David Pakman (32:22)
Well, of course, the entire point here is that the law gives people access to due process. I was going to say it guarantees them due process. It's not guaranteed because they're not doing it right. What do we, what is guaranteed mean in this environment? And Tom Homan saying this makes it clear that a new deportation is not inevitable. If you listen carefully, what Homan says is if he comes back, he will immediately face deportation again. But the truth is that he faced deportation once before in 2019, and he avoided deportation. He could in fact avoid deportation again. This is why we have due process. This is why when Caroline Levitt says he's an Ms. 13 member, we say, you haven't demonstrated that. You've presented no evidence in public. And no court or immigration judge has determined that to them, due process has become a technicality when supposedly to constitutional conservatives, it was the most important and highest power. Due process, the rule of law. My, how things have changed. And we'll see ultimately what happens with Homan's idea of going after those who simply refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities. This is terrifying stuff. You know, I'll often talk to my friends about what do we really think is private on our computers and on our phones. And many people believe that their emails are genuinely private. And it turns out that a lot of the email services are looking at your emails and can look at your emails even after you have deleted them. Which is why I recommend our sponsor Start Mail, a trusted name in secure email for more than a decade. Start Mail is based in the Netherlands. Netherlands is known for very strong data protection laws. Your emails won't be scanned, your emails won't be tracked. Start Mail will block those invasive tracking pixels so you won't be monitored by companies and by hackers. And when you delete an email in Start Mail, it is gone for good. Your data stays private. They are all in on this with a ton of features including aliases to keep you anonymous, strong encryption with your emails. It is super easy to move to Start Mail. It's a few clicks. Migrate your emails, migrate your contacts, you really can't go wrong. Try Start Mail for yourself completely free for seven days at start mail.com/pacman, which will also give you 50% off your first year. That's star t mail.com/pacman for a seven day free trial and 50% off your first year. The link is in the podcast Notes Support our show by checking out our sponsor Brain FM Focus Music. They're giving you free access to their app for a whole month at Brain FM Pacman. Once you try Brain fm, you'll quickly understand why this has become my go to music app when I just want to focus on work. In addition to music for focusing on work, they have modes specially designed for sleep, relaxation, meditation, all created by musicians working with neuroscientists. A peer reviewed study showed that Brain FM's music boosts attention, especially for people with adhd tendencies. Brain FM's Focus Music is the only music made to support ADHD. Brains Brain FM is the only music app funded by the National Science foundation because of their unique audio technology that changes the patterns in your brain. Brain Brain FM has been an amazing tool when I just want to focus on work. In the past I've tried Spotify or YouTube. I end up distracted or can't find exactly what would be most useful for me. So at a certain point I figured silence must be the solution until I discovered this. Brain FM is personalized depending on your brain type. So if you want to improve your focus or relax, give Brain FM a try for 30 days totally free. Go to Brain FM pacman. The link is in the podcast Notes. That's Brain FM Pacman. Well, it finally happened. The Wall Street Journal, one of the flagship publications of the American right, the billionaire class, the corporate elite, the Wall Street Journal published an op ed openly floating impeachment as a way to stop Donald Trump from destroying the American economy. Not after he leaves office right now, in the middle of Trump's second term. It is not written by some never Trumper. It's not written by a left wing bomb thrower. It's written by holman W. Jenkins Jr. A conservative columnist who's been defending Republican policy for decades. And that is what makes this such a huge deal. I encourage you to read the entire piece and we will link to it. But in essence, what this piece argues is that Trump's tariff war is a disaster, pushing the United States and China towards a total trade freeze, which would be extraordinarily disastrous for our economy. Investors are losing faith in the United States as a stable, insane place to put their money, and courts may soon have to weigh in on whether Donald Trump's trade war is even legal or constitutional. And here's the big one, Jenkins says. Impeachment may be the least bad option remaining a future Trump impeachment seems all but guaranteed. It may even be desirable to restore America's standing with creditors and trade partners. Now that's the key. With creditors and trade partners. Billionaires and giga millionaires are getting fed up with the chaos. We heard from not Mike Portnoy, Dave Portnoy. If he's going to keep losing 3% a day in the stock market, which admittedly has not been happening every day since he said that if he's going to keep losing 3% a day in the stock market, he's not going to go for any more Republicans. So this is not because Trump's a wannabe authoritarian. It's not because of creeping dictatorship. It's not because of the mass deportation schemes. Trump is threatening the US his place at the center of global finance. That's what scares them shitless. The billionaires and the billionaire class don't like it. Their wealth isn't just about dollars and stocks. It's about the US Being the world's reserve currency, the safe haven for capital, the place every investor trusts in a crisis. That's what gives them their power. That's what lets them dictate terms to the rest of the world. And Trump is setting that on fire. They're realizing it now that the guy they propped up because he gave them tax cuts and he said he hated regulations, he's too unstable to protect the very system they rely on, their greed blinded them. Now, if you believe Bill Maher, who recently had a powwow dinner with Donald Trump at the White House, Bill Maher says Trump's not actually deranged. He plays a deranged guy on tv. And Bill Maher said it like, that's praise of Trump, like that's a good thing. It's less bad to only pretend to be crazy. Now, you can come down on either side of that. On a recent bonus show, Pat and I talked about, is it worse to be totally unhinged or to play an unhinged character? Because you've calculated that that's how you benefit. You can decide that. But the point here is we are looking at Trump's actions, not the things that Trump said. And the instability is causing a problem for the billionaire class because they wanted a puppet, they wanted someone they could control, and instead they got an out of control wrecking ball that's potentially going to destroy everything it bumps into. And they're panicking. So when you see a Wall Street Journal op ed like this one, gently suggesting Impeachment may kind of be the only thing. It might be the least bad thing. It's not just political. This is economic self preservation. It's the billionaire class realizing they may lose more than just money here. They may lose the very system that gave them what they have today. Now, of course, the irony is they did it to themselves. They said, I don't like Biden, and eventually it became, I don't like Harris. I'm going to bet with their vote and with their money, I'm going to bet on a narcissist with the attention span of a mosquito and the economic knowledge of a goldfish. And now they're begging for a lifeline, maybe even impeachment, to go and clean up this mess. Now, what should the left's role, what should the Democratic Party's response be to this? Depends the direction that we want it to go. Accelerationists will say get the hell out of the way. Let them destroy it completely and then we can rebuild it from the ground up. Now, those of you who have read my book know I am not an accelerationist. The risks of burning it all down is you might assume it will be rebuilt one way and it won't. You might assume you get to rebuild it, but you won't. Even worse, people might end up rebuilding it. That's not my approach. I know some in my audience like that. I personally don't. My approach would be very quickly and I mean like For November of 26, OK, very quickly figure out a way to turn this around to justify electing the people that you can say will do a better job. We definitely are going to have to take a wait and see attitude as far as that is concerned. But when the Wall Street Journal is talking about impeachment, you know, things are falling off the walls. Donald Trump also just hit the worst polling numbers of his entire presidency. And this is not some outlier from a left wing think tank. This is from CBS, YouGov. It is getting so bad that even they can't sugarcoat the disaster. The bottom is falling out and I want to break it down. In February, Trump was plus six approval, approve versus disapprove, plus six. In March it was even. He, he had lost six points. In April, he's at minus six. That is a 12 point swing in under two months and the number that should terrify every Republican running with him. This is the key is that 54% of Americans now blame Trump for the state of the economy and only 21% blame Biden. Now, as always, when we see These numbers, we go, oh, it's breaking my brain that 21% blame Biden. It's breaking my brain that only 54% of Americans now blame Trump. And you're right, but what matters is how these numbers are changing. In March, 38% blamed Biden. That's down to 21%, down 17 points. In March, 34% blame Trump for the state of the economy. Now, 54% blame Trump. You don't typically see numbers shift like this so quickly. Why did they shift tariffs? Number one, recession fears. Number two, general what we might call generalized chaos. Number three, Trump ran last year on fixing the economy. That was his whole thing. Americans are watching their retirement accounts, which have shrunk, prices which are going up. The bond market fiasco, which Trump panicked and tried to reverse. And now they're actually blaming the guy in charge. We should be glad. Not that things aren't going well, but that increasingly Americans are blaming the guy in charge. Because often that doesn't happen. Think back to Obamacare and the Medicaid expansion. Many red state voters said they passed Obamacare and I didn't get Medicaid. Why not? I blame Obama. When, of course, it was an optional expansion, which many red state governors said were not doing the expansion, they still blamed Obama. So this idea of misplaced blame in American politics is a big deal. Trump tried to pin it on Biden. The public didn't buy it. He tried to distract with deportations, with TikTok bans, with tariffs. None of it is working. And in fact, we should talk about the tariffs a little more deeply. We covered the small business owner who saw the China import tariffs go from $26,000 to multiple six figures overnight. We covered the Fox host admitting that Trump's tariffs are causing inflation and might even cause a recession. We covered Stephen Miller screaming on Fox News as the administration openly defies court rulings. So this has gone beyond a policy failure. This is now visual chaos. You can't pay attention to what's going on in the news and not see and feel the chaos. One day Trump says one thing, the next day an adviser contradicts it, the next day they deny both. And Americans are watching, and they're not confused anymore. They're increasingly angry. We've seen presidents dip in polling before, but this isn't, you know, a second term slide because of a scandal or because of fatigue. This is the brand Trump created, which is, I'm good at the economy getting obliterated, and we're not even at the worst of it yet because the full effects of the tariffs, I mean, they're ostensibly paused, some of them sort of for 90 days, or maybe not quite so much. But we've only dealt with the announcement of the tariffs and a little bit of the implementation. The full scope of the implementation is ahead of us still, if Trump's going to do it. Trump's approval is already underwater before the real backlash begins. We talked about that as well. But it only matters if Democrats have something coherent to offer. I don't know that they do. And this is why every single elected official that appears on this show, I will have been and will continue to say, we know Trump's bad, we see what he's doing. But that doesn't mean all of a sudden people necessarily want to vote for fill in the blanks, right? Not we're not picking on anybody. But people won't necessarily vote for Hakeem Jeffries because Trump's tariffs are crazy. People won't necessarily vote for Chuck Schumer because Trump's clueless on trade. And so there has to be some coherent idea here as to what to do next. Some of these ideas I do include in my book, the Echo Machine. The book is really more of an overview as to how we got here, but there are ideas in it. And to everybody who's bought the book, thank you, and please remember to leave a review on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Goodreads, if you would be so kind. Let's take a very quick break. We'll get to some of your feedback next. You know, every time we call out Donald Trump's authoritarianism, the right calls it media hysteria. But I want to remind you that Trump admits he's looking for ways to defy the Constitution and maybe even pursue another term. Now, if you don't know the bias behind your news, you might believe. Oh, Trump's just teasing us. There's nothing here. Go to Ground News, slash Pacman, and see how media bias influences more than your perception from Trump's policy and ability to understand and undermine constitutional norms. I've been with Ground News for years now because this is what they do. They expose the hidden agendas behind reporting sources and make it easy to compare coverage and understand critical issues. Even better, if I'm reading a story on another site, the Ground News browser extension will flag the source's political bias and give me other reports on the same story so I can verify the information. My viewers get 40% off the same unlimited vantage plan that I use, so you get their top tier plan for just $5 a month, go to Ground News, slash Pacman. The link is in the description or, or scan the QR code. All right, let's get into Friday feedback. You can send emails to info@david pakman.com if you have something to say. We also will look at substack comments, Twitter replies, YouTube comments, tic tac, and all these different things. Let's start with some criticism, some more respectful, some less. Zach Rider says David Pakman is the epitome of a weak man. He's broken. You know, I welcome substantive criticisms. And what I would love is for Zach to tell me, which policy am I getting wrong? Where is my economic analysis incorrect? What is it about foreign policy that I am misunderstanding? That is something we could actually work with. The epitome of a weak man. He's broken. While Zack's the one spending his time posting comments online about people he doesn't really know. I don't know. Not so sure about that criticism. Cap Mike, on the other hand, says, I refuse to listen to economic opinions about Trump's tariffs from people who don't even know how many genders there are. You know, Cap Mike, one of the things that sometimes happens is that I will get hate mail that really is better destined for someone else. On this gender stuff, you know, I've been pretty clear. I want everybody treated with dignity and empathy. I always want to make sure that we're providing equality of opportunity. I, I think that on issues of, for example, gender and sports leagues are more than well equipped to handle this stuff and we don't even need government intervention. But this is not a show that, I hate to even use this, but this is not like a gender woke show where that's the primary prism, where, you know, it just seems like the criticism is really better for some other show, not for this one. Ok, let's continue. Theresa. Maybe it's Theresa. Teresa says, did anyone notice that the whole world is talking tariffs and the stock market and we are no longer talking about signal gate? Yeah. So that is true. It is true that essentially the public discourse has moved off of Signal Gate. But if the implication is that Trump timed the tariffs to take attention away from signal gate, I don't think so. The, the, the, the tariffs have been their own monster for a while now. What I will tell you played a major role in getting off of the topic of signal gate was that the administration investigated itself and as Caroline Levitt told us, they found no wrongdoing and they have closed the investigation. What do you do? What? I mean, this is why at A certain point, you just have to win. There's no alternative to, you've just got to win, because this is exactly what they can get away with. We investigated ourselves. We've been cleared. The investigation is over. Many times Trump is doing things deliberately in terms of timing to take attention away from this and give it to that. He's been planning the tariffs for a while, and they are their own sort of fiasco Labor. Tik on TikTok says Trump masters the art of using a shitload of words and saying absolutely nothing. Like we did in school when we came unprepared to do a presentation. Yeah, this, this is a pretty good assessment. You know, sometimes Trump uses a teleprompter, which of course Biden and Obama were evil for using. But sometimes Trump will use a teleprompter, and when he does, it's very clearly the first time he's reading the content of the teleprompter. And sometimes he'll look at it and sort of surprise himself, almost like he's reading a news article, even though this is supposed to be what he says. That's what happens with the teleprompter when Trump doesn't have the prompter. It's a complete and total disaster. It's. What about injecting bleach? It's the rant with the Los Angeles Dodgers about, oh, you know, it has to do with strong arms and weak arms and all this stuff. Yes, he does sound like the kid giving the a book report without having read the book. Shane says, unrelated, love the turtleneck. Susan agrees. This is from Blue Ski, also known as Blue Sky. That's how you know he's up to serious business. Yeah, if you, if you turn on the show and I'm wearing a turtleneck, it's a very serious news day. There is no question about that. But now that it's getting warm, the turtlenecks are going to be increasingly infrequently worn. D.J. tanner's mom says you probably won't see this comment, but I just went on Amazon and bought your book while it's still available. Thank you for continuing the fight for free speech. I am humbled and flattered by everybody who has picked up the book. Recently, the book hit number six on all of. Forget about number six. Nonfiction, new hardcover, bestseller. The book was number six on all of Amazon. Out of millions of books over the weekend, it has had an insane week. If you haven't gotten the book, please do. If you have gotten the book, please review it. We now have something like, let me see here, almost. We're closing in on a thousand reviews of the book, which is just absolutely nuts. So thank you to Everybody. Okay, from TikTok, how do entrepreneurs deal with these changes from one day to the next? These tariff roller coaster is a nightmare for their business. You know how a lot of entrepreneurs are dealing with it. We're starting to hear about it. We were notified by an advertiser recently something along the lines of, listen, it's not that the tariffs are affecting us in this particular way. It's that they were on and then they were off. And now our suppliers, from whom we get parts don't know what they need to charge us. We need to delay our advertising package until the third quarter or the fourth quarter when hopefully there's more clarity. So this is affecting everybody. You know, we, we produce, we own all of the equipment we need already. If something breaks, I'll have to buy a new camera or something. But we're not buying any equipment. We don't have gear. We're really just a service, an informational business. And yet we are being affected by the tariffs because the advertisers that helped to fund the show are saying, the money I was going to spend with you, I'm not going to spend right now. It is an entrepreneur's nightmare, no doubt about it. B Rad says even if this does bring back manufacturing to America, it will be quite some time before factories would produce anything. Trump is the one who's mentally challenged. Yeah, I've met, I've made this point before. If you want to bring industry back or set up American semiconductor manufacturing, or imagine that there's some particular car part that's always imported that we want to make here. It can take sometimes it's decades, but forget about decades. A decade, it can take years. We could be talking six, eight, nine years. The idea that you're going to put a tariff on and overnight this manufacturing is going to start happening here, it just doesn't work that way. And I don't know if it's Trump's naivete or Trump's disregard for how it actually works. I really don't know. But it is not a situation that can be remedied with fixes over the course of a quarter or even a year. It's far more complicated than that. All right, The Crake said on Reddit, this is a good substantive critique. I want to deal with this. Uh, it's not the education system. David needs to stop saying the reason our government MAGA and a large part of the population is ignorant to a lot of basic facts and other things like not knowing. The difference between Oliver Stone and Roger Stone is the fault of the education system. The education system is there with teachers ready and willing to do the job. The problem is the culture relating to the importance of education. Parents are far more interested in looking at their phones, concerning themselves with youth sports, ice fishing, four wheeling, owning $80,000 pickup trucks than their kids education. It's the culture, not the system. Additionally, the behaviors teachers deal with as well as having to take over the social development of kids is way out of whack. Teachers are practically raising these kids. Kindergarten age students are showing up with no number sense and staggering low level vocabulary. Start placing the blame where it belongs. You can bring a horse to water. So I have an all of the above approach here. If I said to you our health care system is broken and you go the doctors are ready and waiting to treat people, you would probably easily make the connection that as well trained and well disposed the doctors are. If you have a system that expects them to see four patients an hour for eight to ten hours a day and do notes and you pay them based on the number of things that they do right, it's not the doctors, it's the system. And I agree with this person that the teachers are there and it's the system that is putting the teachers in a position of having to do all of the things that this person says. Now in addition to that, it is also the parenting. There is no question now having a kid myself and seeing other parents, the difference that I see in the kids when the parents do versus don't read to the kids when the parents do versus don't enforce that. If you're out somewhere, we're going to be polite to people and we're not going to draw on the walls of a restaurant. And this starts at birth. And there's no doubt that by the time five year olds get to kindergarten a lot has nothing to do with the teachers nor the system. It's the parenting. But to say that the system isn't the problem. No, the teachers aren't the problem, but the system is a big part of the problem. Ok, so I think it's a perfectly fair distinction to make. RK Su says. Has anyone seen David promoting his book on mainstream TV or heard him on npr? I'm watching this stoic grifter guy on MSNBC and wondering why the MSM isn't interested in David's obviously correct ideas about modern politics. Maybe I've missed it. I mean, we had a month of Ezra Klein telling us red tape is destroying the Democratic Party. Yeah. So listen, go to David pakman.com press all of my interviews are there. Don Lemon, Chris Cuomo, Matt Dillahunty, Young Turks, Midas Touch Impact Theory, Brian Tyler Cohen, Tom Hartman, Mark Thompson, Bill Press. They're all there. I'm doing NPR stuff this week, so it's all available at David pakman.com/press I try to put all of my interviews up there. All right. We will see you on the bonus show. Make sure you're signed up at join pacman.com email info@david pakman.com if you have something to say. And remember, we are doing everything we can to build our newsletter. Why? It's the only place where we own the data. If YouTube shuts us down, if TikTok shuts us down, which has happened, we have no access to our user base. With our newsletter. We download our full mailing list every week and we own it. So if they come for us, that's how you'll be able to get a hold of me. That's how I'll be able to let you know what's going on. So please sign up to the newsletter@david pakman.substack.com or just send me an email info@david pakman.com and say, hey, David, get me on that newsletter. We'll see you on the bonus show.
