BUCK: The State of the Union address is coming up on Tuesday. We’ll be talking about it a lot next week. I think you’re gonna see a whole lot of delusion on display — I don’t know what else to call it — because they know the polling is against them, they know that on issue by issue they’re gonna have major challenges in trying to convince the American people that anything is going well in the country.

So what they’re hoping for is essentially a redo of 2020 where you’ve gotta remember, 95% of the news media, political media is either Democrat or Democrat-leaning, right? They’re effectively the single most powerful propaganda arm of the DNC in existence and should be taking their orders effectively, probably their paychecks, too, from the DNC. And so that gives them a tremendous advantage because a lot of people…

You and I are, as I say, characters in the news matrix. We’re just existing constantly reading, tweeting, thinking, communicating with each other, communicating with other people in this world. And for folks who are just gonna be tuning in and, you know, they want to vote, they want to do their civic duty, they’re gonna be hearing, “Oh, Joe Biden’s defeated covid! Oh, Joe Biden’s got the economy going!” But some of their stuff, the greatest economy or rather the greatest job creation.

He says, Clay, that he’s “created more jobs than any president since World War II,” I think is the line they used or just the notion that he’s created six million or eight million jobs. No. You don’t get to say you’ve created jobs when you had an artificial shutdown of the economy that never should have happened, by the way. We’ve learned that too. The shutdowns, lockdowns never should have happened. And now they’re gonna try to tell us on Tuesday he’s a great jobs and economy president? I don’t… What’s the phrase in D.C.? “That’s a dog that won’t hunt.” I don’t think this is gonna fly, I don’t think it’s gonna work.

CLAY: That’s exactly what he’s trying to sell because they’re trying to sell this all the time, right? They put out a fancy little graphic and say, “Look, we’ve added 6.8 million jobs,” or whatever it is. Yeah, because we’ve had 20 million people stop working immediately and we went to a 20% unemployment rate or near there if I remember correctly, and so we’ve continued to climb back. But that’s the important essence of this. We still don’t have the same number of people employed as we had employed in late February of 2020.

Two years ago, we still have not recaptured the jobs that we lost in March when we shut down. Remember we’re gonna have some heck-of shows coming up, Buck, when we have the 15 days to stop the spread anniversary, two-year anniversary of that, with it still going on. And I think that’s what the Biden administration is trying to get a hold of as they get ready for these midterms. I want you to think about this for a minute.

If you were selling — and I always say, “You need to always propose yourself to argue the other side.” Pretend that you had to pause and go to the other side and make the other argument. What are you pitching if you are Joe Biden, if you’re Ron Klain, if you’re in the Biden White House right now? You can’t sell anything on inflation. Everything they tried… They tried to say inflation was gonna be “transitory.”

They tried to say it was a relatively short-lived supply chain issue. That failed. So inflation is off the table. They’re just gonna have to argue things are gonna get better, but they’re not gonna be better by November in a substantial way. Murder. They’re not gonna be able to sell violent crime, Buck. People see and feel violent crime viscerally all over this country, and we have many different cities setting all-time highs.

And they’re gonna try to sell, I think, identity politics, which is why they wanted to get the Ketanji Brown Jackson nomination officially announced today, ’cause we talked about this earlier, Buck — and I do think it’s an astute point, and certainly I’ve seen many politicians including Marsha Blackburn put out a tweet directly analyzing this. Why are you announcing a Supreme Court nominee in the middle of the biggest war, the biggest invasion that has occurred in Europe since World War II?

It’s because they’re desperate to get her name out there so they can say, “Hey, we followed through on the promise we made. We’re putting a black woman on the Supreme Court.” Identity politics, and, “W beat covid.” It ain’t… As you said, that dog ain’t hunting. But that is the argument that they are going to try to make as they get ready for the midterms on Tuesday, for the State of Union on Tuesday, which sets the table for the midterms coming up in November.

BUCK: They don’t have any good arguments.

CLAY: No.

BUCK: They don’t have a good pitch at this point know at this point because Biden was never a good candidate nor a good option. And this should have been known all along. This is why on all of these issues, there are the things… I do like that line, the Rumsfeld line about “known unknowns and unknown unknowns.”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: There are the things that come up for an administration that are unforeseen. I mean, the covid pandemic, for example, is a very well prominent one, right? But there are things that can hit you and you can’t see coming. Then there are policy decisions that are made by people who are given power in our government bureaucracy or in the executive branch, and it’s obvious what the outcome will be. If you open up the border, you’re gonna have more illegal immigration. If you undermine police and have progressive prosecutors, you’re gonna have more crime.

If you spend more money… They spent $1.8 trillion without a single Republican vote testifying ’21, Clay, the Democrats did as if it was chump change, something they found in the cushions on the couch, $1.9 trillion. Obama was gonna spend $900 billion, I think, in the initial… Not TARP. That was Troubled Asset Relief Program. In the stimulus. He was gonna spend almost a trillion in the stimulus and that was cause for the Tea Party to come together, right?

Oh, my gosh. They spend almost $2 trillion like it was nothing. You know, this is 10 years later. So we look at this now and we see all of these were foreseeable consequences of the actions the Democrat Party has taken up to this point, and we need to have a corrective. I really do believe this is what’s in the best interests of entire country, even double-masks, scared-to-go-outside, “I’m on my eighth or ninth booster” libs will be better off if Democrats get their hands taken off the levers of power.

I know they obviously vociferously disagree with that, but we’ve already seen the results. There’s nothing… This should be a hard thing for us to do right now, Clay. We should be sitting here saying, “Man. Looking at long-term consequences of some of Biden’s decision-making are gonna be really rough,” or, “I think we haven’t seen the full…” No, no, no. We’re not telling people things are gonna get bad in two years or 10 years or whatever.

We’re saying, “Look at what you have already experienced,” and we’re gonna go into a State of the Union address that’s going to be a master class in delusion, misdirection, and just absurdity, I think. And we know this before even hearing it because what’s the argument really gonna be? (Biden impression) “Yeah, we’re all in this together. Wear masks.” They really gonna try that crap? I think they are. And so that’s why these latest maneuvers, naming Ketanji Brown as the next Supreme Court justice, most likely, the mask reductions that are taking place, ’cause they gotta get a win out of something here. Otherwise, it’s gonna be the most depressing State of the Union address anyone’s seen in decades.

CLAY: I don’t think there’s any doubt that they are captured by the awfulness of the job that they have done, and there isn’t an escape route. Because the issues that they have created are long lasting. You can’t fix inflation in a couple of months. It didn’t get to 7.5% inflation — and, Buck, how did it get there? I was reading a study. Do you know what we spent on the average American family for covid relief since we started spending all these trillions of dollars?

The average American family has gotten over $50,000 per American family that our government has spent. And that’s how we’ve gone… We talked about this the other day but it’s as if this magical monetary theory — Modern Monetary Theory as they call it — doesn’t exist. We’ve gone, in the space of 40 years, from a $1 trillion national deficit to a $30 trillion national deficit, and we’ve added about $5 trillion to the national deficit in the last year and a half or so and change. It’s unheard of, not sustainable.

And so what should have to happen is if Joe Biden was as he claimed to be, a reasonable, moderate, wisdom-laden, elder statesman, what he would say is, “We gotta put our financial house in order.” That’s actually the role that Joe Manchin is playing in the Democratic Party right now, thankfully, ’cause otherwise we would have spent trillions of more dollars on Build Back Better, and we’d have even worse inflation.

So it’s gonna be a mess to even see him try to argue that he’s had any measure of success. And I think overwhelmingly the American public — and to your point, Buck, there are a lot of people who don’t pay attention on a day-to-day basis that might be willing to tune in to the State of the Union just to see what’s going to happen. And I think it’s gonna be an abject failure. The media will say it’s a success (chuckles), but the American public ain’t buying it.