← The David Pakman Show
The David Pakman Show
8/29/25: Republicans pounded at town halls as Trump predicts major win
00:59:21
-- On the Show: -- Rep. Barry Moore refuses to answer who pays Trump’s tariffs and Rep. Mark Alford is confronted by a farmer over losses caused by those tariffs -- Robert F. Kennedy Jr blames antidepressants and transgender transitions for...
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- [00:08]
David Pakman
It's getting increasingly difficult and humiliating for Republicans to do town halls in their districts. They're getting booed, they're getting jeered at, and they're getting, quite frankly, substantive questions even from Republicans. Not because Republicans have had some sudden awakening, but because Republicans are starting to see in their paychecks, in their grocery bills, in their household budgets, in their electrical bills, that the promises that Donald Trump made simply aren't coming to fruition. We're going to start today with a video of Republican Congressman Barry Moore asking, rather being asked the question, who pays the tariffs? Who pays the tariffs? He doesn't answer the question, but you start hearing chanting from the audience, who pays the tariffs? That who pays the tariffs? It is a simple question to answer. The American companies doing the importing pay the tariffs, and sometimes they pass that cost along to the consumer. Meaning you, meaning me. It's the reason why my coffee beans are now 1850 instead of 1550. Okay, let's take a listen. And this is the hostility that they're getting hit with. More and more.
- [01:19]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
They want to know who pays the.
- [01:20]
Soybean Farmer
Tariff as a consumers or through the exporting country.
- [01:24]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
So right now, what we just saw in a report is that we haven't seen inflation at all. Y' all saw a report.
- [01:29]
David Pakman
That was the question. That wasn't the question.
- [01:32]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
So if there was inflation.
- [01:44]
David Pakman
Who pays the tariffs?
- [01:46]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
Can I at least tell you about the terrorist.
- [01:48]
David Pakman
No time to pay. And then you don't have a couple.
- [01:52]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
Things you need to know about tariffs. But do you realize that after World War II, the Marshall Plan coming out.
- [01:57]
David Pakman
Remember, the question was, who pays the tariffs? He's talking about World War II, said.
- [02:01]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
Okay, Germany, and in order to help you rebuild. We're not going to. We're not going to. You can sell your cars in America, but we're not going to. We're not going to force US Autos to sell into foreign countries. And so that's why when you go to Berlin, Germany, you do not see a General Motors product.
- [02:18]
David Pakman
And of course, the audience is really concerned with what they do and don't see when they go to Germany as they ask, who's paying the tariffs? Why is Trump making stuff more expensive?
- [02:30]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
You do not see in Tokyo. You don't see force, but you see it's been going on a long, long time.
- [02:41]
David Pakman
What's the question?
- [02:42]
Republican Congressman Barry Moore
So Trump asked Myr, the chancellor of Germany said, why is that? She said, I don't know. Ask a question. So we'll start seeing as we just cut the taxes on all the New cars, the interest on the taxes that you'll get taxpayer on any cars you buy, that helps the auto industry in Alabama because.
- [03:01]
David Pakman
So the question continued, who pays the tariffs? And this didn't go well. One of the difficulties of running a campaign on incoherent economic policy that even the candidate doesn't understand is that it puts other people in positions of having to defend the impossible. How do you bring prices down with an import tax? Economists look at it and say, sir, that doesn't make any sense. Consumers look at what they're paying and they go, that doesn't make any sense. And, and then you put members of Congress, in this case, Barry Moore, in the position of having to explain something that he quite literally cannot explain. Now he could just say, well, the importer pays the tariff and in the short term it might be passed on to the consumer. But we believe that over the long term, this is actually going to make our economy more robust and it's going to increase national security. But things are going to cost more, will be more secure because of it, but it's going to cost more. That would be the truth. But they can't do that because if they do that, they admit that Trump's been lying about the entire thing. We then have another example. This, this is, it's happening at every single one of these. Here is Republican Mark Alford from Missouri and he held the town hall. And a soybean farmer just lights him up.
- [04:27]
Soybean Farmer
I realized as, regarding tariffs, people are on both sides of the fence on this. However, I mean, the tariffs do have an effect on this, regardless whether you support them or not. You know, Brazil is now China's top exporter of soybeans or they import soybeans and our pork exports to China have dropped like 35% or something like this.
- [04:57]
David Pakman
Okay.
- [04:58]
Soybean Farmer
And you talked about the importance of agriculture. In all honesty, these markets are never coming back. You're right. You know, there are. They were one of our top customers. You talked about being in, in business, you don't kick out your top, your top customer. So how do you, what do you tell farmers in your district that guys, these markets aren't coming back? And yeah, we can import or export a little something to Mozambique or someplace like that, but they're not going to, to make up what we've lost to China. So what do you what, and you know, what do you tell the farmers who are losing their farms or, you know, we have low prices because, so.
- [05:46]
David Pakman
Listen, the honest answer for a lot of these farmers, because they mostly voted for Trump just statistically, based on where they are, not all of them, but statistically, as a group, they mostly voted for Trump. What you've got to tell the farmers is you fell for Donald Trump's lies, you fell for Donald Trump's lies, and now there are consequences to that. You could have looked at the other candidate, you could have looked at Kamala Harris. You would be selling more under Kamala Harris because we wouldn't have these tariffs and we wouldn't have the current circumstances that we have today. The problem for these Republicans, the reason they can't say that, is they supported Trump's policies. If you have a Democrat and they go, hey, listen, we're having a problem on the soybean farm, the Democrat could go, I know we told you you were going to have this problem. Kamala Harris told you we were going to have this problem, and you voted for Donald Trump anyway. So this is going to be clearly a growing trend. We're going to see more of these Republicans being lit up at the town halls. Some of the, some of the Republicans, like Elise Stefanik, they don't even want to do town halls. She spoke publicly the other day, was booed off the stage twice. So they're going to have a problem. And it's a problem that they have earned themselves. In a desperate attempt not to link guns to shootings, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Said, you know what we might look at as the cause of shootings like the one we saw in Minnesota just a couple of days ago, we might look not only at SSRIs, a classic of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. We might also look at some of the drugs that those undergoing a gender transition are taking. Anything to avoid talking about the most obvious problem, guns. Here is RFK Jr looking a bizarre shade of orange that I have never seen exist in the natural world. He explained it on Fox and Friends. Prevent it.
- [07:49]
Fox and Friends Host
And we're still trying to get a lot of answers to a ton of questions, but the one thing is clear, you are dealing with a person who's trans. There was transitioning. Are you going to be examining at all some of the drugs that are used in order to make that transition happening, to see if it plays a role? Because we also know there was a trans shooter in the Tennessee situation.
- [08:13]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We are doing those kind of studies now at nih. We're launching studies on the potential contribution of some of the SSRI drugs and some of the other psych psychiatric drugs that might be contributing to violence. You know, many of them there have black box warnings that warn of suicidal ideation and homicidal ideation. So we need. We can't exclude those as a culprit. And those are the kind of studies that we're doing.
- [08:52]
Fox and Friends Host
So I've never seen that medicine. But you're saying that if you get it, some of the side effects could be homicide, suicide.
- [09:02]
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Well, there are black boxes warnings on some of these psychiatric drugs that warn about in their clinical trials that they saw a suicidal and homicidal ideation. So, you know, we are going into that with an open mind.
- [09:20]
David Pakman
Now, I know many of you are probably thinking, David, top level, can we trust a guy who looks like a traffic cone? And that's a fair question, but it's not really the one I want to deal with today. What I want to deal with is do we have any evidence that SSRIs or other psychiatric medications or so called transgender transition drugs might play a role in leading people to commit acts of violence? Now, before I even get into the data, one of the things that's really important to consider is if there were a correlation. That's an if. So. So we're thinking now if there were a correlation between, for example, SSRIs and committing shootings, just hypothetically, theoretically, we would be doing a disservice if we didn't say, is it possible that the reason they are on the SSRI has to do with whatever is underlying their lives that might predispose them to commit an act of violence? That. That's all theoretical. Right. But we would be. If we want to think clearly, we should say, well, okay, could an SSRI cause a shooting? Or is the population that takes SSRIS on them for a reason which might explain the violent behavior and it's not caused by the ssri. But that's all theoretical because there has been review of, after review, after review of FBI data, and there has been no link between psychiatric medication, including SSRIs and shootings. There was a 2019 review of FBI data. There was a 2025 analysis indicating no causal link. In fact, the events are so relatively rare, they're way more common than in other countries. But still, in a country of 340 million people, as far as a rate goes, these are still rare events. There was a 2020 large scale study which found a small statistical association between SSRI use and violent crime among adolescents, but it found no causality. It found a correlation. And then there was also a 2015 cohort study which found a core, a modest correlation between antidepressant use and some acts of violence, but found that other medications that are much less stigmatized had a greater correlation. Opioids, for example. So none of this demonstrates causation. Now then we've got like the trans drugs and what that means is very different in different situations. But there was a systematic review done of puberty blockers that sometimes what people are talking about, you know, you ask them, which drugs are you talking about? They often don't know. But if they're talking about puberty blockers, those have been looked at and there has been no association found between puberty blockers and violent acts. And of course, trans individuals are rarely perpetrators of mass shootings. They are overwhelmingly carried out by cisgender males. And only when there is a non default identity, I guess is the word I would use, or agent identity. Sometimes it's called. Only in that scenario do they even start talking about these correlations. So really dangerous and irresponsible stuff from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And I anxiously await the scientific data to back up any of these things that he is looking into. As he says, a terrified Donald Trump worried that the Republicans are going to get crushed in the House in the midterms. Trump is now saying, oh, we're going to win. We're going to win so big. Donald Trump posting to Truth Social Quote, the Republican Party is doing really well. Millions of people have joined us in our quest to make America great again. We won every aspect of the presidential election and based on the great success we are having, are poised to win big in the midterms. Now that is a lie, he goes on. We have raised far more money than the Democrats and are having a great time fixing all of the country, destroying mistakes made by the Biden administration and watching the USA heal and prosper. The results are incredible. A record pace. In that light, I am thinking of recommending a national convention to the Republican Party just prior to the midterms. It has never been done before. Stay tuned. Donald J. Trump, President of the United States of America. Donald Trump is thinking of a self serving, egomaniacal, narcissistic event in which there will be a Republican convention on a midterm year. Something which hasn't been done. What's the real point of that? If he does it to give himself the primetime speech and to make himself the main character in everything, which is the way he sees himself. Now, we should consider a few important aspects to this. Number one, it's not looking particularly good for Republicans next year. Historically speaking, because Trump took the White House in 24, Republicans would be due to lose the House in 26. Now, as I have said before, I am not seeing anything from the Republican Party, from the Democratic Party rather, other than like Gavin Newsom and a couple other people, I'm not really seeing much of a willingness to fight. Strongly worded letters and interviews on msnbc, sorry on Ms. Now are not going to win you the midterms. Simply saying Trump sucks isn't going to win you the midterms. So on the one hand, Trump's idea that everything's going so well so they're going to win, it's nonsense. In fact, increasingly we're seeing Republicans boot at town halls like we've been talking about. We're seeing inflation tick up, job creation is down, electricity costs are up. All all of that stuff. But on the other side of it, we've increasingly learned that just pointing that out doesn't guarantee any kind of win. And in fact, Trump is right that in 2024 Democrats lost everything despite trying to make it clear that the alternative of Trump is so bad that nobody should vote for Republicans. So on the one hand, Trump is panicked, he's worried, he's terrified. On the other hand, it is not at all a guarantee that Democrats are going to be able to pull it off. We are going to have more about that certainly once we get into 2026. In the meantime, I want to hear from you. Leave a comment on my substack substack.david pakman.com who in the Democratic Party right now on the national level do you see as fighting in the way that Democrats need to do? Ridge is doing something huge right now, running a sweepstakes where two winners will get their choice of a $300,000 Lamborghini or a Con Stirato $150,000 Hennessey Velociraptor or 100,000 bucks in cash. It's now through September 15th. Every dollar you spend at ridge.com/pacman gets you one entry. If you've been thinking about upgrading your wallet or key case, this is a great time to do it. There is also a no purchase necessary way to enter, which you'll see on the page. I've used Ridge wallets for years. Mine is slim. 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It usually is heard from a Republican elected official or like a right wing influencer. And they have this imaginary idea of a red utopia where the red states courageously and powerfully secede from Washington DC's tyranny. They go out on their own and they make this incredible, flawless, perfect society made up of places like Texas and Mississippi and Louisiana. You be the judge as to whether that would work or what, what that would look like. But there's this reality we usually come up against, which is actually seceding from the Union is very difficult. The U.S. constitution doesn't provide a legal pathway for states to leave the Union. The Civil War and the Supreme Court case Texas v. White in 1869 sort of attempted to settle this matter, which is states can't unilaterally secede. Texas can't say we're out of the United States and with that declaration alone be out of the United States. Now, even if they could, even if states unilaterally seceding was a thing, the logistics would be very difficult. Who gets the military bases? Who assumes the national debt or portions thereof? How do you divide up infrastructure? How do you divide up trade routes? What about water rights that flow from one state to another? So there might be individual answers to each of those things. But the bigger story is the secessionists talk about walking away from the United States, but. But they never deal with how you disentangle the electric grid, the interstate highway system, and so many of these other things. And then you've also got the human side, which is that you would have tens of millions of Americans living in politically opposite states from their own party preference. So, like, Texas secedes and becomes part of red America. But what about Austin? The people in Austin certainly would rather be part of the blue America rather than the red America that their state becomes a part of. So then what about population swaps? It's chaos. The point I'm trying to make here is it's complete and total chaos, even if it could be done. But that's what gets us to what is being now referred to as a soft secession. Nobody needs to secede formally, but blue states could just stop paying for everybody else. Now, I'm going to explain it, and the math is very, very brutal. For decades, blue states, many blue states, have been net donors to the federal government. What does this mean? They send in more in federal taxes than they get back in federal spending. For red states on average, the opposite is true. Red states on average are net 10 takers. They rely on Washington D.C. to fund basic services subsidized by mostly blue states. So like for example, in 2022, New Jersey, for every dollar it sent to the federal government, New Jersey got back only 91 cents. In other words, New Jersey would be better off not doing any of that. Now this puts aside infrastructure and intangibles, but just on a purely financial basis, New Jersey would be better off not doing it. New York got 93 cents for every dollar it sent in. California got 99 cents for every dollar which is closed. But California is so huge that that one penny difference actually makes a very big deal. Now you look at the other end of the spectrum, Mississippi. This is just nuts. Mississippi received $2.53 for every dollar it sent to the federal government. West Virginia got $2.36. Alabama got $2 and 2 cents. So the point here is red states are keeping their lights on, not with their own tax base. They're running on subsidies paid for by the very blue states that they despise and that they want to insult because of the Democratic governor and the Democratic mayor and so on and so forth. So a soft secession essentially means the donor states back out of the deal. They fix the glitch, to take a phrase from the movie Office Space. They could decline to administer certain federal programs. They just go, we're not going to participate. Money's not going out, money's not going in. They could reduce their participation in competitive grant programs. They could design state policies that make federal aid less necessary. And you could frame all of this in sort of like local control language. You don't even need to do a big declaration. You don't need fireworks. You don't say it's because of Trumpism. You just slowly shift money and dependents away from Washington D.C. this would devastate, devastate the red states. Without the federal cash, the red states would face budget shortfalls. They would see further cuts to already disastrous education systems, cuts to health care, degraded infrastructure, cuts to emergency services. And unlike the blue states that have the tax base themselves, they have more diversified economies on average, they would not be able to replace those dollars. And the irony here is a hard to miss one. The states that really loudly yell about freedom from the tyranny of DC are the ones that can't afford that freedom. They just, they don't have the money for it. They don't have the tax space for it. And if blue states called their bluff, wouldn't be a civil war, it wouldn't be any formal secession. It would just be a calculated financial unplugging. Now, what are the possible problems with this? One problem is there are many federal dollars that come with strings attached. If a state wants the money, it has to follow certain federal rules, like Medicaid coverage rules, or to get road funds. Your highway speed limits have to be in compliance. This sort of thing. A state can deal with that by just saying, no thanks to the money, it's legal. But the state does have to replace those funds. That can be expensive. So that's contention number one. Number two, there's federal preemption in some areas. Federal law overrides state law. State laws can't block or contradict certain federal laws even if they want to. Like air traffic control, I think would be an example. The workaround is even if the blue states can't stop the program itself, they can refuse to run it, or they can just refuse to do any enforcement. Now, there's no doubt that this is messy and chaotic, but this is what could be done. There's also, like Interstate compacts. These are federal programs that involve deals between multiple states. Water sharing, for example, rail systems, disaster planning to some degree. If you drop out of that, you might be in violation of those agreements. Well, then you've got to negotiate some alternative. So there's no question that there is complexity here. It's far less complicated than actual secession. And this would ruin the red states and presumably put Trump and his administration in a position to have to change their tune. Is there an appetite for this? Is it doable in the three plus years that are left of Trump's term? Those are all reasonable questions, but this is the idea of a soft secession. I want to hear from you. What do you think the White House wants you to believe that Donald Trump, at 79 and obese, is the healthiest president that the country has ever seen. And to prove it, they didn't trot out the current White House doctor. They didn't release test results. They didn't give us the full medical record. They didn't allow media to interview Trump's current doctors. They called in Ronny Jackson. Ronny Jackson is the MAGA congressman who can't legally practice medicine outside of an emergency, who lost his medical license, was stripped of his Navy rank, and once was nicknamed the Candyman for handing out medications like candy on Air Force One. He's the guy who said if Trump just modified his diet, he could live to 200 years old. And he was trotted out to say Trump is mentally sharper than ever before, and Trump is physically sharper than ever before. Now this is where they get into trouble. You can say for a 79 year old, Trump is healthy. And then we would debate that and we would say we'll give us some information. But they go so hyperbolic that it becomes unbelievable. He's the, the healthiest president mentally and physically than anybody. Even compared to Obama in his 40s, Clinton in his 40s. Give me a break. That doesn't make any sense. Now, meanwhile, the administration has admitted Trump has chronic venous insufficiency. That's why his ankles are ballooned. He has bruises on his hands because of handshaking, although if you believe that, that would explain the bruises on the right hand but not the left hand. Doesn't make a sense. Make, make much sense. Trump's gait is increasingly wobbly. Where he was meeting Putin, he was sort of going side to side, unable to walk in a straight line. And meanwhile, they want us to believe that Trump is 62 or 63 and now has a weight in the two 20s, which, you know, do it yourself. Get pictures of Trump, go to the chat bots, go to Chat GPT, go to Claude, go to Gemini and say, is it plausible based on these images that this individual is 62 or 63 and weighs 224? See what the chat bots tell you. And you will quickly see that that's very improbable. So if the president is dragging out his disgraced former doctor to argue that he's in perfect health, to me it confirms that there's a problem here. You do not handle a healthy president by bringing out a guy who is not his doctor anymore and couldn't possibly be more politically compromised, as is Ronnie Jackson, and say, look, Ronny Jackson says everything is good. It's gotten to the point where J.D. vance's team, whether they will admit it publicly or not, is reportedly preparing for what they see as the imminent death of Donald Trump. We're going to talk about that after the break. So I don't want to get into that right now. It sounds hyperbolic and outrageous, but it's less outrageous than the White House claiming this is the healthiest president ever and that the cankles and the purple hands are simply nothing. And Trump weighs to 24 and no one's been healthier. And also Trump's wobbly gait is nothing to pay attention to. Thankfully, Trump has taught us. How do we interpret such a statement? When a former doctor who's a Republican congressman says, this is the sharpest Trump's ever been, physically and mentally, we now know what that means. It means something is wrong and we're not going to tell you the truth. The parade of political loyalists offering medical reassurance instead of the doctors. The more that they tell you this guy's the healthiest ever, the more we should be wondering what the hell is going on here. The one good thing, and there's not a lot of good here, but there's a little something good, is that this is getting a little more attention on legacy and corporate media. On Wednesday, we talked about Gavin Newsom going after Trump publicly for his hands and going after Trump publicly for his cognition. That is a big deal that a sitting governor is now doing that and doing it publicly. That makes it easier for legacy and corporate media to talk about it. So where will we be in three months? In six months? I don't know. But just in the last six weeks, the very obvious deterioration of Donald Trump is unavoidably clear. Where do you believe we will be in six months? And is there anyone that could come out that we would say, okay, listen, examine Trump and just tell us the truth that Trump would actually allow to do it. I think the answer is no. If a panel of doctors said, we are going to do a group physical of Trump, we're going to release everything, we're going to get all the blood work, we're going to do all of it, I don't think there's any way the White House allows them within 100 miles of Donald Trump. Let me know what you think. When it was time for a new mattress, I didn't want to gamble on something generic. I had heard about Helix. I like that they customize the mattress based on how you sleep. I'm mostly a stomach sleeper, so I took the quiz and ended up with a model that felt tailored to me. I've had it for years. What I notice is I don't wake up with back stiffness. I don't wake up with shoulder pain. I don't toss and turn looking for a comfortable position. It's just better than my old mattress. It's more supportive, but it's still comfortable. Another thing I like about Helix is that there's no one size fits all approach. It's really tailored to you in terms of firmness as well. It's made a difference for me and, and I'm thrilled to be partnering with them. Go to helix sleep.com/pacman and you'll get 20% off site wide. The link is in the description. All right. I've been going back and forth about whether to even do this story, and I was about not to do the story. But I do find that this is a really important thing. It has to do with the existential threat facing Democrats. And I am seeing the writing on the wall that Democrats still don't get it. So I'm going to tell you this story. It's a personal story. Do with it what you will. And I know that I may be potentially burning some bridges by talking about this. One of the things that we learned during the 2024 election was that the Democratic Party doesn't really seem to get new media and independent media, and they continue to do the kind of stale thing of the Sunday shows that very few people watch and buttoned up interviews, trying to be as least controversial as possible, occasionally dropping in a swear word or whatever to try to be a little more provocative and relatable. And it's all pretty disingenuous. But In December of 2024, I was invited to the White House. Of course, Kamala Harris had lost the election by then. And I met with senior Biden communications officials and the president even came in to meet with us as well. And the topic really was the failures of 2024 by Democrats to understand independent media, to work with independent media. Podcasts foment an environment in which it's actually useful and sort of like creates a community where audiences get to know elected officials and blah, blah, blah. And I had high hopes that the corner was being turned. And in fact, in 2025, as you all know, we've had more Democratic elected officials on the show. This includes governors, this includes members of the House, this includes members of the Senate. One of the unfortunate things for Democrats, and I've been totally upfront with everybody about this, is that even when they appear on our shows, most of them really don't connect in a genuine way. They talk about fighting back with strongly worded letters and meeting voters where they are. And there's very little sense that they are up for the fight and understand how to work in this new media environment. There are exceptions. I mean, most recently we had Gavin Newsom on. I think he gets it. And part of it is, is Gavin Newsom himself. Part of it is his staff, which really gets it and understands how you generate interest and inspire people. Okay, so I had these periods of cautious optimism. They're not really doing it right, etc. Let me tell you what's happened over the last couple of weeks. I'm not going to name names here, but I do think it's important to tell you this story. There is an elected official, House or Senate, who we have been in touch with on the show off and on over the years. And that is an individual who has challengers in the forthcoming 2026 election. And this individual's challengers have been reaching out to me. Individual, this. The challengers for this elected official have been saying, david, fan of the show, I would like your endorsement, or at minimum, I would like to be on your show. What about maybe doing a debate, including the elected official that I'm running against? And so I want to kind of learn about what's going on in this race. I don't even know for sure that the elected is running for reelection. I assume that they are, but I don't know. So I reach out to the office of this elected official and I say, hey, just a reminder, David Pakman, you've done the show off and on over the years. We have a relationship. I am trying to get in touch to figure out what is going on for 2026. Are you running for reelection? Are you not? Are you up for doing a debate? Your challengers are asking me to appear, they're asking me for an endorsement, etc. I just want to touch base and figure out what's going on. I want to hear it from you before making any decisions about our coverage so that I ensure that our coverage is calibrated to Is this an open seat or is this a. An incumbent who's being challenged? Just want to touch base. I hear back from the office of this individual and they simply say, for any campaign questions, email info at a different website, which is clearly the campaign side, not the administrative, you know, congressional office of this person. Now, there's of course nothing wrong with saying we really only handle the legislative affairs for anything related to the forthcoming election. You have to be in touch with the campaign. There's nothing wrong with that. But shuffling me off to an info at email, which goes into a black hole. It's just where all of the crap goes. I know we will never, ever, ever hear back. And this is the fundamental problem, that sort of way of dealing with independent media is how all of us will end up going, screw this elected official. Let's endorse the challenger, let's fundraise for the challenger. Let. This is exactly the problem that we are talking about. And so I reached out to my contacts on the Hill and I said, listen, this is what happened. This is exactly what I thought we were trying to fix when we went and met with the Biden administration and met with people from the House and met with people from the Senate in D.C. and we're doing the same old thing. We're doing the same damn thing right now. So the point of this is, as I hear feedback from you and most of you say about most of the elected officials I have on David, these people are law. They don't get it. They don't understand what's going on. They're not understanding how to effectively communicate in this new environment. They're just. They're not getting it. They're going to get crushed. Well, maybe some of them deserve to get crushed, right? I mean, maybe this is going to lead to a turnover generationally or ideologically or whatever, because even after everything that happened in 2024, email info@ for any questions about the campaign. All right, have it your way, guys. So listen, I'm sure there are going to be opportunities to say more about this upcoming, but the takeaway for me is I don't know that Democrats are really set up at all, like, not even remotely for a successful 2026 midterm. It's a midterm that Democrats should do well, and it's a, it's a midterm that Democrats should be able to, at minimum, take back the House, maybe with a large margin. And the Senate's difficult, but maybe the Senate will be in play. But this is not looking good. This is not looking good. I've been getting a steady stream of emails and DMs and YouTube comments from people asking me to weigh in on a theory, or maybe we would call it a hypothesis that's starting to circulate. And the question is really simple. Is there already a quiet movement inside the Republican Party, maybe inside Trump's inner circle, certainly inside JD Vance's staff that is setting the stage for, for Vice President J.D. vance to become president if Donald Trump dies while in office. Now, I want to be clear about two things. This is speculative and also the definition of being vice president is being ready to become president if the president dies. So I know you might be saying, well, David, that's like the job of the vice president. What I mean is a little more about this. What I mean is in the context of real questions about Donald Trump's health and also a movement within the Republican Party that doesn't see Trump as a good steward of the party. And this sort of techno autocrat. Technocrat, Technocrat. The sort of technocratic movement, the Peter thiel types behind J.D. vance. Is there more of a proactive movement that is saying, J.D. hold on here. We don't think Trump's going to make it. We're going to set you up to take the Republican Party in a different direction. The reason so many people are bringing it up is because of the dots that we've been connecting lately. Trump obviously is an older guy, but there's more to it. His health is a growing topic of conversation. He's obese. He eats a terrible diet. He doesn't exercise. His ankles are extraordinarily swollen. Both hands are bruised. He seems to struggle to walk in a straight line. His eyes are regularly swollen, red and tearing up. He's up all night sometimes seemingly dissembling and disoriented, slurred speeches, meandering thoughts. And the fact that being president for most presidents, people who are actually doing the job, it's an extraordinarily stressful thing. And so on paper, the answer obviously is, well, the reason you have a vice president is in such a scenario where the president were to pass away in office, J.D. vance is ready. That's how the line of succession works. But what's interesting and what people have been writing to me about is how J.D. vance may be deliberately positioning himself since the inauguration. J.D. vance is visible, but he's not too visible. He shows up for big policy announcements and for major fundraisers, and he's in the Oval Office sitting there when Trump is meeting with world leaders. But he's not glued to Trump's hip. He's not jumping in to defend every bizarre truth social post. He defends some of them, but not all of them. And so the idea that many of you had, that you've written to me about is that Donald Trump may be playing a little bit of a different game here, a game where Vance stays close enough to benefit from Trump's base, but far enough that if Trump goes down, he can plausibly say, I'm my own man. We are going to go in a different direction. Now. Behind the scenes, Vance is sort of building something real. He's doing high profile stuff of his own, committee appearances, talking about foreign policy. And so you get the sense that Vance wants to get all the benefit he can from being around Trump, but he wants to be his own man, in a sense. And those, to me, are the moves of someone who's thinking of their own presidency. Maybe that means 2028, but maybe it means sooner. Now, we've seen versions of this before. When Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke, his wife Edith was quietly running the show for a while, and Cabinet members kind of tiptoed around the truth. When FDR died in 1945, Harry Truman was suddenly sworn in and he inherited World War II. He inherited a lot of important elements at that point in time. When JFK was assassinated in 1963, LBJ was ready within hours to step in. And the idea was stability, reliable leadership in the middle of a national trauma. In all of these cases, there was contingency planning. Now, some of it was formal, some of it was whispered. In modern politics, it doesn't have to be a secret plot. Sometimes it's just people around the leader making sure there's a path forward if the unthinkable should happen. So could all of this be nothing? Of course, Trump might serve out his term. Hell, he's talking about maybe running again in 2028. Who knows? Maybe JD Vance kind of fades back into Ohio politics. But when viewers write in and ask me if the Republican Party is already looking beyond Trump, the signs are sort of there. And there seems to be, at least plausibly, a careful distancing happening with JD Vance, the brand separation. And if the moment comes, they're going to tell us it's a tragedy. They're going to tell us it's a shock. They're going to tell us it's a moment they never could have imagined. But if you've been paying attention, you will probably notice that Vance steps in and starts to go in a different direction that becomes his own Republican Party. Every indication is that people like Peter Thiel and others behind Vance and have this in mind. And so is it conspiratorial thinking? No, it's not conspiratorial because that's what VP's do. They are there as a contingency plan if something should happen to the President. But is there something extra where they are really thinking about it in the context of Trump's age and health? There probably seems to be. I want to hear from you about it info@david pakman.com A pending Supreme Court case could strip our Fourth Amendment rights and allow immigration agents to come into our homes for any reason. No probable cause needed. All while Republicans try to twist things so that you think this is all great for America. This should be the biggest story in the US Right now, but it's almost impossible to keep up with the millions of moves that Trump is making every single day. That's why Ground News exists. Ground News is an app and website that exposes the blind spots and spin the before it takes control of our opinions. Ground News is the smarter, more reliable way to stay informed when MAGA is banking on us getting distracted. I'm partnering up with Ground News to give you 40% off the same vantage plan that I use, so you'll pay only five bucks a month for all of their premium features. Just go to Ground News slash Pacman or use the code Pacman in the app. When you sign up, the link is in the description or scan the QR code. All right, let's get into Friday feedback for the week. You can always email me if anything is on your mind, hopefully relevant to the show. Like I don't know anything about cats for example. So like don't write to me with cat questions. But anything relevant to the show you can email info@david pakman.com we will sometimes highlight comments on YouTube or Spotify comments Tic Tac who? Who knows? We start today with Spotify and this is something Spotify related and we've been hearing from a lot of people but I'll just highlight a couple of comments. Juan said, we finally have the video version on Spotify. And Chris said, yay, video version. Thanks. So, yes, we have finally come into the 21st century, I guess, or something. The video version of the show is now on Spotify. And there are. You might be saying to yourself, why didn't we do that sooner? It's not all pros when it comes to the video version on Spotify. And there's a bunch of technical stuff that goes on behind the scenes, including how views versus IAB compliant podcast downloads are calculated. I mean, it's. If you want to. If I wanted to really bomb the show, I would turn it into a show about podcast statistics. But needless to say, the video version of the show is now available on Spotify and you can seamlessly go from watching to listening. So that's a cool thing and I think overall people are liking it. All right. Now, more substantively, Ron Santucci wrote on Facebook about how our elections are organized. Popular vote, electoral college, etc. Ron writes, I have an idea. Whatever percentage of the popular vote a presidential candidate receives in each state equals the percentage of electoral votes that candidates get. That method would work both ways and would reflect the popular vote also to which Patrick Baker responds, or just add up all the popular votes. So Ron's thinking, which is a good first step. Ron is thinking of a way for the electoral vote to more closely approximate the popular vote. But here's the problem with this idea. Imagine a state that has four electoral votes. There is only a few combinations of how you can divvy up those votes. If you have four votes, one candidate gets four or the other candidate gets four. Or you divide them 1, 3. 2. 2 or 3. 1. The problem with this idea is imagine a scenario where the popular vote is something like 57 to 43. The options are you either give the candidate that won 57 50% of the electoral votes by giving them 2, or 75% of the electoral votes by giving Them 3. That's not really great. And so this is why I favor a national popular vote. I think Patrick is completely correct. It's not only more accurate, it's simpler and it will work far better. If there's something I'm missing about the strategy or the nuances of this, let me know. But with the national popular vote, it's simply, these are the results. 51.76% of the country voted for one candidate. Well, then they win. They got more than half the vote. That's it. All right. Michael McKinnon wrote on Facebook, why were their kids working the spa in the first place. Let me explain what this is about. Donald Trump has gone back and forth and changed his explanations as to why he and Jeffrey Epstein had a falling out. One of the latest, the latest version of this from Trump was Epstein stole an employee out from under me, an underage employee from my spa. And the question that Michael is asking is a good one and it is a reasonable one. The question is, why are there underage girls working at a spa in the first place? And the answer is, I think that this is a lot more common than people believe. Let's put a 17 year old doing reception. They're legally allowed to work. Obviously it wouldn't be legal for them to be engaged in what could be tantamount to prostitution. That's a different, different story. But I don't think it's that rare. I mean, listen, I think the place where I get my haircut, the receptionist is someone's kid who's 16 or 17 and is working after school hours. So I don't think that's as rare as people think. Obviously, girl end up out in a different. Working with Epstein and allegedly being victimized. That seems to be the question. All right, questions about the books behind me at the primary studio. Has David been hiding a stack of Bionicle books in plain sight the whole time yet? There are, there are these books that are stacked vertically over my right shoulder at the, at the main studio where I am not today. And they are very short introductions. I've gotten a ton of emails and questions about this. They are not Bionicle. I actually, I have to admit I'm not familiar with Bionicle, but they are very short introductions and as different books are added and moved, those will move around. And I think that that's something exciting to look forward to. Okay, let's go now over to Reddit. Lulu McGoo says the media needs to confront Trump about the Epstein survivors. I've been hearing similar ideas from, from others of you. And what Lulu Magoo says is, dude, the media needs to pin DJT down him. The press secretary, Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche, they need to be asked over and over if they have talked to the victims about what they think about Maxwell's special treatment. I'm really disturbed that the media doesn't think about confronting their lack of empathy or care for them and, and they need to be called out for it. There's two sides to this and this is where empathy meets reality. On the one hand, it's absolutely a fair observation, an accurate observation that the victims and the fact that they were victimized and what that did to them and their families. It's essentially missing from the discussion that is centered around is Trump in the Epstein files and is he considering giving G. Lane Maxwell a pardon? It's completely missing from that. And that is, in a sense, insensitive. The other side to it is that as a political story that has the potential to derail, I guess, Donald Trump's presidency or destroy his legacy or whatever. It's, it's. So this is a crass thing to say, and I don't mean to be insensitive when I say really is irrelevant in the sense of we know there were victims and the question is, was Trump a perpetrator? Was Trump participating in some kind of COVID up? So empathy for the victims, while admittedly missing from the, from the national narrative, is not something that's going to get attention because it does not relate to Trump's legacy, Trump's culpability, etc. It's just the reality. It's just the reality. Over on Spotify, I am asked about civil war. David, do you now believe that we are closer to a civil war as everything that is currently happening seems like the prequel? So let me give you some background as to why I'm being asked the question in this way. I've previously said that the fearmongering about civil war has been overblown. And there's an important distinction to make here, which is that a lot of the people predicting civil war for the last six, eight, ten years, they've been predicting civil war on the basis that it is going to be the left that starts a civil war or revolts or something like that. But I think the, the context in which I think about this today is more the division where we find ourselves, not sort of about democracy itself, but about what is going to happen as a result of the authoritarian escalations of Trump. And so I'm going to come back to that. Do I think we are closer to a civil war today than at any point that I've been doing the show? Yes, I do. But do I think that that's the case because the left wants a civil war or no. The reason I believe we are closer to a civil war than ever before is because we are seeing a president do the sorts of things that sometimes cause civil wars. For the first time since I've been doing the show, the deployment of the military for domestic law enforcement, really going forward with a police state, talking about maybe I'll run again in 2028, it's not about Democrats, Republicans fomenting civil war and rhetoric. It's about Trump is objectively doing the sorts of things that can be catalysts for civil war. I don't say that to say I think civil war is imminent, but I certainly do think that we are closer to civil war than at any time that I've been doing this show, which, by the way, just hit 20 years. I don't know if it was earlier. We're like right around with the new baby. I totally lost track. But the show has been around about 20 years, which is crazy because it means I started the show when I was 6 years old. Hard to believe Catch Lobo said on Twitter your name is misspelled David Pack Woman fixed two things here. Number one, many people ask me, david, why don't you engage in the comments on Twitter anymore? This is why no matter what I post to Twitter, a third of the replies are like porn bots, and then almost two thirds of the replies are just crap like this. I'm just not going to wade through all of that. I'm sorry, I'm too busy. I'm not going to do it. But one of the things that hasn't changed in the 20 years doing the show is that I get a lot of this homophobic type stuff. David Pak, woman you used to be David. You only care about gay rights because you're gay or other words were used for. I'm gay. Hard to imagine. I could just think that gay people should be able to get married, right? Hard to imagine. It seems as though this sort of inherent homophobia is not something that is going away anytime soon. We've got legal gay marriage. So many things have changed in the time I've been doing the show, and yet I still get this sort of comment. All right, weighing in on the Trump health situation, there were hundreds of messages like this I could have selected, but I'm selecting one. Tom Prickett wrote on YouTube, There is no way Trump makes it to the end of this term like never before. Listen, Trump's been an old guy for a while. Trump's been obese for a long time. Trump's eaten a terrible diet for a long time. Trump's been sedentary for a long time. There has never been a period in the history of Trump's political career that I have received so many emails from people saying this guy is not going to survive much longer, and I am opting not to really weigh in on that. It could sort of be a little crass to do so. I will just tell you there are such things as actuarial tables that predict how long people will live based on symptoms, based on level of physical activity, based on height and weight, based on different things. And Donald Trump has significant risk factors. Let me put it there and avoid going further. Email me anytime info@david pakman.com look forward to hearing from you. We'll see you on the bonus show.