The Many Problems Facing Joe Biden

BUCK: Here are the problems the Biden Administration has. The twin problems right now, the biggest ones. Well, there’s a lot of them. I don’t think we could say the biggest ones, but two of them that I want to focus in on with Clay for a second. One is inflation. Here is Larry Kudlow, who knows that with the big Build Back Better Biden super-spending situation, it’s going to get worse.

KUDLOW: I feel it’s going to get worse, yes. I don’t know what’s going to stop it. The pandemic inflation, as I call it, the supply-chain shortages and that stuff. Has lasted longer. But I think that’s actually beginning to taper down. But what’s not tapering down is the monetary inflation, the Feds’ balance sheet. The Fed is ex-jamming bank reserves into the economy. This is excess money. Nobody wants this money. They already have more money than they know what to do with, for heaven’s sake.

That’s what sustaining inflation. And unless he deals with that, Jay Powell, yes, it’s going to get worse, too. That’s my fear, it’s going to be longer, the inflation will be more durable. And eventually the economy and the stock market will suffer.

BUCK: Yep, that’s one big problem they’ve got. Clay, the other one is in this identified or addressed in this political piece: “What Democrats discovered largely through focus groups in Poland” — this is Josh Kraushaar’s Twitter — “was even worse than expected. The problems for the democrats cut far deeper than the failings of McAuliffe or Biden, rather than the Democrat party’s entire brand was a wreck.”

CLAY: It’s toxic, that’s why I keep saying it, but it’s true. There’s lots of you nodding your head out there who never would have listened to Clay Travis or Buck Sexton three years ago. You have been driven to us by all the lies you have seen in the media on a day-to-day basis and by the absolute toxicity of the Democratic Party. And I think when they ultimately do sort of the review, the deep dive into what happened and explain 2021, 2022 and what we’re headed to in 2024, what they are going to find is that the Democrat Party turned itself over to Twitter in the belief that Twitter was real life and the reality is Twitter is a carnival funhouse mirror that doesn’t remotely reflect what real Americans care about on a day-to-day basis. Because most Americans are too busy to sit around hitting “refresh” on their Twitter screens all day long. Now media can do that.

It doesn’t mean that Twitter isn’t entertaining and that there’s not lots of stories there. But an analogy, wrote it in my recent book, Buck, hey, if you were trying to figure out whether or not you were in good shape or what you needed to do, if there’s a lot of us putting on weight during the holiday season. If you went to a carnival and you stood in front of one of those old funhouse mirrors that make you look too tall or too fat or too wide and you tried to judge the right way to fit your diet by looking at that reflection in that carnival funhouse mirror you would get a distorted sense of reality and your response would be worse than if you had never looked in that mirror in the first place. That is Twitter and what it’s done to the Democrat Party, it’s destroyed the brand.

BUCK: They’ve got a big problem, because how do they turn all this around? They’re going to rely on Joe Biden they’re going to have quite a issue. They don’t have a charismatic leader. They don’t have a leader who seems he’s entirely or even perhaps somewhat of sound mind.

BRIT HUME: I don’t think it’s at all clear that he intends to run again, but I do think that, as a political matter, you have to say that. Because if you suggest or hint or outright say that you’re not going to run again, that makes you instantly a lame duck. And lame duck presidents don’t do well. People, their influence wanes overnight. So I think this was boilerplate in a sense, but boilerplate that had to be uttered.

I think it’s a far cry from certainly, he will run again and he’ll be in any condition to. In fact, I think the thing we have to watch is the question of whether he serves out his first term. He’s clearly deteriorating, he’s clearly senile, and his health is, despite his doctor’s claims to the contrary, you know, when you’re falling down stairs and so on as he did climbing the stairs to Air Force One, that’s worrisome.

BUCK: This is Brit Hume. I know Brit a little bit. I know his work well.

CLAY: Middle of the road, not going to be the guy throwing grenades.

BUCK: He calls it like it is. And he’s using words like “senile” and “clearly deteriorating”.

CLAY: He nailed it. That’s a reflection, Brit Hume is speaking for the majority of Americans. That’s what the majority of Americans believe right now. And every single day, week and month Joe Biden falls further apart. I do agree with him that publicly Biden has to pretend that he’s going to run in 2024 because as soon as he says he’s not, he has no political capital at all. And that’s why he’s got a lie right now but there’s no way they can drag him across the finish line.

BUCK: What’s the smooth way to do the whole, Hey, you know how we said he was fine? Actually he’s not. Here’s our next candidate, America, for you to support as a Democrat. There’s no easy way to pull that switch. And what does it mean for Kamala, by the way?

CLAY: It’s Kamala versus Mayor Pete.

BUCK: That would be an interesting one. The intersectionality warfare that will be going on will be amazing.