BUCK: Welcome back, everybody, to the Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show. I’m Buck. My man Clay right here with me. And wow. We just had Trump Power Hour, a Trump-a-thon for the middle of the show, and we were honored and privileged to have it. What a great conversation covering so many topics, from Biden’s cognition to the policies of Kamala, to the border, to: Should Herschel Walker run for Senate? By the way, I think kind of a “get” there. He’s saying he’s running.
CLAY: He said he’s running.
BUCK: Yeah, he said he’s gonna do it.
CLAY: Which would be a big deal. He mentioned the situation in Georgia, which obviously got us to 50-50. And Warnock, for people out there who have not done the math or paid a lot of attention to it, was running to fill not a full term yet. So he will have to rerun in 2022. So, in theory, you could have Herschel Walker going up against the Reverend Raphael Warnock in Georgia to potentially decide who’s going to have control of the U.S. Senate.
BUCK: And that will be a big national level, attention-getting kind of Senate race for sure, if, in fact, that is the lineup. We want to know what you think, ’cause we just had former president Trump on for a full hour here on radio. Just thoughts about it. You know, I feel like for a lot of you — look, it felt this way for me — it’s a voice that it’s just good to hear these days because we don’t have him around the same way we did before.
I don’t just mean because he’s not in the Oval Office right now. He’s been shut down. He’s been treated like a cancel culture target, and social media’s kicked him off. I would tell you, “I miss the Trump tweets,” and I was a frequent retweetee of President Trump. So I used to love when Trump would get fired up on Twitter and do things.
And it was always a good experience to see what your timeline, so to speak, looked like after Trump had decided that a tweet would go to his 80 million followers, right? You’d see a lot related to the commentary. But here, we just want to make sure everyone knows.
We want you to react. 800-282-2882. 800-282-2882, plus you’ll have clips from that interview, if you want to listen on demand at ClayandBuck.com. If you’re not already, please follow us on social media: @ClayandBuck are the Twitter and Facebook handles, and then the Clay and Buck podcast, which I think we’re now Top 10 for politics, but come on.
CLAY: (chuckling) We should be number one.
BUCK: We should be at the number-one spot.
CLAY: I want you guys to drive us to number one. A couple things, Buck. I mean, first of all, that was, I think, a sign of how much Trump wants to talk to his audience, because, as you mentioned, the scary nature of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram. All of them simultaneously, in collusive conjunction, banning Donald Trump simultaneously, to me was the ultimate crescendo of cancel culture.
Because if they can ban the democratically elected president of the United States from their platforms, then people like you and me, Buck, who have decent size audiences — but also everybody out there who’s listening to us — have no real ability to stand and go toe-to-toe with Big Tech right now. He said a lot of interesting things. This is the first time that I’ve heard him say definitively when he would be making a decision, right after 2022, on whether or not to run for reelection.
A lot can happen between now and then. He said, Buck, that he didn’t think… He talked about the cognitive test that he took when everybody was talking about the 25th Amendment. He said he didn’t think that Joe Biden could pass a cognitive test right now, which I thought was also significant. He seemed to take some joy in the CNN collapsed ratings, which is pretty funny.
BUCK: Well, they absolutely did rely on him.
CLAY: Oh, no doubt.
BUCK: If you go back to the 2016 election and you remember what happened there. CNN thought that they could have these incredible ratings by putting on the Trump rally, and I was a political analyst at CNN at the time, as a conservative. I mean, they would always put, you know, “conservative political analyst,” which is like putting a target on you and saying, “Throw tomatoes” if you’re at CNN.
CLAY: Yeah, right.
BUCK: But I was a conservative political analyst there, and so I knew people internally. They thought — and I mean, Jeff Zucker all the way on down — that by putting Trump on their air, they were getting both great ratings and it was like a laugh line. “Ha-ha! Look at this guy. Look at this Republican.” By the time they figured out that he actually was a political phenomenon, they had given him — I think there were actual analyses done — over a billion dollars of free media.
CLAY: Oh, there’s no doubt.
BUCK: It was a crazy number. So he got the last laugh on that one.
CLAY: And I do think that’s a really interesting question, because who is going to be — and you asked him this. Who right now that is in elective office is someone who can go toe-to-toe with Joe Biden and the Democrats, considering they have control of the Senate and control of the House?
And I think one of the real difficulties associated with this is you know that if Trump were not in office, he would be throwing punches all the time on social media. There isn’t really anybody. Like, who would you even point to right now as the guy or the girl that you say, “Oh, this is the person who’s kind of in the ring throwing punches on a day-to-day basis and having responses that they would give”?
BUCK: Oh, he was Maximus in the arena of social media.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: You know? He was.
CLAY: Are you not entertained?
BUCK: Not only was he able to defeat all those who came at him on social media and in a way that was just often hilarious, but that, then, I think, Clay, really he was leading by showing people that by punching back, the left is… They’re bullies. They don’t like it when people call them out.
They don’t like it when they have those on our side, on the conservative side who will stand up to them and say that this is crazy or what you’re doing is wrong. They’re used to just getting away with it. So, because Trump was able to do it successfully, I think there were a lot of other people who really punched it up a lot on social and realized they could get into the fight too.
It was like he was first into the MAGA breach, so to speak. You know, he went through the crumbling outer walls of leftism. And you had so many others that were following him in, saying, “Wow. We have a brawler.” I mean, conservatives were not used to having a brawler on their side.
Somebody who no matter how things got in that bar fight, you knew that he was gonna be the guy you wanted to have close at your side. There’s nobody else who’s been able to fill in that space yet. That’s where we are. No one else yet. And that’s why I think the possibility… He’s leaving it open. We all know he would be formidable. It’s just a question of, “Does he want to do it?” You know, that’s where this is.
CLAY: And how would he feel at 78 years old? That’s how old Joe Biden is right now. Does he want to be sort of the godfather candidate who gives his support behind somebody maybe younger who is deciding to run, or does he think this is his race to go out and run?
And I think the other question is, I think everyone out there who’s listening to us right now would presume that Kamala Harris is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2024, maybe even running as the incumbent, depending on whether or not Joe Biden is able to finish his term.
BUCK: So I think that’s such an interesting analysis of it, because Trump running against Kamala has gotta feel like Trump’s gonna win that one, right? Because the whole pitch with Biden was, “Oh, it’s normalcy and unity,” right? That was really what was behind it. “He’s not Trump. Normal, unifying, old.”
CLAY: Unthreatening, old, white guy.
BUCK: Exactly. Now we see he’s really just a Trojan horse candidate for the left. He’s essentially like a pass-through. He’s a figurehead for the more AOC-like policies. He hasn’t gone totally AOC-Bernie, but he’s certainly pushed much more in that direction — or the people around him are pushing much more in that direction — than what was promised. But, I mean, a Trump-Kamala showdown would be pretty amazing.
CLAY: And that’s assuming… Again, my assumption is that there’s no way that the Democratic Party — which right now is founded basically on everything is racist and everything is sexist and, oh, by the way, everything is also homophobic. If they didn’t run Kamala Harris, by their own definition, it would be racist and sexist to not give a minority woman their nomination if she were to run.
Now, she ain’t a good candidate. So I really wonder, as we start to look towards what might happen in the future, will there be other candidates willing to step to Kamala Harris and try to win that Democratic nomination, or is everyone cowed into submission such that she basically gets a free ride to that nomination?
BUCK: And we’re gonna be right back into the cycle here. That’s what everyone has to know.
CLAY: Oh, quickly.
BUCK: You know, the summer is gonna fly by — we all know that — and then as soon as the fall hits, it’s midterm season, everybody. That’s when we start looking down the political side, and Trump is clearly going to be a really powerful voice on the campaign trail for the Republican Party and pushing for candidates.
And he was saying — and, by the way, I think he does deserve credit. One fascinating and very clear difference between Obamaism and Trumpism — and I know there are a lot of things we could talk about. But one difference in their political skill set, their political abilities was Obama’s popularity among Democrats never translated into wins for other Democrats.
CLAY: True.
BUCK: Obama did very well individually among the left, but he never was able to be a kingmaker. Donald Trump’s popularity does actually get transferred onto people that he believes in. When Donald Trump calls on behalf of or shows up on behalf of a candidate, it is a game-changer.
He’s absolutely right when he says that. So we know that will be a part of this. It’s really just a question of… Well, we all know the question: Is he gonna be the guy leading the charge, or is he gonna be, you know, Obi-Wan Kenobi teaching next generation of Jedi to go fight for the principles that he believes in?