Hour 1 - Pete Hegseth Won't Back Down

Buck Sexton (0:00)

Welcome, everybody. Tuesday edition of Clay and Buck. Kicks off now. Just Buck today. Clay is traveling, doing clay things. Very, very interesting things. I have a lot to talk to you about. We have the latest on the effort to, well, let's just say it, to impeach our Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, my old buddy from the Real News on the Blaze days and Fox News and many, many other things.

I think Pete gave a phenomenal speech in his defense, or rather in defense of his tenure as Secretary of War. What the Pentagon, what our military has accomplished while he has been at the helm. And I know the president liked it because he already put out a tweet to that end or a post to that end.

We've got that and we're going to break that down for you. And Trump also, I might add, has said that after a meeting with Qatar or Qatar, I think people say it both ways, prime minister, Trump says there's positive momentum in the talks and that more strikes don't seem to be a very necessary thing. We'll give you some of those updates.

Oil and gas down a little bit, by the way. Inflation coming in a little hot. So people who said that oil and gas would start to drop right after the election, it looks like they were very prescient in that. And it also makes you wonder, hmm, I wonder if there was anything going on intentionally perhaps with the speculation in the markets and other things to mess with those prices a bit. The midterm counting, I might add, continues. NBC is projecting Democrats at 259 seats, Republicans at 176 That would be the biggest Democratic House majority since the 1990s. You've got about 17 races not yet called. They also are projecting Lauren Boebert is going to lose to Democrat Eileen Laubacher. And in Mississippi, the Democrat Scott Colum leads Cindy Hyde Smith by more than 2500 votes, with two batches left to count before Friday's certification deadline. So there are some races still underway. We've got that way, continued fallout, speaking of the economy, from the Nvidia Chinese spy situation. I will tell you, the Internet yesterday was quite amusing with memes. A lot of meme territory between Jensen Wang's leather jacket, the Chinese spy, all that stuff. It was entertaining for those of you who are quite online, as I have to be for this for this gig. But, let's get into, this morning I watched it live, Secretary of War Hegseth talking about where things stand, how he has done, and I think, now keep in mind, Massie, Representative Thomas, for a little bit still, Representative Thomas Massie has introduced eight articles of impeachment against Secretary of War Hegseth. Most of them, I read through them all, most of them are, you know, conducting war without Congressional authorization in Iran, and also saying mean things about the guy, you know, the former astronaut from Arizona, Mark Kelly, there we go, saying mean things to him. There is some really weak sauce stuff in there. The one that I think that the opposition to Secretary War Hegseth, the one that's going to be perhaps the most fertile ground for his detractors and the attacks on him would be these strikes on the boats in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific. That is a new thing, and it is a thing that people are going to litigate and argue over.

But I still think that when you listen to the full scope of what has happened in the last two years as Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth is conducting himself as the President's top military advisor and the executor of the President's military will in a way that is exceptional. And here he is, this is Cut 9, this morning, Secretary of War Hegseth on his impeachment play.

Pete Hegseth (4:32)

You see, we've seen this show before. They impeached President Trump over a perfect phone call. They impeached him again in his final week in office. Both times they failed. Both times he came back stronger. And the American people sent him back to the White House.

Now they're trying a third time, this time against a member of his cabinet. They will fail again. And if standing with President Trump puts me in that company, I'll take that company every day of the week.

Buck Sexton (5:01)

So he managed to do two very important things. One, defend the record. He talked about retention. He talked about recruiting. He talked about Venezuela and his sense of not just what Iran has been so far, but where Iran is going. Look, Pete's very good at this. I speak to this as somebody else who makes a living presenting ideas and communicating them. Pete's at the top of his game. We know he was a Fox News host before this. Quite honestly, one of the most talented of the Fox News hosts. So he knows how to present, he knows how to give a speech and how to engage the audience. And I thought his speech was an A plus for what it was. I thought he could have done a better job. He also was very good at making it clear that he was doing this at the behest of, on the orders of the President of the United States. And Trump already tweeted out that it was a fantastic speech and Pete Hegseth is great and all this sort of stuff. So that's one aspect of this. Now, on the actual mechanics of and the prospects of impeachment of the Secretary of War, as you know, they've wanted to take Pete out more than anybody other than Trump himself. We've been saying this here, Clay and I have both been saying this for really the whole time. They went more all in to stop his nomination than anyone else in the cabinet. They went after Pete a lot harder than they went after, for example, Christy Noem, who I think, if they had decided to dig a bit more, would have found a whole lot of stuff. But they, as came out later, that's not speculation. There was a whole lot of stuff.