CLAY: Joe Biden, you’ll memorably recall, ran his entire 2020 presidential campaign predicated on the idea that he would shut down the virus, that he would take “the science” seriously and that he would do that with a federal plan that he would put in place. That sounded good enough, again, to persuade a segment of persuadable suburban voters, independents, “Hey, Joe Biden’s going to fix covid! He’ll take it seriously; Trump hasn’t.” Of course, that’s no longer true. And now Biden has just pulled up the proverbial mask and revealed, the reality is, there’s not very much the federal government can do to combat covid. This was Biden right before the holiday season.

BIDEN: Look. There’s no federal solution. This gets solved (cough) state level, and it ultimately gets down to where the rubber meets the road, and that’s where the patient is in need of help.

BUCK: Wait, so if there’s no federal solution, why is there a federal vaccine mandate?

CLAY: Well said.

BUCK: If there’s no federal solution, why do planes require you — because of FAA regulations — to mask up between bites? Remember, you’re not masking up on planes, everybody. We all drink a little water or eat. So you are actually masking up between bites. If you were running this as an actual scientific experiment, you’d have to have people enter a room with a highly transmissible aerosolized virus like, say, measles or chicken pox and have people pull their mask up and down every five minutes for an hour and see how effective it is. That is the idiocy they’re subjecting you to on planes right now. But, yeah, all of a sudden Biden’s discovering federalism, it seems? Maybe it’s just, Clay, the obvious thing here, which is the federal plans have failed. So now by saying it’s up to the states, he’s passing the buck, so to speak.

CLAY: That’s exactly what he’s trying to do. The entire rationale for him running for president ultimately boiled down to — when he was in his basement wearing in a gargantuan oversized mask with his sunglasses sometimes. The entire basis for his running for president was that he would solve covid. We are nearly one year, almost to the day as we come up on it. We’re a couple of weeks away from one full year of Joe Biden being president and what looks like is going to happen is every single day potentially between now and the one-year anniversary of Joe Biden taking office we’re going to be setting, Buck, an all-time record for new covid cases.

It’s impossible for Joe Biden to have failed more spectacularly. It’s impossible for the underlying reason, the foundation for his presidential campaign, to be more undermined than simply by looking at the data on covid. He has failed amazingly, and imagine what people would be saying if Donald Trump had won this election. They called losing their minds over covid still being an issue and Democrats would still be saying, “If Joe Biden had won, this would never happen.”

BUCK: They would impeach him for the covid mess.

CLAY: No doubt.

BUCK: They would be impeaching the president because of covid. Guaranteed.