PRESIDENT TRUMP: We will lead the conservative movement and the Republican Party back to victory, and it will be a greater victory than this party has ever had.

CROWD: (cheers)

PRESIDENT TRUMP: We will take back the House. We will take back the Senate. And then, after witnessing all that has gone wrong in our country in such a short period of time — with our borders, with our economy, with crime — we will take back that glorious White House.

CROWD: (cheers)

BUCK: Welcome back to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. There you have the former president, Donald Trump, at CPAC in Dallas over the weekend. I had a lot of friends there. I couldn’t make it this time around, but it was well attended, and certainly the keynote there at the end.

Former president Trump getting everybody particularly fired up about both what he views as very strong chance, strong future. It’s Trump, so it’s a certainty, right, Clay that he’s gonna come back and win or the GOP will win. But beyond that, he also wanted everyone to know that the Biden administration has been an abject failure, and here you go.

PRESIDENT TRUMP: In a matter of mere months, Joe Biden has brought our country to the brink of ruin. Right here in Texas, we are the epicenter of a border and migration crisis unlike anything anyone has ever seen before in the history of our country. At the same time, they have totally obliterated your energy industry. I told yooou!

BUCK: You know, Clay, the president was… (laughing) I’m sorry. That’s an accident. The former president… If I was talking to him, we’d say “Mr. President.” The former president was in his usual form at CPAC, and I gotta say, he’s got the energy; he’s got that same electricity and charisma. He won the straw poll. There was a CPAC straw poll. DeSantis had the second best showing. But it feels like… I know we’re wagering for the presidency. It feels like going into the midterms, he is the single most powerful voice the GOP has of opposition against the Biden fiasco.

CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt. You mentioned that Texas straw poll, the CPAC Texas straw poll result without Trump… All right. So let’s start with that one. Ron DeSantis, 68%; Pompeo 5%; Donald Trump Jr., 4%. So DeSantis just dominates in a marketplace without Trump. With Trump, Trump gets 70%; Ron DeSantis gets 26%.

He has become such a big part of the story, indeed, that Kristi Noem’s even taking shots at him during her speech which I thought was kind of interesting in and of itself. We have some of the audio of the CPAC event. But Kristi Noem took some pretty good shots at him. I think we have the audio, right, Buck?

NOEM: We talk about rewriting history. Let’s talk about rewriting history. We’ve got Republican governors across this country pretending they didn’t shut down their states, that they didn’t close their beaches, that they didn’t mandate masks, that they didn’t issue shelter-in-places. Now, I’m not picking fights with Republican governors. All I’m saying is that we need leaders with grit —

CROWD: (smattering of applause)

NOEM: — that their first instinct is to make the right decision, that they don’t backtrack and then try to fool you into the fact that they never made the wrong decision.

BUCK: Hold on, hold on, hold on a second here, Governor Noem. I have a little bone to pick, little issue here. We gotta… First of all, okay, thou shalt not attack thy fellow conservative Republican governor. That should be — and I know she didn’t name him, but we all kind of know who Kristi’s taking a shot at.

CLAY: When you said beaches —

BUCK: I think it was clear.

CLAY: — that’s kind of pretty clear.

BUCK: It’s not Oklahoma we’re talking about here.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Nothing but love for Oklahoma, but we’re not talking about the beaches there.

CLAY: This is a lot of angling going on behind the scenes to start to line up some donors in the event that Trump doesn’t decide to run. And Noem sees herself — because they never really shut down her state, to be fair. She, you know, obviously it’s a different state than Florida or Texas.

BUCK: Right. It isn’t Texas. I mean, South Dakota’s got a couple million people and has a population density — and we love our South Dakota listeners. It’s not that. But I’m just stating some facts here. The population density is more similar to islands in Polynesia than what you got in, you know, the densely populated eastern corridor of the United States along I-95, right?

CLAY: It’s even less than a million people, Buck.

BUCK: I said a couple. Okay.

CLAY: The whole state doesn’t even have a million people. So comparing the way that you respond to covid, to be fair, in South Dakota with Florida or Texas where they have obviously big population governors, that’s a big difference.

BUCK: And the bigger issue, and I’m sorry Ron DeSantis… Look I’m sure Ron’s gonna take the high road on this and just let it go, because Noem was also a little bit agitated about the fact that a lot of conservative media folks — and I gotta I’m one of them — were very displeased with her for backing down from the fight over that trans-sports bill in her state.

And she went on Tucker’s show, and it was not a good look. It was not a good showing for her there. She seemed very smarmy and like she knew something everyone else doesn’t know. Yeah, what we knew is that she backed out of the fight in a way that she shouldn’t have.