Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump's New Disaster Policy Just Flopped (w/ Adam Mockler)

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Adam Mockler joins Jon Favreau in studio to break down Trump’s disastrous new trade war with Canada, the Scott Jennings drama, and Fox News’ absolute meltdown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Standard message and data rates may apply. John Favreau here, and I've got Adam Mockler with me today. What's up? Thank you for having me. It's going to be a good one. Thanks for being here. For those of you who don't know Adam, he's built a couple million subscribers doing daily politics on YouTube.

I believe as a channel you started when you were nine years old. Nine years old. Making Minecraft videos. Same channel I used today, yep. This is funny when I learned this because my six-year-old Charlie is now obsessed with Minecraft videos. Really? Yes.

It's timeless. This is what he would like he plays Minecraft. We let him play. a little bit, but he also, like, when he wakes up in the morning, he wants to sit and go on YouTube for like a half hour and watch Minecraft videos. Well, I'm sorry, Charlie, but all of my Minecraft videos are privated because I was like 9, 10 years old. But I learned how to edit, and now that kind of built into what I have today. So, you know, who knows what that will spring into for you. That's true. And now, you know, you're 23 and you're making Scott Jennings lose

a shit and nearly cry on CNN. I guess you also just launched a long-form debate show. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's really cool. I think it's really important to be having these conversations and to be playing on the battlefield that Republicans have been playing on for the past decade, which is debating, clipping it up, and pushing an affirmative liberal narrative for me. That's awesome. I'm so glad you're doing that. All right, we got three stories to cover. The first is Trump's war with one of America's most dangerous and brutal enemies, Canada, which he's waging by trying to bankrupt Americans and Canadians alike. After Trump said he'll impose a 50% tariff on car steals and other products in January, on 10%.

Terry O's Premier, Doug Ford, had some choice words for the president. Let's listen. Well, I can go back and forth with Trump. You know, I'm not going to, I'm just not going to take the bait. This guy's a loser. He's going to be a loser. And as simple as that, we're going to fight with everything we have. And, you know, something, I have more courage, more brains in my baby toe than he has in his whole body.

So there you go. And I have a lot of real estate on my ass. So he has a lot of room. kiss my ass. So I dealt with guys like you my whole life. And guess what? You all become losers because you're a loser. That's who Trump thinks he is. That's who Trump thinks he is. Multiple body part metaphors. That's not liked about that. So Trump responded this morning with with a brilliant ploy that is sure to bring Canada to its knees. He wants to change the name of Lake Ontario to Lake America. Let's take a look at his truths on this subject. There it is.

There's soon to be named Lake America. Adam, what do you think of all this? On the scale of impossibly stupid to impossibly destructive, where does this one fall? I think it's just impossibly destructive. It like breaks the entire scale. This is a type of juvenile symbolic BS that Trump has done throughout his entire term while not actually fixing anything. And I think what bothers me the most just to take a step back. One week before this, Trump is pulling our military partially out of South Korea in the way.

beginning to sort of praise Kim Jong-un in North Korea. So it's like a destruction of the liberal international order that has benefited us and many of our allies for a while. And when it comes to Canada, how are his priorities so effed up that he's soft on Russia, soft on North Korea, he's screwing up Iran. Now he's starting a trade war with a country that is geographically neighbors with us that we benefit from trade with. It's really sickening. And there's no actual policy prescription that Trump has put into place. It's all just symbolic juvenile BS. Well, and it's also, I mean, there's the issue that you just raised of our, you know, Canada's like our, should be our closest ally, has been our closest ally and is also our second biggest trading partner. And so aside from just bullying our neighbor to the north and are supposed to be our close ally, like he's doing it by shooting ourselves in the foot.

He's like doing it by trying to make life more expensive for Americans. Like, that is how he is showing his supposed strength and exerting his leverage over Canada by making people pay more for shit in America. And Canada's response has been to turn to the EU and China in order to trade with them more while we're weakening our position. So we're alienating ourselves from both of our allies above and below us. They're turning to other countries and Trump's doubling down with the same type of, what was it, the Gulf of America that he did about a year ago.

in between the year where he did a Gulf of America, and he's trying to say, like America, what has he done in that year? Start a new war, increase our deficit and our debt, make prices more expensive for every American. There's no actual policy here. I haven't seen any polling on this yet because it just happened. But I would say that based on how many people didn't like the whole Gulf of America thing, which was more than I expected, it was universally disliked, Same thing with his attempt to try to annex Greenland. So that combined with his most unpopular economic policy, tariffs. Yeah, yeah.

And now he's combining the two where he's going to like rename a lake, fight with our closest neighbor. And by the way, Americans are going to pick up the bill. And once again, he's going to impose tariffs that have been wildly unpopular. Like, I don't know if we have to see the poll to know that it's going to be pretty unpopular. The tariffs aren't even constitutional, first of all. But second of all, my favorite thing that Trump does is when he makes these grand, new, big, bold policy announcements, and it's just reversing his policy from a year ago. Like, recently he was like, we're going to artificially lower the price of beef that we import, which is an inverse tariff, basically.

Like, what's the inverse of liberation day? Like, capture day? Like, we're all just being captured by him. If you're artificially lowering the prices of things you import, you're undercutting the same people you were trying to help by artificially raising the prices. So I guess just like take a step back. How are we in a situation where our president is alienating us from Canada, Mexico, the EU, Denmark, Greenland, and then moving closer to North Korea being just like pretty soft and charitable to Vladimir Putin and in a failed war with Iran. It's a complete mess. Also, he is heading into a midterm where control of the Senate could come down to three states that border Canada, Maine, Michigan, and Alaska. That's true.

So that's happening. Minnesota, I guess, too, even though probably one Minnesota. He's treated Minnesota very well thus far, though. Yeah, exactly. That's true. That's true. So I'm interested in, I know Susan Collins made her typical, like, statement where she was, you know, displeased with the tariffs.

Haven't heard Mike Rogers say anything to Trump's guy in Michigan? Well, as Abdul Al-Said says, his name is Mike Rogers for a reason, because he always says Roger that. Every time Trump says something. That was in my favorite lines. I stole it from Abdul. He's like, Trump wants a data center. He goes, Roger that.

Trump wants to flood ice, he'll go, Roger that. Trump wants to start a trade war, like a war with our next door neighbor. He'll say, Roger that. That's good. That's good. I'm going to start using that. Credit to Abdul. I didn't come over that.

So the good news is that Trump can focus full time on the North American front of his ever-widening World War because, according to your good friend, Scott Jennings, America has won the battle with Iran. Let's listen to Scott. The United States has won the war against Iran. Wars are one when one side achieves its strategic objectives and the other loses the ability to achieve its own. Iran entered this war with four great pillars of strength. Its nuclear program, its missiles and drones, its regional terror network, and its ability to hold the world economy hostage through the Strait of Hormuz.

Every one of those pillars has been severely damaged or outright destroyed. driven the United States Navy out of the Strait of Hormuz. No, our ships travel at will. Is Iran able to stop oil from moving in and out of the strait? No, in fact, millions of barrels of oil are transiting the Strait of Hormuz every day, more and more every day. But there is something deeply wrong with allowing partisan hatred to make you so emotionally invested in American failure, especially when that leads you to openly lie to the American people about what's actually going on here. That is some Baghdad bobshit. Oh, my God.

You could have pulled that out of like 2005, any other war, and it would have been the same thing. So I guess the tryouts for White House Press Secretary are in full swing. Yeah, going well for him, I feel like. Can I say in that clip, he redefined what winning a war means and then he redefined what our objectives for the war were. Winning a war means using force, military force, to extract a political concession from your enemy. We've extracted zero concessions from Iran. In fact, they're still holding the line. And then he redefined our objectives.

Sorry to like hijack it for a second, but our objectives were erasing their nuclear capacity, first and foremost, removing their nuclear capability. And it was stopping their funding of proxies and regime change. The regime is still standing. They've got hardliners in there. So that hasn't been done. The nuclear material is still. under the bases, buried under the rubble. It's not completely inaccessible.

They clearly still have missiles because why else would Trump be ducking for his life? They clearly still have like a military. And the proxies in the region are doing fine. So you can't just redefine what winning a war means, then redefine the objectives and think you're doing something. We call this in my generation, Gigacope or Megacope. You ever heard copium? Copeum I've heard. Okay, that's it.

I've not heard of gigacope. I like that. I just kind of made it up, actually. I don't know. Guess how many ships passed through the straight yesterday? One ship. One ship yesterday. We're back.

Usually we're at like 30 to 40 ships. That was pre-war. And gas prices hit a record high, the highest ever recorded in the month of August. So, and then we still have, for a war that we've won, according to Scott, we still have 50,000 troops deployed there. Four were killed just a few weeks ago by the supposedly decimated Iranian military. So yeah, I'd say that Scott's right. We've totally won this thing. It's kind of the same thing I was just saying about how they declare a huge victory,

but their victory is just kind of reversing something they've done before. But in this case, they haven't even reversed it. I know. And like, think about it. You're, are you millennial? Yes. I'm Gen Z. Just hanging on.

So people in both of our generations have memories of Iraq and Afghanistan. And the government would come out and say exactly that, that we're winning. We killed Saddam Hussein. The bad guy is dead. Then it turned into a grinding counterinsurgency for like two decades in the case of Afghanistan. it cost us trillions of dollars that have been added to our deficits. Now, our generations have to cope with that because we pay $1 trillion per year just on the interest of that. So just to back up, we are seeing the same exact thing happening now.

They're declaring victory, but we're 180 days into this four-week war. And it's kind of manipulating the American public, which is what he was calling out at the end there. I believe that this is the topic of the argument that you got in with Scott on CNN, right? Yeah, it's exactly. So how long were we into the war when you guys had your... I got to say we were like 70, 80 days into it. And I could see him, I could see his posture getting worse and worse every week of the war. Like, I was on panels with him.

And he got more and more cold as the weeks went on. And he basically backed himself into a corner. And you don't know the question that made him blow up. I said, name one political concession we've gotten from Iran since the beginning of this war. None. There's nothing you can answer to that. And that's when he told you to get his, get your fucking. hand out of his face. Yeah, yeah. By the way, my hands weren't even like, what, what, it's so fragile.

You know that guy's entire bit is being condescending and smug and cutting people off. But then the moment, I don't play by the same rules that he plays by. And I'm like, I'm not moving on until you answer this. He's fragile. He almost cried. Well, I was going to say, yeah, I heard Tim Miller say this. And so I went back and watched the clip, but I'm like, he does seem like he's close to crying. Yeah. I thought he was going to strike me for a second. When he went like this, I was like, is this a dude about to hit me, bro? This is why, by the way, I don't think he can be White House Press Secretary or a good White House Press Secretary because Trump does love people who are going

to fight for him and that will be punchy on TV. But Caroline Levitt, for all you can say about her, and you can say a lot, she's sort of unflappable. Yeah. And he is quite flappable. Like, dude, he almost cried when John Alsop said something about Natalie Harp a few days ago. Yeah, that was what we played. This one really pisses me off. Like, I was 13 years old when I heard the Access Hollywood date for the first time.

And that's burned it in my memory, like the presidential candidate saying he grabs women. Yeah. And then 10 years later, he's yelling quiet piggy. So he's like just incredibly demeaning. And Scott Jennings has been blind to that the whole time. But John Ossoff making an innocuous comment is enough for Scott Jennings to like piss his pants on CNN. Get out of here. It's so annoying.

Scott Jennings' transformation, which I think is accelerated, I mean, even since your confrontation with him, because there he was so upset because he couldn't think of a good answer for you. Now he's just like, oh, my answer is just things that aren't happening. He grew a beard after. He grew a beard and he was just like, I guess the easier thing is to just lie about everything, even just tell the most obvious lies and who cares? Because I'm like trying to just, you know, get a job. I can't remember. Did he declare the straight-of-form rousse open in that?

He did. Oh, my God. He said our ships are freely transiting. He's done that like four times since the beginning of the war. Like how was this not emasculating? Is that the word, unmasculating? How is this not emasculating? I think that, I think if you asked him, I'm now going to get into Scott Jennings's head,

I think what, because Trump has done this too, right? Which is because we have the blockade, the Navy blockade of Iran, they contend that our ships, our military ships are just in the region and they're fine. And that all these boats, all these ships that just won't go through the Strait of Hormuz, that's their fault because they're just too afraid. But, you know, America's saying it's open. You can come through if you want, but it's just these ships that's their problem because I guess they don't want to get blown up. It's like in high school when I was like, no, she didn't break up with me.

I broke up with her, actually. You can't just inverse reality. Right now there's no ships going through except for one maybe. In the same countries that he's been bullying and threatening to annex part of, he's now asking for help from. The same Gulf allies that have been struck by Iran due to our war, he's now asking to put money back into Iran with this $300 billion fund. It's all just despicable. It's a mess. Pod Save America Breaking News is brought to you by ZipRecruiter

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to defend our northern border with Canada is, as we mentioned, our pal Abdul al-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan. Last night, Abdul put on his armor and proved that he's a bit of a masochist by volunteering to sit for an interview with our pal, Jesse Waters. Let's see how it went. Our pal. So you think it's okay for a parent to slash his kids stiggling off? You think that's okay?

I mean, do you? So do you really want to have this conversation? Are you circumcised? Yeah, yeah. Mike Rogers, who you and I both agree is a beta and won't come on your show. debate me in November. I didn't agree to that, but that's funny. I just think I have the right

to the fruits of my own labor. That's America. It's not communists what you're talking about. Billionaires don't make their money off of their labor. That I think is where you head off. Billionaires that make their money off their money. You want to talk about budgets. I'm happy to do that. The guy who used to work on your channel, I think

was like the sixth host on the five, he wanted to raise our military budget to $1.5 trillion and you don't seem to be upset about Yeah, I'm not scared you. If you think, Abdul, I just think it's my name. So the idea that you have somebody like Tommy Tuberville, right, who, you know, barely was good at coaching football, is out here trying to ban Sharia law when there's less than 1% of the Muslim community in America as if somehow Muslims are out here trying to push Sharia law. Legendary is here with BetMGM Sportsbook.

Sign up to unlock access to hundreds of pre-match and live betting options for all your favorite sports. Download the BetMGM app. See BetMGM.com for terms. 18 plus Alberta only. Please play responsibly. Subject to eligibility requirements. If gambling is affecting your mental health or well-being, 21-1 Alberta is here to help.

Call or text 211 or visit ab.211.ca. BetMGem operates pursuant to an operating agreement with the Alberta Eye Gaming Corporation. Standard message and data rates may apply. So that was the interview. There's a lot more of that. I would encourage everyone to watch the whole thing if you like that sort of thing.

So my reaction to the full interview was that Abdul did really well. I also have heard a lot of people say, I just think, like, why did he do it? It was just so, like, contentious. And my thing is I'm sort of, like, grading it on a curve. And the curve is, like, if you're Abdul al-Sayed and you're a progressive who is running for Senate

and you're going to go on Jesse Waters' show, it's not going to be fun. And you're not just going to get a whole bunch of time to just like deliver your message the way you want to. But if you can break through the crap and still deliver some of the message, I think that's a win. And I think it's probably, I think it's still worth doing that net. Like I don't think it's going to be comfortable to watch or like the most fun interview.

But I think it's good to do. You can't just cede this ground and let them lie over and over and over. The original interview on air probably had millions of viewers. And then it's pulled tens of millions of more views online. afterwards, which means these people are being introduced to fact patterns on Fox News that they wouldn't otherwise hear. I think the clip economy and the way that attention works right now necessitates going into these combative arenas and oftentimes posting clips afterwards. I learned a lot about Abdul's frameworks. I followed his campaign closely. I learned a lot about how he thinks about

things. And you know what really struck me is just how un-nimble, how rigid a lot of these hosts are. Like, Abdul is very nimble and flexible. He could jump from topic to topic and give his deep framework, Jesse Waters seems to have a superficial grasp of what he was talking about. Like, he had these snarky one-liners, like, oh, I don't think it's that funny or whatever, but he didn't have any actual substance. And it kind of reminds me of Scott Jennings in a way, too, how these people are used to these rigid conversations where because the rules and the time limit, just lets them move on, they're not used to being challenged. Like when Abdul Al-Said said, are you circumcised? Those types of questions that you ask and they can't answer confidently will always

knocked them off their feet. Jesse Waters is a prime time host. He got cooked right there. He got cooked. Yeah, it's funny because I, so I, my one and only time doing Jesse Water show was during the Democratic convention in Chicago. And so his producers came and was like, come on the show. And Fifer was like, are you crazy? And I'm like, you know what? Maybe I am, but like, I'm feeling a little punchy. Let's go do it. Been there for a couple days. And I, it very unlike me, I was like, oh, I had that same thought as like, he's very scripted. I could see when he was like reading

the prompter for his intro to me. And at one point, during the commercial break, he was like, wasn't that a good intro they wrote? You know, like, and so I'm like, oh, he is pretty scripted. And I kind of like pushed him a little bit. And it does throw him off his game. You realize, now, I think it's much harder to do in a remote setting.

Like, I would not have done it just remotely for the first time. Like, I was next to him, so I felt more comfortable doing that. It's hard to do a remote. Is it a Fox News? tactic? Do you think this is a tactic they do is put a delay on Abdul to give him the lower hand, or is it just a natural delay? I think it's just a natural delay. I think, and I think remote interviews are tough, and they're tough when you have a host that wants to dominate the conversation,

because it's easier to dominate the conversation when you're the host and it's remote. Honestly, Abdul gave really solid energy right there. Like, that's a type of assertive, aggressive, almost like affirmative messaging that needs to happen. It's really easy to knock on Trump, take down Trump, all of that. But going into those spaces and giving your own affirmative framework is really powerful. I mean, that's going to really help them out there. How do you feel about the Michigan Senate race in general? I think that it's a rough one because right now the polling is neck and neck, but Abdul is very clearly the stronger, more well-equipped candidate. We're just getting off

the back of a primary where $60 million was spent in negative ads against Abdul. And for my understanding, Mike Rogers didn't have nearly as competitive as a primary. So Abdul right now is still kind of tainted by these negative ads. And they haven't been able to refocus it on Mike Rogers quite yet, but we're only like one or two weeks past the primary. So as we continue to push this, I think that Mike Rogers will be hit with a bunch of negative ads, will continue to drive home the message that he's not a good person, he's rather corrupt, and then from there we should be able to build a good base for Abdul. I mean, I think that we're in a good position.

I saw Jonathan Martin in a clip from Morning Joe this morning say that Abdul shouldn't have done it not because he didn't do well, but because the goal is to make the race about Mike Rogers and Trump and not make it about Abdul. And I get that to an extent. I think Abdul's number one objective is to tie Mike Rogers to Trump and use the national environment, which is a whole bunch of people pissed off at Trump to sink Mike Rogers as well. But I think because of what you said and because of like all those, that $60 million worth of ads in the primary, he's got to He's also going to do some work defining himself and reassuring people that the caricature that the APAC ads and other ads and Republicans have painted of him isn't true. And the best way you can do that is to go on Jesse Waters and be tough, but also seem like, I mean, honestly, Jesse's saying, I'm not scared of you.

I just think you're misguided. It's probably helpful. That's actually pretty good. Jesse Waters seemed really meek in that interview. Like, I was surprised how meek he seemed. I guess with Abdul El-Sayed, he just got to. continue cooking like this. And I guess it sounds trite, but the attention economy is very important. And the attention economy is going to be dominated with clips and moments like that. And when you're

able to keep having appearances and moments like that, it worked for Donald Trump. He had a million train wreck interviews that only increased his profile. And now Abdul can use his increased profile as a vehicle to attack Mike Rogers, at least in an ideal world. I think that's right. I think that, like, yeah, getting attention in these races is the toughest part. I mean, we just talked about it on the pod yesterday that like Troy Jackson has this challenge in Maine because it was very nationalized and every new grand planter because everyone was arguing about grand Platner but since his exit from the race it's just kind of yeah you don't see it's just hard for Troy Jackson to get attention yeah and now does he need to get that much attention

probably not because again his goal is the same tie Susan Collins to Trump even though she's trying to separate herself from Trump but people need to know who he is and so you need to do some kind of attention-grabbing thing to kind of define yourself a little yeah I agree and I think Abdul did a very good job of at least getting the moments and he had a very nuanced framework on a lot of these things they were trying to ambush him and trap him there's a moment where Jesse Waters goes you think Sharia law and banning that as white supremacy play the clip and he just tries to ambush him with this clip yeah and Abdul flips it on him in a very

clever way so it's good stuff yeah all right those are all of our those are all of our stories for today Adam thank you so much for joining as always where should people go and subscribe to all the good content that you're you're turning out you know I'm on YouTube Instagram wherever you You are, we are under the name Adam Mockler. We have a lot more debates, more CNN hits, more back and forth coming soon. So I really appreciate the time and let's do it again. Appreciate you being here.

And everyone, go subscribe to Adam's stuff and please subscribe to Pod Save America. It's free. Just subscribe to our YouTube channel so we can keep surfacing good content. That's what we're here for. Peace out, y'all. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari with Reed Juerlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill.

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