CLAY: Welcome in! Friday edition, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton show. I am coming to you live from the free state of Florida. Buck would have been here if he had not gotten Omicron. He is — with his scarf — hanging out in his apartment almost at the end of his quarantine process — 80 degrees and sunny down here. We have got an awesome present for our listeners in the Fort Myers area.
It’s gonna be a really cool, 5 to 7 o’clock Eastern here. We’re looking forward to meeting hundreds of our listeners down here. Got a lot of great affiliates, Buck. You and I are gonna get out and about, some on the road during the course of 2022, and hopefully be able to meet a lot of our different listeners all over the country. We got an event coming up in Houston in the in the future.
One of the craziest ones I saw, Buck: Only 28% of voters nationwide want Joe Biden to run for reelection in 2024, and so there’s been an attempt to manufacture a crisis. And that manufactured crisis has to be outside of the Democratic Party because we got crises with everything that’s going on with the murder rate. You’ve got the border disaster, covid at all-time highs. You have inflation at a high going about it all the way back to 1982.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: I get along great with Ron. Ron was very good on the Mueller hoax. He was right up front along with Jim Jordan and all of the rest of them. They were fantastic. The Republicans really stuck together, and it was a great thing. And Ron was one of them, and Ron wanted to run, and I endorsed him and that helped him greatly, and he went on and he’s done a really terrific job in Florida.
And I think, you know, Ron has been very good. He’s been a friend of mine for a long time. It’s like totally fake news. I think Ron said last week — he said it very publicly. He says, “The press is never gonna get in the middle of my friendship with Donald Trump. We’re not gonna do that stuff,” and he said it very strongly. I thought (chuckles) it was very interesting, actually and is very nice. But he said that. And I agree with him on that a hundred percent.
BUCK: I never bought this, Clay, that there was some feud. It’s so obvious, right? It’s the oldest trick in the book for the libs to point out at this time some open warfare breaking out between the Trump and DeSantis camps. They are terrified because let me say this: I think they recognize, what, we have 28% of Americans want Biden to run again? You told me that poll right before we came on air. I think they’re terrified because they realize not only could Trump right now beat Biden, DeSantis right now would beat Biden.
And if the two of them work together in any capacity, whoever is actually on the ticket or whatever the case may be, there’s no way the Biden regime is gonna get for more years. And they already know it. So they’re willing to play the dirtiest tricks. These are the same people that say January 6th was an insurrection. So, yeah, they’re trying to start a fight between Trump and DeSantis, and we shouldn’t fall for that for a second because there’s no reason for them to fight.
CLAY: Well, this is what I think is going to be the big question going forward, Buck. It is to what extent is 2022 and then later 2024 depending how exactly it lays out a referendum on Joe Biden? To the extent that Biden is the story, and the Democratic Party is the story — which is what it should be — then Democrats are gonna get destroyed, because what they did in 2020 was hide Joe Biden and try to make 2020 a referendum on Trump, in particular based on covid.
And now the referendum on Biden is an unmitigated disaster. There is no way to defend Biden. In fact, Biden right now is clearly going to be the worst president pretty much of any of our lives. When you really look at how badly things are going… Now, maybe he can start to pull things up in the next couple of years. Maybe things won’t be as bad as they are right now. But we’re talking about a historically inept presidency on virtually every level.
That’s why I thought it was funny that Biden said, of all the ridiculous things he said in his press conference on Wednesday, Buck, the idea that he believed he had outperformed expectations is maybe the most ludicrous of anything. Because even the most dyed-in-the-wool, die-hard Joe Biden fan isn’t willing to accept the idea that he has in some way delivered any form of excellence at all.
BUCK: Jimmy Carter is one of the big winners of the Biden presidency because I think, Clay, we’ve reached the point where Jimmy Carter’s like, “I’m much better than that guy,” you know? I think Jimmy Carter has a lot of room to make the argument that Joe Biden is far less competent than even he was already. So you start with that, and then I think on the DeSantis Trump front, let’s keep in mind: They want to us focus on that feud, which doesn’t exist.
But they want to create that feud in advance of the midterms. We’re not even in the presidential cycle right now. And why is it so important for them to create this perception that there’s disunity among the GOP? Because you have both Trump — who is still a very potent force among Republicans and very much able to get people fireman and mobilized — and you have Ron DeSantis — who, as governor of the state of Florida where you are right now (where I wish I was but covid) — he’s proving the model of Republican governance in the era of covid in a way that I think is gonna be a critical component of the GOP hopefully shellacking that they hand out to the Democrats this fall.
So we’re in a midterm cycle, we’re not in a presidential cycle, and so all this stuff about, “Oh, but, you know, DeSantis and Trump,” is they’re trying to distract. They’re trying to turn us against each other, and I was honestly so happy to hear — wasn’t surprised but happy to hear — that from Trump, just because this is the way it’s gotta be. We have to crush the commies this year. That is the focus.
CLAY: And, Buck, I would point this out to your I think astute observation there. We’re in a midterm. What the Democrats are basically doing by trying to create conflict between Trump and DeSantis is default acknowledging that DeSantis is gonna win in 2022, because he’s gonna be on the ballot down here in Florida where I am in November. So if they’re already talking about how DeSantis won’t bow down to Trump in 2024, they’re implicitly acknowledging — by creating that conflict this early — that 2022 is not going to be a challenge.
‘Cause remember initially, Buck, in the early days of covid, they tried to argue, “We’re gonna knock DeSantis out. The way he has run the state of Florida is going to leave him vulnerable, and we’re gonna beat him in 2022.” It’s an off-year election. Florida isn’t voting at the same time as a presidential election. He narrowly won in 2018, and they were thinking, hey, we’re going to knock him out as a viable national candidate by beating him in 2022.
Now, just based on this narrative cycle, they are implicitly acknowledging, “Hey, he’s gonna win, and it may not even be very close. Let’s go ahead and try to create angst between Trump and DeSantis.” They’re already a narrative cycle ahead. They’re already effectively acknowledging the butt kicking that they are gonna get in 2022 and trying to serve up some protection for 2024.
BUCK: Yeah. The person that’s running, as I understand it, against Ron DeSantis on the Democrat side for governor is pretty unserious year, Nikki Fried, who is the Florida commissioner of agriculture. Also, my Florida friends tell me that this is one of the worst years in memory for the citrus harvest, which is a big deal in Florida for obvious reasons. It is the Sunshine State. It is the citrus state in many ways. So Ron DeSantis, you’re right, he’s probably looks like he’s a shoo-in for governor.
But keep in mind, adding to all that is all the people who have moved to Florida who are overwhelmingly gonna be DeSantis supporters. And so this now becomes a state that is looking like isn’t just a little but is gonna be solidly red for the foreseeable future. And it’s in direct contravention of what they were telling us was gonna happen early on in the pandemic. You remember this. They were like, “Just wait and see what happens in Florida. Just wait ’til all the mayhem and the unmasked destruction that will go on.”
Yeah, if by that you mean hundreds of thousands of people running to Florida saying please, “Please, can I live here instead of the psycho-lib state of…?” Usually it’s California, New York, maybe New Jersey, a few other places. That’s what’s been occurring. So we’ve run the experiment, Florida won, and now what do we do with that political momentum? That’s what I think remains to be seen, and that’s why I’m so glad DeSantis and Trump are gonna be working together on this.
CLAY: Buck I’ll tell you this when I walked outside of the Fort Myers airport — it’s not as big a deal for me obviously ’cause I live in Nashville, which is also a free state inside of Tennessee. But the number of people from the East Coast walking outside of the airport and ripping off their masks the moment they walked outside of the airport, it’s like seeing people suddenly being able to cross the Berlin Wall back in the day.
You were coming from East Germany to West Germany, and you just feel the freedom sort of emanating everywhere. There’s a joy and a glee and a euphoria that you will see when those East Coast airplanes land in Florida and people come walking out of the airport, rip off their masks, breathe the warm air, and they’re like, “Oh, my God. I’m free again.”
BUCK: I feel like Andy Dufresne in Shawshank, but instead of sewage, it’s communism that’s dripping off of me, and I’m walking out into the free sunshine of the state of Florida every time I leave that airport. It is a remarkable feeling. It is absolutely the closest thing to feeling like you’re crossing over the actual Iron Curtain back in the 1950s and the 1960s, and everybody who’s lived in both places knows it. You’re no safer in New York than you are in Florida — in fact, the opposite recently — when it comes to covid.
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