Vote in Clay’s Poll: Will Cuomo Ever Run Again?

CLAY: Do you think Cuomo will run again, Buck?

BUCK: No.

CLAY: You think he’s done.

BUCK: I think… Well, I’ll have to hedge this insofar as saying, “He will never win again.” Will he run again? I don’t think so, but I wouldn’t put that in my view of absolute Crazy Town. But could he win statewide in New York again? Could Eliot Spitzer win statewide in New York? (laughs) No. That guy was toast and his political career was done forever? CNN did hire him and give him a show. It was a very bad show, but then again so are pretty much all shows at CNN.

CLAY: But think about Bill Clinton. I know Bill Clinton didn’t resign. But if Bill Clinton could have run for office again in 2000, I think he would have won, even with the Monica Lewsinsky intern scandal, even with lying under oath.

BUCK: But resignation is a little bit like an admission of guilt in politics. I mean, he can say it’s not. But this is why I think… First, there’s no way his first speech was an “I’m gonna resign” speech. No way. We heard it; we saw it.

CLAY: Last week. A hundred percent. He was gonna fight. Yes.

BUCK: So clearly he thought he could dig in and win, and it was the Democrats in the statehouse in New York who weren’t just saying — ’cause oftentimes the game, as you say, is, “Oh, so-and-so has to resign,” and then a couple of weeks pass and it’s, “Meh, he’s doing a good job. We’ll let it go.”

They weren’t willing to do it now. I’ll be fascinated — and, Clay, I’ll be making calls and reaching out to sources to try to find out what was it really was. Why did they decide that this thing, this time…? Remember, sending your grandma in a nursing home to die? Not enough for Democrats in the state of New York!

CLAY: They lifted the DOJ investigation on that.

BUCK: Right. Not enough for them to get so exercised about it that they would impeach him over it. By the way, I find that far more impeachable.

CLAY: Way worse, yes. I agree. I agree.

BUCK: The other part is why I feel like I’m living in the crazy world here, my friend. But it is American politics.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Boom! Bombshell! Literally as we’re coming on the air, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, the patron saint of the Democratic response to covid — even though the disaster that happened with the nursing homes kind of gets overlooked by Democrats, got a special Emmy.

I don’t know if he’ll get a new Emmy for this or not, but he resigned. And in 14 days he will officially be out of office. Remember, we’ve got the potential of Gavin Newsom being recalled in a little over a month in California. Can you imagine, Buck Sexton, if we ended up with the two patron saints of the Democratic response to covid, Andrew Cuomo — now gone — and Gavin Newsom potentially gone as well?

BUCK: I mean, I think that Fauci is the pope and these are —

CLAY: Can’t get rid of him ’cause he’s not elected.

BUCK: Maybe Fauci is not even a patron saint. I think the libs think Fauci is God now, so they’ve completely lost their minds.

CLAY: The Holy Ghost and the Son and everything else.

BUCK: Yeah, he’s all of the above. You know, there’s also a part of me that I’m a little disappointed in Cuomo as the bad guy here. I kind of thought he was —

CLAY: You wanted it to drag on. You wanted a real fight.

BUCK: You thought he was gonna go out like Tony Montana in Scarface. You know what I mean. I thought it was gonna be him in the mansion with all the guys coming, and he’s like, “I’m going down fighting.” By the way, still a great movie.

CLAY: It is still a great movie.

BUCK: Very violent, but great movie to this day. And knowing he must have thought that he could rally allies in the state legislature, didn’t have ’em, and realized that it was a doomed effort, ’cause I do believe that if he thought there was any chance he could survive an impeachment, he would have gone to trial.

I don’t think he’s trying to… His whole thing in the speech was (impression), “I’m trying to prevent New York from being dragged into…” No, no. I think his thing was, “I can’t win this fight; so what’s the point?” If he had any belief that he was gonna come out, I think he would have been willing to go to the mattresses on it, but he absolutely did not. It was also just a crazy moment of political theater to be defending yourself. Imagine if Bill Clinton did this.

CLAY: And just pivot like he did.

BUCK: Imagine if Bill Clinton would have said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman but I’m not president anymore. I’m done.” You would have been like, “What?” That’s basically what Cuomo did, right? It’s like, “I didn’t do it, I’m not a bad guy, but I’m actually gonna step down.” So that’s —

CLAY: I think what’s happening here, Buck — and I think you’re gonna eventually come around on this, ’cause it seems like as you’re kind of processing it, I think this is about maintaining his political viability.

BUCK: Okay. We’re gonna have to just place a bet on this one.

CLAY: Only way. What is a good bet here?

BUCK: Fancy barbecue in Nashville versus fancy barbeque in Brooklyn in New York, and meal on me, ’cause maybe he kind of thinks about running… Even when Anthony Weiner was running everybody thought it was gross —

CLAY: Yeah, right.

BUCK: — when he was running for mayor of New York after he had resigned from his congressional seat. I just don’t see —

CLAY: Who’s the biggest comeback kid of all time? Well, I say “all time.” Modern era in politics.

BUCK: Well, you could go to —

CLAY: Clinton obviously.

BUCK: Grover Cleveland, right? He came back after losing.

CLAY: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. In the modern era. I mean somebody who would be alive that we would be able to point to. They went out in some way in a scandalous fashion. I think Clinton is probably the closest.

BUCK: Yeah. The Clinton brand somehow managed to get much wealthier, much bigger, and much more corrupt even after the debacle of Clinton’s actual time in office.

CLAY: Monica Lewinsky and everything else that went on there. He managed to fight his way through, but in terms of somebody that everybody just totally wrote off, I mean, Nixon when he lost the first time people said, “Oh, Nixon is done when he lost to Kennedy,” and then he managed to go out and come back and get elected in, what, ’68 and reelected in ’72.

BUCK: You gotta say, as grotesque as it is, it’s amazing that Ralph Northam is still the governor of Virginia given how that whole thing went down.

CLAY: That’s pretty wild.

BUCK: That’s pretty crazy.

CLAY: He’s a one-termer, and we talked about that a little bit. It is this perfect political theater that all three of the top people in Virginia who were Democrats were going to have to resign, which would have gotten a Republican in, because I think if that hadn’t been the case, they probably would have chopped each of those guys down.

BUCK: Yeah, I don’t think the best story there was that number three, Mark Herring, initially called for the Governor Northam to resign over the blackface/Ku Klux Klan, “I’m not sure which one it was.”

CLAY: Yes. Yes. Yes.

BUCK: — and Herring had to say, “Well, actually I’ve got my own little issue with a blackface thing in my past.” So basically, it was the Democrats looking at this and realizing, “We’re gonna have a Republican from the legislature taking over.” It’d almost be like Nancy Pelosi becoming president.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: That’s kind of the chain of succession they were gonna have in the Virginia statehouse and so all the sudden it was, “Ah, I guess we’re just gonna pretend like this all cancels each other out or something.” It was insane.

CLAY: Remember Northam, too, not only did he have the picture in, like, the medical school yearbook or whatever that was, he also had put on blackface and pretended to be Michael Jackson, I think it was, back in the day.

BUCK: You’re also leaving out —

CLAY: Break dancing.

BUCK: — probably the liberals’ favorite politician outside of the U.S. on planet Earth —

CLAY: Oh, Justin Trudeau.

BUCK: — Justin Trudeau of Canada, who seemed to think that every party he went to, he had to darken his skin.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: This was his thing for a while!

CLAY: It wasn’t even that long ago. That was the nineties, he went as Aladdin. And, by the way, do you have to darken your skin to go as Aladdin?

BUCK: This is why if you walk around with a T-shirt on that says, “male feminist,” you’re not gonna get a lot of dates, but you are gonna get a lot of political protection and cover. You know what I mean?

CLAY: Those pictures were unbelievable of Justin Trudeau.

BUCK: It was wild, the whole thing.