Weekly Review With Clay and Buck - Hour 1 - Mission Creep?
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Welcome, everybody, to the Monday edition of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show. I am back from France.

And very happy to be here with all of you. Still not 100% on the voice. Sorry about that. Got a little sick when I was abroad. No shock there. I don't know, man. This Miami situation, Clay. My immune system is not what it used to be. If I don't have perfect weather and the beach nearby, it all collapses. Anytime you leave and go anywhere now that you're in perfect weather all the time around, a little bit of a subtle shock. You got to get back to the New York City. Got to get back to Eden and...

you know, rat infested pizza parlors in New York City to to get the immune system back up and running. You know, communism, one of the things you wouldn't expect, maybe good for the immune system. Speaking of New York, we got a lot of stories. Obviously, the Iran situation will dive into. I haven't had a chance to talk to you about it yet.

I'm gone just about a week, and sure enough, Clay almost gets us into World War III. Who knew? Clay, what are you doing, buddy? I thought you might throw a party. I didn't think you might start a global conflict. But we've got a lot to get into with Iran and the strikes there. Over the weekend, as you know, President Trump ordered the bunker busters to be used and substantial damage done to the three main nuclear facilities in Iran. We've got also some

Live updates on that one coming from the news wires here in just a moment. I mentioned New York City, though. This guy, Zoran Mamadani, who is really a shocking socialist. I mean, he's a straight out of he's actually even crazier, I think, than Bernie Sanders in some ways. He is surging ahead in the Democrat primary polling in my old hometown of New York.

which is just going to be disastrous if he ends up as much as I, I don't know. I despise Cuomo because of what he did during COVID, but I don't think he is a complete lunatic. I think this guy's a total lunatic politically speaking. He's out of his mind, Mom Donnie. So we'll get into that. We've also got, gosh,

So much, as is generally the case on a Monday, the president weighing in on what will happen if anybody decides to mess with us. The Iran strikes obviously occurred over the weekend. The U.S. involved last week. I remember Clay and I were in the Oval Office a few hours later. The strikes on Iran occurred by the Israeli Air Force. That was last, not this Thursday, the Thursday before, right on Thursday before that.

And so here we are now, really two weeks into this.

This conflict and over this weekend, President Trump ordered the deployment of our two point four billion dollars apiece. When you add the full scope of the program in B-2 bombers, also Tomahawk missiles fired from our nuclear subs. So two of the three parts of the nuclear triad involved in the strikes, our nuclear triad involved in the strikes on these reactors and these research sites.

that the Iranians had been operating and refused to negotiate their way out of. The story right now, and look, my assessment, some of you were asking, and it was really because I was overseas and I was six hours ahead. I had to make sure that I was...

paying attention to world events while also representing us abroad for our wonderful advertisers or possible advertisers. But Clay, I think that a lot of what you've shared on the strikes, I would agree with in terms of its incredible military precision tactically. Both the Israeli and American components of this have been remarkable. And the Iranian response has been far more inept and precise

and weak than I would have even anticipated. We could have witnessed what I would call the greatest aerial strike success, certainly in this century and perhaps even going back a century. Now we are waiting to see what comes of this. Clay, we've got the imminent threat. This is the big headline across Fox News and other sites right now. Look, this is the concern, right? The concern is what is the

The blowback, what are the consequences of these strikes? We worry about terrorist cells. I think that's the highest likelihood threat, but also the lowest impact threat against U.S. strategic interests. You know, if some lunatic somewhere, you know, God forbid, but shoots a few people or worse, that's not going to change the trajectory of the war in the Middle East. It's just a spite act of a terrorist or spiteful act of a terrorist.

But you have something here where you have military action that is apparently imminent from the Iranian regime firing at bases in our U.S. base in Qatar. So striking, obviously, Qatari soil and going after or rather, you know, in the sovereignty of Qatar, going after U.S. bases placed there.

If this happens, I think we can expect a major escalation, a retaliatory escalation, Clay, from Trump. And I think that this is the concern a lot of people have. What we've seen so far has been a remarkable success. What happens next is the big question. Look, I think welcome back and glad to have you back stateside. And I think that Trump had to make.

the most consequential decision of his presidency so far. And I think he made the right one. And so Saturday evening, we, uh, attacked the B2 bomber pilots, all of the individuals who fired the shots from, uh, our, uh, our submarines. It's an incredible statement for American know-how. And I think you also have to extend it. We have talked a lot about this. There were no leaks, uh,

Trump 1.0 was a sieve. Everything immediately got out. Trump 2.0, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance, obviously Trump himself, everybody in the national security team, Tulsi Gabbard, they delivered a magisterial plan and performance in terms of the attacks. Now, you went through this once before, right?

To me, the question that we are monitoring as we are speaking to all of you is how will Iran respond? And there seems to be an expectation that they will respond in some way by attempting to attack American forces in the Middle East, which is not dissimilar to what happened. And you could probably speak to this very well. After Trump killed Qasem Soleimani and so many people out there said, oh, Mike, you remember what?

World War Three was trending. Everybody lost their minds. There were injuries to American troops. Thankfully, no deaths. And then it was like, OK, Iran got to have their public reprisal against the great Satan. But it was not a substantial response in terms of its devastating impact by any stretch of the imagination.

and we moved on. I wonder what the decision is going to be of the Ayatollahs from a face-saving perspective. What will they do now, I think, is one of the questions that lingers. I think you would sign off with me on...

Trump's decision to wipe out much of the nuclear capabilities of Iran sent an important message. It was necessary since Iran seemed to have no interest in actually negotiating. We kind of forecast that this would be likely the outcome. I think the vast majority of the Trump supporters, voters, all of you out there listening agree. Some disagree, and that's OK. It's healthy to disagree. We should have big debates in public on major issues. But I think now the question is, what's next?

Well, I also think that it's not a finished situation by any means. And so for anyone to come to a conclusion on this, you know, you have to remember, everyone, I worked in that Office of Iraq Analysis, it was called actually, OIA, and

of that had been the place that was also responsible for, before I got there, so don't blame me, for the WMD analysis, largely, in Iraq. And to look at what the Iraq war was, now that's a full-scale invasion. It's very different. I understand this. And one of the problems we have here is that people can pick their

You know, is this World War II and Neville Chamberlain situation? Or is this Gulf of Tonkin incident? Everyone can pick whatever the historical analogy they want is for the situation and try to find a way to fit this in. This is a, no surprise, is a unique and complicated circumstance that is specific to exactly what we are seeing here. Meaning, you can draw some lessons from other things here,

But nothing else is a roadmap for this because this is still happening and this is different from everything else that we have seen. Can the government lie to you? Yes, absolutely. Is mission creep a real thing? Absolutely. Should there be concerns about those as well as other aspects of this? Yes, there should. However, so far what we've seen is the Iranian nuclear program brought to an end with minimal success.

casualties both on the good guy side and minimal civilian casualties on the Iranian side. And the response from the Iranians has been almost nothing. I mean, let's just call it what it is. The Iranians have been, I think, taken very much by surprise by how effective these strikes were. And as I said initially, when this first happened, when the Israelis opened up,

If you have a great capability to counterattack somebody, you don't let your entire military leadership get wiped out in the first hour of the war. Okay? That's the truth. There's no playing possum here. There's no, oh, wait, we're lulling them into a false sense of security by letting them take out most of our major military assets, most of our military leadership. No, of course not. So you're talking about a largely...

defanged Iranian military, certainly for external operations at this point.

It's very different when you get into something like nation building or counterinsurgency or regime change or anything like that. Then it's just people walking around the streets with AK-47s can ruin a much larger army. We've learned that lesson, but we're not there. So we need to line these things up with where we are. And I just, Clay, one thing, I was observing a lot of this as I was in France and doing my thing and smoking my, actually, I did not smoke any Galois because that would have been,

That would have been bad for my cold. But I observed all these things, and people want to declare things that they were either right or wrong based on what's happened, and I would just say that nobody knows yet, really. If you've been saying World War III would break out right away, yeah, clearly that's not true. The notion that the Iranians were going to be able to turn to Russia and China, and those two countries were going to militarily intervene against the United States, that's insane.

And I saw a lot of people saying that. Unfortunately, that's just not based on any reality of anyone who understands really how national security works at the most fundamental level because there's no interest in those countries in doing that. Why would they do that? It doesn't make any sense. But then again, we're waiting to see, as we talk to you right now in real time, if there are major strikes on U.S. military bases and what that looks like and what our countermeasures are. So I just say to everybody, we don't know yet. We're watching this as it goes. I think Trump made the right call.

I think the Israelis so far were far more successful than most people anticipated they could be this quickly. Now we see what happens next. Now we see what the next phase is. So we'll take calls on this and dive into it more here. And Clay's watching closely on the monitors as we see him. And obviously we're thinking about our troops too. And we don't want to have any losses on our side. So we'll watch this. I think what you hit as we go to break here, Buck, is super significant. Yeah.

Iran is isolated and pay attention to what people do, not always what they say. There's nobody in the Middle East that is actually lined up aggressively behind Iran. In fact, most of them are behind Israel in the United States. And on top of that, this idea that somehow China or Russia were going to get involved. China and Russia don't actually want, I don't think, a nuclear Iran. I don't think they trust Iran.

the Ayatollahs with nuclear weapons. And so they have been very muted in their criticisms as well. Some countries are going to chirp

But in terms of actions, I don't know that we have ever seen Iran more isolated in terms of actual support and backing, which is why the idea of, oh, what comes next, World War III? No, actually, there aren't people allied with Iran who are willing to put themselves on the line over this. Now,

Again, we may well get an Iranian response officially live on the air as this show progresses based on the way things are looking right now. We will update you on the latest there. But in terms of everything falling apart after this strike, to me so far it feels like the Soleimani assassination where Iran talks a big game but isn't able to actually respond in a significant way and maybe doesn't even want to respond in a significant way. I was aware, Clay, of very...

of the highest level discussions back in the Iraq war days, I want to say, you know, late in the Bush administration, early in the Obama administration, in that era, high level discussions about what to do when it came to the IRGC Quds Force and Soleimani and the consensus on the policy side, not from the war, the war fighters wanted to take him out because he was killing more fellow war fighters.

He was just handing these EFPs, explosively formed penetrators, to the Shia militias to deploy specifically against our troops. They wanted to take him out. Policy community said, oh, no, it'll create so much of a, you know, we'll have to worry about the Arab street so much or whatever. They were wrong.

So on the Qasem Soleimani thing, we saw the results. We saw what happened. The people that said you can't hit that guy, they were wrong. And Trump proved them wrong. So now we see it's going to take a little more time. We see taking out the reactors, the U.S. getting involved in taking out the reactors. Was this a brilliant masterstroke tactically and otherwise to end the Iranian regime's nuclear ambitions for the foreseeable future? Or was it is it something else? We'll see.

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Welcome back in. Clay Travis, Buck Sexton Show.

It probably is not going to surprise you. And by the way, I don't think we have any guests scheduled today, so we'll take some of your calls. Talkbacks were phenomenal last week. If you want to be able to ask questions, get in rapidly. 800-282-2882. It probably will not surprise you that Democrats, even though

They shouldn't necessarily be lining up because this is this is something that should be not particularly partisan in nature that virtually every Democrat has lined up saying that what Trump did is not only unacceptable, but AOC within an hour of the attacks said that Trump had to be impeached.

which even for me, who expected them to behave in an outrageous fashion, even for me, I saw that and I thought, this is crazy, impeached for this, but this was AOC response. Obama drone strike a 16-year-old American citizen. That actually happened. A 16-year-old.

Yeah. And knew what he was, you know, he's like, sorry, you know, Amaral Aki's son, like, gotta take him out. And then they tried to say, oh, it's classified, no one can talk about it. Yeah, and then the press all wrote about it. I mean, there's...

They said, Clay, we have dropped under the Obama years specifically. We were dropping bombs in in Libya. We all know about that. And, you know, we drop bombs in Syria and Somalia. I mean, you get on the list and now all of a sudden they're like, you can't take a strike that's in American interest. What is it? Is it a Ninth Circuit judge going to enjoin Trump from doing anything for the military?

Yeah, that was what was trending after the attacks was that a federal district court judge had mandated that Trump had to clean up the mess from the attacks in Iran, which sadly is not far from the truth. If you look from even this weekend, some of the rulings from judges will take your reaction will continue to unpack this.

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Welcome back into Clay and Buck. We're still waiting for the updates if and when they come in on this reported imminent threat against a U.S. military base in Qatar. We've also got more updates from the region on what Israel has been hitting. You see, Clay, they blew the doors off of or the gates off of the infamous Evin prison in Iran, which is where they keep prisoners.

political prisoners, high-profile prisoners. He's really just blew the gates open. It's on the front page or on the – it's funny. I say front page as if I actually, like Clay, read paper papers. But it's on the website. I was walking around trying to find paper paper this morning in Michigan. I'm doing the show from up here, and I finally found paper paper to sit down and do all my reading.

You and my dad. I don't even know. You guys can both also maneuver it around like it's no problem. Yes, Laura gets driven crazy by the amount of sound. And even if there's an article on multiple pages, she's like, I don't even want to read it. I don't know why they have to put it on two pages. I co-sign with her on that one. But here is from the weekend. I wanted you to hear it from President Trump himself. Remember, this is a big decision made by the commander-in-chief

to follow up the iranian strikes with a military capability only the united states has uh... that really goes to among our most expensive and a high-tech and and uh... sensitive from a uh... you know classified and proprietary perspective i mean this is something we can do no one else on the planet can do what the u_s_ military did with the strikes in iran president over the weekend at about ten eastern time

on Saturday address the nation he had JD I'm click I carry and I watched it live as it happened I'm sure many if you did as well but just you can get a sense as to what the president's view of the strikes this happened on Saturday some you might not even heard it this is cut one play it a short time ago the US military carried out massive precision strikes on the three key nuclear facilities in the Iranian regime

Fordow, Natanz and Esfahan. Everybody heard those names for years as they built this horribly destructive enterprise. Our objective was the destruction of Iran's nuclear enrichment capacity and a stop to the nuclear threat posed by the world's number one state sponsor of terror. Tonight I can report to the world that the strikes were a spectacular

He made it very clear. First of all, he's a spectacular success.

And, you know, President Trump in what I think will be one of the more memorable moments of not just his second term, but really of his entire presidency, presidency, when all is said and done is a big moment. Clay, we've been talking about the Iranian nuclear facilities and possible strikes on them for decades now. I mean, this is a conversation going on for a very long time.

But notice this, Clay, and this is the part of it that I think has to be factored into our calculations about the success of this and about the risk-reward calculations. He's let the Iranians know.

If you mess around now, you know, that's it. We did our thing. We hit your facility. If you come at us with some terror strike or you do something somewhere, we can hit you a lot harder wherever we want to hit you. It's not worth it to you. So the question is, what is the calculation made by the mullahs, by the Iranian regime itself? That's what remains to be seen, and we could be finding out at any moment.

Yeah, reports that the expected attack is in Qatar. I mean, question for you. If we have all of the intel about where the attack is coming from, and theoretically we're going to remove our troops to keep them safe, how much of letting them have a couple of missiles land is just for show? In other words, it almost feels like

allowing your sparring partner to kind of catch you one in the ribs when you know it's coming and it's not actually in any kind of significant danger because you're giving them the opportunity to look like, hey, we returned fire, even though, look, on a scale of 1 to 10, our attack on them was a 10. If they punch back with a 1...

It's like, okay, nothing really happened, but you're allowing them to save face a bit. I mean, how much of this is, in other words, kabuki theater or almost sparring on our side at this point? This brings up, and I know a lot of you, and we'll take some calls and some talkbacks on this, because in MAGA world, as you all know, there are very, very fervently held beliefs on this particular issue that are not all in alignment.

Okay. You really have a non interventionist. What are we doing? Have we not learned the lessons wing of MAGA right now? And then you have a Israel needs to not live under the specter of nuclear threat.

from lunatics and this is the time and we can do it and we've done it and you know you have these two different I'm very aware of this I've been reading and a lot of you know some of the big voices on one side some of the big voices on the other side so we have room for this discussion here but Clay to the point you're making it's about well do we want you know there's we want let me be very clear about how I'm saying this there's what we'd like a regime change to occur

And then there's, do we want to take part in any kind of regime change? And do we realize, if we go with number two, what the implications of that may be? Like, there's these different phases or different tiers. I think that the Trump administration wants a new government in Iran, but I think they're very careful about not involving themselves further in overthrowing the existing government because we don't want to be in a situation where

There's mission creep and we're doing more, you know, that and I and I completely share that sentiment. We should not be rebuilding. Well, you went to Iraq. You you were there. So serving the country. So, I mean, you know, which I know a lot of listeners were. I was not.

Most listeners were not. I would imagine your perspective, but I was interested to hear your perspective on this in particular. There are obviously differences between Iran and Iraq, but your perspective would be, but I'm curious to hear, having seen the United States try to engineer a government in Iraq,

Now, Iran was involved in helping to try to stop that from being in any way successful. Deeply involved. I mean, it really subverted our efforts in the most malicious ways they could, but yeah. And I think a lot of times people miss that, that Iran has been a malign influence basically on anything that could be good in the Middle East for some time to come. But...

Having been there, I imagine you don't think it's a good idea to have boots on the ground trying to impact in the event there were regime change that decisions made by the Iranian people.

That would be an absolutely horrible idea, and it is one that I would vociferously oppose in whatever ways are available to me, having seen, Clay, not just the reality in Iraq, the reality in Afghanistan. Yeah. I was in Afghanistan in 2010, and it was when Obama had decided that this was the good war and Iraq was the bad war, and anybody who was in Afghanistan then, and remember, I

I had essentially like delivery of, I was almost like a highly classified gopher. I would deliver classified among principals in theater. So I would take the stuff to the ambassador. I would take the stuff to the four-star general. And I mean, hand-carried, like, you know, hard copy stuff. And I just remember any of these, and I had to read the assessments. I had to be familiar with what was going on.

If you knew what was going on in Iraq, I mean, in Afghanistan in 2010, you knew that the policy was failing and had no chance of success.

But what happens is that everything gets cleaned up when you get to the, I wasn't in the military, but the guys would say, when it gets to the division level and then the command level, all the assessments from brigade and battalion and company, all this stuff that the guys are actually seeing, it gets cleaned up to, yeah, no, we're doing great. It's working really well. Because the four-star doesn't want to tell the president, your ideas suck and this is never going to work.

Or, you know, our ideas suck and this is never going to work. So, yeah, that is a lesson that I think was learned very painfully by us in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And so that's something that we have to keep in mind here. But I think that right now we're not there. Not everything is, you know, just like not everything is Vietnam, that everything is World War II.

this is its own situation. And so far, what we, do you have an update on that? Yeah, we just got breaking news reports of explosions in Qatar. Uh,

And this is from Barack Ravid, I believe, who's a reporter at Axios. Sorry to interrupt, but an Israeli official says Iran has launched six missiles towards U.S. bases in Qatar. So as we were telling you that it was likely to happen, we will keep you updated on the absolute latest there. But that report just coming down in the last two minutes or so. Well, yes. So to your question, though, so there's the regime change conversation.

that factors in now to everything that comes from this, you know, the aftermath of the U.S. strikes and the nuclear facilities? How do we avoid getting drawn into that? I think there's pretty clear...

I shouldn't say a universal or clear agreement, but there's pretty widespread agreement among MAGA. Democrats just hate Trump and they hate everyone. They just need to figure out why they exist other than hating Trump. And that's their own problem. In terms of Republicans, in terms of the Trump voters out there, there's, I think, a broad rejection of any intervention that would require U.S. boots on the ground or anything like that.

But that's one thing that we have. Now, though, we look at the escalation, the back and forth that would happen after something like this. Clay, if Iran hits military bases, that is a proportionate response in some way to what we did. That would not, it doesn't mean that we're going to.

allow them to do it. It doesn't mean that we don't necessarily exact a price for them doing it, but it wouldn't result in, I think, an escalation where we go, okay, now we're really going to make things more painful for Iran, substantially more so than we already have and than the Israelis already had.

If they do something horrific, I mean, I don't want to get into it, but something Al Qaeda style, which is really the concern here. The concern is that the Iranian regime, the IRGC, who is every bit of me, look at the bombing of their, well, that was a military target, but you look at the bombing of Marine barracks, they've been involved in mass casualty terrorism in the past. If they do that against a civilian target, then I think the question turns to, or the likelihood is that the Trump administration will,

goes and takes out the remnants of senior Iranian leadership. I think Trump has intimated that. Essentially, okay, if you order, if the Ayatollah orders mass casualty, civilian murder anywhere in the world against Americans, Israelis, then you are Mullah Omar with bin Laden and the Taliban. Then we're in a whole different world of how we're going to handle this. So that's what I think remains to be seen. If they just strike our military bases, I don't think...

Not that that's we told them not to do that. We may hit their bases more in retaliation and say, are you done yet? Are you done yet? But if they do something against civilians, then I think that you might just decide we might decide to decapitate what's left of the regime. That's what I think could happen.

Trump is in the Situation Room, by the way, which suggests we'll give you the latest on this. Again, reports that six different missiles fired by Iran at Qatar and our military base presumably there. Again, this is we will give you the latest. There's video out there showing those missiles coming in. It's night in the in the.

Middle East right now, at least in Qatar. And we'll give you the absolute latest on that. But the reason why it suggests that we were very well aware that this was coming is because the president was already in the situation room. And I'm sure they are monitoring in real time what exactly happens

There. So we will give you the absolute latest when we come back. But Israeli citizens certainly appreciate solidarity. Our nation has shown them over the past six hundred and thirty days since the October 7th Hamas terror attacks. Billboards on display today in Israel with the words, thank you, Mr. President, along with a picture of President Trump just 12 hours ago.

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Welcome back in, Clay Travis, Buck Sexton Show. Okay, we have got continued responding to the reports of attacks that have been levied. This is from Fox News. Explosions heard over Doha, and there are videos out there. This is also in...

Buck, I don't know how to pronounce this, and inevitably I screw up every pronunciation, but Iran is calling this Operation Basharat al-Fath against U.S. bases have begun. And so it would suggest that not just Qatar, but also other U.S. bases in the Middle East may be targeted again.

This is not dissimilar to what we saw after the Soleimani attack when we. They fired a lot of after we took out Soleimani after Trump ordered that hit, which happened on Iraqi soil. As you remember, a drone strike. The Iranians fired a lot of ballistic missiles at I think like 100 missiles at U.S. bases in the region. They made a member. If you've never a lot of you have served, you know, some of these military bases are a couple of miles across. I mean, they're huge.

Yes.

But that was it. And I think, didn't the Iranians shoot down a Ukrainian airliner by accident too? Yeah, they killed almost 200 people as a part of that response, which was actually the most devastating aspect of the response, and it was inadvertent. This is a reminder, the...

Iran is a poor third world country because of the people in charge. It actually should be a great place, but that's a whole other conversation. It's a poor third world dysfunctional country with a really inept military. I mean, the truth is the Iranians, I mean, yeah, they're good at killing innocent people or they're good at ambushing peacekeepers, stuff like that. They can't actually go toe-to-toe with an advanced military at all. Not even a little bit. That's the truth.

So, you know, what were they doing in Iraq? They were just making it a hellish nightmare for everybody, for the Iraqis who were there, by killing Americans who were effectively trying to keep the lights on and get the sewage cleaned as peacekeepers. Because they feared if Iraq was in some way a peaceful Middle Eastern country, that their power would be impacted.

By the way, also reports out there, and certainly our prayers for all the troops that are in the Middle East, that air defense systems have been activated at the U.S. Air Base in Iraq as well. So much like what we saw with Soleimani,

There is going to be an attempt to extract revenge in some way, and we will continue to update you on the absolute latest. Yeah, but we have U.S. military bases under attack right now as we talk to you. Missiles in contact. That's correct. So we'll continue to follow this.

And again, the president in the Situation Room, they are monitoring it in real time. I would suspect, Buck, that we may get a statement from the White House sooner rather than later when we have some sort of finality on exactly what happens here. We're definitely going to get a true social post. I mean, Trump's not going to let this go. You know what's great about your investment account with the big guys? It's actually a time machine. Log in and Zoom. Welcome back to 1999.

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