BUCK: How does it work? I want somebody to answer that in the West Wing.

.@pdoocy on Biden not being ‘jazzed’ about Pelosi visiting Taiwan: Is President Biden just worried about hurting Xi’s feelings? pic.twitter.com/yScXZ8RFy1

— Media Research Center (@theMRC) August 3, 2022

BUCK: Monica Crowley is with us now. She knows how it works. Government, top level. She’s a former assistant secretary of the Treasury and host of The Monica Crowley Podcast you should listen to on iHeart. Hey, Monica, how you doing?

CROWLEY: Hey, Buck, I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me back.

BUCK: What do you think about this Taiwan visit? What do you think about it from a national security perspective but also economically given where we are right now? Could be some Chinese retaliation. What do you make of it all?

CROWLEY: Yeah. I mean, the timing of her trip here is really interesting. You know, a lot of times politicians will take these junkets. They’ll go on codels, congressional delegations abroad, particularly when they know that they will no longer be in office. So, they try to squeeze these trips out of the American taxpayer in the waning months of their time in, quote, unquote, public service. So, I have a feeling that Mrs. Pelosi’s trip to Asia was part of that. She will no longer be speaker come January 1st, she knows that and she may in fact retire from Congress. So, I think she thought of this trip as, like, her last big international travel on the taxpayer dime.

So, that’s one thing. From a national security at some point, look. You’ll recall that Barack Obama wanted to do a tilt toward Asia away from Europe, and there is a huge argument to be made for that. Obama and Biden didn’t execute that particularly well. And Biden is just a strategic mess. I mean, there’s nobody in this administration doing any kind of strategic thinking in any area of the world. But when specifically, when it comes to China you’ve got an administration that is wholly compromised by the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP. So, they are our number one adversary, and we’ve got a a commander-in-chief, Buck, that is completely stripped of any kind of ability to counter the CCP in any kind of effective way.

So, for Mrs. Pelosi to go, you know, it could have been — look. It could have gone worse and it could have gone better. It could have gone worse where the CCP really did what they threatened to do which is shoot her out of the sky, which they were everyone gonna do but the rhetoric was there, versus really do things that would strengthen our allied relationships in the region with the Philippines, with Japan, with South Korea. And I didn’t see any of that materialize out of her trip. So, it was provocative to the Chinese, but I’m all for it. I think we need a far more aggressive strategy toward the CCP economically, geopolitically, culturally, politically, in every direction.

But this trip just sort seemed to kind of be vanilla in the sense that it didn’t have an effect one way or the other — now, the CCP could retaliate. We could see some action that is going to be kind of a delayed response. Remember after 9/11 people in this country were so infuriated and outraged by the terror attack that they wanted retaliation immediately against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. It came several months after once we had really gotten our act together to respond in Afghanistan and elsewhere. I think in this case we might see something. And I think, Buck, it’s gonna come in an economic form. I don’t know how, what kind of shape that will take. But I do think that the CCP is not gonna just allow this visit to Taiwan just to go unanswered. So, we need to be on standby for — and brace for whatever the CCP might have planned.

BUCK: Speaking to Monica Crowley. You can check out The Monica Crowley Podcast on iHeart. Monica, you were in the Treasury department under Trump, and you were seeing the kind of decisions that were involved in a booming economy, in some ways the best economy in certainly recent memory, perhaps even distant memory. When you see that the Democrats are trying to slip through this reconciliation bill hundreds of billions in spending, hundreds of billions in tax increases, what does this mean to you, we’re gonna get ready for, we’re gonna see here in the economy if it goes through?

CROWLEY: This is a catastrophic bill, and I find myself saying that with everything that the Biden administration and the Democrat Congress has done over the last, what, 19 months. This is an historic catastrophe. And now they want to compound this historic catastrophe by spending another trillion dollars made up of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax increases, which will affect you and me. This is going to affect every single American. It’s gonna affect every small business. This is not just about going after the billionaires and the millionaires like they like to demonize the wealthy in this country. This is now going to affect everybody. They are lying to you when they say no one making under 400 grand a year is gonna be affected. That is a straight-up lie. It is going all the way down the income scale to those making even $30,000 a year.

So, this is what they want. They want to put the squeeze on everybody. The critical element to this, too, is they are going to hire between 75 and 87,000 new IRS agents. And they say they want to do that, Buck, for enforcement to try to squeeze more money out of industries and billionaires. That is false. They are coming after the place where the most money is, and that’s the American middle class, and that is small business in this country. So, enjoy your audit because you will be audited because they’ve gotta squeeze as much money out of the rest of us as possible. And in terms of the macro story, spending another trillion dollars in this kind of inflationary environment, Buck, this — if you think inflation is bad you now, just wait. If you think the economy is weak now, just wait, because it’s gonna take all of these negative economic indicators that we’re all suffering through right now and put it on steroids.

It makes absolutely zero logical sense unless you understand exactly where they’re coming from, which is this is about the fundamental transformation of the nation. This is about moving us away from economic freedom and individual liberty and toward a neo-Marxist state. That is what they want. That’s why they are spending this way. They are driving us into oblivion. They are deliberately torpedoing the U.S. economy. All of this is by design. So, it makes logical sense when you know what they’re really all about and what they’re really up to here in terms of spending and all of these policies.

BUCK: Monica Crowley. Check out her podcast, The Monica Crowley Podcast on iHeart. Monica, thanks so much.

CROWLEY: Always a pleasure, Buck. Thank you.