BUCK: It takes gall, honestly, to go on TV and — not courage ’cause they’re being compensated for this and they’re megalomaniacs and they’re narcissists and they’re selfish, but it does take a certain chutzpah. That’s a good word for it, to go and present yourself as a Republican who only spends time attacking other Republicans. Like, your job as the one true Republican is to undermine everything that the GOP and, yes, Trump and the Trump movement stands for. Liz Cheney has been pulling that routine, to much applause from Democrats, the strange found new respect, Clay, that they have for Liz Cheney in Democrat circles. “I don’t agree with her, but she shows so much gumption, so much backbone.”
In fact, Clay, she even compares herself to Abraham Lincoln.
CHENEY: The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all. Lincoln ultimately prevailed, he saved our union, and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history. Speaking at Gettysburg of the great task remaining before us, Lincoln said that “We here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.” As we leave here tonight, that remains our greatest and most important task.
BUCK: She should be on Mount Rushmore, Clay, obviously.
CLAY: In honor of Abraham Lincoln, she only lost by two score votes. I think I got that right. Four score, 80-some-odd years. Yes, she lost by almost 40 points in Wyoming. I’m looking at the current results. 66 to 29 with around 95% of the vote in. So if my math is right, 37 points she lost by in Wyoming. And this might be the most delusional speech that we have seen. This is like not making your high school basketball team and declaring for the NBA. Because what she’s trying to do now is she’s not good enough to win a congressional seat in Wyoming, but instead she’s going to declare to run for president of the United States.
Make no mistake, I’ll tell you the next two years and how this plays out, she’s gonna raise tens of millions — unfortunately, Buck, maybe even hundreds of millions of dollars — so that Trump can be directly attacked. And if it weren’t Trump, it would be Ron DeSantis or whoever’s running in 2024. She’s going to get to the debate stage initially. They’re probably gonna have to come up with new criteria to keep her off the debate stage, because she’ll get 1 or 2% of the vote, right? And she’ll spend hundreds of millions of dollars trying to destroy the Republican candidate. Then she’ll announce she was treated unfairly by the Republican Party as a part of the race. I’m just telling you what’s gonna happen — and, therefore, for democracy, to save Republicans from themselves, she is going to launch an independent campaign to run for president in 2024 with the idea being that she might take away some small scintilla of vote that otherwise would go to Trump.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: He ran for president. No one even remembers the guy anymore.
CLAY: She’ll have the resources, though, to get on the ballots, Buck. That’s what’s gonna be frustrating. They’ll spend hundreds of millions of dollars to find a way to get her on —
BUCK: You think? I don’t think she’s gonna raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
CLAY: I think she’ll raise hundreds of millions of dollars.
BUCK: Because, Clay, at some level that amount of money is going to detract from what they can actually put toward the Democrat, right? I mean, you know, millions — millions, yes. Hundreds of millions of dollars?
CLAY: How much did the Lincoln Project raise?
BUCK: I think about 70 million, but that was over the course of a number of years. And also, man, they’re not raising 70 million again, my friends. They’ve had some problems over there.
CLAY: I think that she’ll be — I mean, there’s so much more money being spent in politics now, like, every election cycle, I think there’s more money being spent in 2022 —
BUCK: Yeah, it’s a billion on both sides now. It’s in the billions, I should say, on both sides.
CLAY: Yeah. And so I think she’ll be able to raise a hundred million dollars or more because that’s how much people hate Trump. And they’ll try the hardest to get her on in Georgia, to get her on in Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, any state that they think is gonna be close, they’ll spend whatever it takes to get her on the ballot.
BUCK: And I think it’s important that we all understand what Liz Cheney has become. Whatever her voting record was before, whatever her espoused principles were before, she is now a false flag Republican. Meaning in no real way is she somebody who is working for the benefit of anybody who believes in Republican values, policy, platform, you name it, across the country, the people who want less government, who want a secure border, who want less crime on the streets, who want lower taxation, who believe in Second Amendment rights, who believe in First Amendment rights, which is now a conservative value because the left has abandoned and is in fact openly attacking the First Amendment both on religious and free speech grounds in every way they can, Liz Cheney undermines all of that, and she does it because she is monomaniacal.
She is obsessed with Donald Trump as if somehow, even if she got her way, all these other problems would be solved. If Trump said, “I’m retiring tomorrow,” what does Liz Cheney stand for then? And, by the way, I’m just going to point this out. The Bush-Cheney legacy for the Republican Party is a disaster, folks. All right? If we’re really gonna call it like it is here ? I think George W. Bush was a nice guy. I briefed him a couple times back in the day. Iraq war, Afghanistan war did not turn out well. Handed over the government to Barack Obama after the biggest recession we had had since the Great Depression. Not a lot to point to to say, yeah, it’s great.
CLAY: I think George W. Bush is the worst president — I understand there’s still some Bush people out there — I think George W. Bush, if you look at it objectively, is the worst president of the last 40 or 50 years.
CLAY: I think George W. Bush is worse. Because the war in Iraq — this is one thing that Trump got right because almost no other Republican would say it — spending trillions of dollars like we did for nothing in Iraq is indefensible, in my mind, for what he did there. So look. Obama got a lot of things wrong. Certainly Biden is a — should say two-term president. ‘Cause Biden’s the worst president of any of our lives; let’s be honest. But two-term president? It’s hard for me to point to George W. Bush and say, man, he did a really good job on X. I mean, maybe his initial response to 9/11 when he rallied everybody together. But spending trillions of dollars in Iraq was wrong.
BUCK: To be fair, the initial response to Afghanistan that was really CIA led was brilliant and a massive success. And, unfortunately, big Pentagon came in afterwards and it was Special Forces operators, the elite of the elite, you know, working with the intel community at presidential directive to take out Al-Qaeda and the Taliban right after 9/11. Then you had the massive mission creep, all the things we said, “Oh, we don’t do that,”that all happened for 20 years and now the Taliban and in fact Al-Qaeda, basically, is in charge again in Kabul. So it went back in a big way. Iraq, I think, is, in retrospect, a massive blunder and even Republicans agree.
CLAY: And you agree — I mean, there were so many Republicans afraid to say it. One thing that I think rallied a lot of people behind Trump was he is a disruptive candidate, but he also was looking at that clear-eyed ’cause he wasn’t involved in it, right? He wasn’t a politician who cast a lot of votes on Iraq and everything else. And he pointed out that it was a disaster, and that’s really when I think the rupture with Bush-Cheney world started, when they were angry that he attacked them there.
BUCK: Yeah, because all of a sudden the right turns around, looks at Bush-Cheney and says, “What exactly did you guys accomplish here? What did you leave as the Republican Party legacy and handing it over to eight years of Obamaism?” And keep in mind, Obama was really among the only Democrats running then — there were a couple of other lower level candidates — who had not cast a vote — this is important — had not cast a vote for the Iraq war. Now, he wasn’t in office then so he gets kind of a pass but the point is — or not — you know, he wasn’t a senator. But it was certainly to his benefit.
But bringing it back here to Cheney. First of all, I think we should give some credit to Harriet Hageman, who ran a good campaign. She didn’t win by 10 points. What was the final tally?
CLAY: 37% right now with 95% of the vote in.
BUCK: Here she is saying a line has been drawn in the sand.
HAGEMAN: Wyoming has drawn a line in the sand that if we put in you power, you will be accountable to us, you will answer to us, and you will do what is in our best interests. And if you don’t, we will fire you.
BUCK: And I think that this is my line in the sand. I obviously am a Trump supporter. You voted for him in the last election. I voted for him in two elections. I think Trump did some fantastic things in office, and I could sit there and go the length as I know you can — and we do, right? We talk about the good things he did. I also occasionally have criticized some decisions that Trump made. And for the people that are super Trump fans, Trump agrees with me on those now. So he admits — no one’s perfect, right? So the idea that anybody was perfect never made any sense. Trump did the best he could under the circumstances and a lot of good things happened, and I think — I mean, compared to Biden it’s just night and day.
But the line in sand has to be, you can criticize Trump, you can criticize anybody in the GOP — and I don’t mean legally. I mean whether you’re, you know, still somebody who cares about the Republican Party. But when you all of a sudden find yourself hating Trump so much that you’re going on TV or, you know, you’re taking part in a Stalinist show trial on Capitol Hill or you’re going on TV and saying, we really don’t need a wall. Walls don’t work. When you abandon everything else the Republican Party stands for, everything else that rational, sensible policy would dictate, there’s a problem. And that’s what Liz Cheney started to do. That’s the issue.
CLAY: Not only that, Buck, she — I mean, we know January 6th was a show trial. She brought, I believe, the same Hollywood people to choreograph that ridiculous speech where she compared herself to Abraham Lincoln. I mean, this was all planned. When you lose by 37, you know you’re not going to win and it’s not going to be particularly close. And all of that, Dick Cheney calling Donald Trump the biggest threat to America in the history of the country, I mean, it’s all so overwrought and histrionic. And I also love the sloppy embrace now that we’re getting between Dick Cheney who was the most hated Republican ever, probably in most of our lives, by the left wing of the Democrat Party. And now all of a sudden they’re like, “Oh, I’ve always — the Cheneys have always told the truth.”
BUCK: Teah. This is what I mean. The strange new found respect, which we all put in quotes, this is just the convenient political weaponization of a false flag Republican, which is what Cheney became.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: In your home state where you’re a Cheney, by the way, too.
CLAY: Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. Like, you have every advantage, in theory — it’s a home-court advantage. And then you think to yourself, well, this is the launching pad to my presidential campaign, I can’t think of a more delusion — I’m trying to think politically. Somebody who gets absolutely destroyed — I’m not talking about losing a close race and being like, hey, I want to run again, which happens all the time in politics. I’m talking about destroyed and running for a bigger office.
BUCK: I told you this. The most amusing thing back in the days when I watched American Idol with my parents and with the whole family sometimes —
CLAY: The bad singers?
BUCK: The bad singers who are like, “Oh, yeah? Well, I’m gonna go triple platinum.”
CLAY: “I’ll show you.” I mean, we make fun of Beto and Beto is very, as you see evil Keanu Reeves, is very easy to make fun of. He’s gonna get trounced down in Texas by Greg Abbott. We need to talk about how this masterstroke of putting migrants on buses and sending them to the East Coast has actually played out credible for him.
BUCK: I will say this. I was wrong. I thought it was a stunt that would kind of just go down with a fizzle. He was right. Here’s why I made a mistake on that. I thought that the Democrats would be smart enough to realize the political optics of complaining about the — you know, if you’re Eric Adams you’ve gotta say, “Oh, my gosh, I can’t get enough illegal migrates in this city.”
BUCK: But nope. That’s not what he’s saying.
CLAY: Well, what I was —
BUCK: — Bowser is saying in D.C.
CLAY: What I made of Beto about is he lost a close race to Cruz and used that as a catapult to run for president in 2020. Now, that was a disaster. And now he’s gonna get smoked by Greg Abbott. But you can lose a race and argue, hey, this has increased overall my brand awareness. You can’t get beat like Liz Cheney did and run for a bigger race. Right?
BUCK: The whole point. The Lincoln Project only supports losers. Of losers, for losers, by losers. The whole thing.
CLAY: I mean, Abraham Lincoln, if he could still sue for defamation, of all the people to take his name, he should definitely come after them.
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