BUCK: The Biden administration wants you to just focus on the fact that it’s done. The war is over. Our presence has gone down to — at least our official presence — zero. But how could this have happened? They actually got out in advance of the deadline. This was announced yesterday, just a little bit after Clay and I finished our show. Let’s go back to a couple of weeks ago, Joe Biden saying that they would stay. We would keep our troops there until every American came home.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Are you committed to making sure that the troops stay until every American —
BIDEN: Yeees!
STEPHANOPOULOS: — who wants to be out is out?
BIDEN: Yes.
STEPHANOPOULOS: So, Americans should understand that troops might have to be there beyond August 31st.
BIDEN: No! Americans should understand that we’re going to try to get it done before August 31st.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But, if we don’t, the troops will stay.
BIDEN: If we don’t, we’ll determine at the time who’s left.
STEPHANOPOULOS: And?
BIDEN: And if there are American force — if there’s American citizens left, we’re gonna stay till we get them all out.
BUCK: That is what he said on national TV. Very clear, you heard him. He is the commander in chief, for better for worse (we know for worse is the reality).
Clay, this is a broken promise. This is an obligation that he has to get out all of the Americans. We got out a lot of Afghans, as we know. How could we leave Americans behind in the battlefield?
CLAY: Joe Biden is done I think as a viable candidate, to the extent that he was at all, in 2024 based on these clips. It is the very foundation. If you combine that with the –July 8th, I believe it was — clips where Joe Biden said there was no way the Taliban will be able to take over Afghanistan. We’ll play that clip, and just think about.
Listen to this in conjunction with what you just heard. These are two different fundamental failures by Joe Biden. They go to the very essence of what the commander-in-chief is supposed to do. And I believe they will be the foundation of a lot of 2022 campaign ads, and I think that effectively destroys Joe Biden’s chances to be the nominee in 2024. I really do. Listen to this. Think about these in concert together.
BIDEN: No! It is not!
REPORTER: Why?
BIDEN: Because you have the Afghan troops have 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable!
BUCK: That’s a really, well-armed Taliban, by the way, just by the numbers there. So we had 300,000 on the books. We got them all armed up. We got 75,000 Taliban. Guess what? We can all do the math on that one, Clay. But the intelligence failure here. And it’s not just the intelligence community. It’s the White House. It’s the national security apparatus in general on the dissolution! It’s not that the Afghan national security force is lost, Clay, it’s that they disappeared.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: There were no Afghan national security forces after the Biden administration said they’re leaving. Between that and breaking the promise, you would think he would pay a very high political price. But I actually have some concerns about whether that’s actually going to happen.
CLAY: Well, you think they’re going to try to pivot, and I think they certainly are. And there are going to allies in the media that now that there isn’t the day-to-day reaction of Afghanistan shots, where we can see all of the chaos going there. Much of the media will leave. We know that people have short attention spans. And this is really the question that we have debated.
I think the general argument, Buck, is that foreign affairs don’t dictate success or failures of presidents. General argument. I think the problem for Joe Biden is all of the failures in Afghanistan — the way we left, the leaving people behind, how quickly the country collapsed in total contravention to everything that Joe Biden had told the American public — ties in with the covid failures. It ties in with the inflation rate skyrocketing. It ties in with the border being a sieve and nobody stopping anything there, and the ongoing murder rates.
In other words, it sells the message of incompetence. And it’s like, “Hey, Joe Biden is not just incompetent in the domestic sphere. He’s also completely incompetent internationally,” and I think those audio and video in commercials are devastating to Joe Biden to put them back-to-back, because it just brings home that incompetence on a different level.
CLAY: Eight months.
BUCK: That’s what we’ve seen from Biden. However, the timing of this, unfortunately, may work in his favor in some way. As you know, a year from now, who knows what’s going to be going on, right?
CLAY: He’s so bad, so early!
BUCK: That’s right.
CLAY: It’s like a sporting event when you’re down 35-0 in the first quarter. It probably won’t get worse. You’re probably not going to lose 100 to nothing. It’s an interesting argument.
BUCK: Here’s how I think this goes. I say give it a week. I think some people are saying it’s already happening. I think there’s some evidence of that. But give it a week and the Democrat corporate media is going to be talking — and get ready for this, everybody. The gas lighting is going to be thermonuclear. It’s going to be rough.
In a week they’re going to be talking about Biden’s bravery in ending this war, and the amazing improvisation and on-the-spot leadership his team showed under tremendous pressure. And they’ll look at anybody who questions what will be a Soviet style rewriting of history like they are crazy, Clay. It’s just going to turn into: “Biden got us out. It doesn’t matter how he did it.
“He’s the best because he did it,” and anybody who says, “Wait, hold on a second. What about the whole collapse? What about the leaving Americans behind? What about the 13 service members that we lost because we were reliant,” and let’s never forget this, “on Taliban checkpoints for our last foothold of evacuation territory in Afghanistan?” They’re going to be saying: “Nothing’s perfect. Biden!” They’re going to be dismissive about it.
CLAY: I think there’s some truth to it. I don’t even think they’re going to argue it. I think they’re going to rely on the American people having, in many ways, the memory spans of goldfish, Buck. And I think they will just stop talking Afghanistan at all and expect and hope that much as, for the last 20 years, most of the time nobody talked about Afghanistan. They’re going to hope this is going to fade.
I think a good campaign will use these clips and keep recirculating them to reemphasize, “Look, what was the number one thing that Biden sold to the American people? ‘I’ll be normal. Things are going to be back to normal and you can trust me.'” Things are not back to normal, Buck, and you can’t trust him — the very foundation of his electoral legitimacy — and then you’re toss in covid. He said, “You can trust me. I’m going to get things back to normal. I will beat covid.” He’s fundamentally failed on all of those issues.
BUCK: Yeah, I’m going to question the virus, not the economy, which is what he said. And I know right now, the stock market’s really high, but that’s because people are getting ready for inflation. And if you have assets — if you have hard assets, if you have money in stocks — this is what you’re going do.
CLAY: You have nowhere else to put them.
BUCK: You’re going to put money into places where asset values will rise with the rest as a result of our monetary policy, which is also a tax on wage earners, is a tax on people that they don’t see. But that’s also before the huge spending bill is coming.
But I just feel like, Clay, we are seeing already the pivot is coming. Biden is going to be speaking today. It’s supposed to be 1:30 Eastern Time, folks. We will join it in progress if we can. Who knows how late it will be, but I will say this for us. We know and we saw the true weighing of the Biden administration and its team in a moment of crisis, and they have been found wanting.
CLAY: No doubt.
CLAY: They are not the adults as they claim.
BUCK: Exactly. So, because we know this going forward, we can assess everything else they do with the full confidence that this is a buffoon squad. These are the people that couldn’t figure out which way was up in Afghanistan. Let’s not pretend like they know how to secure the border or how to handle crime in cities or how to be good stewards of the economy or how to push back against the socialists that are overtaking their own ranks. Really, the socialist party is the Democrat Party now. That’s what we can all remember.
CLAY: I also am curious whether the failures in Afghanistan are going to immediately translate into the Biden’s budget, the Bernie budget, and how that is going to play out as both the House and the Senate, because the pivot that is going to happen after Labor Day when the congressmen and the senators come into D.C. and that budget policy begins to be debated in earnest.
Has Biden lost some moderate support in the House? Have Sinema and Manchin being looked at this and said, “Man, we don’t really want to tie our electoral futures to Joe Biden’s regime. This is a one-term president. We’re going to lose the majority next year.” Those are all big questions directly connected to what happened in Afghanistan. But, first, what you got for us, Buck?
BUCK: Well, also, Clay, we should look at there are still Americans on the ground.
CLAY: Oh, there’s no doubt. We’ve got audio to prove it.
BUCK: What are we going to do to get them out, and what’s the administration going to do?
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: That’s the piece that I think is delaying the pivot play, because while there are Americans in harm’s way, they can’t fully get the spin cycle going.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: Now, we were talking as we went to break there, about Joe Biden breaking his promises. And some people already, Buck, to your point, are saying, “Well, there’s not really any Americans left on the ground,” or, “Anybody that’s left in Afghanistan at this point, well they just didn’t want to go back to America,” that’s not true at all, Buck.
BUCK: Yeah, the bull crap machinery is underway here.
CLAY: Yeah, and there are people making those arguments already. But I got to give credit. Clarissa Ward, who has been doing a fantastic job on the ground in Kabul for CNN, a legitimate reporter, she analyzed this and said, “Hey, I can talk about a family that expressly wants to get out of Afghanistan and has not been able to do so.” This is her telling their story.
They were in touch with the U.S. military. The military was trying to facilitate their departure. I spoke to another U.S. citizen — a translator, female translator — worked with the military. She was actually told she could leave, but her friend, who was a SIV holder, Special Immigrant Visa holder, would not be allowed to leave, and so she made the decision to stay.
CLAY: We’re leaving people behind directly. Even CNN — at least right now, Buck Sexton — is reporting that.
BUCK: Not even just as we’re discussing this. She mentioned SIV holders, the Special Immigrant Visa.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Some of those are translators; a lot of them are people who worked for a U.S. contractor. There were two tranches of SIV holders. There’s the Immediate Military Assistance SIV. Those are the “terps.” Those are the people that guys I know in special operations are going over there… I mean, they’ll go to the ends of the earth to save those guys, because they view them as their brothers in arms, and they want them to get out. There were people that worked in construction for a U.S.-based contractor, or they worked at the embassy as a clerk or whatever. But they’re also under a different tranche of SIV. But we’re talking about American citizens!
CLAY: Families.
BUCK: Blue passport holders, families, that were left behind.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: How and you think, how is this possible? The Brits, the French were sending out convoys. We saw the video of it. The Brits were sending out their guys saying, “We’re coming to get our people.” I know the American military; if they’re told, “Here’s your objective, go pick up American citizens” —
CLAY: Especially a family, Buck!
BUCK: — in the gates of hell, Clay, they will go and get them if asked to. What happened? How is that possible we didn’t get them out?
BUCK: Nobody would be mad if you slipped up talking about the Taliban.
CLAY: (laughing)
BUCK: Maybe the FCC.
CLAY: Yeah, the FCC would be mad. Our audience would not be mad. But the idea that we are relying on a terrorist organization to safely get our people out of that country is — again, I’m going to keep beating the drum — the biggest foreign policy failure of most of our lives, certainly the biggest foreign policy failure going all the way back to the Vietnam War. I don’t think there’s any doubt. Maybe past Saigon, when you really start to think about that.
BUCK: Clay, you remember when we were talking about the Saigon moment?
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: And we were thinking, “Oh, gosh, we could be…” I think we all believed that we could be heading to something like that. This felt worse than the Saigon moment.
CLAY: Way worse! It’s way worse. We are letting Taliban shoot off fireworks while they fly around in our helicopters dangling people who are being hanged from the underside of American helicopters. It’s crazy.
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