Joe Biden’s Predictably Calamitous CNN Town Hall

CLAY: We begin with the calamitous town hall between CNN and Joe Biden. And, by the way, CNN, we need to talk about this later in the show, Buck. CNN has doubled down on the fact that they claim they did nothing wrong with the Joe Rogan horse deworming stories that they flagellated for, what, weeks surrounding his covid announcement until Dr. Sanjay Gupta went on and said, yeah, that was not accurate, we should have done it. Well, CNN issued a statement on that. We will discuss that in the near term.

But first, here are some of the cuts that I think are standing out and creating news from the town hall that Joe Biden did. First of all, in typical Joe Biden fashion, he completely forgot what he was talking about. Anderson Cooper had to rescue him. Listen to this.

BIDEN: With 40% of all products coming into the United States America on the West Coast go through Los Angeles and — uh — and uh — uh and — what am I doing here?

COOPER: Long Beach?

BIDEN: Long Beach. Thank you.

CLAY: I mean, Anderson Cooper rescued him. That is one of many times where Joe Biden just doesn’t know what’s going on. We continue to point out the argument that Democrats are in real danger on the most — and there’s a lot of problems Joe Biden has — it’s about the border. How about Joe Biden saying he hasn’t had time to visit the southern border?

BIDEN: I’ve been there before and I haven’t — I mean I know it well. I guess I should go down. But the — but the whole point of it is I haven’t had a whole hell of a lot of time to get down. I’ve been spending time going around looking at the $900 billion worth of damage done by — by hurricanes and floods and weather and traveling around the world. But I plan on — now, my wife, Jill, has been down. She’s been on both sides of the river. She’s seen the circumstances there. She’s looked into those places. You notice you’re not seeing a lot of pictures of kids lying on top of one another with — you know, with — with — with, you know, looks like tarps on top.

BUCK: I don’t even know what he’s mumbling about. I mean, you really get to a point, Clay, where you feel like the people that think they’re so smart and wise who hated Trump so much, who told us that Joe Biden was going to unite the country and be a great president or even a good, even a passable president, they should be ashamed. I think they actually look at this with some degree of glee. We could even make, they say, Joe Biden president, and you couldn’t stop us. I mean, I think they view this as an exercise of their power on the left because when you see how he actually interacts with people in a live setting like this, this is the president of the United States? This guy has the nuclear codes? Really?

I understand people say Donald Trump, his tweets were mean sometimes or they have these different things. You know, Trump was a guy who was a force of personality who could do two-hour live rallies that would get a crowd as fired up as they were at the University of Alabama became you took me to. I mean, people were absolutely enthralled. He had a vision. He had a purpose. There was an understanding of what he was trying to accomplish day in and day out. Joe Biden, it’s just muttering Sleepy Joe nonsense from somebody who really seems like he should be spending more time playing bingo. It’s just ra eality. And the fact that the media just skips past this, like, they pretend that we can’t all see this. This goes to show you, we’re suffering from a plague of leftist dishonesty.

CLAY: That whole answer on the border, how about the fact that he said his wife had been there, which does not make any sense.

BUCK: Yeah, who cares? Oh, Dr. Jill Biden, maybe she was telling about her PhD education.

CLAY: The first lady went there? I mean, like, how is that an argument? And also he spent 50 days in Delaware since he got elected president, if I’m not mistaken. I think that’s the number. Somebody can shoot me the actual number — I was reading 50 days that he’s been willing to go there. My point is it’s not that hard to take a trip to the border. We’re not talking about why he hasn’t been to Australia. We’re not talking about why he hasn’t been to China, somewhere where you have to make a legitimately long trip. Buck, from D.C. to the border is a two and a half, 2:45 flight for Air Force One. I mean, he could easily go to the border, visit there, turn around and come back in the same day with no difficulty at all, easier than lots of peoples’ daily commutes, Joe Biden could hop on Air Force One and go down to the border. The fact he hasn’t been there is because he doesn’t want to draw attention and force, to your point, dishonesty, it’s almost impossible for the media to fail to cover the border if Joe Biden takes them to the border.

BUCK: Right. There’s a traveling press corps with him; so there will be photos of him. There will be a whole focus on it. And the Democrat policy right now is to make sure that people focus on it as little as possible. We keep saying this remind everybody. We see the numbers of illegals and say, this is lawlessness, this is of — a systematic, intentional violation of U.S. sovereignty at the U.S.-Mexico border that’s going on day in and day out in unprecedented numbers. Democrats are saying, “Oh, this is great. How soon can we get an amnesty and sign all these people up to vote Democrat and vote for bigger government, higher taxes, more socialism?” But the only way they can’t get there is if enough Americans — not gonna be all — but if the 60% or so of the American people who want there to be some kind of border security and some kind of law and order down there recognize how systemic this problem has become, then the Democrat policy becomes a challenge. That’s why Joe Biden won’t go down there.

People say, “Oh, well, he can, you know, he doesn’t need to see the fence,” or whatever. No, it’s to meet with Border Patrol members, to meet with the people that are dealing with this day in and day out ’cause I’ve done this several times, and all they’ll tell you is: We are overwhelmed. The cartels do whatever they want in terms of importing drugs at this point. We can’t stop the flow of illegal migrants. We can’t stop the flow of fentanyl that killed 90,000 Americans — most of it was fentanyl — last year. And it’s not gonna get any better. It’s only gonna get worse.” Well, if you get a sound bite of Joe Biden talking to the border patrol and tell him that, it’s pretty tough for Biden to then say, you know (impression), “We’re making progress and, you know, no joke.”

CLAY: Well, not only that, where the president goes dictates what he thinks is important. That’s the entire purpose of the presidential bully pulpit. When the president goes on the road to try to sell any sort of legislation or to campaign for someone or anything associated with those kind of travel decisions, it is a clear shining light on what he believes is important. And what we were saying — and I think this is — this is the reason they’re not going — is because, as you point out, there’s an entire White House traveling press corps. And if the White House traveling press corps goes to the border, it’s impossible for them not to report on the border, and the border is by far the weakest of many weak issues for the Biden administration right now. And they are desperate to pretend it just doesn’t exist.

He also said, “Hey, you’re not seeing any of these pictures of kids like being mistreated.” Yeah, because the media stopped covering it when they couldn’t blame Donald Trump. AOC isn’t showing up dressed all in white in a parking lot with her hand outstretched crying in a photo-staged op because it’s not Donald Trump’s responsibility now. Remember when they found out that the Obama administration was responsible for the “cages,” in quotation mark, that wouldn’t tried to blame Trump for, these stories just kind of started to vanish.

And remember Trump had the border solved. That’s what’s so frustrating about this, Buck. It’s not only that we’re in a disastrous, worst-ever border crisis maybe in any of our lives; it’s that it was not an issue when Trump was in office, he had solved it.

BUCK: The illegal immigration flow had found, because of the structure of some U.S. laws, particularly around asylum, had found a way to get around the legal immigration system, had found a bad faith mechanism to stay in the United States illegally, indefinitely. And it was being exploited. To your point about Trump fixing it, the Trump administration looked and said, whoa. This is a problem. They didn’t make those laws, pass those laws that were being exploited in that way. But they figured out that if you changed the incentive structure — and that is what the Remain in Mexico program did — so you can still apply for asylum.

You can apply for asylum. And, by the way, if you really deserve it, if you’re going to be, you know, executed for your political stance if you go back to Cuba or Venezuela or Chile or Vietnam or, you know, name your country, right? Okay. That’s asylum. But you don’t get to pretend that’s who you are to stay in the United States and then just hope you get lost in the system and Democrats won’t do interior endorsement. “Remain in Mexico” means you stay on the Mexican side of the U.S.-Mexico border and you have to wait until your hearing, and when you go for the hearing, guess what? If you don’t qualify for asylum, you’re immediately subject to deportation back across the border.

The Biden administration did not like that this was fixed; so they unfixed it. And this is why — to your point about how we had figured out what the issue was here — they said, “Hold on a second. We want the incentive for illegals to come across to be what it was.” And they’d say, “Oh, it’s a humanitarian thing” and Biden says “It’s not who we are.” I mean, if we had a real press corps, they would ask why do we turn anyone away? This is a question I always ask Democrats who do AOC, “Oh, I’m crying and I’m touching the fence,” and the big tears and everything. Who doesn’t get to stay? That’s the question they never have an answer for.

CLAY: And how does it ever end? That’s the question. If you don’t have a border, millions and millions of people are going to continue to come here, and they’re never going to leave. So how do we exist as a functional country when we don’t have a border, which is the existential question that Trump initially in 2016 ran on.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

BUCK: Joe Biden showed last night that he has no sympathy for, does not see any reasonableness when he looks at those who don’t want to get the shot. Mind you, if you are a young minority who do not get the shot, somehow this doesn’t apply to you. Joe Biden’s disdain is only for the white male Trump supporter or just the Trump supporters out there who don’t want to get the shot, which, of course, is not everyone who’s it is not getting the shot but doesn’t matter because that’s the narrative. But Biden has — this came across last night the CNN town hall — a disdain for anyone who will not get the shot. Looks down upon them and even thinks that they’re basically a murderer.

BIDEN: Two things that concern me. One are those who just trying to make this a political issue — freedom. “I have the freedom to kill you with my covid.” I mean, come on, freedom. Number one. Number two, the second one is that, you know, the gross misinformation that’s out there.

BUCK: Look, Joe Biden’s a moron. I mean, honestly. He’s just ain’t very smart man. And it’s nice that I can actually say this without, you know, getting shut down by Twitter or Facebook or something. He’s not a very smart guy. That’s a really disgusting thing for the president of the United States to say. I know he thought he was being funny or something. It’s not funny. It’s not funny at all.

CLAY: Also his data is not accurate. And I just want to keep hammering this home. Last night my wife makes fun of me ’cause I’ll be sitting in bed just kind of looking through all the covid data. I get some people have more exciting pre-bedtime routines. Mine is I look at all the most recent covid data. And if you look at what’s going on in England and if you look at what’s going on in Maine and if you look at what’s going on in Vermont, Buck, 70%, over 70% of the people dying in England right now are double vaccinated.

The idea that Joe Biden is selling to the American people and which he tried again last night at that CNN town hall to argue if everybody was vaccinated covid would go away, this whole idea that we have a pandemic of the unvaccinated, it’s not true. It’s just a lie. He is selling a bill of goods. The vaccine offers some limited amount of protection for a relatively short period of time, and then its efficacy fades in a hurry, which is why we have boosters. We may have boosters that we have to get for years into the future. But when you are selling an artificial bill of goods, which he is, Buck, to the American public, the blowback on this whenever people come to realize what the data is actually showing is going to be staggering, and it’s going to destroy the Biden administration.

BUCK: I think that this is why they’re scrambling right now. I mean, they’re just trying to get as many people to get these boosters as fast as possible because the longer that there is a gap here in protection, the more clear it will become that all this rhetoric they used about, “Oh, you’re murdering people ’cause you didn’t get the shot.” Really? Because if you see the vaccination numbers and you see the number of people that are in the hospital and that are dying from covid in this winter season go up dramatically, including the vaccinated, what does that mean about the stories that we’ve been told all along? How can we look at them and say that they are to be taken seriously, Biden, Fauci, all the rest going forward?

CLAY: It’s all a lie, and it’s exploding on them. And I think our friend Alex Berenson has been correct that they know this and they’re hoping that the boosters are gonna save them in winter and by the spring the natural seasonality of viruses will decline. I think that’s really what they’re hoping.