← The David Pakman Show
The David Pakman Show
6/16/25: Record-setting protests, Trump parade flops, MAGA nut kills Dems
00:59:27
-- On the Show: — Trump’s attempt to crush protests with military parades and ICE raids massively backfires, sparking the largest single-day demonstration in U.S. history — American flags fly at anti-Trump protests nationwide, signaling a...
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- [00:08]
David Pakman
Welcome to the show. What a weekend. I don't really remember any 4872 hour period with as much good and bad that took place over such a short period of time. If you are Donald Trump and MAGA and you were trying to intimidate people into silence and into staying home, this weekend was an absolute disaster. Except for everybody who stayed home from Donald Trump's military parade. But we will get to that. I want to start with the no Kings protests. I was out there. I know so many of you were out there. Instead of cowering, Americans did something else, which is they came out and marched and showed up. We saw it in cities, we saw it in suburbs. We saw it even in deep red towns that voted for Trump twice or even three times. People flooded the streets with a very clear and simple message, no Kings. Trump, now fully, fully leaning into his authoritarianism, staged this massive military parade in Washington, D.C. where there were tanks rolling down the street and fighter jets and troops in formation and the entire thing. And that was nominally supposed to honor the 250th anniversary of the, of the army, but it was really a Trump military parade. It was about him. And just days before, we saw Trump send federal agents and National Guard troops and Marines to Los Angeles over the ICE raids. And there were helicopters and tactical gear and protesters and media shoved around. And the message that they were trying to send was very clear, which was, if you step out of line, we're going to crush you. And Trump even saying, if there are protesters at my parade, they will be met with very big force. But what all of this did, and it's the nightmare scenario for maga, is, is that it lit a fuse. It didn't kill momentum. It actually lit a fuse under people. Something cracked open in the country. And we saw small towns with no spotlights, traffic lights with protests that would have surprised people if you saw how they were voting during the 2024 election. So, of course, we saw it in New York, in Philadelphia, in D.C. in Boston, in Los Angeles. But we saw it in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We saw it in rural Arkansas and in Greenville, Ohio, Lake Mary, Florida. I'm just looking through the emails. I got hundreds of emails from people about all the places that they were in Youngstown, Ohio, although it's not clear from this one whether the protest was in Youngstown or it was just the person who went Riverside, California, Holland, Michigan, Torrance, California, Quakertown, Pennsylvania. I mean, this is Syracuse. This is anecdotal just from my audience. And in some of these Places they hadn't voted for Democrats in decades. But people came out. We saw kids holding signs. We saw veterans marching, grandmothers waving flags in the heat, yelling, this isn't who we are. And so Trump believed that he could scare people off of the streets, and he couldn't do it. And people put their shoes on and they joined in. And the crackdown that Trump threatened, and to some extent the crackdown that they did in California, it didn't suppress dissent. It amplified the dissent. In Florida, a sheriff said they'd let your loved ones know where to pick up your remains if protests got out of hand. That's a threat. And yet people showed up. This wasn't about a single ICE raid. This wasn't just about Trump's military parade. This was about years of erosion of trust, erosion of norms, suppression of media. And people, to a degree, snapped. And they said, no kings at all. It's not just about Donald Trump. The system feels rigged. The system is distant and untouchable. Government no longer wants to answer to us. And organizers now believe that this was the largest single day protest in American history, certainly in decades. About 5 million people reportedly came out. That's like 1.5% of the population of the United States. Not the 3.5% that maybe we were hoping for, but a significant number. And we saw it. You saw it on tv, on social media, on Twitter. This wasn't a PR stunt. It wasn't a flash mob. This was genuinely just people saying, we need to wake the country up. Really easy to be cynical, to think our votes won't count, that the right wing has too much power, that the autocrats and the authoritarians have irreversibly taken over. That history has already been written. But when I look at this weekend, I see a very different message. I see that millions are willing to show up and stand up and speak up. That alone doesn't change anything. But the point here is, doesn't matter how many tanks roll for Trump's pleasure, it doesn't matter how many ICE raids they do. This is very sad and pathetic strongman theater. And eventually it's going to backfire. And this, I believe, is the beginning of the backfire. Trump wants to rule like a king, but he clearly needs to prepare to be met by a nation that remembers that it was founded to stop kings. If you think back to George Washington, so this is all very good. 5 million people. It was peaceful. And meanwhile, Trump's military parade completely and totally failed. We will talk about that later, but we have to also talk about the fact that. That to a degree, these protests are already working. Let me explain. Donald Trump has blinked. To a degree, the protests have worked. Trump has done what he always does, which is he has chickened out. And he has paused some ICE raids. This isn't all of them. This doesn't undo the new travel ban. This doesn't change his hostility towards media. Ok, but this is one vignette in all of this, because we've had weeks and weeks of ICE raids terrorizing workers in farms, hotels, and restaurants. And for now, Trump has paused ICE raids at farms, hotels, and restaurants. Now, he's not doing it because the policy was wrong as far as he's concerned. He's not doing it because he grew a conscience. He's doing it because the backlash got too big to ignore. Now, I think it's important to acknowledge some of the backlash is from people like me and you and others who have been out protesting to a. To a degree. The backlash was also from some of Trump's billionaire buddies who are saying, listen, these raids are hurting our businesses, they are hurting our farms, they are hurting our hotels, they are hurting our restaurants. So this is not that. Trump had some awakening. But let's go back to the beginning. It starts with the crackdown. ICE agents at Home Depot, raids at restaurants, farms, hotels. Thousands detained, families torn apart, the whole thing. The protests swoop in. The no Kings movement explodes. More than 2,000 cities, 5 million people in the streets. We see it in L. A, we see it in Des Moines. Just kidding. We see it everywhere. And now, after seeing that and after getting backlash even from Trump of some of his buddies, Trump has folded on this particular issue. The Daily Beast reports that Trump ordered ICE to pause all raids in agriculture and in hospitality. So for now, it appears no more surprise visits to restaurants or ambushes at meatpacking plants. An internal ICE memo flat out says, hold, hold on all enforcement at farms, restaurants, and hotels. This is mostly because Trump's donors called and the industry started screaming. And cracking down on immigrants might sound like fun until the lettuce starts to rot in the fields and the hotel rooms are staying dirty. I recognize that. But we also have to see the broader backlash here. 42% of farmworkers are undocumented. A third of hotel workers are immigrants. If ICE kept raiding, Trump's own base would get wrecked. So I don't have a delusion that this is because Trump had an awakening. With Trump, it's always about resulting. What is the impact of what I'm doing? And Trump even said it On Truth Central where he said farmers and hotels, hotel owners are losing longtime workers that they can't easily replace. And then he teased this by saying changes are coming. Well, some of the changes are here. The message is clear. Trump's big anti immigrant fantasy has smashed into the wall of capitalism. So this is an empathy. We don't go, what a big boy you did. You're so nice. No, this is mostly just economics and also the protests. DHS has confirmed the change. ICE can't arrest people unless they're charged with crimes. Stephen Miller reportedly lost it. He wants 3,000 arrests a day. That seems to be dead in the water. So what does this mean now? To a degree, the protests worked, the money pressure worked, people made noise and it hit. Trump didn't see the light. He stopped because it was a threat that he needed to deal with. So this is a pause and not a pivot. Trump's going to try again the moment we stop paying attention or the corporate overlords look away. So we've got to stay loud and visible. Record protests over the weekend. For a moment, power blinked and the people to a degree, got a win. Even though it might be a short lived victory. Temporary, partial and to a great degree caused by Trump's billionaire buddies. Now, one of the great things that I think we saw this weekend was the presence of a particular, call it an element at the no Kings protests. An element that I think is so critical to taking back the monopoly on patriotism from the maga. Right. So we're going to take a break. I'm going to talk about that next. Make sure you're subscribed to the YouTube channel. It costs nothing and it really supports the work we do. Make sure you're getting my Substack newsletter at. David pakman.substack.com will be relaunching it and adding a bunch of new content very soon. We'll take a quick break. We're back, we're in studio and the show will continue after this. I've been using Graza olive oil for years and I am super excited that Graza is now a sponsor of the show. Graza olive oil is always fresh, it's never blended. They use one olive from one region in Spain. No mysterious blends. It's a traceable and fresher product and the packaging is super practical. None of these messy drippy spouts. Graza oils come in easy to use, squeeze and spray bottles. They've got three types. Super simple. Frizzle for high smoke point cooking, sizzle for everyday cooking and drizzle, which is more for garnishes and dressings. I've been using Graza Oil in my house for years. 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No waiting rooms, no overpriced bills. Just a better way to protect your teeth while you sleep. Try Remy Risk free at shop remy.com/pacman and use the code PACMAN to get 50% off your night guard at checkout. That's shop r e am I.com/pacman Use code PACMAN for 50% off. The link is in the podcast notes. The David Pakman show is an independent, progressive media program. That is not some vague, amorphous thing, theoretical phrase. Especially not when this administration has shown a hostility towards progressive independent media that we have never seen before. We have never produced the show in a more hostile environment from the federal government than today. And I think it's really important that supporters of progressive media understand that. I would love for you to support this show by signing up@join pacman.com we see potential economic strife coming. I'm hearing from a couple people every day. David, I'm sorry. I'm tightening the belt on subscriptions. I can't renew. I've got to cancel my membership at the end of this year, at the end of this month. And I get that. So that is the reality for much of independent media right now. So whether it's this show or a different show, no. That we are not supported by media conglomerates and advertisers that pay $1 million a spot for a commercial. No. We are primarily funded by two to four dollar a month contributions from people in the audience. Check it out@join pacman.com consider getting a membership and you can use the coupon code. It will end soon. All one word, all lowercase. It will end soon to save about 50% off of the cost of a membership. There is one specific detail from this weekend's record setting no Kings protests that you might have noticed. Maybe you didn't, maybe you thought about it, maybe you didn't. It certainly eluded corporate media coverage and I believe it's one of the most important aspects of the protests. It wasn't the chance, although many of the chants were great. It wasn't the signs, although I saw some great signs when I was out there. It wasn't the size, although the size was massive and the size really matters. It was the American flags. Let me explain. Whether it was in blue cities or red towns, on flagpoles or wrapped around shoulders or staked in the grass, there were American flags everywhere at the anti Trump no Kings protest this weekend. And this really matters. For most of my adult life, certainly the time I've been following American politics, the American flag at protests has almost automatically meant one thing. This is a right wing rally. MAGA hats, the military type costumes, 1-6-Energy. Is it a Tea Party march? Is it a Trump convoy? Whatever. You wouldn't have assumed for much of the time I've been following American politics, that if you see a sea of American flags, that it's a protest against authoritarianism, against right wing ism. That is how deeply the imagery of the American flag has, has been hijacked by the political right. It was not an accident. They did it on purpose. Okay, Republicans made this calculated bet. We're going to wrap ourselves in red, white and blue. We're going to claim the moral high ground. We will be seen as patriotic. It'll be a visual monopoly on patriotism and it'll be a marketing campaign for if you're not with us, you're not patriotic. Reagan launched it, Bush militarized it with the Iraq war. Trump turned it into a sort of costume fascism of sorts. And for the most part, we on the left have let him do it. We brought the pride flags, the union banners, the peace symbols, the Black Lives Matter signs, all important symbols, meaningful symbols. But we didn't really focus on the flag. Almost like we gave it up. We, we conceded, we ceded ground on the flag. Maybe some were embarrassed by it, as if we kind of handed it over. Like, listen, fine, you get the American flag. We'll find Something different. That changed on Saturday. This time, the biggest anti Trump protest since he returned to power. The biggest anti Trump protest of Trump's, both terms. One of the biggest single day protests possibly ever in American history. It was full of anti Trump American flags. And this, to a great degree, flips the script, because what we saw Saturday was not some fringe resistance cell. It looked like the country. Middle aged parents, veterans, grandparents, kids in strollers waving the American flag and chanting no kings. And it is a very different image than what we have become accustomed to. And the reason that it's powerful is not just because it feels rebellious. It's because it feels normal and familiar. It was grounded in something bigger that we recognize, and that is where the real damage is done to this authoritarian movement. It really goes against the entire mythology of Trumpism, because when your authoritarian movement is out there parading tanks and drones through Washington, D.C. which we'll get to, while the other side is simply waving the flag of the United States, it makes the small crowd cheering the tanks, the squeaky tanks, look like the fringe. It makes that look like the threat, which of course it is. And all of a sudden, we had an environment Saturday where we have one guy hiding behind the military, screaming about traitors and enemies of the state. He looks less like a president and more like a dictator from some crappy, you know, Netflix series or something like that. And it makes the no Kings protesters look like the patriotic ones, which is exactly what we need now. There's a lot of history wrapped up in this. You go back to the 1960s. Protesters burned the flag. Constitutionally protected, by the way. This is not a legal criticism. It's not a criticism at all. Just saying this is how this has kind of shaped out, shaken out over time. The protesters burning the flag in the 60s rejected what the United States had become. And it was a symbolic destruction. It was sort of like a we're done with this country kind of message. The no Kings protests with the flags, even without the flags. We knew that this was the idea, but especially with the flags, it's, hey, we're not burning the flag, we're taking it back. What, what they were saying is you don't get to use the flag as a weapon against us anymore. You don't get to brand fascism as patriotism. You don't get to claim this country as yours while you're actually tearing it apart. And this is potentially a game changer, because protest isn't just about who can shout the loudest. It's who can disrupt the narrative. Shake up what people thought they knew. And that is what the American flags at the no Kings protests do do. If you're sitting at home and you turn on whatever and you see the protests and you see a flag, you see a sea of flags rather, and you hear the chants of no Kings, it doesn't trigger fear. It doesn't look like a rebellion. It just looks like, oh, these people are here for the country. And so that, in a sense is bigger and more clever than the most clever signs I saw. And the signs I saw were very, very clever. And it leads us to sort of like the question at the end of the rainbow here, who is really defending democracy? Who's standing up for American values? And what we saw Saturday was it certainly wasn't Trump standing up for American values with squeaky tanks and sleepy looking acolytes standing and sitting alongside you. It wasn't the military parade, it wasn't any of that. It was the people who said, here's the American flag. No more Kings, we against Trump. So I don't want to overblow just the importance of the American flag, but because of all the context that it's gotten wrapped up into certainly over the last 20 years, since the Iraq war, probably even longer, since Reagan started kind of weaponizing the flag, it was incredibly important. Now, there were some other flags. Anecdotally I saw Mexican flags at the LA protests and, you know, pride flags here, here and there, that's totally fine. But the presence and the prevalence of the American flag in sort of saying we're taking back this symbol, I think was absolutely critical. It wasn't all good over the weekend. And this is something about this one cuts deeper. And I don't know if it's like the fake cop uniform or the manifesto they found in the trunk or the names on the list like Minnesota Governor Tim Walls and others. But what happened in Minnesota over the weekend was not random. It was not senseless in the sense that it had a particular point. It wasn't new, but it almost feels like it was inevitable. Vance Bolter. I don't even, I think it's Bolter. It's B O E, maybe it's Belter. Vance Bolter was a Trump supporter, a self styled security CEO who ran possibly a fake ministry, drove a fake cop car and turned his home into a MAGA command post. Dressed himself up in police gear on Saturday, put on a latex mask and gunned down Democratic Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their home hours earlier on the same day he Shot Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette. Multiple bullets. But by sheer luck they survived. The killer left behind a list of dozens of names. Abortion providers, elected Democrats, community leaders, health care workers. These were not symbolic targets. These were specific people with addresses. And he wanted to assassinate Democrats one person at a time. And this was not some rogue lunatic detached from political reality. He was living in the political reality that Republicans built. Anti abortion, evangelical, obsessed with Trump. Now his roommate was interviewed and his roommate said that he would watch MAGA content all the time. He would rant and rave about abortion. He was immediately. The right immediately rushed to paint him as some left wing plant. Maybe it's a false flag or this is some liberal, but it turns out that sometimes if it looks like a duck and it walks like a duck and it smells like a duck and it sounds like a duck, it's a duck. And here is his roommate saying this was exactly what it looked like. This was a MAGA potamian with a bible, a gun and a list. And let's take a listen to this, talk about his politics a little bit. I know that you had some discussions.
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Guest or Co-host
Well, well, everyone's calling him a Democrat.
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David Pakman
He's not a Democrat.
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Guest or Co-host
He would be offended if people called him a Democrat. But because of this board thing he was on for Governor Walls, it wasn't to serve, he wasn't. He was just serving the community. But he, you know, he.
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Trump or another speaker
I can't.
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Guest or Co-host
Believe a political issue would cause him to do such a thing.
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David Pakman
Did he ever bring up the senator or the representative who were targeted, like I was saying?
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Guest or Co-host
No, he never talked about, I didn't know.
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David Pakman
Any politicians. He mentioned.
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Guest or Co-host
They like Jim by.
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David Pakman
Tim Walls. What would you say about him?
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Guest or Co-host
Well, I mean, nothing. I mean it's just normal. Oh, I don't like this that Tim Wall did this. I don't like the day did that.
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David Pakman
Did he mention the protests that were planned for yesterday?
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Guest or Co-host
He never mentioned the protest.
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David Pakman
What do you make of everything that's happened here?
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Guest or Co-host
Maybe I mentioned it to him, but I don't think he mentioned anything.
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David Pakman
Of course. What would you tell him?
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Guest or Co-host
I would tell him to surrender himself so he can be taken alive because.
- [26:55]
David Pakman
Well, ultimately he was. Ultimately he was and we're going to talk about that. But it's really important to understand that this is, this is stochastic terrorism. This is what we're talking about. This is a system that statistically will lead to some number of these outcomes. You know, you get these Republican leaders talking every day about tyranny and baby Killers and Democrats are trying to destroy America and they tell millions of people that elections are stolen, that real Americans need to fight back, and then somebody does, and then they go, oh, he was crazy. And then they move on to sending more fundraising emails that inflame using the exact same language. Okay, we saw here, I mean, Melissa Hortman wasn't just a legislator, she was the speaker of the House in Minnesota. She led protests to protect, or led efforts rather, to protect abortion rights and pass climate legislation and expand worker protections. And she was assassinated. Hoffman nearly died. John Hoffman nearly died. He didn't. Thank goodness he didn't die. And the most chilling part of this is that the, the police said they only found Bolter because they randomly checked on the Hortman's after responding to the first shooting. And if they hadn't, who knows how many more people would be dead right now. So we can't dance around this. The Republican Party as it currently exists is cultivating a political culture that excuses, ignores, and sometimes straight up incites violence against its enemies. It's more than a brand. MAGA is not just a brand. It's really a threat architecture of stochastic terrorism. And when rhetoric turns to murder like this, they go, oh, it was either a left winger or, or merely a mentally ill person. What are the reflexive instincts? Oh, you blame Biden or immigrants or, you know, mental health, even though they always refuse to fund actually getting people mental health treatment. But this is an ideology now that is really defining of Trump's base. And this wasn't an outlier. The outcome is a less common one. But we've been warning for years that the Republican Party's descent into extremism wasn't going to stop on January 6, 2021. It was going to go further. And now it's kicking in people's front doors. So Melissa Hortman is dead, her husband's dead. John Hoffman barely made it. And if we don't name this for what it is and say, hey, this is a form of organized terror that is happening as a result of MAGA radicalization, more people are going to die now. They got him. Ok, they were able to get him. He turned himself in. There was sort of speculation, did he give himself up and allow himself to be taken alive because he has some expectation of a pardon or something, or he believes that somehow he's going to be saved? We have absolutely no idea. But he was taken alive. And so where we now land is when a sitting president radicalizes his base and then followers kill for the cause and then half the country is reacting like nothing really happened here and maybe this guy was a left winger or something like that. What do we do? What do we call that? What is the next step? It certainly doesn't feel or sound like democracy, that's for sure. And if we continue to sort of allow part of the country to resist calling this what it is, it's hard to imagine that we're going to root it out. So let me know your thoughts, your reaction to this disgusting politically motivated MAGA terrorist assassination. You can write to info@david pakman.com if you or someone you love is on Medicare, this is important. The Department of Justice filed a major fraud complaint against three of the biggest Medicare brokers in the country. These brokers pretended to offer unbiased advice while secretly steering seniors into plans that paid them the greatest kickbacks. 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It's like having a tutor in your pocket. And Babel is giving my audience 60% off subscriptions at babel.com/pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. That's B a b b el.com/pacman. Rules and restrictions may apply. The most embarrassing moment of the weekend was Trump's military parade flopping and Trump being endlessly humiliated by this puny, flaccid crowd. Now, now, I have to admit, I expected a sort of Russia, North Korea, Iran style military parade. Huge crowds, massive energy, authoritarianism just leaking out of everybody's ears. But at the end of the day, it was a tiny, puny, pathetic crowd. Extremely low rent, extremely low energy. And I have to be honest, our military didn't even look that great. And this is not a commentary on the competency of the military to do their jobs. What I mean is, in this setting, it all looked low end because it's just simply not something that the United States should or is used to doing. We don't do this crap. But Trump wanted it and it didn't come out well. Now, despite media avoiding mentioning the obvious, the crowd was teeny tiny. It was smaller than Donald Trump's hands. And here is video. And it just, everything about this is low energy small. You see, you see the, the, the, the bleachers, they're just mostly empty. Trump reportedly furious, furious about this tiny crowd. At another moment, the crowd is so silent and so sparse that you can actually hear the squeakiness of a tank rolling by, screwing up the streets. By the way, we. I've told you how the weight of the tanks messes up streets and then you got to pay to repair them. This here's a squeaky tank projecting force. I mean, just embarrassing. Embarrassing. Here's a service member parading, holding a small drone in his hands. Wow. Really, really cool. And then completely goofy in every way. Here are tanks rolling to the tune of Hart's Barracuda. Then it goes into Led Zeppelin. Yikes. Anyway, so then it goes into Led Zeppelin. I mean, I don't know how much of this crap I need to subject you to, but it was very, very bad. They also tried to play up the theatrics that we would expect with images meant to be considered patriotic. And the whole thing here is Donald Trump standing at strange attention, hinged full forward at the waist, with Melania to his left and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to his right as Lee Greenwood sings and Pete Hegseth, I guess, singing along. They really look like buffoons. Yeah. As you can see, an absolutely electric atmosphere. And then almost beyond parody, in the middle of the parade, the public address announcer. Thanks, Coinbase, for sponsoring the parade. Special thanks to our sponsor, Coinbase. Oh, dear God. Dear God. All right, so then we get to the attendance issue. We were told hundreds of thousands of people were going to be there. 250,000. Record this. Record. That didn't happen. OK. Tiny, puny crowd. And J.D. vance even sort of like alluding to this when J.D. vance goes, oh, thanks to the thousands that came here. Thousands. I thought it was going to be hundreds of thousands. Well, let me say to the thousands of Americans who traveled from distant towns and across town state lines to be here today. Didn't they all travel across state lines? Because Washington, D.C. isn't a state. I mean, it's extraordinarily careful language, but sort of an acknowledgment that there's no one there. This is your national capital. Welcome to Washington, D.C. we are thrilled to have you. Yeah. All right. Well, certainly thousands. That sounds right. And then finally, here is Donald Trump looking absolutely miserable. Even suggestions that he was falling asleep at his own military parade. Just a pathetic failure. In 1914, years of escalating competition between European alliances culminate in the outbreak of the First World War. The two sides engaged in the savage war of attraction, Patricia, defined by opposing. All right, I think you get the picture. Ok. Pathetic, failed, embarrassing. Five million people protested against Donald Trump on Saturday. And the crowd of 250,000 that he said he would have at his military birthday parade, only a fraction of it materializing and pathetic in every way. Now, Donald Trump did speak at the parade, and I think it's worth just looking at a couple of the things he said during the failed military Trump parade. Over the weekend, Donald Trump attempted to give what some might consider a speech. He did mostly use words from the English language that I recognized. But Trump really struggling to read and as often is the case, really struggling with the word infantry.
- [40:37]
Trump or another speaker
There is no earthly force more powerful than the brave heart of a US.
- [40:43]
David Pakman
Infremen in free men. And as you can see, you see that glitch? See that shoulder glitch? This is that thing we've been talking about for a long time. Pop. Look at it. Just pops right up. Boom, boom. When Trump glitches on words, he has a physical twitch. It's a very odd, odd thing. The crowd did Sing Happy Birthday to the Dear Leader. And Trump was presented with a gift. If you can imagine anything more vomitus. When the crowd. If you're just listening when the crowd starts singing Happy Birthday, first of all, Trump is standing behind Melania like he's stalking her like prey. And then a service member brings a flag out for Trump. The Army Golden Knights. I would like to present to you.
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Guest or Co-host
This flag, which was flown over our.
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David Pakman
Nation'S capital n fall during the Army's 250th birthday celebration. There you go. A really inspiring moment. Donald Trump closed out the military parade by delivering the oath to new members of the U.S. army.
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Trump or another speaker
I, State your name. Do solemnly swear that I will support and defend.
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David Pakman
You can tell that the material is really connecting with Trump in a deeply spiritual and visceral way.
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Trump or another speaker
The Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic. That I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same.
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David Pakman
I hope no one's eating during this.
- [42:50]
Trump or another speaker
And that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States States and the orders of the officers appointed over me according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
- [43:16]
David Pakman
Trump is a great respecter of laws and codes, as you know.
- [43:23]
Trump or another speaker
So help me God. Congratulations. Congratulations. Welcome to the United States army and have a great life.
- [43:35]
David Pakman
There you go. Have a great life. Don't ever come near me again, okay? And then finally, finally, Donald Trump, awkwardly standing on stage, has to be asked to leave. Imagine if this were Biden, and one of the things that happens is you'll see someone come up to Trump and say, it's time for you to get off the stage. Trump hesitates to make it seem as though that's not what he was just told, and he's going to decide for himself where to go. Ranger school is the best life insurance for our army. It will always end with two people facing off with each other. And we need young leaders to be able to close with and destroy the. He doesn't know where he is. People need to tell him where to go. All right, so listen, cognitive decline aside, the opposite of everything we need in this country right now, okay? Symbols of loyalty to Trump above law. Classics out of the authoritarian playbook. We sing Happy Birthday to the Dear Leader. We bring a birthday present to the Dear Leader. We placate the Dear Leader, and he says he wants 40 tanks. Well, then we get 80 tanks, just so we really do the job very well. Trying to project power by rolling tanks, no matter what is the reality of Trump's lack of knowledge and lack of intellectual rigor. But as long as we get the symbolism right, then people we think will think he's big and he is strong. So hard to imagine. I don't remember any weekend single day even forget about it. I don't remember any single day in my entire time covering American politics where we saw Such contrast between 5 million Americans, patriotic Americans coming out and saying we defend the Constitution, democracy, the rule of law, the American flag as a symbol that we're taking back against kings and even worse dictators. On the one hand, hard to think of a more patriotic movement and then on the other hand, a relatively small group of the biggest Trump suck ups who couldn't care less about the rule of law, couldn't care less about democracy, couldn't care less about what the founders wanted with the Constitution, and just want to cheer the most sort of stereotypical symbols of military power in the worst sense. Not power in that we have the power to bring people up by showing them how we do things in the United States and how we respect the law and respect the Constitution and respect the media. No, just here's some tanks, squeaky tanks rolling down Constitution ave in Washington D.C. as the great leader sort of sleeps and sometimes claps. Hard to imagine any single day with bigger contrasts in this country. The disastrous nature of the weekend was not lost on the Trump administration. After the break, I'll show you how they attempted to recover from it. Make sure that you are signed up for free to my YouTube channel. Get my daily Substack newsletter. So many free ways to support the work that we do. 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 scan the QR code. Well, this was without a doubt an absolutely disastrous weekend for the Trump administration. And so what did Donald Trump do yesterday? Well, he tried to sort of clean up the mess and clean up the mess by trying to get us to forget that we still have zero trade deals. Since the on again, off again tariffs and tariff threats started. We were told 90 deals in 90 days. We're at zero deals in, what is it, 130 days or something like that. Here is Donald Trump saying, as soon as we send letters, the deals are done. But Trump seems to confuse trade deals with just imposing tariffs on countries and understand that all of this is, nobody showed up to his military parade. 5,000 people showed up to protest against him. You know, all of these different things. And here is Trump going, no, it's all great. With the trade deal after trade deal announced at the G7 summit coming up.
- [49:15]
Trump or another speaker
We have our trade deals. All we have to do is send a letter. This is what you're going to have to pay. But I think we'll have a few, few new trade deals. Yeah.
- [49:24]
David Pakman
Those elusive trade deals just always right over the horizon. We've got to send a letter telling them what the tariff is and then it'll be done. Of course, sending a letter to a country saying, here's your tariff rate is not a trade deal. Trade deals are actual deals made with other countries. It reminds me of, you know, sometimes you'll watch these big criminal trials, and this happened in the, let's see, some version of this happened in the George Zimmerman criminal trial years ago, the Kyle Rittenhouse criminal trial. We're seeing it now in the Karen Reed trial, which so many of my friends are just absolutely obsessed with. And there's this technique that's often used where defense attorneys arguing for an acquittal for their client will say versions of things like, listen, if you think that my client might have done it, that's not guilty. If you think it's plausible that my client did it, that's not guilty. If you think my client had the motive to do it, that's not guilty. Only when the prosecutors have proven guilt beyond a reasonable doubt is there a guilty verdict. And so it's the same thing with the Trump administration. All the countries are calling us to talk. That's not a deal. They're afraid that we're going to put big tariffs on them. That's not a deal. They're talking to us. That's not a deal. I'm going to talk to China. That's also not a deal. As soon as we decide we will have deals. That's not a deal. Only deals are deals. And Donald Trump is now relegated to as soon as we want the deals, we're going to have them. We were told 90 deals in 90 days. We didn't get it. One other clip from this fiasco that I want to play. Donald Trump couldn't brag about the attendance at the military parade because the attendance was terrible. Donald Trump couldn't say that the no Kings protests failed because 5 million people came out to protest against Donald Trump. So what was Trump relegated to saying? That climate change must not be real because rain was expected at the parade and it didn't rain. Now, I don't even know that it's true that it didn't rain. Maybe it didn't rain for part of it, but anyway, this is all Trump can do with a fantastic audience.
- [51:49]
Trump or another speaker
It was supposed to rain. They gave it a 100 chance of rain and it didn't rain at all. It was beautiful. And so I asked if they gave it 100% chance, right? 100%. It was going to rain like crazy and it didn't rain at all. How did they predict 100 years out and 50 years out or 200 years out? They didn't do too well, the weather people last night.
- [52:14]
David Pakman
But it was, according to Donald Trump, climate change is in doubt because of his perception that last night's forecast, forecast, forecast, forecast was wrong. That's what he's got. You know, nobody showed up to the parade. Five million people showed up to protest against him. At the time that Donald Trump said this, there was an active manhunt for a Trump supporter who went on a shooting spree against Democrats. And Trump is focused on, oh, the meteorologists botched the forecast. Really powerful, powerful stuff. Donald Trump has been caught using fake, violent protest images. Does this really shock you? Donald Trump wants you to believe that Los Angeles has been on fire for weeks, that the streets are burning, the chaos has taken over, that he had no choice but to send the National Guard and the Marines. And now we know that some of the evidence he used to justify all of this was fake. This week, the official Department of Defense rapid response account, an actual Pentagon channel, posted a video showing Los Angeles police cruisers on fire, spray painted and smashed up during so called violent immigration protests. The problem is that those images were not from the protests of this year. They were not even from this year. At all. Some of them were from George Floyd protests from 2020. Same car number, same position, same flames. Snopes has looked at it and confirmed it. One car, number 504, is sitting with the hood up. Another car, 658, is engulfed in flames. Those exact cars appeared in NBC coverage of the Floyd protests five years ago. This was not a mistake. This was recycled propaganda pushed by an official government account. California Governor Gavin Newsom, who was recently a guest on this program, slammed it. He says this is part of the propaganda campaign from the Pentagon, and that's exactly what it is, not a fringe troll account. Not even Cat Turd or Cat Turd to. This is the US Department of Defense trying to justify militarizing Los Angeles based on a lie. It wasn't just that one video. Multiple viral clips were exposed as either being recycled or mislabeled. A Jeep that was on fire. That was March 2024. A 711 owner getting attacked. That was Anaheim, California, in October of last year. Claims of illegal immigrants lighting themselves on fire. Completely unrelated footage. So this is a coordinated effort. Trump ordered 4,000, I believe, National Guard troops and 700 Marines into an American city. Tries to make it seem as though there is widespread chaos when even the protests were contained in a few block square radius. Then the administration floods social media with fake images to say, look, we were justified. Look at what's going on. This is straight out of the authoritarian playbook of the 20th century. This is how authoritarianism gets normalized. You create the illusion of chaos. You overwhelm a public with dramatic visuals, and then you say, I'm the one who knows how to restore order and anything I do is justified because of these videos that I've just shown you. Never mind that some of the footage is five years old. Never mind that most protests were peaceful. Trump's team needs the optics, and they made them. And it's important to understand that the AI tools are not helping. Some bots flagged the old clips, other bots amplified them, and by the time it all got sorted out, the false images had millions of views. And so this is one of the dangers. You don't really need a real emergency anymore. If you get one, that's great, but you don't really need it. You need a good archive, an editing app, a public too exhausted to care, and a bunch of people posting stuff to social media saying, this is what this is, even if it's something completely different. And so if you've studied the way that these movements tend to work, fear and misinformation to justify military deployments, very common. Fear and disinformation to justify crackdowns, very common. And they're willing to lie about burning police cars. What are they going to fake next time is the question. So this was not like a cheap Internet hoax that didn't get much spread. This was federal disinformation used to sell the deployment of federal troops to a city and a state where the mayor and governor didn't ask for it. And we've got to call it out, because if we don't call it out, it's not going to stop here. If a peaceful protest can be criminalized by old videos published by the Pentagon on Twitter, then the right to protest is already in danger. And we know that the right to protest is in danger because Donald Trump had said, we will meet protesters with very big protests force. Now, on the bonus show today, we are going to talk about a critical issue that has sort of been mixed up but suppressed in the context of these immigration protests. The US Might lose more immigrants than it gains for the first time in 50 years this year. Now, I know that some people will say, good, get them out. The problem is, the problem is that if you believe, as most mega potamians do, that the United States needs to grow economically, to maintain itself, to maintain viability as a country, you need to bring smart people in. And one of the ways that that is done is by bringing in highly skilled immigrants from other countries, experts in their fields, so on and so forth. And this movement that wants to get rid of everybody is convincing many people to leave by choice, people that we want here, that we need here. And the US could lose more immigrants than it gains for the first time in 50 years. And I'll talk about the economic impact of that. There is also an additional list of countries that could be put on Trump's latest travel ban, according to some new reports. And this is all completely haywire. I mean, just the absolute opposite of what we should be doing. And then finally, I've got some personal anecdotes on this last one. Spaniards in some parts of Spain are turning to water guns against visitors because they are protesting mass tourism. I've got some experience with this crowd. I'm going to talk about it on today's bonus show. So what a weekend. What a show. We are here all week. I would love for you to join us on the bonus show, which you can do by signing up@join pacman.com becoming a member, getting instant access to the bonus show. You'll also get commercial free audio and video feeds of the show hours before we publish the show everywhere. All of that and more on the bonus show. And I'll be back with you tomorrow.