. Kamala Harris, according to the Wall Street Journal here, says she and Biden haven’t discussed running for reelection in 2024.

This is from Kamala Harris: “‘I don’t think about it, nor have we talked about it,’ she said in an interview, noting it’s their first year in office amid a pandemic.” Well, let me just say a few things. First of all, Clay, that she doesn’t think about it is a huge lie. (laughing) There’s no vice president of the United States who’s like, “I never even considered whether the big guy’s gonna run again or maybe I step in and try to help out a little bit myself.” These are politicians. They are obsessed with themselves. They wanted to keep going forward. They want to stay in power. Now, do you think this is just an inartful response from Kamala, or do you think that this is Kamala Harris realizing, “It’s time to push the old man outside into the cold?”

CLAY: I think it can be both because let me read you the full quote in the way it’s contextualized. She was directly asked by the Wall Street Journal whether or not she and he would mount another campaign in 2024, and this is the lead-in. “The White House has said repeatedly he plans to seek reelection in 2024.” Kamala was asked about whether Biden and she would seek reelection, and she said this: “I’m not going to talk about our conversations, but I will tell you this without any ambiguity: We do not talk about, nor have we talked about reelection.”

Okay. So I’ll read a little bit more. First of all, when you say to someone, “I won’t talk about our conversations,” but then you say exactly what the conversations were about, right? “I’m not gonna tell you about any of our conversations.” Just think about this if you’re in a marriage. You come up to me and say, “Hey, Clay, do you and your wife ever talk about having a fourth kid?”

By the way, she doesn’t want a fourth kid. We’re not having a fourth kid. But if I came out and said, “We don’t talk about our private conversations, but I will tell you this: We are not going to have a fourth kid,” that would be a direct conversation that we had that I am sharing with you. So she said, “We don’t talk about our conversations. We do not talk about, nor have we talked about reelection, because we haven’t completed our first year and we’re in the middle of a pandemic.”

All right. That’s her answer. Here’s the deal. They cannot trot her out for interviews, Buck, without her making the story something other than what they intended the story to be about because she is so inartful in the way that she responds to questions. Let me tell you what the easy answer to that question is. Have you guys talked about running for reelection?

First of all, the answer should be, “We don’t talk about our plans for 2024 in great detail ’cause we’re only one year in, but we are doing an incredible job, and my plan is that Joe and I will run for reelection in 2024. We plan on that.” Something along those lines, right? You can rehearse this answer. I think she is trying to push Biden out the door because I think that they had private conversations when she took this VP job, Buck.

I think that Joe Biden let her know, because he basically ran on this idea, “The future is yours. I’m, in the meantime, going to return America to stability, then I will step off the stage and you will be the nominee.” I think that’s what he told her. Do you think that’s likely that conversation, and now she’s getting nervous because she’s gonna be tethered to Biden potentially as the 2024 campaign plays out?

BUCK: Well, yeah. I don’t think she’s some strategist of any note when it comes to these things. I think if you’re Kamala Harris right now you probably don’t want to be thought of as the heir apparent ’cause your poll numbers are terrible. You’ve got nothing to show for anything yet, and even a lot of the Democrat media has started to say, “Hey, you know, who’s pretty great? Pete Buttigieg!” They started to do this, “Hey, look over here, everybody!”

CLAY: And he took most of the first year off for paternity leave! That’s how bad things are for the Biden administration, the guy they’re saying is doing the good job actually wasn’t there for months and they got the biggest supply chain crisis in the history, maybe, of America, and they’re like, “He’s done a great job at transportation secretary.” That’s how low the standard is.

BUCK: To be a no-show in the Biden administration is probably a smart move in a lot of ways when you see the results of what’s actually done by the people who are making the decisions here. But this will be fascinating to see. Here’s the only thing, though, that I keep in mind as I go through this: Joe Biden, nothing about him is really a surprise to me.

I thought maybe he’d be able to get through Build Back Better this year in some capacity but those election results, specifically Virginia — and then also the near-miss in New Jersey — I think that made a stiffened spine for Joe Manchin and, by the way, Kyrsten Sinema right now is also saying that she won’t go along with the break of the filibuster for the voting rights bill that they want to push through to obviously try to change the reality of how the election will play out next year.

So there’s some things you could have expected. Joe Biden… I remember I got invited a long time ago, like 2008 to see the third tier, the also-rans of the Democratic candidates. I was invited to to political event to just to sit there and listen by a friend — lady friend, neither here nor there.

CLAY: That’s why you went. You’re burying the lede there. She was good-looking.

BUCK: We don’t have to be talking about that. This is back when occasionally I’d go on dates with Democrats. So I go to this event. I go to this event, and it was like Dennis Kucinich, two other people who were running for president — Democrats I can’t even remember — and Joe Biden. Joe Biden was a third-tier candidate who had been running for decades but this time around at a time of national anxiety.

And, “Oh, gosh, Donald Trump is so scary and covid!” Putting this decrepit but supposedly grandfatherly figure forward somehow worked, right? I mean, he is currently the president of the United States. Given all of that, Clay, I look at this and I say, is it really beyond the pale that they’ll try this one more time and then maybe have him step down for health reasons after they think he gets reelection? ‘Cause I do believe this.

The Democrat establishment would rather try Joe Biden — even at age 82, 83, whatever he’ll be — against Donald Trump if Trump is in fact the Republican nominee again, than to risk running Kamala Harris against Donald Trump. I think Kamala Harris as a matchup against Donald Trump is something the Democrats know is just a nightmare for them.

CLAY: Oh, I think… Look, Kamala Harris against Donald Trump, they’re gonna get destroyed. I’m not even sure she would be the nominee in 2024. If Trump didn’t run and just decided to kind of play the grand pooh-bah role and, for instance, deputize Ron DeSantis as his chosen successor, Buck, that I think Ron DeSantis might beat Kamala Harris 57 to 43, right?

I think we might see a landslide of epic proportions because Trump is going to bring out the anti-Trump corps that are going to be against him no matter what. And I appreciate the fact that, as I said earlier in the show, Trump has taught people how to fight. But I think a younger candidate who has not been on the national stage, whether it’s a Ron DeSantis, a Tim Scott, whoever that person might be, I think is sometimes is harder to land a punch on. And if it’s Kamala Harris against a new breed of Republican, a younger version, then I think it’s incredibly hard for her to land any punches on them, and she will get destroyed.

BUCK: The first year of a presidency, they’ll tell you, “You have a get everything done that you really want to get done in the first six months,” some people say the first 90-days, “of a new presidency, right, of an entirely new presidency.” And then you get to run on what’s coming next, the next steps, you’ve set the groundwork, you’ve laid the foundation. Look at Obama with Obamacare. You look at how this has worked in the past for Democrats. Right now, they’re going into the midterm election year without even a foundation to build on, really.

CLAY: You’re right.

BUCK: You just have Joe Biden having made a whole bunch of promises that he was not able to keep, and looking increasingly frail and befuddled to the American people. Oh, which reminds me. I actually think this is perfect timing. Clay, we are about to learn a new word today, because it has never appeared in the SATs before. It might now ’cause it’s not actually a word. Joe Biden goes around saying this all the time. These are all different instances of his usage of the word “epodentially.”

BIDEN: (montage) Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially! Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially! Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially. Epodentially.

BUCK: It goes on for like almost a full minute. Clay —

CLAY: I’m trying not to get this caught in my head because I’m gonna find myself when I try to saying “exponentially,” I’m gonna say, “expondentially.”

BUCK: It’s not even a filler word! It’s a word that he leans into. It’s like, “We’re gonna make the country epodentially better!” He really leans into it. Not a word, Joe. Not a word.

CLAY. Oh, my God. And that I think is why Kamala Harris is trying to kick him right off the ticket here in this interview. The problem — and remember when people were concerned that Joe Biden was the Trojan horse candidate, and he was going to step down and Kamala Harris was gonna take over, because there was this fear that she was particularly skilled maybe in a way that Joe Biden was not?

Now people are afraid that Joe Biden is going to step down and Kamala Harris is gonna take over because as incompetent is Joe Biden is, Kamala Harris is far more incompetent. So the idea was, “Hey, you’re gonna have the runway to take over the Democrat Party, ’cause Joe Biden’s 78′ he’s gonna be 82 in 2024. There’s no way that he’s going to run again.” Now Democrats are going to try to run a guy who would be 86 years old at the end of his tenure. That’s unbelievable.