CLAY: I want to begin here with a pretty, I think it’s fair to say, blockbuster poll finding. It’s rare we say a blockbuster poll finding from USA Today. Joe Biden’s approval rating has fallen all the way down to 41%, according to USA Today. Only 32% of independents say Biden is doing a good job; 55% of people disapprove of the job that Joe Biden is doing. Again, this is a USA Today poll.

Only 26% of Americans approve of the job Biden has done withdrawing from Afghanistan, 39% approval on the economy, and even covid — which was to be the saving grace of Joe Biden — 50% now approval and falling there. A bunch of other stories that we are gonna hit. I’m gonna hit Buck with all that data and see what he thinks here momentarily.

You got doctors saying they don’t want to serve the unvaccinated in South Florida. Budget drama in the House of Representatives with more Democrats demanding a vote on infrastructure before they will support the $3.5 trillion Bernie Sanders budget. Afghanistan mess. A debate over what the word “stranded” means. That’s how strangled the messaging has become in Joe Biden’s White House. And we’ve got more covid madness.

LSU. LSU, yes! The Bayou Bengals are now requiring either vaccines or negative tests to go to college football games this fall. They join Oregon and Oregon State. This is going to be wildly controversial all over the South where people are not supporting vaccine passports. But, Buck Sexton, we have been talking about what the impact of Afghanistan — this unmitigated disaster from Joe Biden — would be.

And whether it might connect to failures on the border, failures on the economy, failures on covid, failures across the board when it comes to public safety, murders in particular. He’s at 41% approval, 32% among independent voters. This is unheard-of-level collapse for a Democratic president. I can’t even remember in your and mine’s lives any Democratic president who was ever this low on the flowchart.

BUCK: Remember back in the day when there was that moment with the State Department, Clay, where Hillary Clinton was the secretary of state, and a question — a pretty innocuous question, it would seem — came up? “Well, what did Hillary Clinton…?” This was toward the end of her tenure. “What did Hillary Clinton accomplish?” As in, what are the things that she did?

‘Cause we heard about how she traveled everywhere. And there was the most telling silence and then stumble, stumble, nonsense, nonsense that I think occurred in the entirety of the Clinton era in the State Department. The answer was there was no answer because there were no accomplishments. Nothing. Nothing that anybody would recognize as such. We are at the place already — and this is what you’re getting into with this polling data.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Early on we saw with Biden, with the executive orders, the kind of things that he signed, that he was willing to be a pass-through and a Trojan horse for the left, right? It was right in the beginning. Keystone XL pipeline. Why do you do that? Why do you get rid of that? Well, because you want to just throw something to your left-wing environmentalist base. There’s no rational policy reason.

And that was just one of many, right? Remember the executive orders? So we saw that he was that but there was still this belief that could linger that he would follow through on the promises he made of the campaign. “I’m gonna crush the virus, not the economy. We’re gonna restore normalcy! We’re gonna restore America’s standing in the world,” whatever that really means.

And all these things that he said, we are already seeing in year one, it’s not that he’s not following through on this and accomplishing it, he’s going in the opposite direction. There’s no good case to be made that Biden is not year one a disaster on everything that matters, including the promise to get us back to normal from covid, by the way.

CLAY: He can’t even, Buck, read off of a teleprompter now without me thinking he might collapse. The way he walks when he leaves the teleprompter. He’s eight months in, and I don’t want to overexaggerate here, because I don’t think we are. A 41% approval rating is an unmitigated disaster for Democrats.

And I have to wonder whether they are going to question a lot of these moderates — Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, the 10 House Democrats, the seven who are in districts that were won by Donald Trump that they are still representing in the House, whether some of these people — are gonna say, “We’re not going to support this three and a half trillion-dollar budget bill.” Look, 41% is… Even with the failed polling that was surrounding Donald Trump, Trump almost never got down that low.

I just don’t see anything that’s gonna happen that’s gonna raise Biden back up. There have to be so many people in the White House now… ‘Cause they do their own polling, right? And they have some version of this. But to have a 41% approval rating in USA Today — which it’s important to note, Buck, is not exactly known as a rabidly conservative polling organization. This is every alarm bell known to mankind has to be going off in the White House.

BUCK: The silver lining… Far be it for me to find the silver lining from the Biden administration and this White House, Clay. But if you were asked to find one, it would be of course, for us, for people on the right, there’s… I don’t know. It’s bittersweet because there’s the victory dance moment of, “We were right. This guys a deteriorating, bumbling, stumbling clown.

“It was reckless and dishonest to foist him… After his basement hiding and all the election changing and rule breaking that was going on, it was reckless and dishonest to foist him upon the American people.” So you and I can sit here and say —

CLAY AND BUCK: We told you so.

BUCK: — but we also want what’s best for the country. I see what’s going on in Afghanistan. I see what’s going on in the southern border. I see what’s going on with the rise in crime in major U.S. cities and now that level staying far elevated above where it was in terms of shootings and murders. And I say, these are the things — these are the nuts and bolts of what you really care about when it comes to political leadership. And the Biden administration is failing. The silver lining, if I can find one, for the Biden team is that, Clay, it’s so bad in year one.

To what you were saying a second ago, how do you turn this around? It’s so bad in year one that year two it feels like there’s nowhere to go but up. He’s not facing a midterm election this fall. If he were, I think so anybody who’s being honest would say it would be a catastrophic loss for Democrats. They’re lucky that he’s screwing up so badly year one because year two, you gotta think, is gonna be better. Although what has Afghanistan shown us? This Biden administration is capable of going below our lowest expectations when it comes to competence, wisdom, and strategy.

CLAY: Yeah. And I actually think, Buck, things can get worse. Because if you dive into these numbers… First of all, you know how hard it is to have a 26% approval rating on something? He’s at 26% approval on his Afghan withdrawal right now. I mean, that means that Democrats are all refusing to even stand by him.

BUCK: Yeah. I think cold sores have a 26% approval rating.

CLAY: Yeah. That’s what I’m saying. That’s hard to get 26% approval rating. Thirty-two percent approval rating for independents. These are people who are not affiliated with one party or the other. And the only thing that’s holding up for him right now, Buck — and this is why I think it can get a lot worse. He’s still got a 50% approval rating on covid. And let me play this from Dr. Fauci, your boy, saying that things (chuckles) might be getting able to get back to normal by the spring of 2022! Play cut 12.

FAUCI: If we could do that with the people who’ve been infected — get them revaccinated; the people who are unvaccinated now, that 90 million people, get them vaccinated — I think we can get a degree of overall blanket protection of the community that, as we get into the early part of 2022, getting through the winter — which could be complicated by influenza, by respiratory syncytial virus, that as we get into the spring, we could start getting back to a degree of normality.

BUCK: (impression) “You know, he likes to use the longer version of words — interstitial whatever, whatever — ‘influenza’ instead of ‘flu,'” ’cause, Clay, he wants you to think that he’s still smart and you should listen to him. This guy… I swear, there are very few people in government who make me angry to the point where I want to start breaking things and cursing loudly. That they still put him on TV is just horrific. That anyone listens to him is mind-blowing. I just feel like never has a man so unimpressive been wrong so often with terrible consequences for so many. I’ve never seen anything like this before.

CLAY: Fifteen days to stop the spread has now turned into two years to stop the spread and here’s what I think —

BUCK: At best, by the way.

CLAY: At best, two years. And so that’s why I think things can get worse for Biden because you and I have been saying the expectation — I think it’s reasonable — is that as we go into the fall and the winter, that the Delta variant, covid, whatever other variant is gonna be circulating by then is probably going to continue to rise. That’s what the data would reflect, the number of cases.

And Biden is just going to be sitting there, sort of impotently without any answers. And the only thing that he’s been able to stay a bit above water on is covid? But by the fall-winter, people are going to say, “Hey, it’s on you now. Eight months in, 10 months in, a year in, you can’t point to any issues now with Donald Trump. You told us you were going to fix this, and you haven’t.” And combining that with all the other failures — Buck, you were saying, “Hey, if I’m a Democrat, here’s why I’m optimistic.”

BUCK: No, no, no, no. (laughing) Not optimistic. Silver lining.

CLAY: Silver lining. Right? Things can’t get worse. I think some Democrats right now as they work through the budget, I think that wouldn’t may just say, “Screw it. We’re gonna get destroyed next year, but we’ve gotta get through this budget right now because otherwise we’re not gonna be able to accomplish anything.” And the thing I wonder is whether all these moderates — and they do exist in the Democratic Party — are gonna say, “Hey, we’ll support you on infrastructure, but this budget is dead on arrival.”

That’s what they should be saying if they want to keep their seats next year. I’m not sure whether they’re going to be willing to do it. But that’s what they should be saying. And this is… I mean, 41% approval, that’s unheard of for a Democratic president. Think about all the positive media attention he’s gotten, Buck, and that still we’ve reached that level.

BUCK: Can it get worse for Biden? We can put that one to all of you out there.