The Adam Mockler Show - They can’t hide it any longer…

Episode Date: July 7, 2026

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Someone's already claiming this is our year. Someone else said that last year too. A round of Jameson, ginger and lime arrives at a table. Smooth enough for kickoff, smooth enough for extra time. New friends pulling up a stool. Debates about whether that was a handball. Cheers rising like a roar around the room. Because match days are about the shared moments.

How did Jameson to your match day lineup? Jameson, it's what you bring. Please enjoy our products responsibly. I hope that Mitch McConnell is alive right now, just so that we can give him the gift of showing, A, that Democrats learn how to actually wield power, maybe a lesson that Mitch McConnell could have offered us, and B, so that he could watch the U.S. Senate, you know, his prized institution flip from red to blue, and that'll be the legacy that he leaves behind. I have a really important question for you all, and we have to keep asking this question.

What are the Republicans covering up? It has been almost one month since Senator Mitch McConnell has been seen in the public eye. We have reports that he has been medically brain dead for a few days, but his wife, Elaine Chow, is currently over in China, so can't make the decision, as the next of kin, to pull the plug. Mitch McConnell's neighbors have said they have not seen anybody enter or exit his house in D.C. in almost 30 days. Obviously, something is very wrong. Nobody is denying that, but the reporting is conflicting about what is actually going on behind the scenes. A bunch of Republican operatives are now coming out and claiming that actually Mitch McConnell, is fine. He's quite energetic. He's in the hospital having lengthy conversations about complex

political topics. There's only one problem is that the people reporting this are people like friend of the show Scott Jennings. Obviously, he's not a friend of the show. He's anything but I say that in jest. But Scott Jennings sent out this ludicrous tweet that I want to break down. And then later in the video, I'm going to bring in Brian Tyler Cohen in order to further break down how Democrats can wield power in a post-Trump era. Make sure you drop a like. And I urge you to watch until the end of this video because it is a really good conversation. And Scott Jennings, Mitch McConnell, these are people who have wielded power over the past decade, few decades,

in such an asymmetric, cynical, and just shamelessly disingenuous manner. So we're going to break all of that down, drop a like, watch until the end. Let's start off with what Scott Jennings said, because it's rather absurd, and people are now making fun of him. He said, I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this morning, the senior senator from Kentucky. He's still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just shy of 20 minutes about Iran, Ukraine, the unfolding situation in Maine,

my visit to the TR presidential library, and even a little bit of Senate history. I told them we want to see him back at work as soon as possible. This tweet has 11,000 likes, but 22,000 replies, meaning people are just dogging on this guy. And it's because when's the last time we've heard Mitch McConnell say anything coherent about a war, about any issue over the past like 18 months? it's been probably about 18 months to two years since Mitch McConnell has made any sense on these issues. There is no way they had a 20-minute conversation spanning across multiple political topics, but then people started to make fun of him.

Sarah says, I spoke with my dear friend Mitch McConnell for 20 minutes this morning, and he told me he supports universal health care, free college, raising the minimum wage, and housing for all. Then a fake parody account, this is a fake representative. He's joking around here. He said, I spoke to my old friend Mitch McConnell this month. morning, the senior senator from Kentucky. He's still recovering in the hospital. We talked for just

shy of 45 minutes. He's so sharp. This person's joking. Just like always, he let me do all the talking. He's a great listener. After that, we prayed silently for a while and had a staring contest. Just like always, he beat me. I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible. This person is clearly making fun of Scott Jennings, who ended his tweet with the same thing. I told him we want to see him back at work as soon as possible, but it's just so funny. The Republicans are trying to cover this up to preserve their own power, but it's not working. Even the Hill accidentally posted an article saying, do not use a look back at Mitch McConnell's time in the Senate. So they accidentally published an article that they had ready in case the announcement of Mitch McConnell's death does come out.

To expand on this issue more, I want to bring in a friend of the show, Brian Tyler Cohen, who just wrote a book called The Day After, How to Weald Power in a Post-Trump world. Watch this interview and watch until the end. You know, this is an interesting moment with Mitch McConnell in the spotlight right now because there is no greater example of Republicans abusing power while Democrats fail to wield power than McConnell himself. Like, Mitch McConnell unilaterally changed the composition of the U.S. Supreme Court. I know that we talk about how the number nine is sacrosanct, but Mitch McConnell changed it for almost a year from nine justices to eight justices. And so this is somebody who is perfectly willing to shed. norms and process and institutions and and you know the filibuster the parliamentary like these are people who will this is somebody who will completely got all of those things in deference to just figuring out how to consolidate power by any means necessary and the asymmetry between what Mitch McConnell does

and what Democrats do which is you know will be the party of strongly worded letters will be the party that says okay we're gonna give you this one but next time you know maybe maybe reciprocate this this goodwill and of course it never happens. But that asymmetry is so glaring. And look, McConnell is the perfect example of that. So I know that McConnell is in the news in a big way. There's a lot of talk about whether this guy is alive or not right now. But I think, you know what, I, like, I hope that Mitch McConnell is alive right now just so that we can give him the gift of showing, A, that Democrats learn how to actually wield power, maybe a lesson that Mitch McConnell could

have offered us and B, so that he could watch the U.S. Senate, you know, his prized institution flip from red to blue. And that'll be the legacy that he leaves behind. It's beautiful. And as I pointed out earlier in this video, Scott Jennings is one of the people leading the way and saying that Mitch McConnell is still alive. Now, we don't have confirmation one way or another, but that's sort of the problem. We don't have confirmation one way or another. And well, I got to ask, I mean, look, nobody would know better than you. What do you think Scott Jennings' credibility is on this issue when he claims that he's had a 20-minute conversation with Mitch McConnell, somebody who the rest of the country doesn't even know is alive right now.

I think that he is the least credible operator in politics right now. As I next to this guy on TV, week after week after week, while he lied about the timeline of the Iran war. He wasn't bound to any facts, reality, wasn't bound to any timeline. He would say it's about to be over four to six weeks. And throughout that, he got increasingly antsy as this war was just failing. It was failing. He has no credibility and he will endlessly run defense for this administration.

And you know what's interesting. This actually brings it back to the topic. One of my frameworks on TV is I'm not going to let Republicans unilaterally change the rules. Scott Jennings has a style on TV. It's not a secret. He'll lean back, cross his arms, sit from a mug, and he'll demean people on the panel. He'll try to trap them, the women on the panel, he'll talk over. So I went on TV and I'm like, wait a minute.

I'm not going to follow some unspoken norms if the Republican across the panel for me is going to to be lying. I'm not going to let the panel just move on to the next topic if they're going to be lying. So that sort of is what caused a little bit of a spark and controversy. And famously, he was totally okay with that, right? Yeah, famously, he freaked the hell out. And I thought he was going to smack me for a second. Can I ask you really quickly, what does this look like? What does wielding power in a post-Trump world look like in particular? So say we gain power in 2026, which we will, hopefully. Does this look like more oversight committees? Does it look like Democrats being able to, being willing to bend the rules. I mean, of course, we don't want us to go off the deep end like Trump does,

but we have to wield power in some way. Where do you draw that line? So the difference between 2026 and 2028 is a little bit different, obviously, because in 2026, if we're able to gain majorities in Congress, we're still limited in terms of what we can do. There's not going to make any legislation passed, any sweeping legislation passed that Trump is going to sign into law, but I think it looks like using the levers of power in these congressional committees to actually look into the corruption that's happening at the hands of the Trump administration. This stuff all got a free pass. James Comer and the Oversight Committee is not going to look into any of this because he's in favor of all of this. So I think, you know, as of 2026 to 2028, it looks like

actually investigating some of the corruption so that people know what the Trump administration is doing with all of their resources. And obviously, you know, from Don Jr. getting his $620 million loan, all of these short-term... sales, you know, where something will get traded and then five minutes later there's some speech. Like, this is happening on a daily basis. People are getting rich hand over fist. Donald Trump himself is gaining billions of dollars while he's in office. This needs to be investigated. And if any Democrat was doing one one thousandth of what Trump and his family are doing right now, Republicans would be apoplectic. So I think this is a big, a pretty bipartisan issue in terms of being able to make

sure that somebody doesn't get filthy rich by trading, trading, you know, on the, on the processes of the U.S. government. After 2028, though, if Democrats are able to gain control of the U.S. government, it looks a lot different. It looks like not, you know, what we have right now is basically a process where a lot of Democrats will get into office and something flips, where once they're there, once they're in the Senate, they feel like they have to defend the institutions of the Senate, as opposed to just seeking outcomes for their own constituents. And so it becomes a thing where we have to make sure that we're here to preserve the filibuster. We're here to make sure that the parliamentarian still has the last word.

And it can't be that way. It has to be, okay, let's make sure that we deliver outcomes on health care. I argue for Medicare for all in this book. Let's deliver some outcomes on climate. This is an existential issue that we're all contending with right now. Voting rights, which is obviously under major attack right now at the hands of not just Trump, not just his DOJ, but even state governments, Republican governments across the country. And it looks like holding corrupt Republican officials to account for what they're doing right now.

Merrick Garland's inability and unwillingness to actually hold Donald Trump to account when he was the attorney general of the United States set the conditions for Trump to do what he's doing right now, which is to basically have this feeling that he can commit crimes with impunity. And so it's a all of government approach. It's both taking a proactive approach to delivering for people. And it's also holding people who've committed crimes to account for what they've done because there can be no faith in government if it's just a big corrupt tin pot dictatorship like we have right now. It's interesting because Merrick Garland was the one that got completely screwed over by Mitch McConnell, right?

When Obama was trying to appoint him to the Supreme Court, nominated him. Mitch McConnell said, no, there's not enough time left in the presidency. Then when roles were reversed, McConnell allowed ACA. to be nominated to the Supreme Court in the same exact way. So he should understand, but he didn't understand. He dropped the ball. I think you made a really good point about politicians, not even thinking about what affects their constituents or what outcomes they can get for their constituents. They think about the institutions and the incentives at play. Is part of your vision for the party to push back on the corporate money in politics that

distorts the incentives of politicians? That distortionary effect, I feel like it's a big driver of the apathy in our politics. It's a big driver of these politicians who aren't even thinking about what will help my district or my state. They're thinking about what will help my lobbyists and help me get reelected, right? A thousand percent. And in fact, those conditions are going to get worse because we saw the Supreme Court hand down. I believe it was NRC versus FEC, which basically just opens the floodgates even more to money in politics. And so so long as we have just this floodgates open for money to pour into politics, we're not. going to have a system where our politicians are responsive to people. Now, the flip side of that

is that that sentiment has really has really pervaded the left right now in these primaries. And you see a lot of these Democratic candidates now who are winning running on platforms where they're expressly not willing to take money, not willing to be bought by corporate interests. And look, I think in large part, the success of Trump and his movement was that he tapped into a sense of, you know, this, this populous sentiment that was spreading across the country. The downside for him is that now his supporters and the country more broadly are recognizing that like this guy never had any intention of delivering on any of those things. He won't even sign his own housing bill. Like the guy ran on housing. His own party delivered

him a bill and he won't and he won't actually sign it because he's so hellbent on making sure that he can use that as a hostage to dangle in front of other Republicans to pass the Save America Act. So he has no intention of delivering on any of his promises. But now the left are starting to elect candidates that are running on the same platform of delivering for people, of making sure that life is affordable, of not being beholden to corporate interests and outside money. And I think for a lot of those people who trusted Donald Trump and Republicans, when they claimed that they were going to actually govern as populace, now those people are certainly getable, definitely persuadable in terms of these Democratic candidates who are running on the same thing,

but with an actual intention to deliver. Yep. You know, I have one final question for you. But first of all, I just want to thank you on behalf of Macromedia and the audience for introducing this discourse and talking about how to wield power in a post-Trump world. I'll link this in the description below. And I guess my final question is, and I'll answer after you, when you think of the corruption coming out of the admin, it doesn't have to be a singular.

corruption piece, but what is the most egregious thing that comes to mind as of late? Like, I know that a bunch of stuff just came to mind, but what really eats it eats you up at night, what you say? Yeah, you know, I think that the biggest thing is just the sheer amount of money that Trump has made on his latest financial disclosure. I think it was 927 pages for comparison. I think Biden's was like 11 pages. Trump came like several billion dollars in the, in his second term so far.

And obviously there's nobody in this country other than maybe like Elon Musk or some of Trump's donors who have seen a windfall of cash like that. And that would be bad enough unto itself. It would be bad enough to watch the president profit from the presidency to the extent that he has. But even worse is that this guy ran expressly on this idea that he was going to focus on the forgotten American. He was going to focus on the everyman. I mean, he was talking about the price of an egg, right? Like he got so granular that he was campaigning on the cost. of an egg. And now we're seeing all of the conditions that he exploited on the campaign trail,

not only not get fixed, but be exacerbated. Meanwhile, he's making billions of dollars. And you have situations like the E. Jean Carroll judgment where Donald Trump owes $5 billion. And he's appealing this thing to every court, up to the Supreme Court, asking for delays on actually paying for it. He won't spend a single dollar, even if it's money that a jury of a jury of his peers has determined that he owes, or a judge has determined that he owes. But he is so fast to just bilk every supporter he has, to sue his own IRS, to leverage his mean coins and his crypto coins on foreign governments to get all of this money. He is raking in so much cash, hand over fist, won't spend a single dollar of his own money. And meanwhile, everybody else

is just watching as this country gets poorer, sicker, hungry. and he's not doing a damn thing about it. And so I think just like people aren't stupid. They can see the writing on the wall. They can see what it means to have somebody work for you. And then they can see what it means to have somebody look out for themselves. And I think that's been put on full display right now. But I'm curious, what do you think is the most egregious element of corruption that we've seen?

That was a really good answer. I've got a one that really bothers me too. But this guy was saying in the Oval Office, he wants housing prices to go up, not down. He said he's not even considering the pockets of Americans when negotiating with Iran. And then he calls the economy an a plus plus plus economy. This is like whatever criticism was people how to Biden, maybe not treating the economic situation as he should have. This is that times 1,000. But what I really find egregious is obviously there's a whole laundry list.

Micah Irfan and I have a document that we can send you. It's called the corruption framework document with all of this. But I think it's the part in economy that he's created. And then the selling of access to our country. So the big case is, of course, Zhang Peng Zhao, the founder of finance, helped facilitate a $2 billion investment. It's Donald Trump's cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial. In exchange, we gave the United Arab Emirates these chips, these very important chips that China is trying to get their hands on as well. After all of this happened, after the finance founder helped this happen, after we gave them the chips, Trump pardoned CZ, the founder of finance, after he had helped funnel money to Hamas,

after he had allowed money laundering and sex crimes to be done through his platform of finance, just despicable things, right? But that is just the tip of the iceberg. He sold access to our country in other ways. When he put tariffs on every single country around the world, he removed tariffs on Vietnam or he slashed them by 20 percent, and they announced a $1.2 billion golf course the next week. You can look at the Qatari jet.

In response to the Qatari jet, we gave them NATO-level security guarantees. And then when Iran actually did strike Qatar because we started a war with Iran, we didn't do shit. We didn't help them at all. So we have heard our reputation on the global stage, bullied our allies. He's returned our country to this pre-constitutional order where you can just give and receive gifts from other countries and companies in an unfettered manner. And that's what disgust me.

And like, I could sit here and go on for an hour about each granular peace, but Lord have mercy. And you know what pisses me off the most is when I sit across from these Republicans and they try to what about over to Biden? Or you know, it's even worse, when they say, he's been a businessman his whole life. You want him to stop doing business when he's in office? all he's doing is doing business. Dog, it's turning into a zero-sum game where every single time Donald Trump gains a dollar,

Americans lose a dollar. He is stealing money out of our pockets, and people are like, what about Biden? It pisses me off. Right. No, no, no. I mean, it's all perfectly put. I think, you know, you had mentioned at the top

where he was asked to grade his own economy and he gave an A plus plus plus. The problem is nothing will ever get fixed if you're not willing to acknowledge that anything is broken. And so all of the people who are, you know, contending with a difficult financial situation right now, all of the people who are watching their grocery bills rise, their electricity bills rise, their utility bills rise, their health care bills rise. Nothing will get fixed for those people because Donald Trump thinks that what he's

doing is running the government perfectly. And so things are only going to continue to trend in the wrong direction because the only bank account he's looking at is his own. And dude, Donald Trump has never had to worry about getting groceries himself. He's never had to worry about health care himself. This is somebody throughout his entire light. I doubt he's ever walked through a grocery store beyond campaign stunts. He's never had to worry about rent. He's never had to worry about some sort of medical debt that he can't pay off. So why would Americans expect him to then have empathy and put himself in our shoes and try to think about what it's like to be an American who struggles to pay off their bills? He's not there. But you know what's what I think is important to note.

Look, Trump is a con man. Like he is a marketer and a con man. He's had his whole life to do exactly this, to manipulate people into believing him when he presents himself as something else, in this case, a populist. But just as bad, if not worse, is the rest of the Republican Party who allows this to happen because those people don't live in a gold-plated penthouse or not all of them anyway. And those are people in the House or in the Senate who live among their constituents, who do, you know, some of them go to town halls. Those people should know better when they are helping Donald Trump perpetuate this con against the entire country. Like those are the people who have the ability to exercise some autonomy and and serve

as a check to his worst impulses. And yet they're so scared of this guy. They're so afraid of a mean tweet that they sell their own constituents out so that they can make sure to stay in the good graces of a guy who is conning, manipulating, and exploiting their own constituents. It's all just so pathetic. If we know one thing, it's that these people are pathetic, they are fragile, and they can't handle any pushback. And that's why it's very important to have a plan to wield power in a post-Trump world.

So thank you, Brian. I feel like we could sit here and chat for a while. We should do more together. And if you want to, buy the book, check it out in the description. You can drop a like on this video. You can subscribe to both of us. We appreciate all of you. And thank you.

Thanks, Adam.