← The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Truth with Lisa Boothe: Trump’s Middle East Breakthrough: Buck Sexton on Restoring American Power
00:20:19
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Lisa Booth
Welcome to the Truth with Lisa Booth, where we get to the heart of the issues that matter to you today. I'm joined by Buck Sexton. You know him, he's one of the co hosts of the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton show. He's also a former CIA analyst. So we're going to lean on that experience. For today's show. We're going to talk about President Trump's bold leadership, history being made, peace in the Middle East. I don't know if you saw that New York Post cover, but it reads leader of the free world. What a difference a president makes. All we needed was a different president. We're also going to talk about Hamas's brutal executions of Gazans hours after the ceasefire. Where are the ceasefire crowd? You know, where are the from the river to the sea crowd? Where are the people concerned about the plight of the Gazans, of the Palestinians? They seem pretty silent right now. So what's that all about? Also, what impact does this peace in the Middle east and this big bold move from President Trump, what impact does it have on the rest of the world? Will he be able to solve the Ukraine, Russia war? Will China be afraid to try to take Taiwan? What does this mean more broadly? So stay tuned for all of that and more with my friend, Buck Sexton. Well, Buck Sexton, it's great to have you on the show. Appreciate you making the time.
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Buck Sexton
Thanks for having me, Lisa, as always. Appreciate it.
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Lisa Booth
So, Buck, President Trump went from flipping French fries at McDonald's to negotiating World peace. It's quite the career arc for someone. If you, if you ask me, the American dream is still alive and well.
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Buck Sexton
Well, yeah, you know, it's funny, Lisa, because I spent a fair amount of time around diplomats and ambassadors back when I worked in the, in the government. And it's funny because there's this idea that you have to have done that for a Long time to be able to do that. Right. It's like, if you haven't done it before, there's no way. There's no way that you could actually do it in an effective way. And that's clearly not the case. Right. In fact, I think that, if anything, what Trump has shown is that if you have the instincts of a negotiator, you're far better at this kind of negotiation than somebody who's been really producing process for their entire career, which is what most State Department employees do. So, yeah, it makes perfect sense to me.
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Lisa Booth
And that's really good point, too, because you also have, you know, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have also been criticized for. They don't know what they're doing. You know, they aren't up for the job. They don't have the experience. And then to your point, they helped President Trump, you know, deliver history.
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Buck Sexton
Well, yeah. I mean, the. I think the biggest testament, Lisa, to just what a success this whole thing is with Trump is that some of his. I'm sure you've seen this, right, in the last 24 hours or so. Some of his bitterest or most bitter. I don't know if bitterest is a word. Most bitter critics in the media have had to say things like, I may not like what he did on X, Y or Z, but I have to say this Mid east peace thing and getting the hostages back is pretty good. Right. And these are people who, you know, would just spit out their coffee before they would say anything on a morning show or on their evening shows about how great Donald Trump is on anything. So what, what further proof could you need than people suffering from Trump derangement Syndrome? This has actually broken through. And they've had to say, yeah, on this, he got a pretty sweet deal done. Well, well worth it. And that's, I think, a testament to how effective he's been once that point.
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Lisa Booth
You know, you look at the COVID of the New York Post today, and it reads leader of the free world praising President Trump for negotiating peace and getting the hostages released. I mean, like, during the, you know, four years under Biden, it really felt like America had lost its way. Sort of questioning, you know, will we be the world's leading superpower again? You know, really just feeling, like, badly diminished as a country and are standing. But it shows us like all we needed was a new president. Talk about sort of that shift on the global stage that we've seen just in the few short months since President Trump's taken office. And also what this all in the Middle east signifies to the rest of the world.
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Buck Sexton
Yeah, absolutely. And I don't say this to be glib, although I think it will sound that way, Lisa, but I think it's completely fair to say the powers of the presidency are extremely formidable in the right hands. And when you have somebody who is essentially an absentee president, the nation suffers. And in this case referring to Joe Biden, the guy had cognitive, like cognitive decline dementia. We all know that this has been something that was covered up. And so it only makes sense if you think about it, you know, take away all the Democrat narrative in the media and take away the ways that this was covered up. Yeah. Having a guy running the free world, or as leader of the free world, running this country, who has all of his faculties and is a tremendously forceful personality with a vision of what he's trying to accomplish and a competitive guy as well. And I mean that in all the best ways, like you should be a competitive person if you're going to be in that kind of executive role of president, meaning that you want to be known as a great president. You want to be known as a guy who did better even than his predecessors. I think that's healthy. And, and to compare that to Joe Biden, who was barely present cognitively and physically, I mean, the guy was at Delaware like every other weekend. We all know why. Of course, America's in a better position now vis a vis these countries all over the world. But it's funny, isn't it? Because on foreign policy, Lisa, and on global standing, those are places where the so called intelligentsia and like the legacy media would have said that Donald Trump would be the weakest and they claimed that he was going to be. And I think if anything, it has been the place where he has shown the most, the most ability to adapt to the situation and to get results that even, like I said, the most bitter of his enemies have to admit. Wow, this guy knows what the heck he's doing when it comes to high stakes negotiation on the world stage.
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Lisa Booth
But why do you think that is? Is it just being an outsider or just, you know, the way President Trump is or what do you think's behind that?
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Buck Sexton
You know, I think it's skill set, truly. I think that it's understanding leverage, it's understanding pain points and, and what it is, like, you know, this is if you sat down with somebody who, let's say, had been very successful in negotiating big deals and maybe they were teaching people in a business school like an MBA program, I think A lot of that would be the skill set that you would see in someone like a President Trump. If you look at the way that in say the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown or sais, which is the Johns Hopkins equivalent of the School of Advanced International Studies or sipa, which is the School of International Public affairs at Columbia, by the way. These are where a lot of my government colleagues from the various agencies, they come out of the master's programs at these places. So I'm very, very familiar with them there. They take a much more internationalist and consensus based opinion. Lisa. And consensus isn't good in negotiation. Right. It really turns into a who is the decider and what are they trying to get and what are they willing to give and how do they use both carrots and sticks in that process? Trump understands that. And I think a lot of people that work in politics and even people that have a background maybe in things like corporate law or I, I don't think they've necessarily because we see a lot of that. Right. You can corporate law and then you become a senator, especially on the Democrat side, if you're a senator, maybe you run for president or even become president as Biden did. I don't think that they have the time over target, so to speak. I don't think they have the reps to understand when you're in negotiation, who are you dealing with? What kind of a person are they in this negotiation? What do they want? These are instincts, I think, as much as they're experiences for a lot of people or rather they're experiential. And this is where I think Donald Trump is such a. Yeah, he's an outsider as you said, and that means that he doesn't come with all this baggage. But the baggage is of that consensus school of thinking with well, this is what was done before and this is what the so called experts say I have to do now. I'm gonna take that approach. And well, that clearly has failed a lot and Trump has won a lot. And that's a different. And that's the difference between the two.
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Lisa Booth
You know, and Barbara Corcoran, short tanks Barbara Corcoran.
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Buck Sexton
I know, I know.
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Lisa Booth
Barbs.
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Buck Sexton
I mean, I like watch her. I don't know her, but you know what I mean.
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Lisa Booth
But I'm sure you've seen that clip where she was talking about how he's the best negotiator she's ever seen and she kind of like walks through why. But you know, that just came to mind as you were speaking. Is that why you think like these people, like the expert class hate him so much. Is it because he sort of like rendered them useless and sort of exposed them or.
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Buck Sexton
Oh man, there's so many, there are so many answers that are, I think, all valid to that question. Lisa. I think it's a broad sweep of things that first of all, as you know, he's a, he's a traitor to his class in their eyes in some way. Right? Because while he is the point, people say he's the blue collar billionaire. It's like, well, he's supposed to be, he's a New York guy, he's really rich. He should at least respect these institutions that we come from. Meaning he should respect, you know, these Ivy League schools, cuz he went to one, so. But he doesn't really. Or rather you have to earn his respect beyond the credentials. I think the credentialism of our elites is one of the things that they're most sensitive about now, especially with regard to Trump, because he also, you know, usually what happens is if you don't come from that, if you're not from that background, the moment you criticize it, you know this. What do people say? Well, you know, you wouldn't feel that way about the Ivy League if you had gone to an Ivy League school, right? Well, but he did and his kids have gone to Ivy League schools and, and that's just one example of this. But he then looks at it from the inside and says, okay, yeah, these can be great schools, but I don't inherently think that someone is going to be better at the job or smarter because of the school they went to. I want to see who I'm dealing with. And I think that's a slap in the face to particularly the coastal elite sense of who should be involved at the top levels of government and also who should really be in charge in our society. When we talk about the elites, credentialism is really at the heart of it. And I think that he's a challenge to that, like I said, because he also can play that game if he wants to, but he doesn't really want.
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iHeart Radio Announcer
To play that game.
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Buck Sexton
So he throws them completely off balance. And the other thing is he's been willing to hold the mirror up to them and this has been true all along. He will say the things that a lot of us think, but either haven't been in a position to or just don't want to deal with the fallout of when it comes to very powerful institutions and individuals and that off the cuff, let it rip aspect of who he is and who he is politically in particular, or rather the kind of political figure that he's become. That's the secret sauce that just cannot be replicated and is why he's been so capable of taking on all comers.
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Lisa Booth
Gotta take a quick commercial break. More with Buck Sexton on the other side.
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Lisa Booth
You know, there's been reports and video showing Hamas carrying out mass executions in Gaza after signing the peace treaty. I haven't heard anything from, like, the river to the sea people or the ceasefire people about condemning this behavior. It kind of makes you think that it was really never about that.
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Buck Sexton
Yeah, no, the ceasefire people, remember, they were calling for a ceasefire while the Israelis were still counting their dead after October 7th. I mean, that the whole. The whole claim of a ceasefire was supposed to be a way of seizing some moral high ground while you're calling for Israel to just sit there and take it, essentially. And that was morally grotesque. And that continued on for two years. Hamas is a disgraceful and inhumane entity. There's nothing honorable or decent about Hamas as an organization. The same thing is true of Hezbollah. And I know people will try to talk about, you know, Hezbollah running some soup kitchens. Well, I always want to point out if Hamas and Hezbollah had any idea of how to govern and had any principles that they actually lived up to as governing entities, maybe they wouldn't need to run so many soup kitchens because their people wouldn't be so poor and miserable and they wouldn't spend all their time, by the way, stashing cash in banks in the Middle east and flying on private jets to conferences where they have no interest in, actually, until now, until Trump, coming to any real agreement with anyone on the Israeli side. So, yeah, what you saw with the Hamas executions is just more. More evidence that Hamas is executing people in a public square. They want people to see this. They want there to be fear. You would think that maybe they would be if they were normal psychologically like the leadership of Hamas, if they weren't psychopathic, which I believe they absolutely are, and I think there's mountains of evidence to that effect, then you would think they would spend more time trying to feed their people and deal with the fallout of this war. Cause, remember, we were told it was a genocide and we were told that people were starving to death. Both of those things are lies, by the way. And I said they were all along. But there was a big propaganda campaign on both fronts. If you had just suffered through a genocide and you were still suffering through mass starvation, I don't think the Israelis just showed up with huge pallets of food in the last 24 hours. Lisa, why would they be executing people instead of tending to the needs of people. And it's because Hamas all along, I mean, my only disappointment in this Trump peace agreement, the only part of this that I wish could be different, is the entire Hamas, entire Hamas structure was either captured or killed. But the Israelis are willing to let some of them get off the hook in order to achieve this peace and to end the conflict, which I totally respect. But I do wish that Hamas was completely eradicated. And that's the only part of it that I. If I could wave a magic wand and change, I would.
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Lisa Booth
Also, in like, a lot of these videos, the people do not look famished if I'm just being honest. Right? So it's like this, you know, the.
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Buck Sexton
Because they're not. I mean, they're not starving. It was a lie, right? That's what you're saying is. You're saying, what about my. Are my eyes lying to me?
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Buck Sexton
No, they're not. And this is why the New York Times ran on the front page a story about starvation with a kid who wasn't starving but had a congenital birth defect. Had nothing to do with. With starvation of the population around him and nothing with him starving even. It was just a very sad case. You know, it would be like, you know, if you put it. If you put a child on the front page with no legs and claim that the Israelis had blown his legs off with a landmine or something, and then it turns out, no, he's actually just born that way. Well, then why are you blaming the Israelis for. They had nothing to do with it. It was really the same, you know, moral obtuseness on display from what's supposed to be the most reputable paper in the country clearly isn't, but that's what they say. So, yeah, I think that the people who saw this with moral clarity for the last two years have been entirely vindicated, not just by the way that the Trump agreement has come together, but also by the actions of the various parties afterwards. So there should be some real soul searching from even some people on the right, Lisa, who I think started to get this really wrong. And I have no enemies to the right, so I don't name names or get into that kind of pettiness. But for anybody who started to think, oh, Israel is intentionally starving to death, the people of Gaza, they should ask themselves, why was I fooled? Yeah, why? Why did I believe that obvious lie?
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Lisa Booth
What pressure, you know, especially seeing just the show force, you know, President Trump, joined by more than 20 world leaders in Egypt on stage and being able to get this done. What kind of pressure does that put on, like Russia and Ukraine to resolve that war? And then also what sort of pressure does this put on, like China maybe looking to take Taiwan?
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Buck Sexton
Well, this comes all together in what I think you could call the Trump effect. Lisa, and I'll kind of work backwards in your question because as you know, because we're friends and you, you were aware of my recent travels. I just got back from Taiwan. I had a long interview with the president, as well as sit downs behind closed doors with the vice president, the national security advisor. I mean, everybody in Taiwan who's making decisions about defense and national security at the highest level and spent a whole week there going to military bases, going to drone factories, just seeing what's going on. And one thing that really stuck out to me was they said that after Trump hit the Iranian nuclear facilities, and they wouldn't tell me, they didn't want to go to sources and methods, but they said, let me tell you, that rattled Beijing, meaning that rattled Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party, because what it showed was that Trump was willing to throw the punch that he thinks is necessary irrespective of what the status quo has been. And all the predecessors and that group think that consensus that we were talking about before and so that, Lisa, the strike on the Iranian nuclear facilities had reverberations in certainly the, the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, meaning that it was heartening for them. And in Beijing it was, oh, wow, this guy means business. Now, I think that also when you add that to what we've just seen with the Mideast peace deal, Putin is getting more, is going to be getting more pressure on this. Trump does want to bring that to a conclusion as well. And I think that there was some goodwill between Trump and Putin just on a man to man level. I'm not saying that Trump agrees with everything Putin does. Obviously, Putin's a bad guy in so many ways, but I think that there was an adversarial respect between the two of them that Trump now has decided, no, you're actually just a dirtbag. Like, you're not willing to, man to man, meet me in good faith and try to bring this, you know, tell me what you need, tell me how we end this thing, tell me how we can stop the killing. And now I think going into this, Trump is gonna have a more adversarial approach to Putin and to put greater pressure on him. And I feel like he's got the, you know, if we're talking in basketball analogies, Trump's got the hot hand right now and you don't wanna get in the way of that. You don't wanna be on the other side of that on the other team. So that means to me that there's going to be a really renewed effort here. He obviously is willing to push Zelenskyy a lot but he's shown a willingness to snap more in the other direction and put that pressure on Putin. At least talk about turning on the pressure on Putin and that could bring about the result that we're all hoping for which is an end of that conflict as well.
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Lisa Booth
Absolutely. Bug Sexton, appreciate you for taking the time to join the show.
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Buck Sexton
Anytime. Lisa, thanks for having me.
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Lisa Booth
Those Buck Sexton appreciate him for making the time to come on the show. Appreciate you guys at home for listening every Tuesday and Thursday but you can listen throughout the week. I also want to thank my producer John Cassio for putting the show together. Until next time.
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