O’Reilly Reveals Whether He Still Thinks Biden Won’t Run Again

CLAY: We are joined now by Bill O’Reilly. Bill, you and I agreed on a lot the last time we disagreed with Buck about some things. I’m going to start off right here. I agreed with you. I thought there was no way Joe Biden was going to run. After the midterms, sadly, I think they’re going to try to drag Biden across the finish line again in ‘24. Are you sticking to he’s not running, or did the midterms also lead you to reconsider that opinion?

BUCK: Yeah, Bill, I take my steak medium rare, by the way, just throwing that out there.

O’REILLY: Well, first of all, thanks for having me on. And that kind introduction listing all my accomplishments over a 50-year career — including the 18 number one best sellers and Killing the Legends, out right now. Okay, let’s get to it. Let’s get to it. So, Joe Biden’s not running.

BUCK: You’re sticking with it.

CLAY: Wow.

O’REILLY: I mean, when the House Oversight and Judiciary Committee get through with him, he’ll be lucky to get a condo in Barbados. Okay? They’re going to rip him up, twirl him around. He’s not going to know what hit him. And the Democratic Party is going to go down along with him.

BUCK: So, you’re feeling good then, I assume, Bill, about —

O’REILLY: I don’t… I don’t do that. I’m not a Republican. I’m not anti-Biden. I don’t feel good. I don’t feel bad.

BUCK: Well, no, but I had to finish the sentence. I was going to say, you’re feeling good about your earlier prediction that Joe Biden’s still not going to run. And you think this is largely because Hunter Biden is such a drag or is it because of just Biden’s age and infirmity?

O’REILLY: Well, it’s a combination of both. So, if you look at Joe Biden’s gait on television — the way he walks, the way he, his body language — um, he’s an old 80. He’s not Clint Eastwood. Okay. And we know by his verbal acuity that he doesn’t always know what he’s saying. That’s beyond any reasonable doubt. Would you guys agree with that?

BUCK: Yes. Oh, for sure. Of course. Visible.

O’REILLY: So, these things are going to worsen. They don’t get better as you get older. So, that’s number one. That is age has infirmed him and his party knows it. They just don’t have anyone else and they’re exulting in the midterm results because they really did dodge a huge bullet.

BUCK: Bill, that’s the next thing actually I wanted to ask you. So, as a perfect way to ask or perfect moment to ask you, what happened as you see it in the midterms, because there’s been a lot of fighting among our folks about this?

O’REILLY: Well, you basically have a very distracted electorate. So, the collapse of the corporate media, and that includes cable news, has sent people scurrying everywhere. There is no central message anymore. Now, I thought and I think you guys do too, because I listen regularly, I thought the economy was going to spur the independents to vote Republican. Because, look, the stats that just came out are that American homes have lost $17 trillion in value, the worst since the Great Depression. That’s household assets across the country. 17 trillion. I mean, this is just astronomical collapse in the security of the American people.

So, I rightly said, “Well, if that’s what’s going on, they’re going to vote for the opposing party.” They did not for a variety of reasons. They did in Florida. They did in Texas. They did where I am on Long Island, they put Republicans in. But in other areas, the entitlement culture, the Democratic Party, paying people not to work, continual covid relief, that overwhelmed any vision. And so that’s what I think happened. But I was wrong. I thought that the Republicans were going to take the House and the Senate by a pretty comfortable margin.

CLAY: I thought the same thing, Bill, and we appreciate you coming on. The books are fantastic. You’ve been, as you mentioned, on an absolute tear with each of them. What do you think? So, you don’t think Biden is going to run? What do you think happens on the Republican side? Do you subscribe to the idea that we’re going to have a heavyweight boxing throwdown between Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump? Do you think that doesn’t end up happening? How would you assess what plays out in ’23 in your mind?

O’REILLY: A year ago I was on tour with Donald Trump. You guys may remember that.

CLAY: Oh yeah.

O’REILLY: We did four Trump/O’Reilly History shows two in Florida, two in Texas. Trump’s power then, a year ago, was about 40% more than it is now. So, you can’t really predict what’s going to happen in the 12 months hence because it’s going to be horror for the Democratic Party. That’s assured. The economy is not going to get better in a year and then you have the House going after President Biden and the FBI.

So, Trump right now is diminished and he’s making unforced errors like the Kanye West stuff and Constitution stuff. And so, his power is on the wane. DeSantis, the clear number two, is treading water because he has to. He can’t run for president. He’s got to govern his state for at least a year. And this time next year, we’ll get a clearer view of whether Donald Trump can regain momentum, because he could. He governed well in his four years. It’s just that he doesn’t… he’s not able to articulate that message. He was with me. I mean, if you’re a BillOReilly.com premium member, you can archive the four shows and you’ll see a totally different Donald Trump than you see every day at Mar-A-Lago. I mean, this man accomplished a lot. He had a handle on the problems in this country, whereas Biden does not, obviously. They’re getting worse, everywhere. So, I wouldn’t count Trump out. But it’s hard to say how that whole thing is going to come down. But a year from now we’ll know.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Bill O’Reilly. He’s got 18 number one bestselling books out there from The Killing series, in particular, the latest of which is Killing the Legends: The Lethal Danger of Celebrity. Bill, I wanted to ask you on that one. In some ways, it feels like one can open up a news site and it feels like celebrity is more powerful and more worshipped than ever before, but also, we now have, over the last 50 years or so of mass media, seen the devastating effects of celebrity. Do you think that people are starting to wake up to the downsides of it more? Or is celebrity just on a runaway train to being worshiped way beyond what is what is sensible and healthy, not just for society, but for the individuals?

O’REILLY: Well, like everything else, celebrity is decentralized now. There aren’t huge movie stars anymore other than The Rock. And, you know, the guys that do the blow-up movies that play well in Pakistan. There’s no, you know, actors that are they’re bringing in big money. It’s all just blasted across the Internet. Netflix this, the other streaming services that. Disney plus, whatever. But the danger of celebrity is worse now than it ever has been. I’ll submit to you guys that Donald Trump is a victim of his own celebrity. It’s driving him literally mad. I mean, think back. What president would allow Kanye West and some neo-Nazi in for dinner?

Would Bush the younger have done it? Bush the elder? Even Clinton and Obama. Never. Never in a million years. I mean, anybody getting close to those guys were vetted. But Trump doesn’t have that. And it seems to me that he wants to be in the public eye so much that it’s an addiction and he makes mistakes trying to get there. And then I’ll submit to you, Nancy Pelosi. I mean, there’s a guy breaks into her house in the middle of the night with an 82-year-old husband sitting there, who, by the way, if he was a sane individual, would have had a gun in the house for self-protection and that thing might have ended a little bit differently. I’m sure if some guys broke into your homes, 2am, and the outcome would be different than Paul Pelosi, am I right?

CLAY: I like to think so

BUCK: Yep.

O’REILLY: Yeah. So, the celebrity thing is just unbelievably dangerous, particularly now with the Internet and, you know, people thinking that they know you and they own you. Look, you guys are becoming famous. I’m famous. All right? I know what I went through and I was not prepared for it, which is why I wrote this cultural history book about it. Elvis Presley, John Lennon and Muhammad Ali, the three biggest titans that changed the entire American cultural landscape. And I said, look, yeah, these were the biggest names. They were wealthy, they had everything, and it destroyed them and they were betrayed. And this happens to almost every single famous person.

CLAY: Bill, this ties in. The last question for you here. I don’t know how much attention you’re paying to Elon Musk and what he’s doing at Twitter.

O’REILLY: A lot.

CLAY: But certainly, Elon is wildly famous now. He’s got a lot on his shoulders, a variety of different perspectives, whether it’s cars, whether it’s sending spaceships to the to the moon or beyond and certainly what he’s doing at Twitter. How would you assess how it’s going? What do you expect to see going forward?

O’REILLY: Well, I met Musk one time at a party in the Hollywood Hills, and I’m not a party guy, but I had to go for business reasons. He was very introverted, not life of the party, not running around. I spoke with him for, you know, 30 seconds. I didn’t have a lot in common with him, but he’s a genius and way, way ahead on the technological front. And he looks to me to be a guy who has now an amazing amount of money and power and doesn’t know what to do with it. And for a guy like that, that’s really, really a problem because he’s an overachiever. He’s got to be busy all the time, whatever.

So, he buys Twitter and he stumbles into one of the biggest stories of the past decade. And the story is this. Twitter, Facebook, Google and other social media apparently all tried to get Joe Biden elected president. The mass of power, the collective power of the social media in 2020 was used to elect Joe Biden. It is unprecedented in this country. And next time you guys have me on, we’ll get into it a little bit deeper. But I think you’re going to see those layers pulled back. And Elon Musk is going to be doing the pulling.

CLAY: Amen. Books are filled —

BUCK: We’d love to have you on for a deep dive some time on the Clay & Buck podcast. We’ll sit down with you for an hour or so and we’ll just talk about the books and all the things you want to get into. That would be great.

O’REILLY: Well, I’m pretty boring for an hour and I’ll get a snorkel if we’re going to deep dive.

BUCK: All right. Well, I was going to say, be careful what you wish for. You want more time? We’ll do more time, next time, for sure.

CLAY: That would be awesome. Let’s book that. Let’s get it done sometime soon. Long chat with Bill O’Reilly. Go buy the books. Great Christmas gifts. Appreciate the time.

O’REILLY: Okay, guys, appreciate it. Enjoy the season.

BUCK: Thanks, Bill.