President Trump Is Out There Fighting
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CROWD: (chanting) We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump! We want Trump!
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Thank you. And I love you too. You’re incredible people.
BUCK: He’s out there, folks. He’s still fighting. Hasn’t decided to give it up. Not even a little bit. In fact, the more I talk to people… Welcome back to the Clay and Buck show. This is Buck. The more I talk to people from President Trump’s orbit, the more I’m hearing he’s running. It’s just a question of who the team is gonna be around him, who the vice president would be. But I’m hearing that it’s…
I’ve had people tell me it’s a hundred percent in their minds at this point now, it’s obviously not a hundred percent until he declares, which is not gonna happen as we talked about so many times before until after the midterms one would think. But there is an electricity at the Georgia National Fairgrounds over the weekend as President Trump was rallying for a bunch of candidates who are running for office in 2022.
But Trump is just back out there doing what he does, and one thing — especially given there’s a lot of focus right now on whether anybody is allowed to talk about the Arizona audit, the Arizona ballot audit. A lot of people say you can’t. You can’t talk about it. Even on some conservative networks, even on some platforms that you would think would be more open to conservative points of view, Republican points of view, pro-Trump points of view.
Trump was reminding everybody over the weekend about how the people that claim the right — whether it’s on social media or just in general in our society — to determine the boundaries of acceptable political conversation were the same ones who lied about Russia and also are pushing January 6th as an insurrection.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: That’s what’s goin’ on with Russia! They made up a hoax, and we had to live with it for three years. What kind of a sick, perverted mind does that? And it was the lawyer and Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, they made it up. It was a hoax. And now they’re doing it again with the January 6th. Okay? They’re doing it again. They’re doing it again. We went through three years of hell battling this fake charge that was only allowed to happen because the media was complicit — as they always are — for the Democrats.
BUCK: They always are, Clay. That’s for sure.
CLAY: I gotta a question for you, Buck. Two questions. One — and I agree. Everybody that I am talking to says Trump’s gonna run too. So at this point I think it would be a big upset if he decided not to run in 2024. Who do we think is his best possible vice-presidential candidate? ‘Cause not gonna be Pence. And then…
Maybe we could talk about that when we come back for the next segment. Let’s tease that. We’ll pause it. But I want to ask you this question. Has it actually worked to Trump’s favor that he is banned by all these Big Tech platforms? And let me explain my thesis, and you tell me if I’m a mad genius or just crazy. Everybody already has an opinion about Donald Trump — pro or con, every single person in the entire United States.
I believe — and I know there’s people who disagree — that one of the reasons why Trump antagonized people in the medal of the country that… By middle of the country I don’t necessarily mean middle part of the country, although that certainly factors in, but people in the middle of the political spectrum, was they just got tired of the incessant drumbeat of his Twitter.
And the reality is, most media are lazy and not particularly smart. But Donald Trump’s tweets gave them easy stories to talk about and write about without having to do work. When he’s doing these rallies, you gotta sit and watch him talk for two hours to have a storyline associated with it. So, if everybody already has an opinion about Trump, is he actually getting more favorable treatment because it’s not a daily drumbeat of tweets? Instead it’s the overall end result of Trump within which was right, right? A lot of people liked where Trump got. They didn’t necessarily like the bull-in-a-china shop, day-to-day existence of Trump administration.
BUCK: They had some trepidation about his style.
CLAY: So could he actually be helped by not having daily thoughts on Twitter, hourly thoughts on Twitter in some way? Is this a crazy idea or do you buy into it?
BUCK: It’s interesting. I would say a couple things.
CLAY: ‘Cause because it makes him a martyr, too.
BUCK: See, here’s where I wanted to go. The overall narrative… This is what I think you’re opening up, and I would agree on this point, ’cause I actually think that the Trump tweets were also… We kind of think of all as good or bad. There were days that those Trump tweets were incredible, and the fact that he was able to take his message directly to the people and not have to go through, say, a Lester Holt interview or a Fake Tapper interview or whatever.
CLAY: Yes, and I think that was massive in ’16, but now everybody’s kind of got an opinion of Trump already.
BUCK: So here’s what I’d say. This whole notion of Trump being kicked off of social — and there are some conservative platforms now that are essentially conservative mirror images of Twitter that are out there that are gaining some traction. I’m on some. But it proves the system is rigged. By Trump being banned from Facebook and Twitter when these are the most powerful media platforms in the country, shows beyond doubt the system is rigged.
Full stop, okay? And they do it in the open now. They don’t play any games or, I should say, they can’t play the same kind of games they used to when, “Oh, it was an accident when we ban conservatives.” And it’s also a reminder of how people saw Trump in the early days when he started what felt like so improbable campaign to end up winning the presidency in 2016.
And it was that he was considered a blunt force instrument against the apparatus of elite control. And especially given what we are seeing right now, the country we are living in and what the possibilities are of this continuing and even getting worse. Australia, we think of it as the U.K. with better weather and nicer people. Australia is now East Germany with koalas. They have completely lost their minds, right? Like they’re on another planet.
CLAY: They’re tackling random moms and dads who are just out walking in the streets doing nothing at all wrong.
BUCK: If you are not wearing a mask and you’re out where you’re not supposed to be in broad daylight, they will have police officers wrestle you, face plant you into the cement, and take you into handcuffs in front of your own child.
CLAY: Australia is where America would be if we didn’t have federalism and Republican governors.
BUCK: That’s right. If we didn’t have Ron DeSantis and a few other Republican governors who are able to hold the line against the complete madness, we would be in a similar situation. ‘Cause the Fauciites see it, and you never see criticism. They never decry it. Do you ever see people on the left who are like, “You should mask, you should mask,” who say, “Australia, a little crazy”?
They don’t criticize it. They don’t have a problem with it. But Trump, again, was our sledgehammer against people like Fauci, who pretend they have all these credentials and they’re so smart and they do such a good job. But then they actually stink at their jobs. And they’re little, petty tyrants. And they have bad outcomes. And then they try to blame us ’cause we didn’t mask up enough or whatever.
So that’s why one of the reasons why I think Trump is… We talk about the social media thing, and I just want to throw this in here too. Trump realizes that the social media battle is central to the political future of this country. So he started… There was a “lock him up” chant targeting Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. I’ve never heard this before. This was a first time to hear anything like this one.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Officials also took $45 million from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to fund “election-related activities.”
CROWD: (booing) Lock him up! Lock him up!
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Well, they should be looking at that. What is that all about?
BUCK: The sledgehammer, Clay, I want the Trump hammer, the sledgehammer back.
CLAY: And the other thing I should add in here, Biden and Trump are statistically tied in favorability right now. Pretty crazy, right? ‘Cause Biden ran his entire campaign on normalcy, on not creating a stir. And I wonder whether this is having a reverse impact. Just kind of put it in the back of your mind and think about it.
