BONUS: Daily Review With Clay and Buck - Jun 26 2025
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Welcome to today's edition of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show podcast. Welcome in Thursday edition, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton Show. Appreciate all of you rolling with us today.

We'll be right back.

The fact that there was a leak to CNN and the New York Times that suggested the attack on Saturday evening here in the United States on Tehran was not actually effective.

And that has been pushed back on aggressively. And it started really early this morning at 8 a.m. Eastern when Pete Hegseth came out and just went to town on the press and the reporting surrounding this. Now, I want to play some of these cuts because it was a pretty intense press conference. But I'll start with a conversation that we had yesterday, which was about the challenge, the difficulty of finding information

out who leaked this information, particularly as it appears that it may well not have been accurate.

So, Buck, you worked in the intelligence community. When you saw this report was leaked, did you think initially, hey, this is kind of unheard of? Did it totally seem maybe not a positive thing, but not an unexpected thing? And I know we talked about this some yesterday, but what are the difficulties that would be inherent in figuring out who actually leaked to this? Because it is certainly classified information.

Well, the fact that somebody would take this to the press so early on in the process and that it was already known to be a low confidence assessment just means somebody wanted to blunt the narrative of Trump is just kicking ass and making X.

Excellent decisions as commander in chief. And this war, those who said it's not even a war, it's a military strike. OK, you know, think of all the countries that we have had military operations in that we would not consider ourselves to be at war in the midst of a war. But, Clay, this was meant to have a political ramification, because if you wanted this to have.

U.S. national security in mind. If you wanted to be somebody who said, hey, guys, hey, I'm worried about the reactors. I'm worried that there could still be a lot more here. We didn't get enough.

What you would want is to wait until you pull together all of the best sources, get it rock solid, and then work its way up the chain through the CIA director or the DIA director in this case. And then at that point, you know, you would have done your due diligence. This wasn't a due diligence moment. This was somebody who decided, I'm going to be the one who reigns on Trump's parade here.

This was an individual. This was a deep stater. This is someone who did not have the interests of the United States in mind, but the interests of...

a very bitter and weak and feckless-looking Democrat machine in mind and hope to take away some of the sense of ebullience and some of the congratulations that have been going around, not just for Trump's decision, but for the men and women who flew the airstrikes themselves, for the Pentagon pulling this off, the intelligence community for having these sites mapped out. Clay, it's a big win, but to me, this is a bit like saying,

Somebody from within the intelligence community after the bin Laden raid is raising raising concerns that there was really, you know, no no document exploitation that that came out of that raid or maybe that we didn't even get bin Laden. So why would you do that?

You would only do that if you were trying to hurt. Now, of course, that didn't happen because somehow our team doesn't do those kinds of leaks. That's always a Democrat left-wing thing when there's a leak of classified to hurt a commander-in-chief. But that's what this was. It's very clear. There's no way that this person could have had the level of visibility necessary to, remember, it's a low-confidence assessment. Clay, I was in the room many times with people from DIA, CIA, NSA, go down the list, all of them.

And there was squabbling over who's right about very important. And we were at a war, right? We were in the midst of a war. And, you know, things like, hey, could a surge in Baghdad work to stabilize things? Let me tell you something. A lot of fighting and dissenting voices over that. The notion that one person has the keys to the kingdom on the damage assessment is absurd. It's just a political hit. And that's why they should go after the leakers.

All right, so let me play some of these cuts. This was from the Pentagon earlier today. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. I do give a lot of credit. We've talked about this on the program. They made everybody get there early. 8 a.m. Eastern time, start for this to dominate the news cycle for the day. Here's Hegseth blasting the press in particular for these leaks. This is cut to. Because you...

And I mean specifically you, the press, specifically you, the press corps, because you cheer against Trump so hard. It's like in your DNA and in your blood to cheer against Trump because you want him not to be successful so bad. You have to cheer against the efficacy of these strikes. You have to hope maybe they weren't effective. Maybe the way the Trump administration is representative isn't true. So let's take half-truths

spun information, leaked information and then spin it, spin it in every way we can to try to cause doubt and manipulate the mind, the public mind over whether or not our brave pilots were successful. How many stories have been written about how hard it is to, I don't know, fly a plane for 36 hours?

Has MSNBC done that story? Has Fox? Have we done the story how hard that is? Have we done it two or three times so that American people understand how about how difficult it is to shoot a drone from an F-15 or 16 or F-22 or F-35? Or what it's like to man a Patriot battery? Or how hard it is to refuel midair? Giving the American people an understanding of how complex and sophisticated this mission really was.

There are so many aspects of what our brave men and women did that because of the hatred of this press corps are undermined because people are trying to leak and spin that it wasn't successful. It's irresponsible.

Okay, so that's one. Let's continue. This sounds a little bit like Fox and Friends or a hit that Pete Hegseth is doing on Fox News, and it's one reason, I think, that Trump wanted him in this position because he is a very talented communicator. And that matters in this world where you are really having to lace on the gloves and go head-to-head with the press every single day. Here's cut three more on Hegseth saying...

The classified information, as you said, Buck, is leaked to try and harm Trump. Cut three. Time and time again, classified information is leaked or peddled for political purposes to try to make the president look bad. And what's really happening is you're undermining the success of incredible B-2 pilots and incredible F-35 pilots and incredible refuelers and incredible air defenders who accomplished their mission, set back a nuclear program in ways that other presidents would have dreamed.

How about we celebrate that? How about we talk about how special America is, that only we have these capabilities? I think it's too much to ask, unfortunately, for the fake news. So we're used to that. But we also have an opportunity to stand at the podium and read the truth of what's really happening. And the reality is you want to call it destroyed. You want to call it defeated. You want to call it obliterated. Choose your word.

This was an historically successful attack. We should celebrate it as Americans. And it gives us a chance to have peace, chance to have a deal, and an opportunity to prevent a nuclear Iran, which is something President Trump talked about for 20 years. I mean, guns blazing here. I don't think we mentioned the New York Times getting upset about the fact that...

Hegseth praised our boys. And so he was actually asked, we have this cut and I couldn't believe it. He was actually asked, why not acknowledge female pilots that participated instead of congratulating the boys? This is cut for.

Why not acknowledge the female pilots that also participated in this mission? The early messages that you sent out only congratulated the boys. So when I say something like our boys and bombers, see, this is the kind of thing the press does, right? Of course, the chairman mentioned a female bomber pilot. That's fantastic. She's fantastic. She's a hero. I want more female bomber pilots. I hope the men and women of our country sign up to do such brave and audacious things.

But when you spin it as because I say our boys and bombers is a common phrase, I'll keep saying things like that, whether they're men or women. Very proud of that female pilot, just like I'm very proud of those male pilots. And I don't care if it's a male or a female in that cockpit. And the American people don't care. But it's the obsession with race and gender in this department that's changed priorities. And we don't do that anymore. We don't play your little games.

I love this. I mean, I can't believe that's a real question he got asked. But it's good that we see that this is what the press still pretends is their job, right, is to push –

They're just asking questions. We'll get to Jake Tapper's latest on that. Really, they're always pushing an agenda. No one thinks that Pete Hegseth was undermining any woman who... This is a bit like saying, hey, when you were talking, you said, hey, you guys, great job. Why didn't you say you guys and girls? I mean, it's absurd. It's childish. It's focused on nothing. But I also think that what this shows you, Clay, is in these...

You know, the media, the non-Fox media, the Democrat media, the non-aligned leftist media, they have been making a lot of jokes about how Fox News essentially has staffed this Trump administration. And what's interesting is, yeah, guess what? Now you've got people who are both qualified to do the job, people like Dan Bongino and Hegseth and others, who are also really good at media and comms themselves.

Yes. And so if you think back to other times, we've had people who are running, you know, Department of Defense. We've had people who were in these kinds of cabinet level positions, secretary of state. Look at Secretary of State Rubio. I mean, that guy might as well have been a Fox contributor for the last decade. He's been on Fox, you know, as much as anybody.

They're good at this. And so the ability that the media has to attack them, trip them up, undermine them, and then focus on that instead of what's actually happening is vastly diminished. I mean, it's almost non-existent at this point. Can you imagine being a Pentagon News reporter?

And we just had the strike that we did on Iran. And you get a limited amount of time to ask questions and a limited amount of things that you can even ask about because they're only going to be whatever it is, five, six, seven people called on that. That would be the thing that you went in as a Pentagon reporter saying,

to focus on was the fact that one female was there and said when the when he said the boys in the planes or whatever the heck it used to be that that would be your focus it even is stunning to me still this all this all makes sense though because their job if you work for the washington post and you're in the pentagon briefing room or if you work for the new york times and you're in the white house

The only way you're going to get any attention and that your readership, which is hyper-partisan, is going to like your reporting is if you manage to attack successfully, get them to stumble, get to pull some soundbite. They don't actually care about the information. They don't. They're not there to ask relevant, reasonable questions and get back at you.

objective data for the American people, they are there to be partisan attack dogs. And so if they don't do that, they're not actually serving the purposes of their paper. I get the partisan attack dog thing, but to think that your audience is obsessed because he used the word boys and in fact there was one girl. Did you see who asked that question?

Did you see who asked that question? She's been wagging her finger at people for saying, you guys, for the last 20 years. I guarantee you.

I just I can't believe that that is real. And by the way, the New York Times got savaged in their live chat because they had a male reporter who said in real time, hey, well, actually, you know, there was a girl. First of all, when the idea that boys and girls or guys or anything.

We all understand the concept. I mean, I imagine it comes from the boys in the bombers is also a phrase boys in the boat, which was one of the best selling books. Great book, by the way. But is there are there any women that were actually offended by that?

I just the fact that that would be a question that's asked of the secretary of defense in a limited public availability situation where he doesn't answer a lot of questions is actually even for left wing media. I think a huge embarrassment for them. Look, heads up, everybody. Another massive data breach has happened. Sixteen billion, 16 billion login credentials have been leaked. Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter.

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Mamadani mania sweeping the Democrats all across this land of ours. And we all know from yesterday that this guy, Zoran Mamadani, is the Democrat nominee for the mayor of New York City. Now, that's not a done deal. There are some long bomb in the end zone hopes.

that maybe Eric Adams could pull this off, or maybe there's some Cuomo deal, although I think Cuomo now is just considered a loser. The comeback, Clay, the comeback has not worked out the way that Cuomo wanted.

these spaghetti and meatballs was not as good as he was hoping for. This was a total whiff by me, Buck. I mean, I really thought that they had rolled out the red carpet for him. I thought he was going to win the mayoral race and would then use it as the jumping off point to be a candidate in 2028. Instead, I think his political career is over. I think he gave up the political ghost, so to speak, in that loss and the way that he lost.

So now here's again, I have to I bring this to your attention because so go with New York City. So go with a lot of other Democrat cities. I think this is going to be viewed. So if you live in Texas, you're like, well, that's New York's problem.

Yeah, but, you know, you live in a city like Houston or Dallas, which is Democrat majority, unfortunately. This might affect you. You know, obviously, if you live in California, you're in a Democrat enclave statewide. You know, there's a lot of stuff, a lot of stuff that will filter out from this. And I think it's an interesting test case because you already have national level Democrats. You had Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton.

Bill Clinton. I don't even know he was on Twitter. He was like, hey, I hear you're a socialist. You love those pretty ladies. I like pretty ladies, too. We should talk. You know, Bill Clinton, all of a sudden, giving his congratulations. Uh,

Khomeini himself. Just kidding. Khomeini didn't congratulate him, but it would have been funny if he had. Khomeini did say that they've won the war, though. I do have that one here. We'll get to that later. Bill Clinton, congratulations to Zoran on your victory. Wishing you success. Yeah, nothing really interesting there. But Bill Clinton weighed in. AOC and Bernie. There's really a decision that's being made.

With AOC within the Democrat Party, there's the AOC Bernie pathway. And then there's the, you know, somebody who is the Democrat in charge of Kentucky. What's that guy? I'm forgetting. Blank. Andy Beshear. You know, there's like the Beshear or the governor of Maryland or the you know, there's that like I'm a Democrat, but I'm not like one of those crazy Democrats. They'll do whatever Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi tell them, but they pretend not to be right.

Right now, you've just had a big win go up on the board for the crazy AOC wing of the Democrat Party. And I understand you might say, Buck, they'll never be able to win a national election. Kamala lost by, in an electoral college, which is what matters, a couple hundred thousand votes, really.

Right. Meaning I understand she lost by a lot more. She lost the popular vote. I'm not taking away from Trump's enormous victory. It was fantastic. But if you were able to shift a couple hundred thousand votes in half a dozen states, really less than half a dozen states, Kamala Harris would have been president. So don't let's not get complacent about the fact that the worst presidential candidate in my lifetime.

is somebody who wasn't that far. It was not like a Mondale absolute thrashing. This was something that was closer than it should have been. Now, just because of why, I don't want you to think, oh, this is just New York City's problem.

This is that's like saying Soros prosecutors were New York's problem. Oh, wait, hold on a second. They were in every major city in the country for a while. There were Soros prosecutors in St. Louis and in and in Philly and in L.A. and in Atlanta. You know, you get on the list, right? Chicago, Soros money all over the country. So you have to watch these trends. Clay, let's get into some of the crazy stuff here. Socialist Democrat Zoran Mamdani.

Something that he says he wants to do. This is cut nine. This guy says he wants to 800% increase sales.

Hate, hate crime prevention. Play this. I know that Jewish New Yorkers, like Jewish Americans, are fearful in this moment of anti-Semitism. And ultimately, it's through the conversations I've had with Jewish New Yorkers that I have developed a proposal for the Department of Community Safety that would include an 800 percent increase in funding for hate crime prevention programs.

because ultimately we cannot simply say that anti-Semitism has no home in this city or no place in this country. We have to do more than talk about it. We have to tackle it. And that's what we will do through this funding and through this commitment. We will root out bigotry across the five boroughs. Let me just throw this out there, Clay. This is going to absolutely not work at all to stop any bigotry, but it will be a way to fund left-wing indoctrination programs in community centers, schools, and et cetera, all the rest of it. Yeah, and...

Look, I think what you're saying is so important because a lot of people think, oh, New York City, that doesn't really impact my life in a substantial way.

I think who the mayor of New York City is impacts all of our lives. Even if you live in the smallest town in Alabama or the most remote part of Utah, the decisions made in New York City, given its primacy as the financial capital of the world, have a major resonance. And the idea that New York City is going to potentially elect a guy like Mamdani is

should be a clarion call for sanity to ring forth. And I think maybe some of these parents that are subsidizing all their kids to live in New York City, producer Allie made a good point yesterday, but I do think it's true that a lot of Mom Donnie's voters are young, under 30s, who otherwise wouldn't be living in New York City, but for the fact that their parents are helping to pay their rent.

and they have decided they like socialism. The parents like capitalism because that's how they can afford to take care of their kids. But I do think that there's a generational divide here. And I think as you break all of this down, unfortunately, look, I don't know that the Democrat Party, this is a good question for you, Buck, is still in a powerful enough position to

that they would be able to knock out a Bernie Sanders candidacy now, that they would be able to knock out an AOC candidacy now. I think the party is so fractured and so broken, and you might say, okay, well, that's good. The problem is they could win.

I don't think it's a crazy idea that Bernie Sanders could, if he weren't 83 or 84 or whatever the heck he is, that he could catch fire. Someone like him could catch fire and end up as the president. I don't think it's a crazy, ridiculous idea. I'm going to tell you something. I watched a lot of these Mom Donnie videos.

And the guy is very slick. He understands social media. He comes across as, just objectively, he comes across as affable and pretty humble.

And a guy who just wants to talk to people, he did this whole video. It's now gone pretty viral, Clay, where he goes around talking to, like, you know, people call them like halal carts, like the meat and rice carts that are in New York City, asking them, like, why is it so expensive? Like, why is it $10 or $12 now for this? Couldn't it be less? And he has these guys. He goes right in, and they're saying, oh, it's because of city permitting.

The city permitting process is corrupt and takes too long and it's too expensive. And he goes, oh, we're going to fix that.

You know, say what you will about the fact that he, you know, freezing. There's a whole Bill Ackman has a whole takedown of this guy. Freezing rent prices is just going to make the housing shortage worse. Yes. Because it means that, you know, there are expenses that are already baked in and people have to build more and they don't want to build more if they can't actually charge the market rate. Anyway, so he's an economic illiterate, but he understands. Mamdani understands story.

And he understands social media and how to connect with an audience. I, you know, don't sleep on this guy, everybody. You know, we have this thing, you know, and I know we've done this with AOC, too. Oh, you know, geez. But this guy doesn't strike me as dumb. Wrong, yes. Dumb, no. He doesn't strike me as dumb. And, you know, horrible ideas, certainly. But...

This is the other, you know, the option the Democrats have is to say, we're not going to go toward the center and try to reform our crazy. We're going to double down on crazy. We're just going to package it better. Oh, I think AOC sees this and says, I'm running for president now in 2028. Absolutely. I've said this all along. You asked me right after this election, who's going to be the leader of the Democrat Party? I said, well, I said AOC at one point, and then I've also mentioned Wes Moore, the governor of Maryland. But those are the pathways.

There's the AOC, hard left, socialist, just say the stuff that you want to say. And then there's the, oh, I'm not like them. I'm more normal. And then you get the AOC policies, but you get somebody who pretends to be something else during the election cycle. I'm not sure the Democrat Party has the ability to slap down someone like Bernie Sanders if he were running today, which if I'm looking at AOC, I'm saying Mamdani just –

ran through what did mom Donnie do? Well, he's pretty good on social media. You may think, and I certainly think that AOC is economically illiterate and a moron. There's a huge audience for what she puts out on social media and she skilled at that. Now I don't, I hope that her overall policies are so crazy and she would do such a poor job even of defending those policies that she would not be capable of winning an election. Um,

But I think you're starting to see that the Democrat Party had two pathways. They could wake up.

and be somewhat more sane, or at least pretend to be more sane, and take the more moderate path as they move towards 2026 and 2028. Or they could double, triple, and quadruple down on crazy. And it seems to me that the early returns, based on what we saw in New York City, are that they're going to double, triple, quadruple down on crazy. And you know, now we're in a situation where Eric Adams is the savior of New York City, and

And that's only if they can get Cuomo to officially drop out, if they can find a way to kind of corral this strange coalition that potentially he would be able to bring to bear. And that would require black voters, interestingly, deciding that they had to show up in a monster number for Eric Adams in order to offset a lot of these young white voters that have fallen in love with socialism.

So you've got Mamdani talking about the 800% increase in the anti-bigotry forces. Not police. I don't know what they're going to be. Bigotry prevention programs. Also, as we know, in New York, if you're talking about anti-Semitic or anti-Asian bigotry,

Yeah, probably not going to if you're leftist, you're not going to like the demographics that are disproportionately targeting those groups. This is just a matter of fact, a matter of numbers and data. But put that aside for a moment. Here is really at the heart of it. Mamdani saying that our criminal justice system, this is cut eight, is just straight up racist. The alternatives are things that we must look to.

immediately, both with regards to neighborhood groups who do anti-violence work and are shown to be more effective than the police, but also asking, you know, if we have an understanding that our criminal justice system is racist, which is quite a general understanding now, it seems to be shared by many, many people, then how can we simultaneously be investing in it as the way we both judge and determine the futures of so many people in our state?

Now, that was 2020, granted, but the criminal justice system in this country is actually not racist. It is not racist. I know that this is something Democrats love to say, but the laws are the laws.

And we have talked about this before, and to me, the way that this gets destroyed is if you just push back, anybody who says this, just nod and say, super sexist, too. Why are men charged with crimes at such higher rates? Really unfair, those murder laws. Men do all the murders. This is my favorite argument, Clay. We've been making it here for a long time because they don't know what to say because they have to admit, yeah, men commit more murders. We just do. Sorry, guys. We're the ones who kill people.

Does that mean we should change the murder laws? Does that mean that murder laws are sexist? It does not. It's a pretty strong argument. It's a good one to use on your kids or grandkids if they bring that home with you sometime. Instead of immediately combating them there, say, you know what, I've been thinking about this a lot. Why are men in prison at such higher rates than women? I think maybe we need to go back and look at all of our laws. They're very sexist. And see how your kids respond.

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White House Press Secretary, our friend Caroline Leavitt, taking questions right now on the intel leaks surrounding the Iran operation. We have been talking about the big decision that New York City is going to have. What do you think Cuomo does?

I was totally wrong. I thought I did think he would run for mayor. I look like a genius. I've told that a month ago. You can put this one in the forget file, Clay, okay? You've made some great calls. This one didn't quite work out as we thought, but it's okay. What's the best? Let's pretend that you were giving advice to Andrew Cuomo. Is it to now get behind Cuomo?

Mom Donnie and just kind of step off to the side? Or is it to try to run as an independent and maybe have a secret deal behind the scenes? Because if he runs as an independent and Eric Adams runs, then Mom Donnie's definitely going to win because they will split the...

Mom Donnie opposition vote. I think he's a two-time loser, and that means the best thing that he can do is to get an agent and find his way onto an episode of Law & Order where he plays...

a probably elderly mobster or something along those lines, maybe a corrupt politician. I do not think that he has a future in New York politics anymore after this. I don't see it because, you know, you can't win the – he'll just be playing spoiler at that point. If I'm a New Yorker, and I'm New York adjacent in my heart, right? I mean, if I'm a New Yorker still, though, voting –

I talk to my family about this all the time, and I want what's best for New York, not just for all of our fantastic WOR listeners and podcast listeners in the New York area. We want the best for all of you. But also, my own family is there. So when we talk about safe streets in New York, I'm thinking about my mom, my dad, my sister. I'm thinking about people who I love and mean a lot to me. So that means that I want what's best. Now, in what way is Andrew Cuomo...

an improvement over Eric Adams. I have to say, I don't think he is. And so that's where you've got a guy who's already mayor, already in the job, not horrible, okay? He's not good. You know, I think Eric Adams, and let me know, WOR listeners, if you want, if you think this is a fair grade. I think he's a, you know, if de Blasio was an F, I think Mayor Eric Adams is probably a C-.

Maybe a C, you know? I think that's a fair... You know, he's not intentionally, maliciously destroying New York. He's just not a very good manager. He was good on the issue. Let's take a few things. He tried to help on the crime issue. Brought in somebody good here with Jesse Tisch to run the NYPD as commissioner. He...

spoke out in a way that I think was really important for the Trump campaign, actually. He didn't speak on behalf of them, but when he said, guys, we're flooded with all these migrants, this is crazy. He was honest about that and said he didn't want any more. So he did do some things that are, there's nothing I can, de Blasio did nothing that is good. Everything de Blasio did was, in my mind, every decision he made was against the interests of New Yorkers. And we can just forget about him. Didn't he run for president, by the way?

Didn't he run for president for a second? I think he did. Wasn't he one of those guys who was like, I'm also on the stage? Everyone was like, get out of here. So, Clay, I think that Eric Adams is the non-Mom Downey hope of New York now. And is that enough? And people who are going to tell me, Buck, you can get behind Curtis Sliwa. You can get behind Curtis Sliwa. Obviously, I agree with Curtis. I like Curtis. We've had him on the show several times. We've had him on the show.

You know, it's an 80-20 Democrat city, guys. It's just not going to happen. It's just not going to happen. I wish, you know, that that wasn't the case. But you just had the most radical leftists win the Democrat primary. You're not about to win over a lot of Democrats to be a Republican. That's not going to happen. Vote for a Republican. A part of me wonders whether there might be such a panic setting in among the Wall Street universe.

that somebody with hundreds of millions of dollars, a la Bloomberg, decides. Ackman is by saying he's going to spend huge money. Bill Ackman, who's kind of a red pill. We need to get him on the show because I think that would be an interesting conversation. But he has been tweeting that there are people out there that he thinks he could help to persuade. The challenge is whoever is opposed to Mamdani, everybody else has to drop out.

And there has to be one focal point of, hey, this is the guy or the gal, as the case may be, who is going to go head-to-head against Mamdani. And everybody has to get behind this person. My concern is I think Cuomo's ego is involved here now. Eric Adams, I don't think there's any way he's going to drop out.

And then Curtis Sliwa, you start getting all these different groups and it's hard to get to 50% plus one when you've got this many different splintered individuals running.

de Blasio's presidential campaign, by the way, good research by Ali. He ran from May 16th, 2019 to September 20th, 2019, spent $1.4 million, and everybody just kind of laughed him out of the arena. Because even New Yorkers were like, this is one of the craziest things we've ever seen, that a guy who's this... But didn't the guy this unpopular decide to run...

Did it build the Blasio make news most recently, Buck, because he and his wife announced that they were going to basically have an open marriage? Am I wrong about this? I think I know this and tried to forget it because I don't really need to know this stuff. But I believe there's something like that that has occurred. Yeah. They made a public statement that they were staying married, but they were going to be with other people. I mean.

What a ridiculous guy that dude was. The fact that he could get elected actually makes me terrified because Mamdani, to your point, Buck, is actually a super articulate, smart, charismatic guy who's just wrong about everything.

But he's not an unlikable person, if that makes sense. He's wrong about everything, but not unlikable and also smart and savvy when it comes to trying to understand how to make arguments on social media.

Yes, I think that he's more formidable than a lot of people looking from the outside are assessing right now, and that's something to keep in mind as we go forward. So look, I'm totally... I hope I'm wrong on this one, and I hope that this is something that does not come to pass. But here is... Let me see, we've got...

Tom Homan laying down the law here. You know, there's this whole separation of powers thing.

And here is Tom Homan saying, look, you can't kick ice out of New York, buddy. It's called federal law. Place 16. He's vowed to kick the, quote, fascist ice out of New York City. OK, so how do you intend to deal with that? Because I would guess there are going to be a lot of criminals and Iranian cells and whatnot in New York City. The job's not done there. What do you say to this guy? Good luck with that.

Doug Law trumps him every day, every hour, every minute. We're going to be in New York City. Matter of fact, because this is a sanctuary city, President Trump made it clear a week and a half ago. We're going to double down and triple down on sanctuary cities. If we can't arrest a bad guy in a county jail, one agent arresting one bad guy, they release him in the streets like New York does every day. We've got to send a whole team to look for this guy.

Yeah, that's going to be a showdown that I don't think is going to go well for Mamdani, by the way. I don't think that he wants to be on the other side of Tom Homan on the immigration issue. Because, first of all, legally, Homan's right. And second of all, if there's anything that looks like a showdown, this Mamdani guy is going to shrink away from that fight very quickly. I'm not sure anybody in the entire Trump team is working harder right now than Tom Homan is.

I mean, if you look at that Miller, I mean, when we saw him, Stephen Miller looks like he looks like he lives on a cot on the White House floor right now. I mean, he's he's going through a lot. There are a lot of guys who are working unbelievable hours because they see this as the 18 months when Trump is able to be his most effective and efficient version of himself.

But the amount of media that is out there that Tom Holman is doing on a day-to-day basis and the amount of success that he is having is frankly unparalleled. And I know we talk about this on this program and try to make sure that we reference it often.

I'm not sure in our lives that there has ever been anything that government has fixed faster and more effectively than the border under Trump. When you consider historic failure under Biden,

And it was as if a light switch just got flipped or got turned off, whichever direction you want to go. And overnight, everything changed and it became flawless. And you know that's the case because it suddenly isn't talked about anywhere. But my goodness, this is the number one thing Trump said he would fix ever.

and they don't want to give him any credit for it. But Tom Holman and the team, and Stephen Miller's a part of this too, they've just been unbelievable on this front. Also want to bring this to your attention, again, because I know we talk about this, and it's like, oh, we're so New York-focused, and Buck's from New York, and maybe that's why. A lot of people are focused in on this all over the country right now,

Because it's a playbook that I think you're going to see replicated elsewhere, and you could even see replicated in the 2028 election cycle, which I know feels like an eternity away, but it's not. It'll be here before you know it. And socialist Mamdani, Kami Mamdani...

This cut 10 is saying, yeah, what I did, this should be the playbook. This absolutely will work in other cities, in other states across America. Play it. You're a proud democratic socialist. Do you think that is a platform that would work for other candidates running in other parts of the country? Absolutely. I think ultimately this is a campaign about inequality and you don't have to live in the most expensive city in the country to have experienced that inequality because it's a national issue. And what,

Americans coast to coast are looking for are people who will fight for them. And part of how we got to this point was through the endorsements of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders, who've been leading this fight against oligarchy across the country. And I think that in focusing on working people and their struggles, we also return back to what makes so many of us proud to be Democrats in the first place. Not shying away from it at all. Clay, I think you will see more people try to play this

Remember, the whole thing about socialism is that all you have to do, you find as many people as possible who are unhappy with some aspect of their day-to-day life, and you tell them, it's not your fault. There's nothing that you can do to change this. Other people are the reason for this. I'm going to hurt those other people, usually financially, sometimes more than that, but I'm going to hurt those other people and take their stuff and give it to you and make your problems go away. It's very appealing, intimately.

It works for a reason. And so I don't we have not seen the end of this. You know, on the right, we yell socialism and act like it's some kind of argument. And a lot of people, a lot of you, especially Gen X and Gen Z, they love their socialism. They don't know what it is, but it sounds good to them. The biggest flaw of capitalism is it provides the wealth and luxury to think you don't need capitalism anymore.

It's just the lesson out there is you have to have the freedom and the time and the wealth in order to make these arguments. And I look at those Mom Donnie celebration partners. Those aren't poor kids celebrating Mom Donnie winning.

That is not people struggling to put food in their mouths. I know who they are. I know who they are. I used to socialize in New York with a lot of people that would fall into the Mamdani category. But, Clay, you know, I often mention Naval Ravikant. Did you see this? I just thought this was a perfect one-liner on this whole situation. He wrote, socialism is the suicide pact of mediocrity.

It is absolutely true. And that really gets the psychology of it. If there are people that have more than me, people that are doing more than me, people that are happier and enjoying more than me, I want a system of power that will pull them down and promises to pull me up. And even if it doesn't pull me up, as long as it pulls them down, I'll be happy.

This is why I thought sports was such an important battleground, because sports is the ultimate meritocracy. Best man or best woman wins, and as soon as they can start to create the idea that there's something wrong with that or that a boy can be a girls' champ and all this other stuff, they destroy the underbelly of much of success in the meritocracy in the country, which is embedded in sports. I made this argument, something fun for you guys to think about.

Is there anything more trusted in America today than the scoreboard? Think about that for a minute. And where everybody sits around and argues about everything, the scoreboard in a game, if it's a little bit off, everybody's standing up like, hey, that bucket was just made. Now, you may be upset with officials every now and then, but I would argue that the scoreboard might be the most trusted symbol in America today.

That we trust it to be able to tell us who's winning and who's losing. And at the end of a game, everybody says, you know what? That team won or that team lost. Think about it for a minute. I really think it might be number one. Look, I want to tell you about James Carey. He joined the United States Marine Corps after being inspired by his grandfather, who also served our nation. James loved being a Marine.

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Get yours now at Safeway.

You know that feeling when you're about to score 30% off, but they want your number?

I really want to say thanks. I've met a ton of you up here.

in northern Michigan. I know a lot of you say, please don't say positive things about it up here because it's getting so crowded. But it is amazing in the summer up here. We've been all over the place. Traverse City,

News Talk 580 has been taking care of us every single day here this week, and I appreciate all of you. Buck's been down in Miami. I'm sitting here in a jacket because it's only like 65 degrees today. But new affiliate that we have up here in Traverse City, Michigan, WTCM 580. They've had me all week. They have been fantastic. A couple of cuts that I want to play for you because I think they kind of get at

The failures that CNN in general has been having. First of all, every evening they just have sort of the Star Wars universe of crazy left wing peddler arguments. And Jamal Bowman, who lost his Democrat primary and no longer has a job.

was on. He is the guy who pulled the fire alarm and was defeated in the New York City area district, which he was representing.

Here he is saying, and I want to get Buck's reaction to this, that he was confronted on the street and heckled, and this is what he has to deal with on a regular basis. Listen. I don't want to fight. I just want to chill. I just want to not. I was walking down the street the other day. Some white dude, bald-headed, he looked at me, called me a piece of shit, and

to my face, say, I'm going to get what's coming to me. Why did I deal with that, dog? In Yonkers, New York. Well, can I tell you something? I'm not making that up. Do you buy it, Buck? Do you think Jamal Bowman, not a small guy. No, I think he's making it up. Yes. I think he's making it up. Jamal Bowman, I've seen him bench three plates on each side. He's a big dude.

Yeah, I mean, so I just, I don't buy this story. And it's one of these things you can never prove or disprove. But I don't believe that somebody went up to him in yonkers. And, you know, I'm just glad he didn't say that, you know, the guy yelled like this is MAGA country or whatever. Like this just sounds fake to me. I just don't buy very often big dudes being confronted by probably small. And if the guy who confronted Jamal Bowman would have to be

a heavyweight boxer or an NFL defensive lineman to be appreciably bigger than Jamal Bowman. First of all, I don't think most people know who Jamal Bowman is. And I don't mean that to insult him. I just don't think most people in New York City have any idea who he is. So the percentage of people that would hate him enough to taunt him face-to-face and know him is what? Like 1% of New York? Also, the way he tells the story...

Did he do something rude to somebody and then they responded? No.

Because you're supposed to think, I guess, that someone came after him because he's Jamal Bowman. I don't know. Maybe he was having a loud speakerphone conversation or doing something that sets people off. You know, I gave somebody on my plane ride over to France, Clay, an extra set of headphones. Oh, no. Because I turned around and I said, I have a spare. I have a spare. He was a guy. I'm just going to say he was a white guy in his 50s, okay? Okay.

very well-dressed, like very, you know, hoity-toity, had like Louis Vuitton baggage, and he thought he could watch his iPad like he's a little kid with no headphones on. So I actually had a spare. I had the wired set in my bag, and I said, here you go. Here's a wired set of headphones. And he kind of stared me down for a second and realized, like, so now what's your excuse? So he put them on. Now I have to watch them, though.

That is really, really. So he gave them back to you at the end of the trip? He did. He rolled them up nicely and gave them back to me at the end. So now this is my new move. I'm going to carry an extra set of headphones in public places and offer headphones to people who are on the side of barbarism and think that we want to hear your cell phone conversation or your iPad noises or whatever it is. This is funny because on my flight up to Michigan with the Travis boys,

My oldest son wanted to watch Trump's address about the bombing of Iran, did not have wireless phones or a plug to put in. And my wife, who was in the row in front of us, turned around and complained about our oldest son making too much noise while he was watching Trump's address. So she would have certainly appreciated it if

you would have had an extra pair of headphones for my son. All right, that is Jamal Bowman claiming that he's a victim. This also always reminds me, there are people who behave awfully towards famous people. But the idea that Jussie Smollett, this is MAGA country,

The number of Trump voters who knew who Jussie Smollett is or was in that era was zero. I mean, there was nobody watching. What was the show Empire? The number of Trump voters watching Empire frequently enough that they knew who Jussie Smollett was, that they would feel compelled to not only know who he was, but know his politics and taunt him in Chicago at 2 a.m. It's one of the craziest stories. On a freezing cold winter night to lie in wait.

With a noose. Yes. And some kind of thing to spray on him because you're that angry about Jussie Smollett, who nobody who voted for Trump had any idea whom he was. Yes. That would be, that was a strange one.

And you would think that the media might have actually questioned some of that, particularly because our good friend Jake Tapper wants all of you to know what the role of the media really is. So you got CNN Jamal Bowman saying he's getting taunted because of who he is. Here is Jake Tapper lecturing everyone about what it is the job of the media really is.

Asking questions is literally our job, demanding facts and answers instead of just taking a president's word for it. No, that's actually not their job, though. This is where I have a really, I have a big bone to pick with all these people who call themselves journalists. We have seen what their job is.

Depending on where they work, the job of a CNN employee is to tell Democrats in the audience what they want to hear and to hurt Republicans in terms of public perception in every way that they can. That is the job. That's actually the job. If you don't do that, you will be fired.

So that's what the job is. It's to ask questions and get the truth to the people. That is a lie that is meant to cover for the actual job, which is to tell Democrats what they want to hear and attack Republicans in every way you can. Let's pretend that suddenly you or I were in charge of CNN, and they said, hey, we've been listening to your radio show. It's phenomenal. They should do it, by the way. We would shake that place up. It'd be amazing.

Okay, so is it salvageable? Like, let me just give you a hypothetical. If Megyn Kelly, who obviously had a very successful show on Fox News. Look at you. I was given, I mean, look, Megyn's great. She was always great to me in my career and everything else, but she's always number one on your list for who's going to be the top of CNN. I think she's the smartest, most talented person in digital space that I don't work with. Does that make sense? Wow.

Wow. Who would you put at the top of the list? Someone cut this and send this to Megan. Well, I think she is. I think she asks really smart questions. I think she gets to the heart of issues. If I were running, so, but the question here is, let's pretend that I am running CNN. And I say, hey, I want to change. We got to get away from the Jake Tapper world. We can't have this stenographer for the Democrat powerful anymore. We're going to shake things up.

Could Megyn Kelly, who I think, I'm just telling you, I think is the most talented independent voice in media today. All right, all right. I mean, I think Megyn's great too, but yes, okay. Could she alone? Would she be able to produce an audience? Or is CNN's brand so broken that even if you put somebody who's good at television and good at doing a show, people wouldn't respond to it because their brand is broken? In other words, how salvageable do you think it is? Right. You would have to...

Except that during the change process from being a Democrat propaganda outlet, you would lose a lot of audience and then have to rebuild audience. Yeah. The audience of CNN right now does not want anything to be told to them that is outside of what the DNC would approve and send themselves. They don't want to hear it. And so you would have to accept there would be that.

painful ratings transition period and then I think you could build into something else but that's you know that's a risk that executives at these places are very rarely willing to take any risks

I think CNN's brand is in terminal decline. I think CNN will exist in kind of the way that ABC News and some of these places, yeah, sure, they'll have some audience, but a shadow of their former... Now, ABC News still has a pretty big TV audience, but it's a shadow of what it was 20 or 30 years ago. So I think that that's where... I don't think CNN's going to be able to turn this thing around. I just look at it purely from a business market perspective,

If Fox News has around 70% of the news audience on cable, and it does, and it's got an incredibly loyal brand,

What is CNN's angle? Because that leaves 30%. MSNBC, whatever you think about them, has the left-wing angle covered. Why would you not go after some of the 70? This is why, and I was there and observed this when it happens, CNN, under Jeff Zucker's leadership, if you can call it that,

ignominiously ended in scandal, CNN decided to become MSNBC with different letters.

Anti-Trumpism, completely crazy, treat all the actual conservatives who would have come on your air like trash. This is what they did. And so that space that they were at least theoretically occupying of somewhere in between Fox and MSNBC, that just became untenable. They were just another version. They were MSNBC with less honesty. And that is...

not a tenable brand that that's not a place where you can really be. And so that's what ended up happening to them. But I'm, I'm happy. I mean, if you had told me, uh,

If you had told me when the Tea Party was getting their thing going, don't worry. One day, not only will Trump call CNN fake news to their faces, but he'll essentially destroy the death star of propaganda that is CNN. I would have said that sounds amazing. And we're pretty much there. Oh, totally. And again, they only have about 10 or 15 percent of the overall news marketplace. And you know what? What it really comes through. It used to be when big news happened.

People would turn on CNN because they trusted them to get big news, right? I still think about CNN back in the day of Bernard Shaw and the Scud Stud, whatever that guy's name was during the first Gulf War, when that really made CNN's brand as somebody that you could trust.

Now they don't even get turned on when big news happens. Fox News, I think, had 4.9 million viewers when the Iran attacks happened. Nobody else was even close to them. And it just feels like CNN is in a terminal decline. And I wonder at this point if there's anything they could do to change the trajectory that they're on. And I don't know that they could, but I would be trying to undertake radical change, I think, if I were in charge of CNN.

Yeah, I mean, it would have to be, you know, when you're doing a you're doing some housing construction stuff. But when you're doing a renovation and people say, oh, I'm going to tear it down to the studs. CNN really needs to be torn down to the studs. You need to get all the way, you know, get all the way into the drywall and really pull things apart in there to rebuild. You can't just do a little coat of paint and call it a day. That's totally what's, by the way, happening with the intelligence agencies right now, too.

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