The Adam Mockler Show - Dems Drop RISKY BOMB To END TRUMP TERM

Episode Date: September 7, 2025

Adam Mockler with MeidasTouch Network breaks down the strategy Democrats can take to stop Trump. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Mitsubishi Motors. Drive your ambition. All right, listen up. We are only three weeks away from another government funding deadline, and we should all be unified about one thing. Democrats need to use every bit of leverage that they have available to stop Donald Trump's authoritarian takeover, or at the very least, use the leverage to slow them down and to put up a fight. There's one word that we've been revisiting on the Adam Mockler channel over and over, and that word is aggression. I don't mean in a harsh way. I don't mean punching down on people, but I mean aggressively standing up for the democratic values that America is supposed to stand for, not only equality and equity, but standing up for the people

who can't stand up for themselves. Time and time again, Republicans have picked down the most vulnerable communities with this big ugly bill, with the midterm redistricting that will target minority communities, and we need to stand up for that with aggression. A few good frameworks or examples are Gavin Newsom's aggression in California, aggressively. Aggressively fighting back against the redistricting. Or what about J.B. Pritzker? He is aggressively standing up for Chicago, the city that I live and work in. So on the Adam Mockler channel, one thing that we will always stand for is aggressively fighting back against authoritarianism. And that brings me to this New York Times piece that was released by Ezra Klein early this morning. The New York Times piece

is titled, Stop Acting Like This Is Normal. I'll link it in the description so you can read it. But I want to play a quick segment from the video that the New York Times produced out of it. Stop acting like this is normal. The piece has a red, pure red overlay over the United States Capitol. The reason why is because we are now at red alert territory. In this piece, as Reclan argues, that the government should be shut down or Democrats should at least entertain this idea and use it as leverage against Donald Trump. Because just to lay the groundwork. Democrats had the opportunity to shut the government down two months into Trump's term when Doge was ravaging the government and Chuck Schumer decided not to. Ezra Klein puts up pretty

good arguments in this video saying that Chuck Schumer at the time actually made the right call. Now just hear me out. This was two months into the Doge operation. A government shutdown would have accelerated Doge's takeover of the government. It gives Trump more executive power because the course are shut down. And at the time, Trump's approval rating had not yet cratered, so it would take attention away from all of Trump and Doge's mistakes, and people would be wondering what the Democrats are doing. Now, if you argue for a government shut down two months in, I totally understand that as well. But then as Reclin argues, the game has changed. We are now nine months into Trump's term, or we will be nine months into Trump's term. And rather than being eight

points above water with the American people, he's nearly 10. So he has dropped in approval rating. People are beginning to wake up and now the Democrats have leverage. But this requires a few things that Democrats have trouble doing. Number one, having a unified, coherent message. This would be reliant on Chuck Schumer and Jeffries, not only being unified, but having top-down leadership in such a way that all Democrats are coordinated. If this were pulled off, we could use the leverage to stop Donald Trump's authoritarian takeover. Now, let's listen to this as a recline clip, but I just want to say on the other side of that, this is a very risky maneuver. Not only for Democrats who are already very unpopular and risked the loss of even more voters,

we could bleed more voters if this maneuver isn't explained properly. But also, also, this hurts tens of millions of Americans. I mean, hundreds of millions of Americans will be affected in some way, but tens of millions of Americans who are already stretched thin could be pushed over the edge into food and security, or could miss their rent, could not be able to pay for their children's school programs. I mean, parents who rely on government programs for food assistance or child care get the rug pulled out, and like every TSA agent doesn't get paid. So when you go to the airport, not only will the airport be a little bit more crowded

and a little bit more tense, but TSA agents are then missing their rent. The point I'm trying to make is there is a real human cost to this. So someone approaching this with the most amount of moral clarity would then want to way the cost of an authoritarian takeover on the lives of Americans. I mean, if we lose our right to vote, even partially lose our right to have a free election, then that hurts us long term. If 17 million Americans estimated are losing Medicaid, that hurts us long term. So is the short term pain for millions of Americans in a government shutdown worth preventing the authoritarian takeover? It's easy for me to make a judgment call, but I don't work for the government at the moment. So let's listen to

Ezra Klein, break this all down. Make sure you drop a like, and I'd love to hear your guys' opinions below. Mr. President, I invite you to see your big, beautiful face on a banner in front of the Department of Labor because you are really the transformational president of the American worker. Tell me that is not what authoritarianism looks and sounds like.

And so the question is, what are Democrats going to do about it? What can they do about it? I think the case for a shutdown is this. a shutdown is an attentional event. It's an effort to turn the diffuse crisis of Trump's corrupting the government into an acute crisis that the media, that the public, will pay attention to. Right now, Democrats have no power, so no one cares what they have to say. A shutdown would make people listen.

But then Democrats would have to actually win the argument. They would need to have an argument. In my head, the argument is, something like this. Donald Trump won the election. He is the legitimate president. His government should be funded so long as it is acting the way the government is supposed to, serving the people being held accountable. But there are red lines that cannot be crossed. Ice can conduct legitimate deportations, but it can't be masked men roaming the streets, refusing to identify themselves or their authority. The Trump family cannot be hurt. The Trump family cannot be hurt.

hoovering in money and investments from the countries that depend on us and fear our power and our sanctions. There have to be inspectors general and JAGs and career prosecutors watching to make sure the government is being run on behalf of the people rather than on behalf of the Trump family. Democrats would have to pick a small set of policies, policies that represent the larger set of problems and stick to them. They'd have to choose those policies wisely. They would have to hold the line even when it got tough. And right now, Democrats have not picked those policies. They've not settled on that message. Right now, they are no more prepared for a shutdown than they were in March. There's an ongoing debate inside the party on whether they

should talk about Trump's corruption and authoritarianism at all, or instead just say that armed troops in D.C. are a distraction from the price of groceries and health care. And look, the reality is that Democrats' best issue is health care. Trump has looted Medicaid. to pay for tax cuts for him and his friends, and Democrats should never let the voters forget it. But I don't think it's impossible to turn these two realities into one story. Corruption is why you pay a fortune for prescriptions.

Corruption is why your insurance claim keeps getting denied. So Trump promised to attack a broken system. I get it. Ripe target. But here's the thing, he's a crook. And a con man. And he won't. wants to be a king.

Yes, the system really is rigged, but Trump's not unrigging it. He's re-rigging it for himself. I think that argument works. But I am, to be clear, on the side of this debate that says Democrats cannot pretend this is a normal Republican administration and a normal political moment. They cannot ignore masked men in streets, armed troops in the cities, billions of dollars of money going into the Trump family's pockets, an administration that's, spins off multiple scandals in a week

that would have consumed other presidencies for years. If Democrats cannot make an issue out of all that, then they're screwed, and so are we. And you know what? We might be. Even if Democrats could agree on a message, do they have the messengers? Have Akeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer distinguish themselves this year as able to win an argument?

Are they going to hold the line as National Parks closed down? as federal employees are furloughed, if checks stop going out the door, if flights are delayed because air traffic controllers aren't getting paid, I don't know that they will. We all want to pursue a bipartisan, bicameral appropriations process. It is absolutely the case that Democrats could lose a shutdown. But whatever they're doing right now, it's not called winning. And here's the thing.

I am on the side that Democrats seem to be less risk-averse and take risks. I think that if we can unify and if we can make the argument properly, then we can win this battle, but it's going to take a lot of effort. As Ezra Klein points out, he makes a lot of good points here.

So I'm going to link the original piece if you want to go read it or share it around. It'll be in the description below. But he makes a lot of good points regarding us focusing on health care. Americans are pissed about the Medicaid cuts and they'll only continue to manifest

in people's daily lives over the next few years. So we could continue to explain, that as Medicaid reductions jeopardize rural hospitals actually put Americans in danger as they cut mental health, prescription services, they strain providers, strain hospitals at a time when we have a doctor shortage,

we just continue to drive these points home. But it relies on the messengers. Can we have messengers who can withstand all of this? I think we've done a solid cost-benefit analysis in this video, breaking down some of the potential dangers, like bleeding more voters, hurting many American people, but also breaking down the reality that none of this is normal. The fact that there's one point that Ezra Klein here makes that just, it hits so hard.

He says, if Democrats can't make the case against masked men in the streets, Medicaid cuts, doge running around the government, if Democrats can't make the case against all of Trump's insane corruption, if we can't effectively explain this, then maybe we do deserve to. Maybe we are just screwed at that point because, man, we need better fighters in the Democrats. party. Not even younger. I don't even care about age. There are old fighters who are amazing. It's not about age whatsoever. We just need more aggressive fighters. That's the word I keep returning to. I hope you guys appreciate these videos. If you do, make sure you subscribe to the Adam Mockler feed below. We are going for 2 million subscribers by the end of year. Thank you all

and peace out.