Kudlow on How Trump Would’ve Beaten Putin

CLAY: We’ve been talking a lot about Ukraine, a lot about the masking sudden disappearance as we get closer to tomorrow’s State of the Union address with Joe Biden. And the American public, despite the fact that Democrats are trying to in some way argue that Trump is still colluding with Russia, they’ve so committed to that narrative that they aren’t willing to actually recognize that it’s completely untrue.

But the American public, as we said, 62% of them believe, according to a Harvard-Harris poll, that there would not have been an invasion of Ukraine by Vladimir Putin if Donald Trump was still in charge — and 59% of them believe that Joe Biden’s own weakness helped to lead Vladimir Putin into this charge. We’re gonna talk about whether or not Putin himself could be in trouble going forward.

But Larry Kudlow from CNBC actually spoke out on what he believes would have happened if Donald Trump were still in charge and this situation in Ukraine had arisen. He did a really good job laying it out. I believe this, Buck, was at CPAC, if I’m not mistaken, where Larry Kudlow was making this analysis and discussion. Let’s listen.

KUDLOW: Trump would have said Thursday, “I am ordering my energy secretary to accept and authorize these LNG export applications. I am ordering my interior secretary to open up all federal lands to drilling and production, and I will encourage our great fossil fuel industry to open the spigots, make as much money as you can, hire as many workers as you will, pay them high wages as you must, and that’s how we will defeat Putin and Russia.” That’s what Trump would have done.

BUCK: He would have done things differently; that’s for sure. I think even the Democrats would have to admit it. It would have been very different had Trump been the president up to this point, given what we’ve already seen from Vladimir Putin. The issue of energy and energy security and the energy sector, I think, Clay, is something that now people see much more clearly. You know, we had the rising price at the pump. We’ve seen the Biden administration, day one — literally day one of the administration — comes in, cancels the Keystone XL pipeline.

Why? Doesn’t stop… Think about this, everyone. It doesn’t even prevent… If you are a climate-change worshiper, it doesn’t even prevent that oil from going to market. It just means it doesn’t come through the U.S. and it’s not something that we have access to more easily and will be as part of the export, take it out west, they’ll take it across Canada and sell it to the Asian market across the Pacific. That’s the likeliest scenario. So it doesn’t even save the planet if they believe that. But yet here is Jen Psaki, who instead of just admitting what Larry Kudlow said is true, wants to remind everybody, “Yeah, we just need to, like, take more bicycles and, like, more windmills.” Play it.

BUCK: Exactly the wrong lesson. This is what Democrats do over and over again. They have shut down oil production in as many ways as they can, the Democrats have. It was obviously stupid and now they’re saying, “We’ll just use less oil. Find a way to do that.” No.

CLAY: Yeah. When you can’t actually find a way to do that — and we need to have this discussion, too, Buck, because there is this unwillingness right now to cut off Russian oil. And until we’re willing to cut off Russian oil, we’re basically fighting a battle with one hand tied behind our backs because Vladimir Putin is still getting the opportunity to bring in all of the oil and gas money that he already was. And if we are truly going to ratchet up pressure to him to a degree, we may start to feel some significant political pressure in his own country. We have to have oil and gas also included in the sanctions.