CLAY: I don’t know how many of you saw the press conference yesterday — I’m gonna play a couple of cuts for you — but to me the most troubling moment of this press conference was when a photo went out that showed Joe Biden holding a piece of paper that says, “Tough Putin Q&A Talking Points” with the questions and the answers already there.
For instance, the first question, Buck, that was there was, “If you weren’t advocating for regime change, what did you mean? Can you clarify?” and then there are bullet points here. “I was expressing the moral outrage I felt toward the actions of this man. I was not articulating a change in policy.” It’s multi-pages here, basically letting him know what questions he was going to be getting and what his answer should be, which plays in…
I know, Buck, people used to want to say, “Oh, Trump is the Manchurian Candidate. Somebody’s whispering in his ear! He’s not making his own choices.” Clearly Joe Biden is not the captain of his own ship in the White House. This is a I believe Ron Klain presidency. Ron Klain is the chief of staff. Biden is not capable right now of being the commander-in-chief.
BUCK: Let’s just compare for a moment the calls that were made regularly by biggest Democrat news outlets in the country to remove President Trump using the 25th Amendment, which is not a “I don’t like the guy in charge” amendment. It’s the “this person is physically and mentally incapable.”
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Incapable! Not, “I don’t like,” incapable of doing the job. President Trump would do off-the-cuff rallies for 2-1/2 hours at a time where he was funny, he would talk policy, he’d have one-liners. He did this all throughout his presidency. President Trump would stop constantly and not just take questions from the press.
Remember, the press walks around holding little glasses of lemonade for Joe Biden, holding little sippy cups for him. It’s pathetic. But that’s basically what they do. Obviously, Peter Doocy and a handful of others are exceptions to that. But in general, the press just walks around, you know, fluffing the pillows for Biden and making sure that he’s comfortable.
Trump walked around — the guy they said was not of sound mind, Trump, walked around — and was dealing with ambushes from the press corps off the cuff. He didn’t have a little note card that said, “Oh, this is what you’re gonna say,” and he was slapping the press around so effectively, so to speak, in a manner of speaking, given the slap discussion.
CLAY: (laughing) Yeah.
BUCK: Clay, they were constantly outraged about it because he was better at it than they were. And I just think you sit here, you say, “Isn’t it amazing, one presidency to the next, the way…? You don’t even hear whispers from the press corps about the 25th Amendment with somebody who…” Just watch him, folks. Just listen to him.
CLAY: Let’s listen to a couple of these cuts if you missed it yesterday. First Biden says, I’m not walking anything back. Let’s play cut 3.
CLAY: So he is walking it back, Buck, but more difficult to even analyze here is, the White House. Biden can’t be upset with anybody in the media or anyone out there who was paying attention to what he was saying. His own White House immediately after his off-the-cuff comments at the end, the nine words about “For God’s sake,” we basically have to get rid of this guy.
Those nine words immediately necessitated a White House response making it clear that Biden wasn’t saying what he was actually saying. So that’s one. And then Peter Doocy — to his credit, as you mentioned him just a minute ago, Buck — he’s the only guy it feels like in the White House press corps who’s actually willing to point out when Biden is inconsistent, and so listen to him tell Peter Doocy don’t believe what you actually heard. You’re mistaken.
BUCK: I mean, he’s just making it up as he goes along. He’ll get away with it, and the condescending tone to do so here because the press is all in the tank for Biden as we know. By the way, they’ll continue to be in the tank for him no matter what until it turns into “we have to have a different Democrat in charge here.” Whenever that moment comes, then all of a sudden, they’ll say, “Yeah. You know what? We shouldn’t have…”
It’s the same thing you’ll see, Clay, which we’ll talk about later, with defund the police. Now we realize that the press was all in favor of this. They were all in favor of this, they’re lecturing us about the cops are racist and BLM and let’s go March in the streets and now a lot of people are dead who wouldn’t have been based on the massive increase in homicides across the country, the biggest increase we’ve had in recorded history over an 18-month period.
Last year was the worst year in 25 years for murders nationwide and guess what? In the Biden budget now, they’re talking about refunding. Now with Joe Biden they’re still pushing the lie, right? We’re in the “march in the streets ’cause it feels good” phase still for the press at some level and also there’s this prospect of a nuclear war in the background; so people do want… I actually want the president to do well on this issue.
I actually want President Biden (almost said “Trump”) to handle this in an adept fashion. But he’s not, Clay. And we all know why, and it’s not surprising, and we saw this coming, and they’re going to keep the lie going here that this wasn’t… The elevation of Biden as the presidency from the basement campaign of 2020 wasn’t reckless and they weren’t just being cynical and exploiting a moment of national panic because of covid — as well as the panic over BLM and the racists police and the racist system — until eventually they decide that they actually can’t push this guy anymore.
You know, there will come a point at which I think it will be unavoidable. And I think we’re getting closer and closer to that now. When you see him kind of shuffling around and muttering, it’s embarrassing for the country. What he said when he was over there was clearly… I mean, you have Democrats who are saying what he did was a problem.
CLAY: Well, and that’s why he was reading a scripted statement in Poland. And that, to me, is why, Buck, it is so staggeringly incompetent that he would go off script. Remember, the sales pitch on Biden is, this is a guy, the adults are gonna be back in the room, they’re gonna be able to do handle significant geopolitical issues. And whatever you want to say about Biden, he seems to hang his hat on his foreign policy experience.
Even though he’s wrong oftentimes, almost all of them, as one of Obama’s (chuckles) own advisers pointed out. But to just blurt out at the end of a speech something that significant, those nine words that completely destroy your previous 27 minutes, and then try to pretend… I mean, he spent now multiple days trying to explain what he meant by those comments, it really undercuts any argument at all that he’s more stable than Trump would have been.
And certainly, again, we’ve been making the argument on this program, and I think it’s the number-one question to be asking, and here in a little bit we’ll talk about this Harvard-Harris poll results which I think the American public is starting to feel the same way. It’s the question that nobody can answer if they are a big-time Democrat supporter. If Donald Trump was such an asset of the Russians, why was Vladimir Putin afraid to invade Ukraine for four years, yet as soon as Biden comes in office, he makes his move? The answer is because he feared what Trump might do. He doesn’t fear Biden.
BUCK: There are some things that have happened in the last year that are just too obvious and important and powerful as really learning moments, I think, for the country, that the apparatus around Biden — that tries to hold up the regime and tell us all how great it is — it’s just beyond their power. What you just said, Clay, they can — ’til they’re blue in the face, they can — say whatever they want.
At the end of the day, it didn’t happen for four years. It didn’t come close to happen under four years of Trump. Vladimir Putin, there was no big buildup, there was no head fake was he was going to invade in the way that he has here. And the same thing you can even say about covid. At the end of the day, more people died in Biden’s first year — the second year of a pandemic when you had better therapeutics, you had a better vaccine program, more people died under Biden — than died under Trump.
For all their talk about how if only Joe Biden were president… I had to deal with this. I remember right before the pandemic lockdown I did the Bill Maher show and the whole thing was we’re all gonna die because it’s Trump’s fault, and I couldn’t even… How am I gonna argue? First of all, at that point not a single person had yet died in the U.S. from covid. But how do I make the argument?
‘Cause they believed it. It didn’t matter that there was no reality behind it. What about that argument that Biden’s gonna save us from the virus; Biden’s gonna bring back the world on the world stage. We have a massive invasion by Russia of Ukraine and we have more people dead from covid in Biden’s first year than in Trump’s last year, which should be the…
It shouldn’t even be close, right? Biden should have had 50% or 30%, whatever. People see this. And then you add inflation and crime and the border. We’ll talk about border numbers later. Clay, it’s a mess. I mean, you and I know it’s a mess, everyone listening knows it’s a mess, but we gotta hammer this home.
CLAY: Well, and ultimately that’s why if Trump was still in office, it would be — covid would be — a cudgel that would be being slammed over and over and over into him and they would be saying as we approach a million covid deaths — and I’m putting “deaths” in quotation marks, or “covid deaths” in quotation marks because again a lot of people are dying with covid, not because of it.
But what Biden coming into office has shown, in my opinion, is that political responses to covid were almost all wrong in general and almost no impact. Right? I mean, when you really break this down, I think what we have now seen is the idea that there was any president out there that was going to make it such that covid was not going to have a massive impact on any country is a lie.
And even in China — which I’m fascinated to see how this plays out now, Buck — with them shutting down Shanghai, they’ve had almost no one, in theory, in China who’s had any exposure to covid at all. Based on what happened in New Zealand and based on what happened in Australia, I don’t see how China avoids that scurrying now because Zero Covid is not a continued tangible goal. And so I think China is in for a world of hurt personally over how covid I’m gonna spread there.
BUCK: Of course, there’s no political accountability in China until… Well, if that happened, that would really shake the earth.
CLAY: That would upset the geopolitical applecart for sure.
BUCK: That would be a big deal. You would think that in places like New Zealand and Australia, here in America, Canada — places where there are still elections that have some real meaning — there needs to be accountability. Accountability is not, “Oh, let’s just move on to the next thing.” It’s you morons destroyed lives and businesses and stole countless people’s basic freedom and dignity under the promise you were keeping them “safe from covid.”
And you were wrong. And that means you should never be in a position of decision-making or authority ever again. That’s what accountability means. It doesn’t mean that you just get to go on to the next thing and, “Oh, we’ll see how the next covid season is.” Unh-uh. Not on our watch, folks. Not gonna allow it.
CLAY: Amen.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CONWAY: What we all say is very funny. I’ve been saying on the show for a while now. It’s not funny anymore. These are very serious times. People are suffering. They’re losing their lives. And you have a president who it’s one thing if you say, “Oh, he’s not all there and that the White House has to walk back.” It’s more fundamental than that.
It seems to me, in an exchange with Peter Doocy, it’s apparent. Nobody tells him what’s going on. Nobody tells him that they walked him back. They’re like, shh, let him be the last to know. That’s dangerous. What we see here… People are comparing him Ronald Reagan. They’re so desperate to make Joe Biden something he’s not. Comparing Joe Biden to Ronald Reagan from the 1980s? We can’t even compare Joe Biden to Joe Biden from the 1980s!
BUCK: Kellyanne Conway there speaking some sense, some cold, hard truth there about the situation with Joe Biden. Welcome to Clay and Buck show, and what we see I think is that there is a staff around Biden, and you could run — we’ve done it somewhat — clips of how they’ll say, “Sanctions are meant to deter,” and then Biden will say, “Sanctions aren’t meant to deter!”
There’s all this lack of clarity on the messaging, and again, we’re not talking about the tax rate here. We’re talking about matters of war and peace and in this case a war that involves a country with thousands of nuclear weapons at his disposal. Clay, precision, precision matters, and I remember when just Trump even wanting to meet with Kim Jong-un was considered the start of World War III by the press corps. Of course, nothing actually happened. Very different tone with Biden.
CLAY: No doubt, and also remember when Trump killed Soleimani and everyone was like, “Oh, my God! This is officially gonna be World War III now,” and the reality is, everything that Trump did made us — in my opinion — safer, and almost everything that Biden has done has made us more in danger. Just put it out there for everybody. My kids the other day had a nuclear war drill. How many of you have even heard of a nuclear war drill in the last 30 years? It’s crazy.
Clay talked Trump's big win on Piers Morgan's big panel.
Buck puts the Matt Gaetz for AG nomination in the context of ending the long…
From pistachio Crème Brûlée to Brussels Sprouts, is this man ever happy?
Watch Clay and Buck analyze what's different about this Trump transition.
Eric Hovde speaks out over concerns about his race against Tammy Baldwin.