NYT Tells Biden Not to Run, Approval Down to 33%

CLAY: Buck, 33% approval in the New York Times poll. This is the lowest Joe Biden approval rate that I have seen anywhere, and we know the New York Times is not exactly predisposed to favor Republican-leaning politicians or anything. If anything, this is biased still in Biden’s favor. But 64% of Democrats — and you and I were texting over the weekend — Sunday front page New York Times, essentially that article, which was devastating to Joe Biden, argues that he doesn’t have the capability to be president.

There were a bunch of different details. But one of them was, “Hey, we’re initially planning to go from Europe to the Middle East and be on the road for 10 days, and we didn’t think he could do it so we went all the way back across the Atlantic.” Now they’re coming back to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, Israel. Buck, that combo — and the reason why it’s important to me is, when they published that article on Sunday, they knew they were gonna double barrel him, for lack of a better way to phrase it, on Monday with this poll.

In other words, all of the editors had this in planning, and it seemed like Sunday and now Monday they are, the media, now, trying to make it so that Joe Biden is unable to run for reelection in 2024. That was my read. You agree, disagree? How would you assess these combo stories front page from the New York Times and their significance?

BUCK: So, he’s the oldest president in American history, which was actually written in the New York Times. It’s interesting not because we didn’t know that. Obviously, the president’s age has been public all along. But you don’t hear them ever say it in that way. This is literally the oldest president we have ever had in the history of the republic, and he’s telling us he wants six more years, everybody, okay? Six more years is what he is saying he wants right now. This is completely outrageous and unacceptable. I think, Clay — ’cause I was looking at the parts of the New York Times piece that really stuck out to me — first of all, they do this thing which is a classic. “Well, behind closed doors, he’s sharp as a tack!”

CLAY: Oh, yeah. They always do that.

BUCK: “He’s correcting where our commas are misplaced in speeches.”

CLAY: “On page 14.”

BUCK: Yeah. Out in public, it’s a little more touch and go. I think the Democrats have… They said things like they’re limiting his schedule. He basically isn’t available at night. They don’t let anyone see him from the press on the weekends.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: I mean, this is the retired and out-of-public-life presidency for a guy who shouldn’t have been in charge in the first place even when he was in a good state of mental health. I think Joe Biden was unimpressive even before he was in cognitive decline, but he’s operating this kind of quasi-retired presidency right now, which is obviously not what we want. Here’s where I think we’re heading, though. They talked about fear of him having a sundowner moment, right, of sundowning, where if you have Alzheimer’s or dementia, you can, from the late afternoon into the evening or at night.

Really just be completely not of sound mind. I mean, you can basically be speaking in gibberish. I think the people around him are realizing with all the stage managing they’re doing and all the work. They’re worried he’s gonna trip. They see that he’s shuffling. This is from the New York Times, and this is the people that are with him all day long, folks, okay? They’re trying to set us up for the possibility here, we may have a president who goes full on gibberish speaking, cognitive decline in public in one incident that is irretrievable.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: We may have Joe Biden break down in the next year or sooner and just start spewing total nonsense. They keep saying it’s a stutter. It’s not a stutter, folks. I saw Biden speeches 20 years ago. It’s not that he is stuttering. It’s not that he has some childhood stutter. That’s a total… That’s total malarkey, okay? Clay, I think we may have a real moment of crisis where it is clear that the president of the United States, in office, starts spewing true nonsense — starts essentially speaking in gibberish — and that the 25th Amendment actually has to be used. I think that’s what people around him are realizing.

CLAY: The data in here is pretty challenging for him, right? The number of — and I’ll just kind of hit you with in this article in the New York Times. Joe Biden has only given 38 interviews so far in his presidency. Trump did — and, remember, they were always talking about Trump and the 25th Amendment. At the same period in time, Trump had done 116 interviews. Barack Obama had done 198. So you look at the last couple of presidents, and the data points on what exactly is going on there are pretty crippling to Joe Biden.

Buck, the other number that’s crazy about this polymer that they did that they released on the front page of the New York Times today, 94% of those under the age of 35 do not want Joe Biden to run for president again. These are Democrats. Sixty-four percent of Democrats overall, 94% of those under 35. From this New York Times piece from Sunday, Buck, it says basically the Harvard-Harris poll about the number of people that don’t want him to run, 60% of those 65 and older do not want him to run. So look. This is a universal belief that I think when you look at that press conference, the awful one that he had…

I guess it was on Friday, right, that we played some of the cuts from where he reads, “end quote,” “repeat the line.” There is right now an overwhelming certainty, whether you’re Democrat, Republican, or independent, that Joe Biden is not in a good place mentally. And, Buck, 30 more months. As we’ve been talking about on this show for a long time, look at what the presidency did to Barack Obama, look at what it did to them; certainly, when you look at the before and after pictures of George W. Bush. This guy has got 30 more months, minimum, of being president, and to your point he’s asking for four years on top of the two and a half years that he already has remaining. It is not conceivable to me that this is possible.

BUCK: I mean, the Democrats were so dishonest and so desperate to have somebody who could, in a pandemic year, defeat Donald Trump. They have put a commander-in-chief in place who we can all see is one bad day away from saying crazy stuff on live television and drooling all over himself, one bad day away.

CLAY: He couldn’t do an hour interview with us, Buck. I’ve used this example before, but you and I went down to Mar-a-Lago. Trump had no handlers. He sat across the table from us, and he talked to us for a full hour. They said all the time Trump couldn’t be president because of the 25th Amendment. If you and I got invited — we never would — and they said, “Hey, we want you guys to come to the White House. We want you to do an hour interview with Joe Biden,” Buck, I legitimately believe that after one hour talking to us he would no longer be able to be president of the United States. I think it would go so poorly for Joe Biden, just trying to answer our questions without prescripting, without preknowledge of what we were gonna ask, that I believe that he would have to step down after one hour with us.

BUCK: The good news for the republic, Clay, is that the Founding Fathers foresaw a possibility where someone may have to step in, a vice president, even. The bad news is that we know who the vice president is right now.