C&B Preview Biden’s State of the Union Speech

CLAY: We want to here give you an early preview of what we think Joe Biden is going to argue at his State of the Union address. And so I have got four things that I am supremely confident in, Buck, will be a part of this State of the Union, all right? By the way, Nancy Pelosi has also joined Joe Biden in saying that she’s also not going to be wearing a mask, but she said if she had young children or some sort of immune-related disease, they would be wearing a mask.

The young children part of that… First of all, she’s 80. She hasn’t had young children in 60 years. But the young children part of this makes zero sense because, statistically, kids are not in danger from covid, and so it’s a totally nonsensical statement by her. The Party of Science yet again demonstrating that they have no knowledge of actual science. But it also flies directly in the face of Jen Psaki attempting to argue that it’s just coincidence that mask mandates are vanishing just in time for the State of the Union.

Buck, it’s a big deal for Democrats, and this is one of my four-part things that I believe Joe Biden is going to get into in the State of the Union. So, let me start here. I think Joe Biden will mention inflation, but he will mention inflation in the context of the reason why inflation exists — this is the argument he’s gonna make — is because we have the largest economic expansion ever. We’ve created more new jobs than any administration ever.

Now, that’s a lie because the jobs that we are getting are the jobs that we forced people to leave back in March of 2020 and we still don’t have the same number of jobs. We have not recovered a lot of people going back in March of 2020. But he’s gonna say we have the greatest economy ever; the inflation is a cost of that. And he’s gonna pivot and argue, Buck, that the way to handle inflation is by passing his Build Back Better bill, which is totally insane.

You’re not gonna solve inflation by spending trillions of dollars more, but that is prong one of the four prongs that I’m confident he’s going to argue. Second one. He’s going to talk about Ukraine in the context of fighting for democracy and tie that in with January 6th and argue that that is a battle that the United States will fight around the world but also is fighting on our own backyard.

And he’ll cite January 6th and argue that there was an attempt to overthrow the government, even though it’s not true, as an insurrection. He’ll also… It wouldn’t surprise me if he takes a dig at Donald Trump by saying, “Putin is not a genius, he’s a brutal dictator,” something along those lines. I would not be surprised. He’s gonna argue — and this is why they’re not wearing masks, Buck. He’s gonna argue that they beat covid thanks to his actions. And finally, he’s going to try and take a lap for success on the Supreme Court using diversity and inclusion as the argument there. Do you think I’m going four for four? Do you think all four of those are gonna hit?

BUCK: Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s right. I think, Clay, it’ll be fascinating to watch a presidency that has, in year one, less to cheer about and less to show for $1.9 trillion in partisan spending. It was just Democrats who went with that earlier on in 2021, and so much-of-what was promised — the Biden agenda, for example — he couldn’t even get his own party to pass it. They keep saying, “It’s so popular!” They keep saying, “Oh, but everyone wants this!”

Really? ‘Cause apparently not. But there’s gonna be a lot of that. There’s gonna be a lot of the attempt to convince people that what they see, what they’ve experienced, what the numbers say somehow doesn’t matter, that Biden is operating at some level of 4-D chess. He’s at the next level of Democrat strategery where, just give it time, it’s all going to be amazing. Clay, in every one of these areas where there has been failure of this administration up to this point, none of it is surprising.

None of it is actually something that wasn’t foreseeable. You spend too much money, you get inflation. You refuse to enforce the law at the border and in the interior when it comes to illegal immigration, you get more illegal immigration. You undermine cops, you defund police, you have progressive prosecutors, you empty out the prisons, you’re gonna have more crime. All of these things, there’s cause and effect.

And that’s what I think is so damaging for the Democrats, a lot of these areas where they’ve had failure. What happens in Afghanistan? The Afghan military after 20 years of training crumbled and did nothing and didn’t actually fight and we had to run off that country as fast as we possibly could. People saw the images themselves, right? They know what they’ve experienced under this administration.

And here’s the other part of it. The memory of, “Oh, Trump is so terrifying and the insurrection. That only got them so far.” The first six months, all Biden had to say was (impression), ‘Our democracy! It’s under threat, folks, under threat, you know?” Everyone said, “Oh, okay, fine, he’s so much better than Trump.” Not everyone listening to this but, you know, the Democrats who voted for him. We’re a year in. What does this guy have to show for it?

Tonight is really the State of the Dumpster Fire address because that’s what Biden’s administration has been. And it’ll be fascinating to watch — and I think it’s perfect that Biden and Pelosi, no masks all of a sudden. You could not script.. If you were writing this as a screenplay, you could not write a better moment to should he the theatricality and politics behind masking all along. If anyone should continue masking, it’s Biden, it’s Pelosi, it’s people basically in their eighties. By the way, you’re in your eighties, don’t mask. It doesn’t do anything. But the point is if anyone was —

CLAY: If anybody was going to do it. You’re right.

BUCK: And yet they’re gonna walk around and act like they’re heroes and they’ve been right the whole time. It’s just galling. The level of brazenness, of the lies that we’ve been told, not just on covid but on every aspect of this. Clay, Biden never should have been the nominee, never been should have been president. This is clear. It’s already clear. And Democrats recognize it at some level, but what are they gonna do? They got the tiger by the tail here.

They don’t want to deal with the alternative scenario would be having him step down for Kamala. We all that know Kamala’s probably a bigger liability for the Democrats from an electoral perspective than Biden. So I don’t know. There will be talk about jobs. Biden loves to go, “Jobs! Jobs, folks! Jobs!” He just yells it and gets all squinty and yells it. That will be a big push. He’ll say he’s created all these jobs. I don’t think anybody’s really gonna come away from… First of all, nobody’s gonna remember this speech. We’ll talk about it tomorrow to analyze it. No one’s gonna remember it. And they get nothing, man. They got nothing.

CLAY: I really do think that the pivot is going to be that they beat covid. Like, I always try to think — and this may be the lawyer training in me. But one of the things about being a lawyer is, sometimes you look at the facts and you’re like, “I got a bad side here,” (laughs) and this is where any lawyer out there can tell you, it’s a lot like being a coach. You know, sometimes it’s how good a talent you got. You gotta try to put the best game plan together, even when you’ve got a losing hand.

And Joe Biden has got maybe the worst hand in the history of a first-year presidency in any of our lives. I mean that legitimately. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. I’m not sure that you can point — and I know we got a lot of people of a lot of different ages. Buck, you and I right around 40. Some people consider that young. You know, middle-age, whatever you want to call us. Two generations. And I know there’s people out there listening who are 80 and beyond.

I don’t think, no matter how old you are right now, I don’t think we have ever had an American presidency in anyone’s life who is listening right now that has been as bad as Joe Biden’s first year. That’s not hyperbole. That’s not me trying… I know everybody wanted to compare Biden to Jimmy Carter. I think at this point it’s unfair to Jimmy Carter. Biden is far worse than Jimmy Carter ever was.

And, by the way, Jimmy Carter was competent, he was intelligent, he was able to at least fashion his own thoughts. Now, he didn’t make good choices and things did not go well for him. But Jimmy Carter is, like, orders of magnitude greater. I would trade Jimmy Carter — maybe even Jimmy Carter at this age now — for Joe Biden now. But certainly 30 years ago Jimmy Carter.

BUCK: Yeah. Something I like to remind everybody about as well is the storyline that was used, the narrative that was used to get Joe Biden elected. Put aside the covid pandemic and how they weaponized that, that was important. But I’m saying another area to focus on is this story that Joe Biden is a really decent, warm, friendly, better kind of politician.

He’s Grandpa Joe riding the Amtrak choo-choo to work every day! You know, he’s just one of the guys. Total bull. I mean, yeah, when his son is not getting paid $80,000 a month by Ukrainian oligarchs or running around a Chinese hedge funds and saying… But put all that aside for a second. Here’s the kind of stuff that Joe Biden says even this week and we’re supposed to believe he’s a nice guy?

BIDEN: We’re gonna keep pushing on this, and we’re protecting our country’s threshold liberty, the sacred right to vote — which I’ve never seen is under such attack. You know, it’s always made it harder for blacks to vote, but this is trying to figure out how to keep the black vote from it occurs from even counting.

CLAY: Total lie.

BUCK: It’s just not true.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: It’s nasty. It’s racial demagoguery, and he knows it, but he doesn’t care. He’s not a nice guy, Clay.

CLAY: Yeah, I agree he’s not a nice guy. I don’t know that he’s smart enough to even know that the things he’s saying are not true now. And “smart” may be the wrong word. I don’t know that he’s functionally with it enough to even understand arguments and counterarguments right now. I really don’t have that sense. If he’s not reading directly off a prompter…

It’s always difficult, I think, when you’re in the White House to be aware of what the real world is like because you’re in that strange universe of the White House, which is abnormal. What did Harry Truman say, “Being a president is like trying to ride a tiger”? I do think there’s truth to that whether you’re a Democrat or whether you’re Republican. But I don’t think Joe Biden has any clue what’s really going on.

When he was wearing that mask walking across that grassy field at the White House yesterday, Buck, I watched that for a couple of minutes, watched on him walk, and I thought to myself, “It is the very definition of ‘the lights are on but no one’s home,'” right? There’s no… You can almost see it in the eyes. He doesn’t have the cognitive ability to be aware.

And I know we’ve used this analogy before, Buck. But every day it feels more and more like Joe Biden is… It’s Thanksgiving, and Joe Biden is the elderly relative at your Thanksgiving dinner who is unable to know what’s going on, follow the conversation, in any way be cognizant of what the actual day-to-day activity is there.

BUCK: The Democrats are the party that mandates child abuse through masking in schools, and engages in elder abuse by propping up this guy, Joe Biden, who… I don’t like pointing this stuff out.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: But they never should have made him president. They never… It was a reckless thing to do, to pretend that he was up for this and of sound mind for the job.