The Adam Mockler Show - This got caught on camera…

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Adam Mockler joins Joanna Coles with @TheDailyBeast to break down Trump and Natalie Harp's relationship, Ken Paxton's leaked tape, and more.Click below for premium Adam Mockler content:👉 https://adammockler.com/subscribe👉 https://www.youtube.com/@adammockler/joinJOIN THE COMMUNITY: Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdamMockler/Discord: https://discord.gg/y9yzMU3GffInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/adammockler/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/adammockler.com/Twitter: https://x.com/adammocklerr/TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@adammocklerContact: [e-mail] inquiries: [e-mail] Mockler - Mockler Media LLC

Adam Mockler, welcome to the Daily Beast podcast. Thank you for having me here. I'm excited. Very excited to talk to you. And I'm wondering, are we going to have any hot mic moments like Ken Paxton had? Maybe not as bad as Ken Paxton's. I think he might have just erupted a Game of Thrones-esque Civil War within the Republican Party. Because if Trump has pride about one thing, it's that he views himself as a kingmaker who can help out candidates. Ken Paxton, the Senate candidate from Texas, just got caught.

on a hot mic saying that Trump is hurting his chances due to the convention. And Ken Paxton is objectively right here. I mean, Trump's awful policy, his nuking of the entire Republican platform, and then him directly attacking the way Paxton dresses is hurting Ken Paxton. I also want to point out Ken Paxton is hurting himself. Yes. Well, aren't they both hurting each other? Yeah.

Because Ken Paxton is terrible for the Republican Party. But Donald Trump is also terrible for the Republican Party. right now. Yeah. I mean, if I were to get caught on a hot mic, it would be something like, this is a great podcast. And it's a great, it's just a really good time right after this. You hear me out there in the hallway and I'm like, that was, that was so good. That was so great. I hope that's your hot mic moment. In fact, we should stage that. So for people who don't know about this hot mic moment, can you explain what happened? Yeah, so at a very fundamental level, Donald Trump chose a very weak candidate for the Texas Senate race. It was going to be either

Cornyn or Paxton on the Republican side. Cornyn, so. but he was at least a senator who was somewhat like approachable to Texans. Ken Paxton is who Donald Trump ended up going with because Paxton is loyal and he is perhaps the weakest. Can I cuss here? Yeah, of course. Most dog shit candidate I've ever seen. Also by Daily Beast standards, dog shit isn't really cussing.

It's not that bad. Okay, okay. I'll come up with some better words throughout the podcast. He's a, he's an awful human being who's like uniquely corrupt. I swear to God, he was turned in by his own staffers, impeached by his own party. divorced by his own wife. Nobody likes the guy. And Trump put his way behind him. On the other side, we have Talarico, who is uniquely strong. He's really good at engaging with the media. He went on, I think it was Jimmy Kimmel's show and he got tens of millions of views on one appearance. It's powerful stuff that Talarico's doing. So Paxton held a convention, rather Trump held a convention

with Paxton in Texas called the Republican National Convention midterms. It was a two-day Trumpapalooza where Trump talked about all of his policy wishes, all of his, you know, insane beefs with AI CEOs, tech CEOs, media companies, the Kennedy Center Board for some reason, the reflecting pool outside his place. You know, Trump was just going, he was on one. Ken Paxton then got caught on a hot mic yesterday and it released today of him saying he thinks that that hurt his chances. He thinks that Trump attaching himself so closely to the party is tanking the polling numbers of a lot of Republicans. And this is a really unique scenario because Ken Paxton is kind of trying to throw Trump under the bus. He's trying to blame Donald Trump. Trump is the one who never likes to get blamed.

He is anything, wants to be the one who saves Ken Paxton. So this is going to introduce some tension. And it's kind of funny seeing Paxton crying because he's about to lose a race in Texas due to Trump. And it's all a mess. And I think that Calarico is a really good candidate. You should weigh. So do we think that Paxton is like Donald Trump in terms of they've both been impeached? They're both blaming other people.

I mean, it's such a characteristic of a certain narcissism that you blame other people for things that, in fact, are your own fault. Donald Trump is obviously a huge blamer in chief. Ken Paxton now, weirdly blaming Donald Trump, do you think Trump will, be vindictive towards Ken Paxton, who at one point he thought he was making. First of all, I think that they're like in more ways than that. They both have cheated on their wives multiple times. They both are so corrupt that their own party has multiple times turned their back on them. They're both using the office to enrich themselves, just amoral people. But yeah, I think Trump will get more vindictive. But maybe in an underhanded way,

Have you seen the way Trump talks about Paxton on stage when he's like, you know, this is what he says. Yeah. I don't like the way he dresses. You may not like the way he talks. You may not like the way he looks, but you have to vote for him. Right. Trump could potentially double down on stuff like that that's a bit underhanded and that hurts Ken Paxton. Trump is very unreliable and volatile.

So he could blow up on Ken Paxton and ruin the Senate race. I think you'll try to show a little bit of discipline because the Republican Party is kind of depending on entire race, they might withdraw some of the MAGA ink funding from Ken Paxton in order to kind of twist his arm in that way. I'm assuming that James Talariko, the Democrat candidate, will be using the hot mic moment in every ad going forward, right? Because his ads have been very good. I mean, he's got one ad of Ken Paxton.

It's an AI ad, but it says Ken Paxton, the most corrupt politician in the world. He's doing a very good job. There's this one where Ken Paxton, you know, it's a voiceover talking about how he let a pedophile, a child predator walk free after one day as the attorney general. This guy was supposed to get 25 years to life. He walked free after one day. Ken Paxton is such a dumbass who bit on the attack line. And he said the other day, no, no, no, I didn't let a child predator walk after one day. It was 60 days. So in the defense, he made another soundbite.

I mean, these people are walking opposition ads for the Democratic Party, I swear. I think you probably like me yesterday were glued to the Jack Smith hearings. What were your takeaways? So over the past few years, the Republican Party has turned Jack Smith into like public enemy number one for them. They've got a lot of enemies. But Jack Smith has been a big one due to his investigation into Donald Trump and January 6th in Trump's attempts to overturn the election in 2020. Jack Smith is a really respected federal prosecutor who is investigating these cases in a very meticulous way, being very fair with it, not breaching any of the norms. Republicans, well, mainly Trump, began to attack him, call for his arrest, say that he should be thrown in jail and that he's attacking our democracy.

He's turned Jack Smith into this enemy. So, yesterday, Republicans got their opportunity. They had Jack Smith sitting in front of them in the Senate Judiciary hearing and they could ask him any question they wanted to. And oh my God, they didn't send their best. It was brutal. There's this one senator, Eric Schmidt from Missouri, and he gets his opportunity to ask Jack Smith a question. And one of his dumbass staffers or someone around him must have gotten the wrong information

because the Schmidt guy, he's so incredibly confident that he's about to catch Jack Smith and this gotcha saying, you were at this hawks game in Atlanta on this day when Fannie Willis was there as well. And Fannie Willis is somebody else who was investigating Trump, another prosecutor. and it was this bombshell that Schmidt thought he had. And then they realized he had gotten the wrong team. It's not the Hawks. It was the Hawkeyes.

And it wasn't in Atlanta. It was in Maryland. And he had completely effed this up. His colleagues are sitting there horrified. Their faces are absolutely shocked. This is like a career ending moment for someone. Okay. We've got a clip of Katie Britt, one of his colleagues, as you say,

just looking absolutely horrified at what's unfolding. I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time and the Marshal Service was there with me. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think February of 2024. But again, you can check that. She's legit horrified. She's horrified, although I would find it very easy to confuse the hawks with the hawk eyes. But whose fault is that?

Is that some, you know, staffer? It's a Senate staffer. I think that it's jumping the gun or like pulling the trigger too fast, whatever the phrase would be. I think they were in over their head above their skis. That's enough phrases. I think genuinely the staffers were so thirsty for some sort of got you moment. Schmidt wanted to set up his vice presidency for 2028. He wanted to be J.D. Vance's BP or something like that.

Right. He really wanted to have this be a moment. And the staffers likely found something that they thought was this key gotcha moment. Oh, my God. He was at a game. Hawks. Wait, Bonnie Willis was there. Wait a minute.

This is connected. And they didn't scrutinize it much more than that. I mean, why would they? Donald Trump runs with conspiracy theories when there's less evidence than that. Donald Trump says elections are stolen when there's less evidence than that. They can push whatever they want. And then it backfired so horrifically in the moment because then Senator Amy Klobuchar, jumps in and is like, I think that you got entirely confused here and you seem to be being

way too aggressive. She called him out. She clocked his shit. And it was really a bad moment for Eric Schmidt and a good moment for Jack Smith. And the funny thing is Republicans on Twitter clearly already had pre-written scripts because then Benny Johnson, all these MAGA guys, started to tweet out, look at this epic moment where Jack Smith is owned and they had to delete their tweets after because they all got exposed. Fascinating. So bad. Like they must have had it pre-written. Right. Well, he must have tipped them off. Eric Schmidt's office must have tipped them off. Right, which is, I mean, let's also just have a moment on these hearings because these hearings have become theater in themselves, right? They're not actually about the real things they should be

about. They are about, to your point, senators, Congress, men and women, getting a moment and being able to then share that moment on social media? The reality is it's a function of the attention economy that we live in right now. I think it's unfortunate and I think it's an awful result and it's not helping the American people. It's actually actively harming us. But it's all downstream from the information ecosystem that we live in. I mean, short form clips dominate people's attention. And if you want a captivating short form clip, it has to be combative in some way. If you want a combative, captivating short form clip. What better way to do that than attack somebody in a Senate judiciary hearing? Use that clip. Bullster your profile, push your narrative, get to millions of views.

You know, like you can see the pipeline that people are trying to create. And the incentives that are created. I think it comes down to the incentives that are created in Congress. Honestly, Trump has really accelerated this new era of slop combative politics with the way that he came on the scene, constantly apocalyptic in his rhetoric, escalatory, making fun of of people after they die, telling women reporters they should smile more, just like sexism 101 from the 60s, right? It's insane stuff that he has introduced and enabled in the mainstream. And now we see politics being turned into this game where everybody's going for clips all

the time. Right. Well, there was another clip from the same hearing route with our friend, I think of her as my friend, obviously joke, Darlene. Darlene Graham. So, Mr. Smith, do you really believe that Lindsay was going to do. destroy evidence that was not even in his possession? No, I believe your brother was a patriotic public servant.

He was not a target of our investigation. And in fact, he likely would have been a witness in our case. Your brother investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making. He found them to be false. He said so on the house floor. I have another question. So she didn't like the answer she was getting. She, earlier, I think, just before that clip said that Jack Smith had been recording Lindsay Graham's conversations, those had included some conversations with her.

So she was leading him to sort of, I think she thought, drink. And then, of course, he said, well, your brother was a patriot and he would have been a witness on our side because he investigated the claims that Donald Trump was making and he found them wanting. and she just carried on going. That was a pretty good Darlene impression you did a second ago. I like it. That was impressive. It was a complete switch of your phone. You know, I think that this is a case.

I saw someone tweet this out and I agree. It's a case of her being given a script, not being able to go off of that script and continuing to follow it verbatim. Because Jack Smith completely uprooted what her thesis was. Totally uprooted. He said, you know, your brother was a faithful public script. And honestly, that was a good answer from Jack Smith. Jack Smith is a man of honor and decorum, and he should be speaking like that in a bipartisan way.

I'm glad that he said that in that moment because it kind of just uproots the entire Republican narrative and smashes it across the head. So, Darlene Graham then continues with her script. Something about it is so sad because, number one, she probably didn't really understand who Jack Smith was a year ago or even a few months ago. So she's given this script. Well, possibly even last week. Even before this hearing.

Honestly, she may well have been briefed in the kind of couple of hours coming up She probably didn't know who she was talking to and she was sitting there reading it to him, like genuinely. And I don't know, just to be plucked in, to be put in this position so quickly, darling Graham. Lindsay Graham was alive two months ago, I'm pretty sure. And then he died. And within two months, she's already in his seat trying to be an attack dog and it miserably backfiring. It's sad to see. And to be honest, I think women in politics in America across the globe already struggle with representation or with being able to assert them.

themselves and build a career in such a male, you know, like driven, dominated society. And seeing Darlene Graham then get this chance and blow this chance just makes me really, really sad because you know how many people are actually qualified and smart and driven? Do you know how many women out there would love to be in a position like this or just be plucked in it? But their last name isn't Graham. Right. They weren't, they didn't have a brother whose seat they get to take. It's extraordinary to me that's the representation that's there now. It's her barely being able to answer or ask a question.

Right. And what she should have done is stop and said, thank you, Mr. Smith. My brother, was a patriot. And the thing that I've always found interesting about Lindsay Graham, and I've talked to a lot about with Michael Wolf, my co-host on Inside Trump's Head, which is another podcast we do, is that Lindsay Graham, on the one hand, you know, having initially called Donald Trump a fruit cake and he was a fruit loop

and he was terrible for the country, you know, then realize where the power was going. Trump had the power, Lindsay Graham swam towards him. But on the, while his front, with the front of his lips, he was talking, well, he was egregiously suck-upy to Donald Trump. He was frantically talking to journalists behind the scenes, giving them a completely different view of what Donald Trump was doing. So he was sort of having his cake and eating it in a way. And so to see sort of Darlene in a very unsophisticated way, trying to understand what was going on. I know that she was, I think she worked in eye care.

She was probably very good in eye care. She should go back to working in eye care, I think, and leave the seat to someone who has earned the right to be there, not just was the brother of the person who is there. Honestly, she seems like she is a smart and sweet person. Like I've seen clips of her. She's not in time. I am. I appreciate that.

Thank you. I try my best. Thank you. And your brother is a patriot and he's great. He is. He was in the Air Force for 31 years. I don't know about national security, but I know my family support the military. You're supposed to attack me after I compliment your brother.

That's what she did because she couldn't go off script. What was she thinking? What was she thinking? So she wasn't. I don't think she has the ability to be quick on her feet because she's in over her. her head right now. I think there are fields that she's brilliant in, like I care or something like that. But then she went on stage and admitted she knows nothing about national security. America's not supposed to be a feudal monarchy where your last name gets you some position

of power. It's supposed to be a democracy where you vote for people. And I guess you could argue the voters did vote for Darlene, but she was kind of forced on them by Donald Trump, the apparatus and all of the money that was poured into this race. So, you know, it's not a good look. It's not a good look for the Republicans, for the party that talks about meritocracy and having skills and using those skills to get in power, she doesn't have the skills to do this. Like, she's in over her head. It's rough. I don't think I could be at this moment, like, the best senator.

I don't think I could be really that good of a senator because I'm a 23-year-old. I've got limitations and my knowledge and my experience and my leadership. And I understand that, right? So to think that Darlene Graham would be a good senator and she has less experience in politics than me, honestly, I've been doing this. I actually suspect you'd be. rather good as a senator. We should have way more age variation in the Senate. I mean, Chuck Grassley 92. I mean, he was on that committee too. Well, 93, I think, actually. He's almost,

almost old enough to be in the White House and to lead our AI policy. Okay. So let's talk about the tech leaders and AI and Trump's insistence that we no longer call it AI, we call it SI for super intelligence. I don't know why he didn't just say, let's call it AI for American intelligence. But explain what happened yesterday with the tech leaders and the lunch that they have with Donald Trump. So at a very fundamental level, Trump has an obsession with superficially renaming things in a juvenile way without actually making progress on the real issues at hand. You can look at Canada. He starts attacking Canada and rather than actually de-escalating or fixing it, he renames Lake Ontario.

Same thing with Gulf of Mexico. He renamed it. Same thing with the Kennedy Center. He renamed it. He does this juvenile symbolic bullshit where he tries to rename stuff rather than address the issue. So when it comes to AI, he thought that his big addition to AI wasn't going to be some guardrails or regulation or talking about the labor force or frontier models. No, no, no.

It's renaming it. And yesterday he held this sort of lunch with all of these AI leaders and tech leaders, Some of the biggest people out there. Elon Musk, Dario was there, Mark Zuckerberg was there, Jensen Huang of Invidio was there. All of these big leaders were in the same place. Sam Altman. Sam Altman, yeah, yeah, of course. All of the big leaders were there.

And like, this press conference happened after where all the leaders are standing behind Donald Trump. And he's standing there in the White House lawn and he's talking to the press. And Trump is the one leading the messaging. You have all of these minds that I disagree. with some of them on things, but they're brilliant minds behind him. These are smart, accomplished people standing behind him who have careers in technology, yet Trump was leading the way. And one journalist asks him, hey, who is held liable if one of these AI agents breaks the law? Is it the company? Is it the CEO? Is it whoever? Who is liable if an AI agent breaks the law? And Trump's

responses, hold on, hold on. It's SI. It's not AI. It's SIE. Please don't be calling it AI in front of me. So he doesn't address the issue. He doesn't actually try to think about the problem. He just in front of all these leaders tries to correct what they're saying. And the AI problem is very real. I mean, as a young dude, I speak to a lot of people in my generation. They are scared of the future and what their work looks like or what their career could look like, rather, with AI so rapidly advancing. And this affects every asset of society. Like if you look at education, it affects early education. How would we integrate it there or ban it there? High school education, college, of course. Then the actual workforce. It affects the military and

technology. Healthcare, science, research, government services. It affects everything. And the big question also right now is, can AI align with humans morals? People talk about alignment a lot because AI, we've given it a goal. There's a goal of something called, it's called recursive self-improvement. It's where AI's goal is to just improve itself, build on itself, improve itself even more, and do that forever.

And when you give AI a goal like that, they will begin to achieve it any means necessary. They're not going to someday wipe out humanity because they hate humans. It's because they're indifferent to humanity while building their goal. Like, you know how... Well, it's the paperclip example, isn't it?

If you say to an AI agent, you need to just make more paper clips, it will do anything it can to just keep on making paper clips. Even if that means harvesting our technology and resources and then building an interplanetary paperclip factory, it's sorry to cut you off. It's not that they hate us. It's that when humans are building a road and there's a pile of ants there, we're indifferent to the ants and we pave over it. So there's a very real fear of AI advancing too much, too fast. We don't have alignments. And Trump doesn't give a shit. Our leaders don't care.

What do you think the AI leaders thought standing behind him? Are they all talking to themselves going, can you believe we have to do this? Are they thinking he's our guy? There's going to be no regulation. This is fantastic. Let's get to market as fast as we can. Are they thinking these guys are not as fast as I am? I'm going to be out ahead of them.

What do you think the conversations they are having with each other are like? It's, I talked about this in my video yesterday because I was genuinely wondering the same thing. Like, what are these guys thinking while standing around him? I think they feel more of a sense of camaraderie with each other than with Trump or Mike Johnson or whatever politicians were out there. So I don't think Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or any, Dario at a fundamental level, like Donald Trump or like his approach to things. I mean, Trump was attacking Dario on truth social about a month ago.

and he sent out this kind of funny truth. It was like, I have tried to talk to these AI people, and he puts people in quotes, like the CEOs aren't actually people. I thought it was funny. I don't know. So, Dario and Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg probably think this is just a means to an end, and it's necessary to continue to fluff him and stand behind him if they want to have a fighting chance at getting what they want with regulation or no regulation or having some sort of like capture

of the industry, they need to be on Donald Trump's side. That's why you see Mark Zuckerberg using the term superintelligence now. They're all adopting this term because they want to glaze him and suck up to him. I would wager that deep down, these intelligent men see Donald Trump for who he is, a tired, old, narcissistic, stubborn man who only wants to be praised because he has these deep authoritarian urges and tendencies to be like the number one leader who is dictating everything. And they understand that and they see that. I feel like if you had any of these guys one to one in a side room except for Elon Musk and you ask them, hey, like, what do you think about Trump? Probably 80% of them would be like, dude, the guy's kind of crazy, but you got to do what you

got to do. Elon Musk might be a little bit more on the Trump train, but I think the rest of them understand that he is kind of just psychotic when he talks about AI or any other issue. Let's go back to the Jack Smith hearings for a second. I wonder if Jack Smith got to the end of the day and thought, this was not as difficult as I expected, because he looked like he was a man who'd probably spent the previous night before the hearing, tossing and turning and looking a little anxious. I thought he'd lost weight. He looked exhausted. And it's intimidating to have to face, even if they're not very bright, some of the senators you're dealing with, as we've saw with us, Eric Schmidt and Katie Britain, Darlane. Did you think that he accomplished what he

needed to by the end of the day. Oh yeah. So, I mean, it was like Michael Jordan playing basketball against some high schoolers. I assume he was nervous heading in because that's a really high pressure situation. And you could slightly hear it in his voice when he was talking. He cleared his throat of futile. I mean, you know, you can, there are tells, aren't there? It's a very human thing to be nervous like this. I do debates and stuff all the time. And there's even moments where I have elevated heart rate and I'm a bit nervous and I'm stressed over things. I mean, it's very human. And he's a professional. So he kept it together. He did very well. I think you can consider it a success by all fronts because the clips that broke through the most were

ones of him either getting a win over or it backfiring on Schmidt or Darlene Graham struggling to get out a non-scripted sentence, right? I think that all of the moments that broke through were good for him. Now, I do want to caveat, maybe that's what broke through in my algorithm in my bubble. I'm a liberal person with a liberal algorithm, but I try to look at all of the clips and we had right winger's deleting their posts about Jack Smith being owned. We had right winger struggling to spin it. I think he looked good. The right wing ecosystem will always do what they do.

Like remember when Fauci pled the fifth the entire time? Yes. And they turned that into one of the most viewed stories of the day because they said he was like, you know, hiding stuff. They're going to spin it however they want. But Jack Smith made his case very well. I have a feeling even some of those senators aren't feeling too good about it. You know Katie Britt was horrified.

Schmidt himself probably screamed it. staffers. Someone's going to get fired for that. I mean, Eric Schmidt should be livid with his staffers. They made him look so foolish. And also for an American, it's one thing for, you know, a formerly British woman to get the hawk eyes and the hawks confused. He got really aggressive with it in the moment. He accused Jack Smith of perjury. He called him a dirt bag and a few other names, I believe. And it was just totally uncalled for unreasonable and made him look honestly, like hysterical. while Jack Smith was sitting there wondering, what the hell are you talking about? Like the Hawkeyes game, the Hawks game?

I don't know what's happening here. So the Republicans aren't sending their best. I'm not going to lie. It's bad. Well, also, do you think, and this is something Michael Wolfe always says, this is about an audience of one. This is about, is Donald Trump watching? Can I impress him with my insults, with my aggression?

And then when it all falls apart, you're like, oh, the boss was watching and I fucked up. I find it interesting how Trump sets the tone for the entire Republican party so much. This guy is convinced like 60% of Republican voters at the 2020 election was stolen from under their feet. He has created this environment where Republicans are like bear hugging white supremacist neo-Nazis and allowing them to be in power. Bo French in Texas, have you followed this guy at all? No, no, tell me. He's running for a Texas seat. And I'm sure you saw, you might have seen this viral tweet from a few weeks back where he posted a photo of a bunch of Indian American students at a football game of University of Texas. They were all doing the hookum

horns. And he said, our country is being taken over or something to that effect. Like, our country is being poisoned or something. This type of bigotry and vile racism and exclusion is top down from Donald Trump. Donald Trump creates this environment where Republicans attack the media, say elections are stolen, attack women around them, like Trump is the one that sets that tone. and are racist openly and say things that are extraordinarily extreme. So in the case of Beau French, he takes this photo of all these, I'm assuming they're like second generation Indian American students who have assimilated perfectly. They're out of football games. With like, you know, paint on their face, probably a little drunk doing hook them horns, their frat bros, I'm assuming.

Like this is what assimilation is. And these racist vile freaks have the permission structure in the party right now to talk about it like this. Now, it's not all Republicans. It's definitely not all Republican voters. There are many Republican voters out there who are genuinely just like concerned about the state of their daily lives. But when we're talking about these MAGA politicians in particular, there's a new vile strain that Trump creates. And yeah, it's coming from the top down. Okay, so where do you think, because we know that Trump is still very strong with his MAGA base, where do you think the rest of the Republicans, the ones that may think, you know what, I don't like Donald Trump. He's a mean guy, he's a bully, but I voted for him in 2024 because I just need prices to come down. Where do you think they are sitting now as we are, what, 34 days from the midterms? That group of people that you described, they are disaffected. and disillusioned. I'm not talking about maga pundance or the true deep maga people. I'm talking about Americans who genuinely had economic concerns and they voted for Trump due to that. And this is a

very real group of people. Sometimes I see this reductive analysis happen in my comment sections or in my threads or emails and they'll say Donald Trump won simply due to racism or simply due to one single facet. Sexism or people just hate immigrants. That's all. That's the only reason he won. I think that's very reductive. A lot of Americans were genuinely struggling economically, and a lot of Americans, I think so foolishly voted for Donald Trump due to that reason. A lot of them are now disaffected. You see these videos of Trump supporters like in tears at a gas station saying that they can't afford things.

There's an infamous one of this woman two months ago crying with her kids. And then she's saying she doesn't know how it got this bad. And on the back of her truck is a let's go Brandon like Trump sticker. Right, right. sticker. So I think people are feeling disillusioned and abandoned by both parties. Just because Trump is incredibly unpopular, it doesn't mean the Democrats are popular. In fact, we have a big trust issue on our side. And I hate to say it, but if you look at the polls, it's a lot mainly due to Joe Biden's age. The Democratic Party and our leaders repeatedly told people that he wasn't struggling, that he

was totally fine. And the debate kind of shattered that. So then voters voted for Donald Trump. And Trump has also betrayed them. There's no trust whatsoever. I think there's a lot of Americans who genuinely just feel like they've been abandoned by our political system. And a lot of times they have been. And they're looking for any sort of change agents. That's why you see DSA candidates becoming increasingly popular across the country. It's not because Americans are like studying Karl Marx and love to go back and read the fundamentals of where the means of production should be.

No, no, no. Americans want candidates that can change things and that can change the institutions for the better. Do you think that nationally Democrats have a message beyond we will be more responsible than Donald Trump? Do you have a sense of how Democrats would get us out of the war, how they would bring the price of gas down, how they would keep the border closed, but not have ICE running around American streets, shooting at people, renaming people who've been witnessing what ICE has been doing domestic terrorists? Do you sense that? Because I've talked to and I've watched quite a lot of Democratic candidates at this point, and they're all obviously positioning themselves as we are the anti-Trump. You've got Donald Trump here. We will do things more responsibly. It's not absolutely clear to me, and I'm curious to get your thoughts on it, what the Democrat solutions are. Yeah, I think that there's a lot of individual candidates that are presenting really good solutions. We don't have a figure head as strong as Donald Trump on the Democratic side right now. We're a little bit more decentralized, but we do have a lot of strong candidates that are talking about how to fix these issues.

So a few that I would use are James Talariko, Abdul El-Sayed, John Ossov. Of course, Zohran Mamdani is very popular doing a great job, and we have AOC as well. Zohran Mamdani had a really good clip a few weeks ago at this mayor summit. It's like the mayor summit in New York City. And he's talking about how Democrats need to reclaim the words efficiency and safety and things like this. Instead of using defund the police. Exactly. Possibly, I think Obama said this, the three worst words a Democrat has ever uttered.

It's honestly a terrible phrase. I'm sure you and I both understand the institutional. problems with our police force and with racism and the way they cover for their own. But when you're saying defund the police to voters and then you already have to explain that it's not actually what it means, politics, when you're explaining, you're losing and you're using a phrase that puts you at a disadvantage. I have to debate stuff like this all the time. You would never catch me dead saying that. But Zoron was basically saying that Democrats need to reclaim a few things. We cannot just be the anti-Trump. We can't just say we're not Trump, therefore we're better because that's not a captive

message. It hasn't been for the past decade. We have to have solutions, which is what you were asking. It also puts Donald Trump still at the center of democratic politics. It does. So there's a few things we can do. Number one, a really unique focus on getting money out of politics so this distortionary influence of PACs in special interest groups can end. Obviously, people talk a lot about APAC, but it's much deeper than that. There are special interest groups which have rotted our institutions at their core for decades and decades. It can be as simple as you're trying to buy a home for a cheap price and there's a realtor lobby standing in the way,

trying to stop you from doing that. It can be as simple as you're trying to get accessible health care and affordable prescriptions. And there's a health care lobby standing in your way, lobbying politicians. It's gotten worse than Citizens United, and we can fix that. We have Abdul al-Sayyad, whose entire phrase is, money in your pocket, money out of politics, and Medicare for all. I think those are really three good prongs that the American people resonate with.

We want more important policies. Do you think anybody has any confidence you can get money out of politics, though? I mean, I understand that structurally it is a real inhibitor for, especially for Democrats. Although Democrats are very good at raising money too, and money is flooding into James Tarleico, right? I mean, and Kate Conley is raising a lot of money against Mike Lawler in New York 17. And I don't see that as being a winning message right now. There seems to be a new urgency right now about what's going on because people are really feeling the price increases in their grocery basket.

You know, diesel's up, gases up. And these are ticket, you know, high ticket items that people see. When you stand at the gas pump and you're watching the thing go round, you're really conscious of it. Whereas when you put stuff individually into a basket, it's the overall basket you're feeling, right? So it's not clear to me that getting money out of politics actually is something that resonates with voters right now. I think a lot of voters, I guess it depends.

A lot of voters are really sick of the distortionary effects of special interest groups. And it's talked about a lot. But as I'm thinking about it, there's a difference between the online discourse and what the average voter actually cares about. So to answer your question, is it possible to get money out of politics? I think that the Republicans did something very unique when they were appointing or nominating people for the Supreme Court. They did it on the implicit basis that they were going to strike down Roe v. Wade. So when ACB was being – Interesting.

She basically was a part of this huge Catholic group. And she never openly said, I oppose Roe v. Wade. But the Republicans knew what they were doing when they were putting these people on the court. Well, I think didn't she say the opposite of that, that she would not to dismantle Roe v. Yes, she was very much. very slippery on it, but you could look at her past and you can look at things that she said, groups that she's been a part of, she's a huge Catholic. And I think that that was a tell. So they specifically appointed people to shape the court in the way they want. I think the

Democrats can do the exact same thing, appoint people on the basis that they want to overturn Citizens United, even if it's not that explicit. Now, when it comes to what the average Americans care about, I think it's a few pronged. It's a few things. It's corruption in our government in the way that our government is non-responsive to their needs. The non-responsiveness goes hand in hand with the lack of affordability. A Democratic Congress likely would have reigned in the Iran war more so. A Democratic Congress wouldn't just blindly approve a $1.5 trillion military bill for next year, because Trump has used so many of our missiles in a failing Iran war that we now need to restock our capacity. So a lot of these affordability issues are downstream from having a blind, sleepwalking

Republican Congress, you know what I mean, constantly rubber stamping, whatever Donald Trump does. You took the words out of my mouth. I literally took the words right out of your mouth. Okay, let's go on to the White House Press Secretary. You had a fascinating exchange where you managed to get under the skin of Scott Jennings, the CNN contributor who has certainly been in the running for the White House Press Secretary. Now, as we know, Caroline Levitt, who left as White House Press Secretary, who left as White House Press Secretary a few weeks ago now said, oh, there could be no better White House Press Secretary than Donald Trump himself. Obviously, he doesn't want to give up any ounce of camera

time. What did you make of Scott Jennings when you were sitting opposite him? I've sat around tables with him on CNN too, and I'm sort of fascinated to get your take on him because you got him to kind of swear and lose control, which was actually slightly unscottish. Tony, I debated you on TV four to six weeks ago and you said we were weeks away from it. Now you're making condescending remarks because you can't defend the fact that this war is not going your way. Wait, one more time. Not going. Not going your way.

We need one political concession. He's good at what he does and what he does is kind of troll the panel by trying to muddy the waters and downplay whatever Trump's doing on any given day. And when when that blow up happened, we had been on a lot of panels over the past few weeks. And it was as the Iran war was continuing to escalate and get into a pretty bad stalemate. I sat next to him at this table when we were one weekend, when we were two weeks in, when we were four weeks in. He kept saying that the war was going to be over soon and that we were winning the war. When that blow up happened, I believe we were eight or nine, I think we were eight or nine weeks in. And I said, dude, you've been telling us this entire time that we've been winning.

Name one concession we've gotten from Iran. And I actually, I had asked this question to him during a few panels. And I think he got increasingly frustrated and flustered and backed himself into this indefensible position that he had no way of actually backing up. And as I would see him in the green room more and more, he would just be a little bit more disconnected. I mean, like, he's a nice guy. I'm sure you've seen. You can talk to him. He's a nice guy.

And when I first started doing these, we would, you know, chat a little bit. Then he would get less chatty. Then look at me less. Then it just got more and more awkward behind the scenes. I could tell, he felt like he was in a weird position. Then we go on air and I press him on the same question. I say, name one concession we've gotten from the country of Iran. And he tries to demean me throughout this entire panel.

One of the first things he says is like, isn't it past your bedtime? I know you get a little bit worked up past your bedtime, but don't talk to me. Like he's like shitting on me there. And then I say so. Is that him trying to be funny, though? I think it's him being petulant, honestly. I think he was genuinely annoyed in me asking him questions and he was trying to undermine my credibility. I think he was trying to piss me off. And I think he genuinely viewed me

as a child. And then later on, I said something about Trump not actually being masculine because he's whining. He was like, I'm sure you know a lot about masculinity. He was trying to undermine that as well. My age, my masculinity, all of this. He was genuinely getting annoyed at me. So he was getting personal. He would try to keep it professional. He was like going after you personally, which is exactly what Donald Trump does. I shit you not. He was going for me personally. And even Abby at the table was like, okay, Scott, you don't have to say that stuff. Like I, you can find the clip and then the blowup happens where I'm like I this is what pisses me off a lot of times Scott Jennings takes advantage of the time limit of the show or the generosity of the other people on

the panel to use his bullshit, spew his bullshit and then hope that everybody moves on. He says something that's trolley and before you know what the segment's up, we move on to the next segment. It's kind of inappropriate to bring up the last segment. You know, no one's going to bring that back up. However, I don't want to play by those rules. Fuck those rules. I would sit there and if he lies, I want to.

pin him down. I'm going to ask the same question. I'm going to ask you one more time, Scott, name one concession. And he, handwaves me. No, no, no, I'm serious. Name one concession. I'm asking you this question. And I was assertive with it. Yeah, I gesticulate a little bit with my hands, but in no way was I having my hands in his face, right? So he screams at me, get your fucking hand out on my face, very clearly feeling cornered, very immature and unprofessional. You don't know the truth. Like, if he thought I was gesticulating a bit too much, I'm a really nice guy. He could have been like, hey, dude, can you not do that right now? I would have been like, yeah, of course. I'm sorry about that. Or he could have said, you seem very excited, Adam,

right now. You seem very, very emotional. That would have actually pissed me off more. That would have looked good for him. That would have been like, you know, I would have gotten pissed. But no, no, no, he got flustered. He lost control of himself. And it's embarrassing. I can't picture him standing up there as the press secretary in these combative environments. What happened afterwards, when you all got off the table and walked out, did you talk to each other? Did he say, oh, I'm sorry, I was kind of over-excited. No. No.

I mean, it was, so the panel, we go to commercial right there, and it's kind of just awkward for a moment. And he starts talking about sports or whatever, trying to diffuse the tensions. But before we go back on, I made a joke to the table. I'm like, all right, no more tantrums, this next segment. And he got mad. Some people at the table laughed. And then it kind of turned into a joke throughout it.

Like one of the other panelists, Kat Abu Ghazale, it was like, I thought you were about to hit him earlier. Like, she was making light of a two in a fun, de-escalatory way. Right. She had my back there. And yeah, then when we were walking out of the building, he was way ahead of me. And I remember shouting, I shit you not. I said, this is not going to look good for you.

And then he turned around and he walked out. And then I went down the escalator after him. It was just, it was a bit of a trip. He's quite thin skin, isn't he? Scott Jenner. You could have said something. You could have made a joke. I mean, I might have been tempted to do something terrible, like make a joke about,

do you need a milkshake right now? Because he's lost so much weight. I mean, obviously, you know, he's a television star now. He's known by millions. But I'm very interested in the makeover, the physical makeover he's had. I'm glad that he's healthy and like, you know, good for him. It seems like a hard thing to do. But, I mean, him getting personal with me on the panel is just so below what an experienced anchor should do.

There's also just the factor of like, I'm still very early career as well. I've been doing CNN hits for one year. He's been doing it for a decade. The fact that he lost his shit due to the Iran war is very indicative of how thin-skinned he is. So how do Republicans explain away the Iran war for the midterms? I mean, this, you know, Donald Trump came to power saying he wouldn't get into forever wars. We're now in month seven of this thing. And it seems very clear the Iranians have a very sophisticated understanding of American politics

and know that he is between a rock and a half place as we look. into the midterms, and there appear to be no concessions the Iranians have made. The Republican argument goes something like this. They say that, yes, this is expensive now, but it would be much, much, much more expensive if Iran successfully got a nuclear weapon down the road, so this is preventative spending. And that's bullshit, because we have achieved nothing with all of the spending that we have done. I always... Well, and we've made the world less safe, arguably, right? Ukraine doesn't have access to interceptors for the incoming from Russia.

We've made ourselves less safe. We don't have access to the same mystical capacity that we did before the war. Xi Jinping is giving Iran intelligence. So is Vladimir Putin while Trump is laying out the red carpet. I mean, it's sickening. And I always break it down with four prongs. I give this four prongs speech a lot. It's very simple.

There were four different reasons, the Republican stated they went into this war. And you've heard all of these. Denuclearization, obviously. Then Trump kept talking about regime change. Like liberate yourselves. was a result change. Then he said he wanted their proxies to be defanged, like the Houthis in Hezbollah. He was trying to attack their proxies. The largest state sponsor of terror is what they'd say. They're sponsoring terrorism in the region. Then the final one is erasing their missile capacity

because that's how they close down the strait. None of those four prongs have been achieved. The nuclear material is not in our hands. It's buried in Iran still. The scientists were scattered across the country. The blueprints for the facilities are up in the cloud. They can download it whenever. The proxies just bombed to the East-West pipeline and are like making moves over in the Middle East to choke Saudi Arabia from oil. So the proxies are still there. There's the missiles. If the missiles weren't there, the straight-of-war moves would be open. They clearly have the missiles. And the regime still exists. They're even more hardliners in the regime, some would argue now. So we have achieved none of the four goals. Right. And now they're trying to do this song and

dance where they say technically we've destroyed their Navy and their Air Force. That is, not how you win a war. Winning a war means achieving concessions from your opponent by using force. That's why I asked him, what concessions have we gotten? Destroying their 60-year-old ancient fucking Navy is not a concession. Their navy was given to them in like the 70s or the 60s. Like that's not a big win for us. Of course, the U.S. military can destroy their fucking Navy and their Air Force. What actual concessions can we get from them? That's the question. And they couldn't answer that. So Scott Jennings, obviously quite thin-skinned, the president also thin-skinned can give it out, loves nothing more than mocking other people,

mocking handicapped people for goodness sake. But can't take it. He cannot take it. So as a result, pretty much everybody seems to have fled him. His wife has fled him. She makes jokes about the fact that people miss her because she's just not in evidence. His daughter has fled the scene saying politics is too cruel. His sons are very much on the fringes of his life.

He doesn't even go to Don Jr.'s wedding. So this is a man who seems isolated, apart from people who are being paid to kind of hang around him. And of course, we have Natalie Harp, who Michael Wolfe wrote about in his book, All or Nothing, 18 months ago, repeatedly saying she is the most important person. She controls the inflow of an outflow of information around him. She controls what he reads, what he sees, access to him. She's all important. frankly quite disturbing photos came out of the White House yesterday

of the president yelling at her and pointing at her. You tell me what you saw on the photos, actually. I mean, it could be anything. Natalie Harper is known for having increasingly bigger bags that she's lugging around, so maybe her bag wasn't big enough on this given day. Maybe her letters weren't sweet enough. Maybe she was chasing after his golf cart. On a serious note, it seems like she's awkwardly laughing while he's really pissed off.

We don't know the context. but we do know that she has a pathological obsession with Donald Trump. Republicans thought that we were all implying some like sexual innuendo a few months back when this first broke. I think it's actually weirder than that. I never implied that. I don't think it's anything like that. I think it is a weirder, deeper obsession that Natalie Harp is going through. I've seen people speculate that after Natalie lost her father a few years back, she's been looking for a figure like that.

Well, her brother said that. Her brother said that. Yeah, yeah. And then after Trump said that he would be dating his daughter if she weren't his daughter, you can kind of see the symbiotic relationship that is built in that manner between them. Well, actually, at the state dinner last week, I mistook Ivanka, who had her hair up for Natalie Trump. They look identical. So I'm not sure if Natalie is single white femaling Ivanka Trump, but that's what it felt like. Yeah.

And it's interesting, this dynamic that's created. it. So Trump could have genuinely been mad at anything. Maybe Natalie made a mistake here. Maybe it was a true social mistake. The one part that Natalie's role encompasses that many people forget, which I find interesting, is she is the one presenting him and vetting most of his deranged truth social posts. So whenever he goes on these overnight tantrums with like dozens of posts, she is right there with them, helping him make those posts. So it could have been related to that, but they have a weird ass relationship. And my mom is a sort of psychologist in workplace leadership. She's an IEO psychologist, which means she helps people, you know, become leaders in the workplace. And when I told her this

story, she said, never, ever, ever should a leader or a boss allow a relationship to get to this point or allow an obsession to grow this pathological and deep? A leader should shut that shit down, should tell people, hey, this is not appropriate and move on or fire them if necessary. Trump obviously didn't do that. In his narcissistic brain, he allowed Natalie to continue to grow this love and obsession for him. And it manifested in this photo where he's screaming at her, he's pointing down. I really don't know what's happening here. What do you think the best guess is? Well, it looks like she is being humiliated by Trump. And we know that that's something he does, that he yells at people. I mean, one of the reasons apparently Caroline Levitt,

left the as White House press spokesperson was not only had she had a second child and she has an older husband who's wealthy enough to say to her, you know what, why don't you stay home? But I'm told that she was sick of being yelled at by Donald Trump. In regime change, the Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan book, they talk about Natalie Hart being his human binkie. And there's a line, I think, in the book where he says, everybody else will leave me. She will never leave me. She will never leave me.

So, and I think in her experience. expression, she's looking like none of this matters. She's kind of laughing it off. She's trying to keep the peace, which I think a lot of women probably recognized that expression that when you're dealing with a kind of out of control man, everybody else around him is just trying to keep the peace. And women in particular end up doing that. I just also realized, as you were saying that, that's very true. There's also a part of the letter that she wrote to him that says something to the effect of you can feel free to yell at me or curse at me all you want. Remember that?

She basically openly said, if I've done something wrong, feel free to punish me for that. So maybe this is part of her relationship too. Like she's okay with being yelled at in this manner. And for her, it's like fulfilling. I don't know. It's hard to tell what's happening in her mind, but it's very weird. And I wonder what kind of books will be written about this relationship in the future. Yeah, it'd be interesting.

I mean, she looked like she was very conscious that. someone was taking photos or that it was on, you know, a video which is running outside the White House. So she looks like she's performing a role and he looks like he's just completely lost control. He's an older fat guy who's yelling at someone and he's used to being listened to. Maybe she sent out the wrong AI video of him with George Washington at the White House or something like that. Like the shit that they send out together is crazy.

It's crazy and we live in crazy times. but Adam Ockler, you help us understand the times. I'm hugely grateful you came into the studio. Thank you so much. And we would love to have you back. Thank you. We'll do it again. And this was a great chat.

Oh, so many comments I have after that conversation. I want to know what you think. What were your favorite parts of that conversation? I loved his recounting the Scott Jennings moment, which I happened to see live. And a lot of our readers responded to when we wrote about it. His demand to understand the concessions from the Iran war, I thought, was so articulate. And, well, it's just thrilling meeting people who have such an encyclopedic understanding of what's going on right now. So if you have been listening, watching, thank you, leave us a comment telling us what you think.

We read as many of them as we can. If you have a limerick, send us your limerick or your poem, whatever your preferred iambic pentameter. we're happy to read them and as you know we read them out on air. Big thanks to our production team, Ryan Murray, John Romero, Rachel Passer, Heather Pissarro and Neil Rosenhaus. So the good news is we have so many Bee Beast tier members now. There are too many names to read out and we really appreciate.