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Speaker 1: Welcome, everybody.
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Speaker 2: Thursday edition of Clay and Buck kicks off right now, and we have a lot to discuss with you today. Thank you for being here with us. Obviously, we're still figuring out a bit of what comes next. I don't mean us, although that's true, too. I mean the whole country. What comes next after the midterms, and we are very much planning to focus our sights on forward onto next steps and what you can expect and what's going to be happening but a part of that is i think also taking full stock of so what exactly has congress been doing up to this point over the last two years how has all of that been going And a name that certainly, well, all of you will be quite familiar with, but Floridians still remain very proud of for being, as I think it is quite clear, the most successful governor of this recent era, Ron DeSantis. He appeared last night and gave some tough medicine, which is what.
00:01:12
Speaker 1: We need right now.
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Speaker 2: We need medicine, which makes things better, but sometimes it's going to be tough medicine. Tough medicine for Congress thus far with hold on a second. Trump's gotten a lot of blame. You can argue how much of it deserved and how much of it not. But a lot of blame over what happened on on Tuesday. OK, fine.
00:01:30
Speaker 1: And he's taking he was.
00:01:32
Speaker 2: Doing the tour, basically a virtual tour of the ballroom yesterday. Trump, he doesn't get phase one bit. He's not he's not moving an inch off of being Trump. OK, so he's he is still unflappable for sure. And he's going to push forward and whether he's going to take the L and come back and try to make it a W on the next thing, which is the right attitude. Ron DeSantis here, though, wanted to point out, hey, hold on a second.
00:01:57
Speaker 1: Where has Congress been in all this? This is cut one. Listen to him on Fox last night.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: If you're going to do huge conservative things that are going to reorient the country for a generation, fine. But I saw no indication that the current group of Republican senators were interested in doing that. that type of correct conservative change to me why haven't we done immigration shut off H1B visas why haven't we codified Trump's immigration executive orders there's so why haven't we stripped jurisdiction from the federal courts over deportation cases there's so many things that could have been done they didn't even attempt it Laura they would say oh if only we needed 50 votes we would have done it you don't have 50 votes for doing conservative things you've never shown that you'll do conservative things even with 50 votes.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Now, Clay, this is coming on the heels of and look, I I pay attention to everything in the online sphere, the back and forth over Tuesday. A lot of people are saying, why is majority leader Thune escaping so much now? Is he escaping it? We're talking about it right here, by the way, won't come on this show. I just want to tell you that right now. Some of you might be saying, why haven't you? I know some of you say this because I read your emails in your text or your tweets. Why hasn't Thune come on the show? Why hasn't Clay backed him into a corner like Mike Pence and made him suffer the code red or whatever? You know, like it hasn't happened because he won't come on the show and he won't defend his record. He won't talk about his time. We've asked him. He won't come on. So just understand that. How many Republican senators have we asked that won't come on the show, Clay?
00:03:37
Speaker 1: I think he's the only one.
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Speaker 2: He's the only one that I can think of who's a Republican senator, at least in recent.
00:03:43
Speaker 1: We haven't asked Susan Collins. I mean, you know, some of them we kind of.
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Speaker 4: I think we did even ask those people like. But some of them are trying. I mean, Susan Collins, a great example, Buck. She's trying to run in a state where being in conservative media doesn't necessarily help us.
00:03:59
Speaker 2: That's also why we didn't want to bother, you know, Sununu during his candidacy. We offered to have him on, but they were obviously lost big time, bigly. But I just want to be clear that we've tried to have Senate Majority Leader Thune on the program. And, of course, he's Senate Majority Leader. We would be completely respectful. We're Republicans. We agree with the guy on a whole lot of things. But really the attitude, I think Ron DeSantis gets at this, the attitude of the Republican-held Senate over the last two years has been, since we don't have a supermajority, we're just going to do budget stuff and leave it at that. And there's a lot of area on this where, Clay, I think that's completely unacceptable. I mean, for one thing, the Democrats, I hate using the word now unprecedented because they always use it and it's never true. But it is the obstruction and the slow rolling of nominees, of judges, of all of these things is just at full tilt from their side. The blue slip process is idiocy, self-imposed idiocy. For those of you who don't know, there's a blue slip that.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: If it's a.
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Speaker 2: Democrat in a Democrat Senate seat and we're going to have a U.S. attorney or a federal judge appointed there, they have to basically okay it as some kind of a gentleman's agreement.
00:05:21
Speaker 1: What is this, Clay?
00:05:23
Speaker 2: So I do think that there's fair blame or there should be blame apportioned here on not meeting Trump with his maximum strategy of do everything he can. The Senate hasn't done everything they can, not even close.
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Speaker 4: Look, what I would say in general is Democrats are far more diabolical than Republicans and they are more loyal to their party than Republicans are to their party.
00:05:46
Speaker 1: That's the truth.
00:05:48
Speaker 4: Democrats showed up in twenty twenty two. when inflation was 7% or 8%, whatever the heck it was, in November of 2022, when Joe Biden was driving the economy off the cliff, they lost one Senate seat and like 10 House seats, Buck.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: They showed up.
00:06:10
Speaker 4: Republicans, meanwhile, in 2026, I think it's fair to say if you were going to like I'm big on segmenting into boxes. I think there's four things that Trump has done that are significant in his term so far. Two of them are absolute home runs. Right. Secure the border and the lowest crime rate we've ever seen in history. That's two unbelievable things. accomplishments such that, Buck, nobody even cared about crime anymore. He solved the border and crime so quickly that it wasn't even a political issue in 2020.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: I have to do a mea culpa here. Thune did come on. I totally forgot this. I'm sorry, guys.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: Apologies to Senator Thune. He did come on one time.
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Speaker 2: We had asked him more than once and we weren't able to get him on, but he did in fact come on And but he only wanted to talk about men competing in women's.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this now. Men competing women's sports. Did you remember this? I apologize, guys. I completely forgot. It was over. It was like 18.
00:07:16
Speaker 4: By the way, Senator Ron Johnson just texted me and said he's happy to come on and answer all of Ron DeSantis's questions.
00:07:25
Speaker 1: So let's do it. Let's get Senator Johnson. I don't know what our. This is what I mean. Let's have accountability for everybody on our team.
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Speaker 5: Right.
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Speaker 2: I think that's a fair meeting. The Republicans for anyone's like, what's your team? But that's fair. What did everybody do? What did we get done in the first two years?
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Speaker 1: Who was doing?
00:07:40
Speaker 2: Trump was doing a lot of stuff. Now, we can argue about the Iran decision, good or bad. We can argue about. That's what I was going to say, Buck. He did two things that are phenomenal. The Iran decision, it never has ended.
00:07:53
Speaker 4: And what did I say for a long time? Find a grand exit and just say, we won and we're out. Even if it's not 100% true, give an opportunity to just say, how does this end? There is a grand gesture, whatever it might be, and we're out. We never got that. And then the other one is, you've hit on this for a long time. I appreciate that caller that we got yesterday from East Tennessee. He said he's going to fix affordability. And that is the number one issue that most people care about. And affordability is drastically better than it was under Biden. But a lot of people don't understand that prices are never going to go back to where they were in 2019. That's never going to happen. Every year, inflation, if we're doing well, is 2% a year. 2% doesn't mean that prices aren't going up. It just means that prices are going up so slow that most people don't notice, Buck.
00:08:57
Speaker 1: And we're almost back to 2%.
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Speaker 4: The problem is we spiked so quickly between January of 21 when it was 1.9% to June of 22 when it was 9.1% that everybody's just angry. And the overarching theme of 2024 and 2026 to me from voters out there is anger. People are just angry. It's like the ooze in Ghostbusters 2, Buck.
00:09:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, the pink ooze. I know.
00:09:27
Speaker 2: It should have been so much better. I know you thought it was okay, but you also thought Gladiator 2 was okay. Ghostbusters 2 was a shadow. The best part of it was Viggo in the painting. He was scary. That was a scary-looking guy. And for those of you who are true movie buffs, he's in Die Hard. And he actually helps bolt down the rocket launcher that they shoot at the armored personnel carrier Vigo.
00:09:50
Speaker 1: That's a hell of a while. I had no idea about that.
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Speaker 2: This is when you've watched way too many 80s movies and 90s movies, my friends, which is the category I fall into. In my defense about Thune, first of all, apologies, Senator Thune. I thought he had never come on.
00:10:02
Speaker 1: We asked. He wasn't able to. I thought he was ducking us. I forgot.
00:10:05
Speaker 2: So totally my fault on that. But if you're saying, why didn't we ask him about abolishing the filibuster? We had him on in March of 2025. Trump first brought up. which I came in March of 2025. I'm trying to think what was going on. Cause where are we now? We're in November of 2026. So Trump first brought up abolishing the filibuster in November of 2025. That was when it was clear that some things weren't happening and weren't getting done and the agenda was slowing down. So did we hold this feet to the fire on that?
00:10:38
Speaker 1: No, we didn't.
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Speaker 2: It hadn't yet been raised as a thing that, was quite honestly an issue at that point. But because it was early when we had him on in the administration, it was March of 2025. So that is an answer to the question about Thune. And by the way, invite him back on, guys. I would love to hear him say, like, what did the Senate get done? He's going to tell me about judges and stuff.
00:11:02
Speaker 1: Let's see. Democrats were obstructing. All right.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: I need someone to tell me why the blue slip process, because here's what happens with the blue slip process, Clay. We get stymied and Democrats still end up putting lunatic DEI maniacs on the bench. That's what ends up happening. Somehow they still get whatever they want, but we won't actually hold the line on this stuff or move the way we need to. But the other issue we're going to have here is what happens for the next few months here?
00:11:33
Speaker 1: What are we going to do?
00:11:34
Speaker 2: I mean, with Democrats taking both chambers, they're going to get sworn in on January 3rd. So the outgoing GOP majority right still has the floor. There's there's a window here, Clay, for part. And I just got to say, they got to go all out in this window. Any judge who does not get through now and getting through.
00:11:53
Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean? They have to be done. This is why, Buck, I said and I hammered it. And this is the most frustrating thing to me. Judges getting confirmed is over. And I understand that a lot to a lot of people. That sounds very nerdy. It's a huge deal. You're making decisions on judges that will echo for potentially not only one generation, but two generations. And it's completely shut down now.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: I mean, they're going to do a debt limit. They're going to do a debt limit increase. So they can cover the rest of Trump's term. If you're looking at a strategy document of what has to get done, it's pretty straightforward. Save America Act money, $ 10 billion in grants for states who implement proof of citizenship requirements.
00:12:33
Speaker 1: Important. I like that.
00:12:34
Speaker 2: Trump's top election security priority all year. That would be a good.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: Thing to get done.
00:12:40
Speaker 2: $ 12 billion in farm aid, by the way, to offset some of the costs of the tariffs. That's something that's perhaps on the agenda today. $ 60 billion for munitions replenishment from, you know, the drones, the missiles, the things we've been.
00:12:53
Speaker 1: Doing in the non-war war that we have been fighting, and.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: Also to help the actual very much everyone agrees a war with Russia and Ukraine. And, yeah, so government funding, National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA.
00:13:07
Speaker 1: But, Clay, the real thing is going to be.
00:13:09
Speaker 2: The nominations blitz. They have to get through. Every pending judge, every important executive nominee. Let's go, Congress. Let's make this happen. You got to earn your pay here and get this done. Because you and I know, as soon as Democrats take over, get ready for impeachment city, everybody. Get ready for endless hearings and, you know, haranguing and grandstanding and nonsense on Capitol Hill. And a lot of increased ratings at CNN and MSNOW, right? I mean, that's what we're in for.
00:13:44
Speaker 1: Nothing.
00:13:45
Speaker 4: And look, I mean, that's the reality. By the way, Senator Ron Johnson, if we didn't say it, is going to join us at the top of the next hour. Here's the one topic that I wish would get discussed that everybody's just stopped talking about. You know, regardless of who's in charge, Buck. We're running two plus trillion dollar deficits every year.
00:14:06
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:14:06
Speaker 4: When the Tea Party had a landslide in 2010. the federal budget deficit was about $ 10 trillion. We've added $ 30 trillion to our national debt in the last 16 years, and nobody has even blinked.
00:14:21
Speaker 2: No one is going to stop it, and this is why inflation will continue. And this is why gold makes sense. This is why I think you should really consider gold. I'm a longtime gold holder. I'm a believer in the thesis. I think history, I'm a big history guy, so is Clay, proves history. the thesis, which is that gold as a store of value, which it has been for thousands of years, will continue to prove out as we spend trillions and trillions more. That spending debases the dollars in your bank account. Gold goes up because you can't just put that as numbers on a computer screen. Lear Capital, my friends, is the gold and silver, the precious metals company that I trust. I'm actually just talking to them this week. about getting some more gold and precious metal for myself, including I'm going to set some aside for my son because I want him, when he gets old enough, when he's an adult, I want him to be a believer in gold too because as a portion of your portfolio, as a portion of your savings, some precious metals makes sense. Just type in what's the price of gold done over the last 30 years. Take a look for yourself. You'll see. Lear Capital, though, wants to also be there to educate you On the long-term thesis on gold and silver, I got to tell you, I know people who are very plugged in to the precious metals markets. They do this for a living. That's all they do. They're big on silver, too. Silver makes a lot of sense as well. Because remember, silver is also used in a whole lot of things.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: We're in this tech era.
00:15:50
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00:15:57
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00:16:01
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00:16:15
Speaker 4: Laugh. Learn.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: Hang with the guys. Right there when you need them most. Clay and Buck. Just preset them on the iHeart app. Welcome back in, Clay and Buck.
00:16:25
Speaker 4: Reports out there that were circulating on social media that Marco Rubio was considering stepping down.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: The State Department has responded. This story is fake news.
00:16:35
Speaker 4: Secretary Rubio doing what he does every day, working hard on behalf of President Trump and the American people. Harmeet Dhillon, however, who we really like, has been working at the Department of Justice, is going to step down. Something to think about, Buck, here. The lame duck Congress is probably the last time that Trump can get his cabinet nominees through the Senate. So if President Trump is going to make any moves or if anyone in the cabinet is saying, hey, after two years, I've served the country, I'm ready to move on. It probably needs to happen now because I think it's going to be supremely difficult to get a Democrat Senate, which may have 56 members before all is said and done, to approve anyone as a part of President Trump's cabinet. So that is something certainly to keep an eye on. And by the way, I said it again, Senator Ron Johnson going to join us at the top of the next hour. We have got our buddy Ryan Gerduski also scheduled to be on the program. to give us a deep dive on all of the data out there. And Brian Kilmeade is going to join us in the third hour as well. We'll get his take, Fox & Friends host, and more there. But I want to tell you, our friends at the IFCJ have done an amazing job helping people of all different faiths and backgrounds be safer in the Holy Land. since the 1980s when they were founded in New Jersey. They have done an amazing job helping people to be safer, and it is an incredibly significant impact that they are having every single day. You can join them and help to support everything that they are working on to keep people safe by going to giveifcj.org. That's the word give. and the letters ifcj.org. Your gift makes a difference and serves as a reminder that Jewish people are not alone and that America stands with them. Jews and Christians coming together, giveifcj.org. Giveifcj.org. One more time, giveifcj.org.
00:18:52
Speaker 2: Welcome back into Clay and Bach. Looking forward, looking ahead, looking to the next chapter battle and the ways that we can make things better.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: That's the attitude.
00:19:03
Speaker 2: That's what we want to do, not just here on the show, but of course, as a conservative movement, as people who have not had a great week politically, but are still philosophically correct. and still love this country and still know that they have to fight for it because nobody else will. And if they don't, the whole thing will collapse and we'll turn into Venezuela. So we don't want that. We don't want that. And that means looking at what we can do now and what the next steps are. Clay, Fortress Florida held, we just started off with Ron DeSantis before at the top of the program and his view.
00:19:46
Speaker 1: Of the Congress.
00:19:46
Speaker 2: We'll talk more to Senator Ron Johnson, a member of the Senate. Specifically, we're talking Senate stuff about what was good, what wasn't good, what needs to happen now.
00:19:56
Speaker 1: That's the basics of it.
00:19:58
Speaker 2: Ashley Moody, the newly elected senator from Florida, had this to say on on Sean Hannity's program last night.
00:20:06
Speaker 1: This is cut 18. Play it.
00:20:08
Speaker 5: When you have losses, you have to look at why that happened. I've been listening to your show. I think you hit on a lot of these points. One of the things that I took from yesterday was that folks want us to really drill down on affordability. And we thought we were delivering historic tax cuts and a housing bill and no tax on these things that we thought was historic what we were able to do. Child investment accounts But the people want more. They want us focused on that. And I think you'll see us get back to Washington and really drill down on trying to live up and be accountable to what folks want.
00:20:43
Speaker 2: This is, I think, Clay, a really important part of this conversation that we're having right now that Iran ties into this. People want to argue with me or anyone else, you know, it's not a war, it's a sustained military conflict, or we're already... OK, I mean, the semantics, it doesn't. The point is we just got our butts kicked. We all know that no one is saying this was a good election. OK, we got our we got our asses kicked as badly, worse than imaginable. And we all we thought it was going to be pretty bad, but worse than than imaginable. And now we have to figure out, OK, what is the lesson learned? What's something we take from this clay?
00:21:19
Speaker 1: The issue.
00:21:19
Speaker 2: And I think, for example, you've pointed out the realities of. the Biden inflation, the worst in 40 years, Trump bringing it down, all the rest of it. One of the problems with, certainly with Iran, just in general, put aside whether the Iran war was good or not, just talking about it, every time the president or every time this administration was having a press conference or having questions asked on Iran, there were people who were saying, that place is 6,000-something miles away? I can't pay my rent. Now, to your point, that's not Trump's fault. There's a lot going on here. But on the mess, she's talking about the messaging on the messaging side. They're America first needs to mean America first. And while we still have time to do something about it for the next 90 days in a congressional way, there needs to be as much action as possible on that. Yeah, let me hit this buck, and I'm curious what your take would be on it. We said this.
00:22:25
Speaker 4: The first 18 months, basically, is when any president can actually get anything done. Trump solved the border. Trump has violent crime at all-time record lows. Those are two incredible accomplishments. If he had never done anything on tariffs, and if he had never done anything on Iraq, What is the outcome of the election? And in other words, I think you can make an argument that Trump's flaw in the first 18 months is he's trying to fix so much that he got bogged down in Iran.
00:23:03
Speaker 1: Let me also say this.
00:23:06
Speaker 4: When in June, it looked like there was going to be some form of agreement, even if it's a BS agreement. If they had just rolled with that and gas prices had come back down to around $ 3 a gallon, I think the people who are diehard foreign policy junkies would have had super strong takes on Iran. The vast majority of Americans would not have cared about anything other than what the price of gas is. And I do think if Trump, I mean, so if you take a step back, my one concern is, and I do think this is a tough angle, inflation in general is around 2.5%. If inflation were 1.9%, would people still think things cost too much? I think the answer is yes, because prices went up so fast under Biden. So I think the challenge with the price of goods is it's never going to come back down. Buck, I went today, this morning, to go talk to a young Republican club at a school in Nashville. So, I don't know, we had 50, 60 kids there. They were asking a ton of questions, super smart kids. And it was fun to go talk with those young guys. And we were all talking about the election. They had tons of questions about it, everything else. I do think the challenge on affordability is it takes a while for the anger over affordability to wash through the overall electorate. And I think one of the stories of 2024 and 2026 is just whoever's in power gets punished because people are angry. I also would push back a little bit on J.D.
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Vance.
00:24:52
Speaker 4: You know, he had that post that he put out where he said a lot of Republicans shifted their vote. There's a data out now that one percent of Republicans flip to voting for Democrats. Democrats won the national popular vote.
00:25:10
Speaker 1: By 13 points on Tuesday. 13 points.
00:25:14
Speaker 5: Fuck.
00:25:15
Speaker 4: Most Republicans didn't show up. If you go actually and look at the data, Greg Abbott, for instance, got almost the identical number of votes each of his first two elections as he got in this one. It was that Democrats showed up. I don't think that many Republicans changed sides. I think a lot of Republicans did not match the enthusiasm that Democrats had.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: Well, I think that their view, and this intuitively makes more sense to me. I mean, the vice president, I would assume, has access to very good polling and data on this. So at first we were dealing with what the data presented was, which he was saying a lot of people switched over. Unfortunately, with the way some of these elections were, 1% of the vote can actually be the difference maker. But putting that aside, it makes far more sense to me that somebody who voted for Trump and is annoyed, disaffected, broken promise, whatever you want to say, would just say, I'm not showing.
00:26:17
Speaker 1: Up this time.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: I think pulling the lever for El-Sayed because you're unhappy with Trump breaking a promise is too far afield for 95, 99, perhaps, percent of Republicans. That I don't see. So what you're saying just intuitively actually makes a lot more sense, which means that I'm more inclined to believe it. But again, I just think that the there's the perception reality divide here with what's going on in prices and how much was done to address the affordability issue. And the more that the news cycle and this was the other problem I had, the more the news cycle became Iran slash gas prices. I think the more that there was this self-reinforcing loop of why aren't we talking about the cost of groceries? And that's why Democrats, that's all they honed in on. Look, they were very, we can get mad, we can be disgusted, we can do a million things, but it is important to learn from the successes of your enemies. It is important to see what they did well, and they knew that all they had to do, all they had to do was constantly talk about affordability, groceries, healthcare, cost of everything.
00:27:36
Speaker 1: They don't even have to have solutions.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: They just had to tap into that anxiety that a lot of people have. And one thing, Clay, we don't talk about enough, and this is policy, not the market, in the sense that it's not just like the free market speaking. Housing in five years has gone up, and depending on the survey you want to see, the cost of a median house in America is up 50%. Five, zero percent in five years.
00:28:04
Speaker 4: I've got so many thoughts on this because I think this is really, really important because for most people, buying their first home is a sign of adulthood, but also significant financial progress.
00:28:16
Speaker 2: You have people who, let's say, were in their 20s who are now in their 30s who feel like, so I got to, I was not in a position to get the two point something percent mortgage rate.
00:28:30
Speaker 1: On the $ 250, 000.
00:28:34
Speaker 2: Or $ 300, 000 house that my family of three or my family of four would be perfectly happy living in. And I would feel like I have a stake. Now, if you miss that window, but maybe you're making enough money that you could have been in that window. Now you're being told, yeah, that house that costs 250,000 is now more like 350,000 and maybe 400,000 depends where you are. And you've got to pay 7% interest on that house.
00:29:06
Speaker 1: It's not only even that.
00:29:08
Speaker 4: That's 100% a huge issue, Buck, is the rapid rise in mortgage rates, which is directly connected to the rapid rise in inflation. That's why that happened, because we had to increase interest rates to try to bring back down inflation. The economics here matter. This is another Biden failure. But what it also does, Buck, It keeps tons of housing off the market.
00:29:29
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:29:29
Speaker 4: There are so many people out there with two and a half and three and three and a half percent mortgages. And many of you are listening to me. If you were fortunate enough to get those, you might be.
00:29:40
Speaker 1: Willing.
00:29:40
Speaker 4: Maybe you had kids go off to college. Maybe you've added kids to your family. You might be willing to move to a bigger house or a smaller house, but you're not going to trade your two and a half or three percent mortgage for a seven percent mortgage. So you are frozen. The housing market, there are tons of homes that if the mortgage rates would come back to 4.5%, which maybe, I have a mortgage company now, so I pay a lot of attention to this, that would unfreeze the market. If that were to happen, it would make everything more affordable, but it's so broken because of the rapid escalation in mortgage rates. Buck, to your point, if you were fortunate enough to buy a home in 2021, You got a rate that was points, multiple points cheaper than somebody who had to buy in 22 or 23. And so many people, as a result, or you refied because rates were low. Your home, I just sold one. I bought my house in a buck in 2014. We lived in it for a decade. I never paid my mortgage off because it was 2.5%. By the time, 2.5%. I refied it, knocked it down to 2.5%. I didn't want to pay it off.
00:30:58
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
00:31:00
Speaker 4: Inflation went to 9%, and I had a 2.5% mortgage.
00:31:05
Speaker 1: Now, thankfully, we're in a good spot. I could afford to move.
00:31:09
Speaker 4: But if I didn't have the financial success that we've been fortunate enough to have, if I still made somewhat similar to what we made in 2014, I would have never moved. And there are a lot of you out there saying, You're never moving because rates are never going to be affordable like they are that you locked in.
00:31:25
Speaker 2: This is still very much an issue. And if we're also doing that after action of, OK, well, what went wrong in this midterm election? I can just give you quotes from what Trump said about this issue. We will this is a quote. We will rapidly reduce inflation by slashing energy costs, taxes and regulations. All true, by the way. And he did that. by quickly defeating inflation, we will in turn bring interest rates down fast. You will be able to pay 2% again. Now, you can say that's campaign rhetoric. You can say that's not Trump's fault. You can say a million things. He said rates will be 2% again. Rates are seven.
00:32:13
Speaker 1: What is the right? It's like seven percent. I check. I mean, something like that. Yes.
00:32:16
Speaker 4: I mean, it depends on if you get a 15 or a 30 year, but it's about seven point three percent, I think, for a 30 year right now, if I'm not mistaken.
00:32:24
Speaker 1: You know, this is I understand. You look. Oh, there's this.
00:32:27
Speaker 2: There's always this pushback on. Look, this has to be addressed. This has to be something that is talked about and Republicans can show fixes for. If you're going to tell me that you're going to sell 10 cookies from your bakery and you sell one cookie, I'm allowed to say, but you told me you were selling 10 cookies. And this is where we are on the issue of interest rates and housing. Housing is wildly expensive in this country, and a lot of people are ticked off about it. You can blame shift or we can are. It's not about the blame. It's about what needs to happen now, much more so. And I just think that when we talk about affordability to dig into this, how did Mamdani, Kami Mamdani, how did he win in New York City? Promised to bring down the rent. By the way, I said on the air exactly a year ago, there's zero chance that he'll be able to do this.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: Zero chance. Guess what, everybody? Highest rents in New York City in history. Let me hit you with this, too. 100%, that's correct. 7.18, 30-year, 6.57 on average, perfect10mortgage. com.
00:33:30
Speaker 4: But last year, Buck, 30-year mortgage rates one year ago today were 6.22%. and a 15-year was 5.5%. So borrowing costs have gone up substantially in the Trump era on mortgages. By the way, do you know why that is? Mortgages often follow the price of a gallon of gas. You put it on a chart and you look at it, and I would say one of the most impressive charts I saw in the wake of 2026, the election outcome, if you plug in Trump's approval rating and you correspond it to the price of gas, Yes. The price of gas for most people is a rough approximation of whether the economy is good or bad.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: And it is it is both, I think, unfair and political malpractice to tell somebody who voted for Trump, but who is having trouble paying the rent in their two bedroom apartment when they need a three bedroom house, that they shouldn't be upset when they're hearing too much about, you know, what's going on with Iran. I just think we have to be honest about that. It's much more important to people that they can pay their bills.
00:34:49
Speaker 1: Clay?
00:34:51
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00:35:08
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00:35:48
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00:35:57
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00:36:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back in.
00:36:01
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00:36:30
Speaker 1: All right.
00:36:31
Speaker 4: Senator Ron Johnson is already fired up and ready to go. He's going to join us at the top of the hour at one o'clock talking about the new Senate and what he expects that to be like and also what they accomplished in the first two years.
00:36:46
Speaker 1: That's next.
Speaker 1: Welcome, everybody.
00:00:00
Speaker 2: Thursday edition of Clay and Buck kicks off right now, and we have a lot to discuss with you today. Thank you for being here with us. Obviously, we're still figuring out a bit of what comes next. I don't mean us, although that's true, too. I mean the whole country. What comes next after the midterms, and we are very much planning to focus our sights on forward onto next steps and what you can expect and what's going to be happening but a part of that is i think also taking full stock of so what exactly has congress been doing up to this point over the last two years how has all of that been going And a name that certainly, well, all of you will be quite familiar with, but Floridians still remain very proud of for being, as I think it is quite clear, the most successful governor of this recent era, Ron DeSantis. He appeared last night and gave some tough medicine, which is what.
00:01:12
Speaker 1: We need right now.
00:01:12
Speaker 2: We need medicine, which makes things better, but sometimes it's going to be tough medicine. Tough medicine for Congress thus far with hold on a second. Trump's gotten a lot of blame. You can argue how much of it deserved and how much of it not. But a lot of blame over what happened on on Tuesday. OK, fine.
00:01:30
Speaker 1: And he's taking he was.
00:01:32
Speaker 2: Doing the tour, basically a virtual tour of the ballroom yesterday. Trump, he doesn't get phase one bit. He's not he's not moving an inch off of being Trump. OK, so he's he is still unflappable for sure. And he's going to push forward and whether he's going to take the L and come back and try to make it a W on the next thing, which is the right attitude. Ron DeSantis here, though, wanted to point out, hey, hold on a second.
00:01:57
Speaker 1: Where has Congress been in all this? This is cut one. Listen to him on Fox last night.
00:02:01
Speaker 3: If you're going to do huge conservative things that are going to reorient the country for a generation, fine. But I saw no indication that the current group of Republican senators were interested in doing that. that type of correct conservative change to me why haven't we done immigration shut off H1B visas why haven't we codified Trump's immigration executive orders there's so why haven't we stripped jurisdiction from the federal courts over deportation cases there's so many things that could have been done they didn't even attempt it Laura they would say oh if only we needed 50 votes we would have done it you don't have 50 votes for doing conservative things you've never shown that you'll do conservative things even with 50 votes.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Now, Clay, this is coming on the heels of and look, I I pay attention to everything in the online sphere, the back and forth over Tuesday. A lot of people are saying, why is majority leader Thune escaping so much now? Is he escaping it? We're talking about it right here, by the way, won't come on this show. I just want to tell you that right now. Some of you might be saying, why haven't you? I know some of you say this because I read your emails in your text or your tweets. Why hasn't Thune come on the show? Why hasn't Clay backed him into a corner like Mike Pence and made him suffer the code red or whatever? You know, like it hasn't happened because he won't come on the show and he won't defend his record. He won't talk about his time. We've asked him. He won't come on. So just understand that. How many Republican senators have we asked that won't come on the show, Clay?
00:03:37
Speaker 1: I think he's the only one.
00:03:39
Speaker 2: He's the only one that I can think of who's a Republican senator, at least in recent.
00:03:43
Speaker 1: We haven't asked Susan Collins. I mean, you know, some of them we kind of.
00:03:46
Speaker 4: I think we did even ask those people like. But some of them are trying. I mean, Susan Collins, a great example, Buck. She's trying to run in a state where being in conservative media doesn't necessarily help us.
00:03:59
Speaker 2: That's also why we didn't want to bother, you know, Sununu during his candidacy. We offered to have him on, but they were obviously lost big time, bigly. But I just want to be clear that we've tried to have Senate Majority Leader Thune on the program. And, of course, he's Senate Majority Leader. We would be completely respectful. We're Republicans. We agree with the guy on a whole lot of things. But really the attitude, I think Ron DeSantis gets at this, the attitude of the Republican-held Senate over the last two years has been, since we don't have a supermajority, we're just going to do budget stuff and leave it at that. And there's a lot of area on this where, Clay, I think that's completely unacceptable. I mean, for one thing, the Democrats, I hate using the word now unprecedented because they always use it and it's never true. But it is the obstruction and the slow rolling of nominees, of judges, of all of these things is just at full tilt from their side. The blue slip process is idiocy, self-imposed idiocy. For those of you who don't know, there's a blue slip that.
00:05:08
Speaker 1: If it's a.
00:05:11
Speaker 2: Democrat in a Democrat Senate seat and we're going to have a U.S. attorney or a federal judge appointed there, they have to basically okay it as some kind of a gentleman's agreement.
00:05:21
Speaker 1: What is this, Clay?
00:05:23
Speaker 2: So I do think that there's fair blame or there should be blame apportioned here on not meeting Trump with his maximum strategy of do everything he can. The Senate hasn't done everything they can, not even close.
00:05:34
Speaker 4: Look, what I would say in general is Democrats are far more diabolical than Republicans and they are more loyal to their party than Republicans are to their party.
00:05:46
Speaker 1: That's the truth.
00:05:48
Speaker 4: Democrats showed up in twenty twenty two. when inflation was 7% or 8%, whatever the heck it was, in November of 2022, when Joe Biden was driving the economy off the cliff, they lost one Senate seat and like 10 House seats, Buck.
00:06:08
Speaker 1: They showed up.
00:06:10
Speaker 4: Republicans, meanwhile, in 2026, I think it's fair to say if you were going to like I'm big on segmenting into boxes. I think there's four things that Trump has done that are significant in his term so far. Two of them are absolute home runs. Right. Secure the border and the lowest crime rate we've ever seen in history. That's two unbelievable things. accomplishments such that, Buck, nobody even cared about crime anymore. He solved the border and crime so quickly that it wasn't even a political issue in 2020.
00:06:49
Speaker 2: I have to do a mea culpa here. Thune did come on. I totally forgot this. I'm sorry, guys.
00:06:56
Speaker 1: Apologies to Senator Thune. He did come on one time.
00:07:00
Speaker 2: We had asked him more than once and we weren't able to get him on, but he did in fact come on And but he only wanted to talk about men competing in women's.
00:07:10
Speaker 1: I'm looking at this now. Men competing women's sports. Did you remember this? I apologize, guys. I completely forgot. It was over. It was like 18.
00:07:16
Speaker 4: By the way, Senator Ron Johnson just texted me and said he's happy to come on and answer all of Ron DeSantis's questions.
00:07:25
Speaker 1: So let's do it. Let's get Senator Johnson. I don't know what our. This is what I mean. Let's have accountability for everybody on our team.
00:07:32
Speaker 5: Right.
00:07:32
Speaker 2: I think that's a fair meeting. The Republicans for anyone's like, what's your team? But that's fair. What did everybody do? What did we get done in the first two years?
00:07:39
Speaker 1: Who was doing?
00:07:40
Speaker 2: Trump was doing a lot of stuff. Now, we can argue about the Iran decision, good or bad. We can argue about. That's what I was going to say, Buck. He did two things that are phenomenal. The Iran decision, it never has ended.
00:07:53
Speaker 4: And what did I say for a long time? Find a grand exit and just say, we won and we're out. Even if it's not 100% true, give an opportunity to just say, how does this end? There is a grand gesture, whatever it might be, and we're out. We never got that. And then the other one is, you've hit on this for a long time. I appreciate that caller that we got yesterday from East Tennessee. He said he's going to fix affordability. And that is the number one issue that most people care about. And affordability is drastically better than it was under Biden. But a lot of people don't understand that prices are never going to go back to where they were in 2019. That's never going to happen. Every year, inflation, if we're doing well, is 2% a year. 2% doesn't mean that prices aren't going up. It just means that prices are going up so slow that most people don't notice, Buck.
00:08:57
Speaker 1: And we're almost back to 2%.
00:09:00
Speaker 4: The problem is we spiked so quickly between January of 21 when it was 1.9% to June of 22 when it was 9.1% that everybody's just angry. And the overarching theme of 2024 and 2026 to me from voters out there is anger. People are just angry. It's like the ooze in Ghostbusters 2, Buck.
00:09:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, the pink ooze. I know.
00:09:27
Speaker 2: It should have been so much better. I know you thought it was okay, but you also thought Gladiator 2 was okay. Ghostbusters 2 was a shadow. The best part of it was Viggo in the painting. He was scary. That was a scary-looking guy. And for those of you who are true movie buffs, he's in Die Hard. And he actually helps bolt down the rocket launcher that they shoot at the armored personnel carrier Vigo.
00:09:50
Speaker 1: That's a hell of a while. I had no idea about that.
00:09:52
Speaker 2: This is when you've watched way too many 80s movies and 90s movies, my friends, which is the category I fall into. In my defense about Thune, first of all, apologies, Senator Thune. I thought he had never come on.
00:10:02
Speaker 1: We asked. He wasn't able to. I thought he was ducking us. I forgot.
00:10:05
Speaker 2: So totally my fault on that. But if you're saying, why didn't we ask him about abolishing the filibuster? We had him on in March of 2025. Trump first brought up. which I came in March of 2025. I'm trying to think what was going on. Cause where are we now? We're in November of 2026. So Trump first brought up abolishing the filibuster in November of 2025. That was when it was clear that some things weren't happening and weren't getting done and the agenda was slowing down. So did we hold this feet to the fire on that?
00:10:38
Speaker 1: No, we didn't.
00:10:39
Speaker 2: It hadn't yet been raised as a thing that, was quite honestly an issue at that point. But because it was early when we had him on in the administration, it was March of 2025. So that is an answer to the question about Thune. And by the way, invite him back on, guys. I would love to hear him say, like, what did the Senate get done? He's going to tell me about judges and stuff.
00:11:02
Speaker 1: Let's see. Democrats were obstructing. All right.
00:11:05
Speaker 2: I need someone to tell me why the blue slip process, because here's what happens with the blue slip process, Clay. We get stymied and Democrats still end up putting lunatic DEI maniacs on the bench. That's what ends up happening. Somehow they still get whatever they want, but we won't actually hold the line on this stuff or move the way we need to. But the other issue we're going to have here is what happens for the next few months here?
00:11:33
Speaker 1: What are we going to do?
00:11:34
Speaker 2: I mean, with Democrats taking both chambers, they're going to get sworn in on January 3rd. So the outgoing GOP majority right still has the floor. There's there's a window here, Clay, for part. And I just got to say, they got to go all out in this window. Any judge who does not get through now and getting through.
00:11:53
Speaker 4: Do you know what I mean? They have to be done. This is why, Buck, I said and I hammered it. And this is the most frustrating thing to me. Judges getting confirmed is over. And I understand that a lot to a lot of people. That sounds very nerdy. It's a huge deal. You're making decisions on judges that will echo for potentially not only one generation, but two generations. And it's completely shut down now.
00:12:18
Speaker 2: I mean, they're going to do a debt limit. They're going to do a debt limit increase. So they can cover the rest of Trump's term. If you're looking at a strategy document of what has to get done, it's pretty straightforward. Save America Act money, $ 10 billion in grants for states who implement proof of citizenship requirements.
00:12:33
Speaker 1: Important. I like that.
00:12:34
Speaker 2: Trump's top election security priority all year. That would be a good.
00:12:39
Speaker 1: Thing to get done.
00:12:40
Speaker 2: $ 12 billion in farm aid, by the way, to offset some of the costs of the tariffs. That's something that's perhaps on the agenda today. $ 60 billion for munitions replenishment from, you know, the drones, the missiles, the things we've been.
00:12:53
Speaker 1: Doing in the non-war war that we have been fighting, and.
00:12:56
Speaker 2: Also to help the actual very much everyone agrees a war with Russia and Ukraine. And, yeah, so government funding, National Defense Authorization Act, the NDAA.
00:13:07
Speaker 1: But, Clay, the real thing is going to be.
00:13:09
Speaker 2: The nominations blitz. They have to get through. Every pending judge, every important executive nominee. Let's go, Congress. Let's make this happen. You got to earn your pay here and get this done. Because you and I know, as soon as Democrats take over, get ready for impeachment city, everybody. Get ready for endless hearings and, you know, haranguing and grandstanding and nonsense on Capitol Hill. And a lot of increased ratings at CNN and MSNOW, right? I mean, that's what we're in for.
00:13:44
Speaker 1: Nothing.
00:13:45
Speaker 4: And look, I mean, that's the reality. By the way, Senator Ron Johnson, if we didn't say it, is going to join us at the top of the next hour. Here's the one topic that I wish would get discussed that everybody's just stopped talking about. You know, regardless of who's in charge, Buck. We're running two plus trillion dollar deficits every year.
00:14:06
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:14:06
Speaker 4: When the Tea Party had a landslide in 2010. the federal budget deficit was about $ 10 trillion. We've added $ 30 trillion to our national debt in the last 16 years, and nobody has even blinked.
00:14:21
Speaker 2: No one is going to stop it, and this is why inflation will continue. And this is why gold makes sense. This is why I think you should really consider gold. I'm a longtime gold holder. I'm a believer in the thesis. I think history, I'm a big history guy, so is Clay, proves history. the thesis, which is that gold as a store of value, which it has been for thousands of years, will continue to prove out as we spend trillions and trillions more. That spending debases the dollars in your bank account. Gold goes up because you can't just put that as numbers on a computer screen. Lear Capital, my friends, is the gold and silver, the precious metals company that I trust. I'm actually just talking to them this week. about getting some more gold and precious metal for myself, including I'm going to set some aside for my son because I want him, when he gets old enough, when he's an adult, I want him to be a believer in gold too because as a portion of your portfolio, as a portion of your savings, some precious metals makes sense. Just type in what's the price of gold done over the last 30 years. Take a look for yourself. You'll see. Lear Capital, though, wants to also be there to educate you On the long-term thesis on gold and silver, I got to tell you, I know people who are very plugged in to the precious metals markets. They do this for a living. That's all they do. They're big on silver, too. Silver makes a lot of sense as well. Because remember, silver is also used in a whole lot of things.
00:15:49
Speaker 1: We're in this tech era.
00:15:50
Speaker 2: Call 800-957-GOLD for your free precious metals investor kit from Lear Capital.
00:15:57
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00:16:01
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00:16:15
Speaker 4: Laugh. Learn.
00:16:16
Speaker 1: Hang with the guys. Right there when you need them most. Clay and Buck. Just preset them on the iHeart app. Welcome back in, Clay and Buck.
00:16:25
Speaker 4: Reports out there that were circulating on social media that Marco Rubio was considering stepping down.
00:16:32
Speaker 1: The State Department has responded. This story is fake news.
00:16:35
Speaker 4: Secretary Rubio doing what he does every day, working hard on behalf of President Trump and the American people. Harmeet Dhillon, however, who we really like, has been working at the Department of Justice, is going to step down. Something to think about, Buck, here. The lame duck Congress is probably the last time that Trump can get his cabinet nominees through the Senate. So if President Trump is going to make any moves or if anyone in the cabinet is saying, hey, after two years, I've served the country, I'm ready to move on. It probably needs to happen now because I think it's going to be supremely difficult to get a Democrat Senate, which may have 56 members before all is said and done, to approve anyone as a part of President Trump's cabinet. So that is something certainly to keep an eye on. And by the way, I said it again, Senator Ron Johnson going to join us at the top of the next hour. We have got our buddy Ryan Gerduski also scheduled to be on the program. to give us a deep dive on all of the data out there. And Brian Kilmeade is going to join us in the third hour as well. We'll get his take, Fox & Friends host, and more there. But I want to tell you, our friends at the IFCJ have done an amazing job helping people of all different faiths and backgrounds be safer in the Holy Land. since the 1980s when they were founded in New Jersey. They have done an amazing job helping people to be safer, and it is an incredibly significant impact that they are having every single day. You can join them and help to support everything that they are working on to keep people safe by going to giveifcj.org. That's the word give. and the letters ifcj.org. Your gift makes a difference and serves as a reminder that Jewish people are not alone and that America stands with them. Jews and Christians coming together, giveifcj.org. Giveifcj.org. One more time, giveifcj.org.
00:18:52
Speaker 2: Welcome back into Clay and Bach. Looking forward, looking ahead, looking to the next chapter battle and the ways that we can make things better.
00:19:02
Speaker 1: That's the attitude.
00:19:03
Speaker 2: That's what we want to do, not just here on the show, but of course, as a conservative movement, as people who have not had a great week politically, but are still philosophically correct. and still love this country and still know that they have to fight for it because nobody else will. And if they don't, the whole thing will collapse and we'll turn into Venezuela. So we don't want that. We don't want that. And that means looking at what we can do now and what the next steps are. Clay, Fortress Florida held, we just started off with Ron DeSantis before at the top of the program and his view.
00:19:46
Speaker 1: Of the Congress.
00:19:46
Speaker 2: We'll talk more to Senator Ron Johnson, a member of the Senate. Specifically, we're talking Senate stuff about what was good, what wasn't good, what needs to happen now.
00:19:56
Speaker 1: That's the basics of it.
00:19:58
Speaker 2: Ashley Moody, the newly elected senator from Florida, had this to say on on Sean Hannity's program last night.
00:20:06
Speaker 1: This is cut 18. Play it.
00:20:08
Speaker 5: When you have losses, you have to look at why that happened. I've been listening to your show. I think you hit on a lot of these points. One of the things that I took from yesterday was that folks want us to really drill down on affordability. And we thought we were delivering historic tax cuts and a housing bill and no tax on these things that we thought was historic what we were able to do. Child investment accounts But the people want more. They want us focused on that. And I think you'll see us get back to Washington and really drill down on trying to live up and be accountable to what folks want.
00:20:43
Speaker 2: This is, I think, Clay, a really important part of this conversation that we're having right now that Iran ties into this. People want to argue with me or anyone else, you know, it's not a war, it's a sustained military conflict, or we're already... OK, I mean, the semantics, it doesn't. The point is we just got our butts kicked. We all know that no one is saying this was a good election. OK, we got our we got our asses kicked as badly, worse than imaginable. And we all we thought it was going to be pretty bad, but worse than than imaginable. And now we have to figure out, OK, what is the lesson learned? What's something we take from this clay?
00:21:19
Speaker 1: The issue.
00:21:19
Speaker 2: And I think, for example, you've pointed out the realities of. the Biden inflation, the worst in 40 years, Trump bringing it down, all the rest of it. One of the problems with, certainly with Iran, just in general, put aside whether the Iran war was good or not, just talking about it, every time the president or every time this administration was having a press conference or having questions asked on Iran, there were people who were saying, that place is 6,000-something miles away? I can't pay my rent. Now, to your point, that's not Trump's fault. There's a lot going on here. But on the mess, she's talking about the messaging on the messaging side. They're America first needs to mean America first. And while we still have time to do something about it for the next 90 days in a congressional way, there needs to be as much action as possible on that. Yeah, let me hit this buck, and I'm curious what your take would be on it. We said this.
00:22:25
Speaker 4: The first 18 months, basically, is when any president can actually get anything done. Trump solved the border. Trump has violent crime at all-time record lows. Those are two incredible accomplishments. If he had never done anything on tariffs, and if he had never done anything on Iraq, What is the outcome of the election? And in other words, I think you can make an argument that Trump's flaw in the first 18 months is he's trying to fix so much that he got bogged down in Iran.
00:23:03
Speaker 1: Let me also say this.
00:23:06
Speaker 4: When in June, it looked like there was going to be some form of agreement, even if it's a BS agreement. If they had just rolled with that and gas prices had come back down to around $ 3 a gallon, I think the people who are diehard foreign policy junkies would have had super strong takes on Iran. The vast majority of Americans would not have cared about anything other than what the price of gas is. And I do think if Trump, I mean, so if you take a step back, my one concern is, and I do think this is a tough angle, inflation in general is around 2.5%. If inflation were 1.9%, would people still think things cost too much? I think the answer is yes, because prices went up so fast under Biden. So I think the challenge with the price of goods is it's never going to come back down. Buck, I went today, this morning, to go talk to a young Republican club at a school in Nashville. So, I don't know, we had 50, 60 kids there. They were asking a ton of questions, super smart kids. And it was fun to go talk with those young guys. And we were all talking about the election. They had tons of questions about it, everything else. I do think the challenge on affordability is it takes a while for the anger over affordability to wash through the overall electorate. And I think one of the stories of 2024 and 2026 is just whoever's in power gets punished because people are angry. I also would push back a little bit on J.D.
00:24:52
Speaker 1: Vance.
00:24:52
Speaker 4: You know, he had that post that he put out where he said a lot of Republicans shifted their vote. There's a data out now that one percent of Republicans flip to voting for Democrats. Democrats won the national popular vote.
00:25:10
Speaker 1: By 13 points on Tuesday. 13 points.
00:25:14
Speaker 5: Fuck.
00:25:15
Speaker 4: Most Republicans didn't show up. If you go actually and look at the data, Greg Abbott, for instance, got almost the identical number of votes each of his first two elections as he got in this one. It was that Democrats showed up. I don't think that many Republicans changed sides. I think a lot of Republicans did not match the enthusiasm that Democrats had.
00:25:39
Speaker 2: Well, I think that their view, and this intuitively makes more sense to me. I mean, the vice president, I would assume, has access to very good polling and data on this. So at first we were dealing with what the data presented was, which he was saying a lot of people switched over. Unfortunately, with the way some of these elections were, 1% of the vote can actually be the difference maker. But putting that aside, it makes far more sense to me that somebody who voted for Trump and is annoyed, disaffected, broken promise, whatever you want to say, would just say, I'm not showing.
00:26:17
Speaker 1: Up this time.
00:26:18
Speaker 2: I think pulling the lever for El-Sayed because you're unhappy with Trump breaking a promise is too far afield for 95, 99, perhaps, percent of Republicans. That I don't see. So what you're saying just intuitively actually makes a lot more sense, which means that I'm more inclined to believe it. But again, I just think that the there's the perception reality divide here with what's going on in prices and how much was done to address the affordability issue. And the more that the news cycle and this was the other problem I had, the more the news cycle became Iran slash gas prices. I think the more that there was this self-reinforcing loop of why aren't we talking about the cost of groceries? And that's why Democrats, that's all they honed in on. Look, they were very, we can get mad, we can be disgusted, we can do a million things, but it is important to learn from the successes of your enemies. It is important to see what they did well, and they knew that all they had to do, all they had to do was constantly talk about affordability, groceries, healthcare, cost of everything.
00:27:36
Speaker 1: They don't even have to have solutions.
00:27:38
Speaker 2: They just had to tap into that anxiety that a lot of people have. And one thing, Clay, we don't talk about enough, and this is policy, not the market, in the sense that it's not just like the free market speaking. Housing in five years has gone up, and depending on the survey you want to see, the cost of a median house in America is up 50%. Five, zero percent in five years.
00:28:04
Speaker 4: I've got so many thoughts on this because I think this is really, really important because for most people, buying their first home is a sign of adulthood, but also significant financial progress.
00:28:16
Speaker 2: You have people who, let's say, were in their 20s who are now in their 30s who feel like, so I got to, I was not in a position to get the two point something percent mortgage rate.
00:28:30
Speaker 1: On the $ 250, 000.
00:28:34
Speaker 2: Or $ 300, 000 house that my family of three or my family of four would be perfectly happy living in. And I would feel like I have a stake. Now, if you miss that window, but maybe you're making enough money that you could have been in that window. Now you're being told, yeah, that house that costs 250,000 is now more like 350,000 and maybe 400,000 depends where you are. And you've got to pay 7% interest on that house.
00:29:06
Speaker 1: It's not only even that.
00:29:08
Speaker 4: That's 100% a huge issue, Buck, is the rapid rise in mortgage rates, which is directly connected to the rapid rise in inflation. That's why that happened, because we had to increase interest rates to try to bring back down inflation. The economics here matter. This is another Biden failure. But what it also does, Buck, It keeps tons of housing off the market.
00:29:29
Speaker 1: Yes.
00:29:29
Speaker 4: There are so many people out there with two and a half and three and three and a half percent mortgages. And many of you are listening to me. If you were fortunate enough to get those, you might be.
00:29:40
Speaker 1: Willing.
00:29:40
Speaker 4: Maybe you had kids go off to college. Maybe you've added kids to your family. You might be willing to move to a bigger house or a smaller house, but you're not going to trade your two and a half or three percent mortgage for a seven percent mortgage. So you are frozen. The housing market, there are tons of homes that if the mortgage rates would come back to 4.5%, which maybe, I have a mortgage company now, so I pay a lot of attention to this, that would unfreeze the market. If that were to happen, it would make everything more affordable, but it's so broken because of the rapid escalation in mortgage rates. Buck, to your point, if you were fortunate enough to buy a home in 2021, You got a rate that was points, multiple points cheaper than somebody who had to buy in 22 or 23. And so many people, as a result, or you refied because rates were low. Your home, I just sold one. I bought my house in a buck in 2014. We lived in it for a decade. I never paid my mortgage off because it was 2.5%. By the time, 2.5%. I refied it, knocked it down to 2.5%. I didn't want to pay it off.
00:30:58
Speaker 1: It's crazy.
00:31:00
Speaker 4: Inflation went to 9%, and I had a 2.5% mortgage.
00:31:05
Speaker 1: Now, thankfully, we're in a good spot. I could afford to move.
00:31:09
Speaker 4: But if I didn't have the financial success that we've been fortunate enough to have, if I still made somewhat similar to what we made in 2014, I would have never moved. And there are a lot of you out there saying, You're never moving because rates are never going to be affordable like they are that you locked in.
00:31:25
Speaker 2: This is still very much an issue. And if we're also doing that after action of, OK, well, what went wrong in this midterm election? I can just give you quotes from what Trump said about this issue. We will this is a quote. We will rapidly reduce inflation by slashing energy costs, taxes and regulations. All true, by the way. And he did that. by quickly defeating inflation, we will in turn bring interest rates down fast. You will be able to pay 2% again. Now, you can say that's campaign rhetoric. You can say that's not Trump's fault. You can say a million things. He said rates will be 2% again. Rates are seven.
00:32:13
Speaker 1: What is the right? It's like seven percent. I check. I mean, something like that. Yes.
00:32:16
Speaker 4: I mean, it depends on if you get a 15 or a 30 year, but it's about seven point three percent, I think, for a 30 year right now, if I'm not mistaken.
00:32:24
Speaker 1: You know, this is I understand. You look. Oh, there's this.
00:32:27
Speaker 2: There's always this pushback on. Look, this has to be addressed. This has to be something that is talked about and Republicans can show fixes for. If you're going to tell me that you're going to sell 10 cookies from your bakery and you sell one cookie, I'm allowed to say, but you told me you were selling 10 cookies. And this is where we are on the issue of interest rates and housing. Housing is wildly expensive in this country, and a lot of people are ticked off about it. You can blame shift or we can are. It's not about the blame. It's about what needs to happen now, much more so. And I just think that when we talk about affordability to dig into this, how did Mamdani, Kami Mamdani, how did he win in New York City? Promised to bring down the rent. By the way, I said on the air exactly a year ago, there's zero chance that he'll be able to do this.
00:33:24
Speaker 1: Zero chance. Guess what, everybody? Highest rents in New York City in history. Let me hit you with this, too. 100%, that's correct. 7.18, 30-year, 6.57 on average, perfect10mortgage. com.
00:33:30
Speaker 4: But last year, Buck, 30-year mortgage rates one year ago today were 6.22%. and a 15-year was 5.5%. So borrowing costs have gone up substantially in the Trump era on mortgages. By the way, do you know why that is? Mortgages often follow the price of a gallon of gas. You put it on a chart and you look at it, and I would say one of the most impressive charts I saw in the wake of 2026, the election outcome, if you plug in Trump's approval rating and you correspond it to the price of gas, Yes. The price of gas for most people is a rough approximation of whether the economy is good or bad.
00:34:21
Speaker 2: And it is it is both, I think, unfair and political malpractice to tell somebody who voted for Trump, but who is having trouble paying the rent in their two bedroom apartment when they need a three bedroom house, that they shouldn't be upset when they're hearing too much about, you know, what's going on with Iran. I just think we have to be honest about that. It's much more important to people that they can pay their bills.
00:34:49
Speaker 1: Clay?
00:34:51
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00:35:08
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00:35:14
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00:35:48
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00:35:57
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00:36:00
Speaker 1: Welcome back in.
00:36:01
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00:36:05
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00:36:09
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00:36:30
Speaker 1: All right.
00:36:31
Speaker 4: Senator Ron Johnson is already fired up and ready to go. He's going to join us at the top of the hour at one o'clock talking about the new Senate and what he expects that to be like and also what they accomplished in the first two years.
00:36:46
Speaker 1: That's next.
