What A Day - Trump's Government-Sponsored Ad Campaign

Episode Date: September 28, 2026

If you watched NFL football on Sunday, you may have seen President Donald Trump's new ad campaign, featuring a 2024 Trump ad. The ad was re-released and shown dozens of times, paid for by the US government. Trump is fixated on making the midterms about him. Jane talks to political commentator and YouTube host Adam Mockler about whether this will help or hurt the GOP candidates.Show Notes: Check out Adam's podcast – https://www.youtube.com/@adammockler Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/ For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail]

There are reports of Byron Donald scrubbing Donald Trump from his website in multiple areas, like removing the photos of him and Donald Trump. Kind of like a high school breakup. Like when I break up with my ex-girlfriend, you just scrub photos of her from your page. Donald Trump is now the toxic ex-girlfriend for a lot of these Republicans. It's Monday, September 28th. I'm Jane Koston, and this is Wadadat. The big problem is the refineries in Russia are being blown up.

This isn't really a Middle Eastern problem. this is more of a Russia problem, that Ukraine and Russia are going at it, and Ukraine is blowing up diesel refineries in Russia because they do a lot of the refining. So this one's an interesting one indeed. And I spoke to President Zelensky, I said, you've got to take it easier on the refineries. That's President Donald Trump today. One, making global fuel prices a Ukraine problem, which it isn't. And two, demanding that Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky, take it easy on poor old Russia.

What a guy. Speaking of gas, the Trump administration released new fuel economy standards today, relaxing regulatory requirements for automakers to control pollution from gasoline-powered cars and light trucks. The new rules were released shortly after Trump rejected an Iranian proposal to reopen the Strait of Formuz, sending oil prices soaring. So, in other words, Trump is willing to make pollution worse so that you don't notice how high gas prices are because of his war of choice, which tracks. But here's some good-ish news. The United States and China today

released reciprocal lists of tariff cuts on non-sensitive products worth about $30 billion. The items range from American hair products to Chinese toys in a deal expected to boost bilateral trade. And according to U.S. ambassador to China, David Perdue on Fox News Sunday, things are going great with China.

So great that Trump also, offered to sell China weapons during President Xi Jinping's visit last week, which is weird and illegal, as it would violate a longstanding U.S. arms embargo against China. But who cares about details? Okay, I do. I love details. But I want to talk about the big picture as we get closer to the midterms. Joining me to do just that is Adam Mockler, host of the Adam Mockler show. Adam Mockler, welcome to Wadadet. Thank you for having me. It's can be a good conversation. So, Adam, with everything going on in the world, I don't know if you watched NFL football yesterday, but I did. And I kept seeing a 2024 Trump ad that was re-released this weekend and shown

dozens of times paid for by the U.S. government. We will expel the war mongers from our government. We will drive out the globalists. We will cast out the communists, Marxist and fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will route the fake news media and we will liberate America from these villains once and for all. It's creepy. I don't like it, but also like, why is Trump so fixated? Again, I'm making the midterms about him. It's interesting. Donald Trump is convinced that if people think he's on the ballot, they're going to show up en masse. But right now, it's sort of the inverse. The Republican Party is losing favor with Donald Trump. Donald Trump's approval rating is underwater on every single issue, and him aligning himself with these candidates is

hurting them. What I find peculiar is that Trump is using government money, government funding in order to put these ads on television, yet every single time he steps foot in front of the camera, he's doing the inverse of these ads. So there's a clip of him from two days ago where he's saying, you know, we're number one in poverty in the world. We're number one in poverty. There's a clip of him from three months ago saying he doesn't even think about Americans' pocketbooks because he's more focused on the Iran War. He is an inverse. He's an opposition ad for himself, essentially. So he's spending all of this money from MAGA, Inc. and from the government putting these ads on the TV. And the reality is he is the worst ad against himself possible.

Yeah. And I understand to some degree. And by understand, I mean, sort of the way that like you can kind of get through like a crazy person's logic where you're like, okay, Trump in presidential elections gets people who don't vote often to vote for him. And I'm like, I guess. But like the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that Trump has the lowest midterm poll numbers of any midterm president since 1990. He's at 37%. This is a question I've been kind of obsessed with.

Do you think Trump knows he's unpopular? Yeah, I do think so. I think that every authoritarian action we're seeing coming from this administration is an implicit concession that he knows his policies are landing poorly. For example, the redistricting heading into the midterms, Donald Trump calling up Republican governors and having them carve up like eight different states to take power away from local communities and give it to the Republican Party. That is a concession that Donald Trump knows he is unpopular and is trying to win. Or what about this? Banning Politico and MS now and CNN, these authoritarian actions are a desperate plea from Donald Trump to retain power when he knows he's losing it. Now, with Trump, it's weird because he's got this like ego narcissism thing where he doesn't really have reality tests or walls around him. Remember, around the 2020 election, there's just no reality checker around him whatsoever.

However, I think he knows Republicans are in a bad position. Republicans have been distancing themselves from Donald Trump. Yeah, it's interesting also going back to 2020 where all of this conspiracy theory is based on the idea that no one could possibly vote against Donald Trump, which is such a funny conceit. Because, I mean, you deal with this talking to Scott Jennings all the time, which is a simultaneous conceit that Trump is, you know, standing alone. No one stands with him. He's so brave. But also everyone loves him and everyone votes for him. And I'm like, you can't have both.

You can be the lone wolf or you can be super popular. But there's no such thing as like lone wolf super popular guy. It doesn't make any sense. You can't have both. It's the thing that authoritarian do where they're simultaneously very weak but also very strong on any given day. So they're like the small weak puppy. You know that the meme with like the big dog and the small dog?

That's Donald Trump literally all of the time. He's simultaneously the small dog who is attacked by the media and by. the institutions, but he's also this big, strong leader. You can't have both at the same time. It doesn't make any sense. So you mentioned the war in Iran very briefly, and part of his failures are linked to this war. He launched a war of choice. He rejected a peace proposal over the weekend, but told Axios on Sunday that he expects more talks to take place this week. And this, again, you can't have both, but Trump wants to, this back and forth between we will annihilate Iran and we should have talks to which the Iranian president, to me, understandably, is like, we can't listen to you.

So what's going on here? What are we doing? What I always say on my show is that Trump is stuck between the carrot and the stick and neither will quite work. So think about it. The carrot is him trying to entice them with these negotiations and talks. The stick is him trying to beat them with strikes and annihilation and threats of genocide over and over. He's vacillating between the two because neither are working right now. There was a brief memorandum of understanding that was like 100 times weaker than the JCPOA that Obama had negotiated. And this was just the memorandum framework, basically. It said that Gulf countries would have to pay $300 billion into a restitution fund for Iran.

It was just very, very bad, right? And now we have Donald Trump stuck in this weird spot. We're nine months into this war that was supposed to last two to four weeks. And we've gotten zero concessions from them. I think he knows that. they're just trying to hold out until the midterms. We'll get back to my conversation with Adam Mockler in just a moment. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.

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But it's interesting also because this entire war, you made the point. Like this was only supposed to take a couple of weeks. And a friend of mine, Jud Legum, who writes the amazing substack popular information, he went through and found 17 different explanations for why the Iran war started, and many of them are contradictory. But this was all predicated in the idea that, like, even if you didn't know why the war started, it would be over so fast you wouldn't even notice. But we do notice.

So what comes after the midterms? where you have this unpopular war. You know, after the 2006 midterms, George W. Bush fired Donald Rumsfeld. I mean, the Iraq war didn't end. But, like, I don't think there's going to be any ramifications for Hegseth or anyone involved in the actual war. More American soldiers will likely be killed in this conflict.

Where do we go from here in a war where Iran, it doesn't need to win, especially because it seems like it can't lose. I feel like Trump has two pathways right now, either really, really intense, horrific escalation in the form of bombing or a severe humiliating climb down where he retreats on the global stage. I always say very quickly there are four different goals that I have heard from the administration since the beginning of this war. First was the nuclear question, the denuclearization. Then Trump was talking about regime change, then removing their missile capacity, then stopping. then stopping their proxies in the region. None of those have been achieved.

None of that has happened. We know the proxies. The proxies are still fine, right? Yeah, the Houthis are doing great. They're fine. Yeah, they're actually more strategic than ever. The missile capacity is still there. We know this because they're striking in the strait.

Donald Trump is ducking for his life when he's in Turkey in the NATO summit. Like Iran still has military capacity. The nuclear material is still in Iran. And I mean, honestly, the regime is still the same. If anything, there are more hard. liners in the regime. So none of the goals have been achieved. It's interesting. I'll add in a couple more reasons because Judd pointed this out. The U.S. attacked Iran because, quote, they've been killing Americans for 47 years. The U.S. attacked Iran because Iran is, quote, the weakest they've

ever been. And the war is personal payback for Trump. He told ABC News on March 1st, I got Ayatollah Ali Khomeini before he got me. They tried twice. Well, I got him first. And I also think, like with Venezuela, the idea of regime change was so much a canard that no one talks about it anymore. Like, there are all these people, I mean, I actually, you know, I feel it's terrible, the degree to which in both Venezuela, repressive government and Iran famously repressive government, at no point is anyone in this administration thinking like what's best for the Venezuelan people or the Iranian people who are still being subject to mass executions at now a ramped up scale. It's even worse. It's the inverse. Trump will one day say that this is to liberate the Iranian people and then the next day say he's going to annihilate the entire civilization, never to be seen again, threatening direct genocide against the Iranian people. I think that the Venezuela regime change that Donald Trump kind of carried out but not really is a big reason why he went to this with so much hubris. He's of the mindset that if you remove, if you kill the leader, the regime will.

fall in line. So if you take off the head, the rest of the body will eventually fall in line. Now, he went into Iran with the same mindset. He thought he decided to kill Khamenei, and the rest of the body would fall in line. The regime would change. Of course, it didn't work. It's not that simple. And it's not Venezuela. Iran is not Venezuela. But you're right. Both have repressive governments that need to be, you know, addressed seriously. Yeah, it just this isn't how you do it at all. Also, because in Venezuela, they're like, well, we got their oil, so I don't see what the issues. But it's almost October. Early voting has started in Idaho, Minnesota, South Dakota, and Virginia. It feels like Republicans are waiting for some sort of October surprise. It's going to

change everything or drop oil prices or end the war. I don't know, make Trump look cool. It feels like the cake is kind of baked. What do you expect to see from Republicans in the GOP over the next couple of weeks. You see some Republicans conveniently trying to distance themselves from Donald Trump's war with Iran as we come into the final weeks. You saw Salazar out of Florida who made a video appealing to Trump saying that his immigration policy was too radical. This could have been a video made by a Democrat, to be honest. There are reports of Byron Donald scrubbing Donald Trump from his website in multiple areas, like removing the photos of him and Donald Trump, kind of like a high school breakup. Like when I break up with my ex-girlfriend, you just scrub photos of her from your page.

Donald Trump is now the toxic ex-girlfriend for a lot of these Republicans. But I mean, in reality, they'll focus on a narrow subset of issues where they think they can resonate with the American people. And I've been realizing this in debates that I've been doing a lot. They have been narrowing what they're actually, you know, saying they've won. So when they were going into office, they said they were going to be no new wars, lower, lower prices and inflation, end the Ukraine war, and Israel's occupation of Gaza, and all of this, right? We're going to end all of this. And now they're narrowing it down and saying, well, we may see the cost of drugs lower and we may see $5,000 checks if Trump gets back into office. So they've

narrowed it so much so that it's now just the goal is lowering the cost of drugs. It's kind of sickening. Yeah. And I think you actually made a point a little bit earlier about how Trump is kind of surrounded by the circle of people. He operates in a non-reality. And I think you do so many debates with people who, I think, get a lot of their information from Twitter. And it's wild seeing how when you're in this echo chamber, which Twitter is now a right-wing echo chamber, is anyone who's ever been on it. You know, these are people who are all very, very mad about Indian Americans going to college football games. Like, how much do you think that that's playing into how Republicans are viewing this race, where you see people who are, like, convinced that there's no way Republicans

could lose the midterms because every Republican they follow on Twitter is telling them that everything is totally fine. It's interesting. Trump is also surrounded by these same people. He's getting his information from the same right-wing edge lords as, like, worst guy you know on Facebook. Literally, yeah, Natalie Harp is feeding him these, like, cat turd memes on Twitter. This is the president of the United States. You know, I think it's interesting. A few, few things are true at once. Like, Twitter is not real life. We've heard this for the past decade. Twitter is not real life. It's not real life. But increasingly so, real life is downstream from Twitter, it feels like. So obviously, there are a lot of bots on Twitter, and there are a lot of MAGA accounts

that are paid to stir shit up. And you see this all throughout the feed. But as there's more volume of MAGA disinformation, and Elon Musk is putting his thumb on the scale more and more to boost this, it does slowly drip into real life. The Beau French thing, Beau French is someone who's running for a Republican position in Texas, and he posted that photo of a bunch of students at a University of Texas game, and he said, like, our country is being taken over, this is a big problem or whatever. Most people don't actually think that way. Like, that's not actually how most people think. But I feel like over the past few years since Elon Musk took over X, he has pushed so much racism and incentivized so much.

hatred and vitriol in the algorithm that it is starting to poison the minds of a lot of otherwise normal Republicans. So on one hand, Twitter isn't real life. The average person you talk to out in public would think that Beau French tweet is horrific. They'd be like, what the hell? That's not the America that I know. But enough of that, enough volume of that, Elon Musk pushing that for years and incentivizing that, you do see some impressionable minds move to the extreme. So that would be my answer. Twitter is not real life, but it's kind of scary how sometimes times it does turn into real life. That's a terrifying thought. Adam, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you very much. This was a great shot. Let's do it again. That was my conversation with Adam Mockler,

host of the Adam Mockler show. Before we go, the countdown to election day is on. As you know, taking back Congress is going to come down to just a few competitive races, so we need all hands on deck. Votes of America's brand new action clubs are based on the latest tactics and tools to get in on the action. In Club Digi, we make it easy to boost helpful information online and get those social media algorithms working to elect the right people. In Club Vopro, you'll get trained on your rights and how to keep other voters safe and informed as they cast their ballots. And finally, in Club Relational, you'll learn about one of the most important organizing tactics of this era, talking to the people in your life and making sure they have a plan to vote. Go to Votesaveamerica.com

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and not just about how according to an interview with Education Secretary Linda McMahon, Trump called her and asked her to be Education Secretary. And when she said she hadn't been in the world of education, Trump said, quote, Well, you did graduate from college, didn't you? Like me, Whataday is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com slash subscribe. I'm Jane Post-Anand.

Yeah, that's kind of how I expected that one. Whataday is a production of Crooked Media. Our show is produced by Emily 4, Erica Morrison, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Haley Jones, Greg Walters, Matt Berg, Adam Lippurg, Johanna Case, and Desmond Taylor. Our music is by Kyle Murdoch and Jordan Kemp. We had helped today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized

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And frankly, numbers have only gotten harder. What does the data actually say? How do we reconcile that with the other things that we're seeing in American politics and around the world. And how do you use that data to understand or maybe even dare to predict the future of American politics? New episodes every Wednesday starting September 9th. Subscribe to Stillcounting on YouTube.com slash at Stillcounting podcast or wherever you get your

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