BUCK: We wanted to start with the Biden speech in Warsaw over the weekend in Poland. It was pretty standard. There was nothing about it that would have stuck out to anybody as he spoke on Saturday in Warsaw, until he said off the cuff… Remember he went off script on this one. Here he is saying something that got a lot of eyebrows raised and a lot of people’s anxiety spiked. Play it.

JUST IN: Pres. Biden closes his speech in Warsaw, Poland, with remarks aimed at Russian Pres. Putin: “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.”

“Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia.” https://t.co/NDK87OwSXa pic.twitter.com/pE7vaokp7G

— ABC News (@ABC) March 26, 2022

BUCK: “This man,” meaning Putin, Clay, “cannot remain in power.” Among the highest concerns of those of us — and I would put myself in this camp, in this mind-set — who do not want the U.S. dragged into a military conflict. Regime change, that’s something we learned over 20 years now comes with a very high price tag and a lot of risks. The White House and the State Department have walked back these comments. But just a stunning blunder from Joe Biden to essentially say, “Yeah, Putin shouldn’t be running that country anymore. Maybe somebody should do something about it.”

CLAY: Well, this is what I think all of us are afraid of, Buck, which is when Biden goes off prompter and decides to go off script, he is, one, not in control of his own presidency because immediately they tried to clean up that mess that he created, and they even made it clear, I thought, Buck — which is rare, relatively speaking — that he had gone off script. It’s as if the Biden White House is throwing the president — who ostensibly should be making the decisions about what’s going on in his own administration — to the wolves and saying, “Oh, this was all him. This wasn’t us.”

And it’s troubling on a couple of different levels to me when I saw this come out on Saturday. One, we elect the president, and the president should be able to make choices about the direction of his administration. He’s not doing that, Buck. This is, I really believe, a Ron Klain presidency. Ron Klain is the chief of staff in the White House. We know Kamala Harris isn’t some devious mastermind behind the scenes pulling strings to end up as the orchestrating power there. It’s Ron Klain.

So we have elected someone as president of the United States that his own staff does not trust to make his own decisions. And, two, Buck, they talk to us as if we are imbeciles in the way that they immediately responded when they put this statement out and then came back and said effectively, “Oh, you know, this was not… Even though you just heard explicitly what he said, and we just played it, that wasn’t what he was trying to say.” This is scary. I mean, this is scary that they don’t trust him to do anything other than read the prompter — and he’s not, certainly, drafting these speeches. Somebody else is. He is a default non-president already at this point.

BUCK: Well, for so many years now the media’s played this game where all of the Biden blunders have an excuse, ’cause there’s a lot of them.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: All of the things that he says — and whether it’s something that’s offensive or something that is problematic from a policy side of things, something that has greater impact than just saying things that would get a Republican in a whole heap of trouble. They say, “Biden has a stutter,” or they say, “Oh, that’s just old Joe being Joe,” or they come up with all these things. Many of us have been saying Joe Biden’s a buffoon and has been for a very long time, and now he’s a buffoon who is way past the point in his life in terms of energy and mental clarity where he should be in this position.

We’ve seen this playing out now since he took the presidency, and when you have Vladimir Putin and a major war — I mean, this is full scare war we’re talking about and we’re seeing day in and day out in Ukraine — these things matter. If Donald Trump had been the commander-in-chief and in the same set of circumstances had made a comment like that, they would absolutely…

The New York Times, the Washington Post would be calling for the 25th Amendment, the invocation of it. “Oh, my gosh! He’s a clear and present danger. His mental fitness for office puts us at risk of nuclear annihilation.” Everybody listening to this knows that is what they would be saying. With Joe Biden it’s, “Oh, that’s just Joe being Joe.” Meanwhile, there’s ongoing negotiations.

They are elevating negotiations between Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, and Putin, the president of the Russian Federation, for a neutrality status, essentially come up with a deal to stop the bombs and the bullets so that no more people are being killed there. That is the first order of business. What Biden did by saying this is clearly unhelpful to that ultimate goal of let’s get the war to stop.

CLAY: It almost feels like Biden is just rebelling against his own managers, right? And Buck, you know this as someone who has paid attention to politics for a long time. Oftentimes what ends up happening is older people are political officials, men and women, and then almost all of their staff are in their twenties and early thirties. And so there’s a staggering generational divide on its face between the average politician…

I mean, think about it. Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, all of the people in incredibly high levels of political authority right now are old, right, in their seventies or above, and they’re all sorts of interesting conversations we can have about what the impact of that might be. But it felt like to me this was Joe Biden on some level rebelling against his handlers. And I understand he gets wrapped up in the rhetoric that he’s reading, but this is such an egregious failure because the entire speech…

I think he spoke, Buck, for 27 minutes. Nobody talked about anything other than those final — I think it was nine — words that he added at the end which changed the entire tenor, scope, and entire intent of that speech, and it’s just… It’s wild. To your point on the 25th Amendment, we heard about Trump needing to be replaced all the time for the 25th Amendment. Biden is so far beyond — from a mental faculty perspective — where Trump was. He’s a mess.

BUCK: And I think the libs in the media, I think the journos are frustrated with Biden because this was the moment for them. From a domestic political perspective, Ukraine was the moment where they got to shift the narrative away from all of the failures and present Biden — and so much of foreign policy writing and analysis and news reporting is just people just almost wish-casting their perception of, you know, “Joe Biden on the world stage making us proud.” How?

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: By reading speeches and… There’s so much of this that they just get to frame it the way that they want to, and this is why journos generally get very interested in presenting their foreign policy credentials and their version of events. Joe Biden here was supposed to have — and I’m talking about from the mind of the Democrat media apparatus — a moment where he would be the steady hand. He would show everybody how this is his moment.

And I do think there’s frustration, Clay, really frustration among the journos who voted for him — they’re all Democrats, they’re leftists, et cetera — because he’s not actually getting some Biden bump in this moment. You’ve pointed out he’s not Zelensky’s right-hand man in terms of the polling and how it would reflect that Biden’s right there with him and he’s helping fight all this back. Here was Chuck Todd on the Sunday show talking about an NBC News poll. This is where Biden is in approval rating, folks: 40%. Play it.

NEW NBC POLL: Biden’s approval rating is at 40% — “his worst showing yet”

71% of Americans DO NOT have confidence in Biden’s ability to respond to the Russia-Ukraine war. pic.twitter.com/eY9sQOlLuE

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 27, 2022

BUCK: They thought he’d get a bump from his leadership on this issue, Clay, and rallying NATO. The bump has not materialized, because of the bumps Biden has had along the way.

CLAY: Yeah, and to your point, Buck, this was supposed to be Joe Biden’s West Berlin, Ronald Reagan, “Tear down this wall,” Mr. Gorbachev moment. This was supposed to be… This trip was supposed to elevate Biden to make arguments on behalf of American democracy around the world in an iconic fashion. The speech location, if you watched it, was all stagecraft perfect. And when Biden stepped off the stage, all anyone wanted to talk about was his real clear call for regime change.