← The David Pakman Show
The David Pakman Show
8/4/25: Trump fires the messenger as economy gets shaky
01:22:23
-- On the Show: -- Donald Trump lashes out with angry social media posts as economic indicators show signs of decline -- Donald Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics head Erika McEntarfer after a devastating jobs report exposed major economic...
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- [00:08]
David Pakman
You know, you can really only bluff for so long and eventually the economy is going to call your hand. And the July jobs report has just detonated whatever was left of Donald Trump's economic talking points. Only 73,000 jobs were added last month. And even worse, previous months were quietly revised downwards. 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than what was previously reported. And the original reports weren't even very good. So this is a very big problem for President Donald Trump. And it turns out that the so called booming economy that they said existed was a lie. It was propped up by bad data. And it was propped up, quite frankly, by sort of blind hope that a tariff scheme that economists knew wouldn't make sense would somehow not hurt the economy. But the bottom is now falling out. Donald Trump is completely losing it. Went on truth social, screaming about rigged numbers, blaming everybody but himself, ultimately firing the person in charge of those numbers. We'll get to that in a moment. But the numbers don't care. The market reacted after news of this. The dow down nearly 600 points. S&P down 1.6%. Nasdaq down more than 2%. And regular people, meaning just voters, are living the consequences of what's going on. You look at polling, new poll shows 6 in 10Americans blame Trump for the continued high cost of living. He said he would bring it down. It's gone up, just not super fast, but it's gone up. 63% specifically believe that Donald Trump's economic actions have made grocery prices higher. And they have. That's accurate. And half say I would not be able to afford an unexpected $500 bill. I would need to go into debt, I would need to borrow, I would need to put it on a credit card and wouldn't be able to pay it all in full immediately. That's not in the distant future somewhere. That is right now. And Trump's solution is let's do tariffs, let's blame other people. And this week, in these days, Donald Trump signed more tariffs out, I guess in some imports now taxed at 50%. We'll see if he relents. Basic goods are going to get more expensive. And whatever you think about, you know, you can separate out. Oh, I have an opinion about what kids should be taught in school. Okay. I have an opinion about gay marriage. Okay. No matter what your opinion is about those issues on an objective basis, what Trump is doing is not a path to economic freedom and it's not a path for releasing the United States from the bondage of other countries. Trade relationships with us. This is just the fast track. It's the don't, don't pass, go, do not collect $200 path to stagflation, to prices going up, jobs falling, and it is very difficult to get out of that. Now, here's the kicker. Jay Powell, the Federal Reserve chair that Donald Trump's been bashing. He says Trump can't be trusted when it comes to a lot of these tariff decisions. Implicitly by saying we are going to see inflation up because of the tariffs. Now Trump says it's Powell who can't be trusted. Trump's desperate for Powell to cut interest rates. We'll get back to that. But Trump is saying to Powell, even though the economy is awesome, do this thing we normally only do when the economy is struggling. So that doesn't make sense. And we're going to get back to that a little bit later. The fantasy Trump gave us and sold to some magazine about we're going to bring back manufacturing jobs. That's not happening. The sector lost 11,000 jobs last month. We are seeing a decline in manufacturing jobs. Trump's just not listening. And the cracks are showing. We're seeing them in the numbers. We, we're seeing them in the markets. And people's lives are the biggest proof that what Donald Trump promised is not coming to fruition. So there is a mismanagement element to this, but there is also a delusional element to this. And we are starting to see this devolve in real time. Now. Today we're going to look at Trump firing the BLS commissioner. Republicans even saying firing the BLS commissioner is too far, that that has just gone too far. We can't, we can't do that. And the continued meltdown that is taking place in Trump world. So make sure that you are subscribed to the YouTube channel, YouTube.com/the David Pakman Show. We are going to have deep economic coverage today and this week. All right, this is not a parody. Donald Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because the jobs report made Trump look bad. The President of the United States, the infinite crybaby toddler, didn't like the jobs numbers. They weren't good. That's the truth. So what does he do? He drops the hammer on the messenger. The July jobs report, as I told you, came in brutal. 73,000 jobs added. The expectation was 110,000. That's about a 33% job shortfall from expectations the two previous months revised down by 258,000 jobs. So what does Trump do. He goes on truth Social. He says the data is fake, that the highly respected BLS commissioner is a Biden political appointee, and he fires her on the spot. No warning, no evidence, just rage. Now, Erica McIntarfer, career economist, commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. She served under multiple administrations. She didn't manipulate anything. She reported the jobs numbers. But Trump doesn't want the truth. Trump wants loyalty. And this is what loyalty looks like in a dictatorship. Give me the jobs numbers, the that make me look good even if they're not true. This was, by the way, not a new strategy for Trump during COVID He said, slow down the testing, thinking we have too many cases. If we don't test, we won't have cases. It's the if I don't take a pregnancy test, I'm not pregnant sort of approach. There's a Simpsons episode that I remember vaguely about a comet is going to hit Earth and the comet ends up missing Earth. And after this happens, you know, characters are chanting, let's burn down the observatory so that this never happens again. That's what's happening right here. State propaganda, not policy. And the economy is objectively slowing down. We see it in the data. The three month job growth average is now 35,000 jobs. That's recession territory. We need to understand. I told you earlier, Nasdaq down more than 2%. Treasury yields falling, confidence collapsing. And what Trump is focused on isn't, hmm, maybe these tariff ideas aren't so good. Hmm, maybe I need to do more about the inflation. I promise to get back under control. No, what he does is purge the people who report the facts. A classic of strongman authoritarianism. Now, meanwhile, even Jay Powell, the same Fed chairman that Trump's been saying, he's always too late, he needs to be put out to pasture. This is what Jay Powell has been warning about. Jay Powell, who has been ignored by Trump in his warnings, said, this is exactly what's going to happen. You will see continued inflation, you will see job growth slow down, and that's not going to be good for the economy. He said the tariffs are inflationary. He said it's not a good idea for the economy. Trump said he's a liar. But the data proves that Jerome Powell was right. So instead of admitting failure, Trump's doing what every strong man does. You blame. You make stuff up. You purge anybody that's inconvenient and then you just repeat the entire thing. And I hate to admit, it's sort of working. His followers are eating it up. Fox News has started to spin it. Newsmax has been spinning it. I'll show you some clips a little later. Inside the Republican Party, no one with real ability to convince Trump of anything. And can anybody convince Trump of anything? I don't know. Nobody's able to step in and say, hold on a second, let's do a little bit of a rethink here. So economic mismanagement at its core. And if you look at history, this is how democracies rot from the inside. When truth becomes optional. And protecting the king, even if he's an orange king, if protecting the king becomes the most important thing. What you see when you get bad jobs, numbers isn't a rethink of the economic strategy. It's fire the messenger. This can't possibly work. But there are people who are saying, I don't know if I can defend this. And that's an important aspect to this as well. Well, the walls are closing in and Donald Trump is letting G. Lane Maxwell out of the prison she was in, sending her to a better facility. This does not happen without involvement and authorization from high up. Let me explain to you what's going on. Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker, longtime associate of Jeffrey Epstein, key to some of the darkest secrets in American politics right now, has been transferred from a secure federal prison in Florida to a minimum security camp in Texas. It happened right after a two day private meeting with one of Trump's top Justice Department officials, Todd Blanche. Blanche used to be Trump's personal lawyer. Now he's Deputy ag. You don't need a conspiracy theory when the facts take tell you what's going on. The Bureau of Prisons has rules. One of those rules is sex offenders aren't supposed to go to minimum security facilities. But G. Lane Maxwell is now living in what is kind of like a glorified dorm room. It's the kind of place white collar criminals dream of. Red roof buildings and grassy yards and limited fencing. And the timing is just perfect for her. Her relocation comes days after the DOJ confirmed Trump's own name appears in the Epstein files. We learned that Trump had been briefed on that. That is not proof of guilt, but it is proof of fear for Donald Trump. This is the Trump who told his followers, I'm going to expose the pedophiles. We're going to get these child sex traffickers. This is the Save the Children movement that was obsessed with Trump. But now, any time Epstein's name is brought up, Trump lashes out and he goes, why are you talking about that? Don't talk about Epstein, don't talk about Obama. Instead, Trump's implicated Todd, Blanche goes to talk to her and next thing you know, G. Lane gets a cushy downgrade. Downgrade in the sense of lower security. And the victims, you know, they found out the same way we did from the press and they weren't told by the way Ghislaine is going now, they, they find out in the, in the news media that after meeting with Trump's deputy AG she's going to a cushier facility. So there is no ambiguity here about what's going on. Trump's DOJ meets with her. She reportedly talks about 100 different people. We don't know who are they? Victims, coconspirators, we just don't know. And then next thing you know, she's moving on down to a lower security cushier facility. What we do know is she wants a deal of some kind. Clemency is being talked about. Trump talks about I have the right to pardon her, but I know nothing about it. But the critical and incredible part of this is that the federal prison system doesn't just accidentally put sex offenders in minimum security camps. You need paperwork, you need overrides, you need signoffs. Prison consultants have spoken out recently and said, listen, our job is place the people we work with in better prisons. We have never seen this happen with a sex offender. Technically, G. Lane Maxwell wasn't even eligible for this transfer. Meaning she needed a waiver, meaning someone signed a waiver, maybe multiple. Someones made conscious decisions. Let's bend the rules. The obvious question is why? And more importantly, for whom? For whose benefit? So this is not prison reform. She doesn't really need to be in the floor. This is protection and it's protection of Donald Trump. The closer the Epstein files get to Trump, the better life gets for G. Lane Maxwell. So when people start doing the both sides thing, remember there is, we were told Trump would be the hardest hardcore guy against these child sex trafficking rings. And transparency we're going to get. There's one side letting a convicted sex trafficker cut some kind of a deal in secret and end up two days later in a lower security prison. And what's forthcoming, we don't even know. It might be clemency, it might be a pardon. We know Trump's name is in the Epstein files. We don't know as what is he a contact of Epstein client. What is he the DOJ attempts to bury? Further disclosures. G. Lane gets a private meeting and suddenly she's floating away From Florida over to minimum security in Texas, victims get no answers. And you can say the timing is a coincidence, but who could possibly believe that? Even 50% of Republicans believe that Trump is covering up the truth about Epstein. So we're going to follow it very closely. There were some legal analyses that it would be better for Maxwell to get clemency rather than a pardon. And there are some technical reasons regarding pleading the Fifth and other things that's beyond the scope of this discussion. But it is very clear there is a lot of action here. We know Trump's in the files. Reporting is that Trump's terrified and the movement of Maxwell does not give me confidence that we are going to see justice done here. Most likely scenario. I still believe the most likely scenario is G. Lane does her big tell all. But lo and behold, Trump's not a player. And then she gets rewarded with clemency or with a pardon or some kind of deal. That's my prediction. Let me know what you think. Info@david pakman.com all right. Well, this is what it looks like when the cracks start to show. Trump fired the head of the bureau and Labor Statistics because he didn't like the jobs numbers. And now there are even Republican senators who are saying this has gone too far, this is enough. I'm talking about Senator Thom Tillis, who's not buying it. I'm talking about Senator Cynthia Lummis, who is not buying it. These are nominally at least Trump allies. They've defended him through indictments and impeachments and authoritarian power grabs. But this blatant manipulation of economic data, they don't seem pleased with it. Take a look. It was just fired because the president.
- [16:11]
Bernie Sanders
Or whoever decided to fire the director just did it because they didn't like the numbers. They had to grow up. The president is firing the statistician because he doesn't like the numbers, but they are accurate. Then that's a problem. It is the sign of an authoritarian.
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David Pakman
Type that when you get information you.
- [16:33]
Bernie Sanders
Don'T like, rather than deal with the issue, you fire the people who gave.
- [16:37]
David Pakman
You the bad news. So there is Bernie putting a fine point on it after we heard from Tillis and Lummis. So maybe a line's been crossed here. I mean, even many Republicans seem to know that when you start deliberately cooking the numbers, the system breaks. You can't run a country off of truth, social posts and propaganda ministers. And if the public stops trusting the official numbers, markets will tank, stability will collapse, and reelection chances for Donald Trump's Republican friends also probably go with it. And Trump, I think, knows this to a degree, which is why he's panicking. He's got a fake booming economy. But that narrative has been nuked by the jobs numbers. And by the way, Trump's begging Jerome Powell to do something with rates that you normally only do if the economy is in really bad shape. That is not leadership, that is dictatorship energy. And now, for once, his own party is saying it out loud. Trump screwed himself, and this time, he might have screwed his defenders along with him. Now, it remains to be seen where this all lands. But what do we know? We know that Republicans have tolerated a lot of. They tolerated Trump's crimes, they tolerated humiliations, they've tolerated policy flip flops. Remember, Trump was going to do ivf. He was going to be the fertility president and make insurance companies cover IVF at no charge. They're not doing it. Ok, so lie after lie. They've dealt with blatant corruption because they believed Trump is our ticket to something. The elected officials believe Trump was their ticket to power. The voters believed that Trump had accurately scapegoated other people and said, they're the problem and I'm going to deal with it. But you fire a statistician for telling the truth. That's beyond authoritarian. That's just instability. And instability scares economies a lot more than bad jobs numbers to a degree. Imagine for a second if Biden had fired a data official when we had revised March 2021 numbers. I mean, just this is not a hypothetical. We had. Biden was President March 2021, we got jobs numbers. They were later Revised down by 146,000 jobs. Imagine if Biden had fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics at that point in time, it would be 24. 7 Fox News special coverage, constant investigations, and was this even illegal firing? And they'd be drafting impeachment articles, 25th Amendment, this, that, the other thing, Trump does it. And they go, yeah, no, the numbers don't really make sense, except just a couple of Republican senators that have the testicular fortitude, the ovarian fortitude, to say, no, this is not the right direction. Bernie really gets it right, which is. It's another trait of authoritarianism. These are where, if you look at the list, and I know that so many people don't want to acknowledge it, and I know that some people, even on our side, don't want to acknowledge it because it's terrifying. I get that. But if you go back to my interviews with Ruth Ben guy, expert on 20th century authoritarianism, you see that all the boxes are being checked. You don't like something that's going on in the country? Well, just get of the get rid of the person who's giving out the data and then that's how you solve it. So there's a couple of Republicans that seem to remember what integrity is. Tillis isn't even running for reelection. So as usual, we tend to get honesty from these people when they have no races left to run. But this is going in a direction that is only bad for the economy. And if you think the stock market goes down when there's a bad jobs report, what happens when jobs reports can no longer be believed? It's not good for the economy, that I can assure you. 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 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. People in my audience know I am a bit of a pastry connoisseur. Our sponsor Wild Grain is the first bake from Frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, pastries and pastas. Wild Grains boxes are customizable depending on what you like and prefer. They've got their classic variety box. They've launched the new gluten free box. They have a plant based box that's 100% vegan and it just takes the hassle out of business baking because all items bake from frozen in 25 minutes or less. Nothing to clean up. My experience has been awesome. I love the croissants. I was having people over last week half an hour before preheat and throw them in the oven and people love it. Definitely the croissants are my favorite. The quality and the freshness of the items is extraordinary. And. And it is just so convenient. Go to wildgrain.com/pacman to start your subscription and get $30 off your first box, plus free croissants in every box every month. The link is in the description. Well, folks, the wrestling crowd really does not seem to like Donald Trump. You might have seen that last week, Donald Trump hosted various athletes and wrestlers at the White House. And when video of that played during WWE's Summer Slam, I have to admit, I'm not a wrestling guy myself. I believe that this is Summer Slam is what it says. There. They played video of Trump shaking hands with. I'm told this is Triple H. There was some brutal, brutal, brutal booing. This is. This is not necessarily a crowd. Here's the thing. I don't want to assume that the UFC crowd and the WWE crowd are the same. It seems pretty clear that they're different. I don't want to step on anybody's toes. I don't know that I would have guessed the WWE crowd would hate Trump. But when Trump popped up on the screen, this did not go well. This was not like a couple of boos from the nosebleeds. This. This was like a wall of booing unified in instinctive rejection of the orange guy. And it's interesting insofar as there's a lot of entertainment first, alpha male posturing in maga. MAGA seeks to make politics entertaining and to bring people in with that rather than good policy ideas. And it's all about posturing. As macho and all of this stuff, you would think that that might be a fit for wwe, but seemingly not. Seemingly not. And so, listen, that is not a political poll. It's a stadium full of people they are paying money to cheer for. You know, I don't think we can call WWE a bloodsport. It is staged. I hate to remind people, but you boo the guy who called himself or considered himself the ultimate showman, and it wasn't even a live appearance. Trump didn't come out with entrance music. There was no promo. It was this. He wasn't in the arena. It was just a video clip, and it just set off raw disgust against him. The most heavily staged event in the world, arguably wrestling gave us an unscripted moment, and we got one of the most honest and genuine things that you could imagine getting out of it. No spin, no press release. Just, here's Trump and just booing. Funny note, Trump was once a WWE hall of Famer, and he did one of these staged. I guess it's a match, I don't know, with Vince McMahon. And he was kind of part of the fabric. So even if he wasn't, he wasn't political at the time, but he was certainly liked as an entertainer. And now he's just getting booed like a villain that has overstayed his welcome. So I find these viral moments funny because there is a sign that something deeper may be happening or shifting. And when the theater of politics crashes into the theater of wrestling and the crowd turns on you and they just go, we don't want anything to do with this guy. There's an, I don't want to call it an underworld necessarily, but in all of these different enclaves within maga, we're seeing the push pull with Epstein. You know, we heard from Republican senators who are like, yeah, the firing of the BLS commission or that's too far. Wrestling fans in all of these enclaves, you're seeing rifts and you're seeing problems. And the question is, are they going to be reflected in voting? And the saddest thing about all of this, and I'm going to talk about this in my segment about what Democrats are doing wrong and in a lot of other places, one of the saddest things is you can convince people one way or the other, you can see a change of opinion. But 40 to 50% of the country doesn't even vote. So you have to ask yourself in that scenario what we need in addition to just having people say, boo Trump, I don't like the guy, is ok, yeah, but how many of you plan to actually vote? Statistically, it's about one out of two. That is not a way to win elections. That we've learned. And we're going to have to talk about the turnout piece as well. Did you see what Donald Trump said about his 27 year old press secretary, Caroline Levitt? Gushing, seemingly extraordinarily titillated by her looks? You know, you would think that by now, age 79, after all two impeachments, indictments, liability for sexual assault, you'd think Trump would have figured out how to verbally keep it in his pants. But here we are. And the sitting President of the United States went on national TV, Newsmax, but still technically national TV, and got weird again, this time about his 27 year old press secretary. Listen to this.
- [28:07]
Bernie Sanders
Answer this.
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David Pakman
I didn't realize she'd be in the room, but she's on my list. Caroline Levitt.
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Bernie Sanders
She'S become a star. It's that face, it's that brain. It's Those lips, the way they move. They move like she's a machine gun. Is she in the room? She's in the room. She's a star. And she's great. She's a great person, actually. But she, She's. I don't think anybody has ever had a better press secretary than Caroline. She's been amazing, Mr. President.
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David Pakman
Totally normal way to talk about one of your employees, right? These are the same people saying workers don't really need protection. And this is how Donald Trump is talking about his press secretary, who is 52 years younger than him. This isn't. This isn't just cringe. This is, you know, we're sort of laughing because it's so cartoonish. This is Power Dynamics 101. This is the President of the United States fawning over the face and lips and a brain of a subordinate on national television like it's a pageant rather than a presidency, which is, after all, how Donald Trump seems to see things. And, you know, he mentions, oh, she's a great press secretary too, sure, but maybe keep the assessment to job performance now, not the way her lips move like a machine gun. Whatever. Whatever that means. So what I think is. Is really going on here is that this answer, it's 15 seconds of Trump talking. Right. This answer really encapsulates a lot of important primary characteristics of Trump. Trump primarily sees women through their looks and sexuality. Primarily. Not exclusively, but primarily. So you see that Trump cares about loyalty and image much more than substance and expertise. And so Trump sort of weaponizes charisma and youth through Caroline Levitt, youngest press secretary in American history. And instead of respecting the milestone, he turns her into a spectacle. She becomes like an accessory in the cult of Donald Trump. And after all, Trump's the guy who said about his own daughter, Ivanka, if Ivanka weren't my daughter, perhaps I'd be dating her. And he talked about her body on the Howard Stern Show. So this is not a one off. This really is a pattern. And the pattern is that women close to Trump don't stay out of the spotlight. They really become part of the show. And this is a guy who partied with Jeffrey Epstein as, of course, we know, a man accused by more than two dozen women of various flavors of sexual misconduct. A guy who we believe has a name that appears frequently in the Epstein files. And so he should be especially careful about fixating on the lips of a woman 52 years older than him, 52 years younger than him. But Trump doesn't do shame. He doesn't do Boundaries, and he doesn't care. And with the Epstein files back in the headlines, legal scrutiny is sort of creeping closer. And Trump's making these kinds of remarks, it's more than tone deaf. It's potentially incriminating. And it's not harmless, not when the show includes the most powerful office in the world. And so we've seen time and time again how Trump choosing image over substance leads to chaos, it leads to turnover, it leads to scandals, and it also has led to lawsuits over sexual misconduct. Now, to be fair, Caroline Levitt is not a wide eyed, naive Internet. She really is a hardened MAGA communications pro. She's a culture warrior in the most extreme sense of it, calling for Trump to get a Nobel Peace Prize, you know, totally with a serious expression supported referring to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. So she is not a naive bystander here. But that doesn't include or doesn't excuse rather a Trump treating her like a character in like a 1950s ad for mouthwash or, you know, talking about her the way in the 50s they talked about, quote, nervous women. But this is the president we have. He's got the nuclear codes and he can't talk about his own press secretary without sounding like a guy catcalling the drinks girl from a golf cart. This is the regime where professional women are often props for Trump. Part of the political theater that he builds up. And the guy at the top is just, you know, thinks that those lips in that face is a compliment worth airing to millions of people. The MAGA people don't care about this. For everybody who's not part of the cult, it's, you know, confirmation that Trump is the guy we have come to believe him to be. Well, Caroline Levitt did it. She has given up whatever last shreds of personal dignity she had, and she has now said Donald Trump should be getting the Nobel Peace Prize. She demanded that he get the prize. This is the same prize that has been given to people who ended wars, who brokered peace deals, who fought for global human rights. And who does Caroline Levitt think deserves that prize? Donald Trump, the guy indicted four times convicted on 34 felonies, escalating military tensions in so many different parts of the world. But he bombed Iran. And Trump said, I've made peace by bombing Iran. Give me the Nobel Peace Prize. Now, it's not lost on us, of course, that Trump seems enamored with Caroline Levitt. Over the weekend, when asked about are saying, oh, those lips, that face. And here is Caroline Levitt. This is how she earned it. She's remaining loyal. The President has now ended conflicts between.
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Bernie Sanders
Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda.
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David Pakman
And the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo and Egypt and Ethiopia. This means President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office. It's well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. There you go. I mean, just don't even go through the normal process. Just give it to Trump now. For people who are sort of historians of the Nobel Peace Prize, it has always carried symbolic weight. When Teddy Roosevelt Got it in 1906, he had negotiated peace in the Russo, I guess you say Russo. Japanese war, the war between Russia and Japan. When Martin Luther King Jr. Got it in 1964, he advanced racial justice through nonviolence. Nonviolence. When Obama got it in 2009, Obama, yeah, even that was controversial, but at least it was based on an explicit rejection of torture, on diplomacy with Iran, on disarmament proposals. Still controversial. We've now got Caroline Levitt saying, the guy who threatened to bomb the shit out of countries, who praised war crimes, who did bomb Iran, he deserves the same award. Now it is a total clown show dressed up as diplomacy and self aggrandizement. And it's part of a larger pattern, which is the authoritarian glorification of one man, the cult like glorification. When you look at autocratic regimes, the cult of personality is fed by these absurd gestures. Let me march in a completely whacked out, exaggerated way to show how devoted I am to the leader. Let's say that the leader got 100% of the vote, as I think Saddam Hussein previously did. Or let's pretend that Kim Jong Un invented all of these things that he didn't really invent. These obviously ridiculous declarations are about control and they're about showing that you are part of the team. You're showing your loyalty. And it's almost better if it's not believable. It shows just how devoted you are. I'm so devoted, I'm willing to say things that are obviously untrue. Caroline Levitt is not just trying to flatter Donald Trump. This is an enforcement of the new normal. We do not care about the truth. History is what we say it is. Trump is not just a man, he is a legend. He's a myth. And if you laugh it off and you go, these people can't possibly be for real, you're missing the point because it might start as a joke, you know, a demand for the Peace Prize for a warmonger, but it ends in real damage because it starts to undermine international norms, and it redefines merit as just loyalty. It rewards propaganda. And we've talked, tragically, you know, we've talked about how democracies sort of evaporate. We've interviewed Ruth Ben Ghiat, who's an expert on this issue. It's rarely with a bang. It's. You start giving absurd stuff, standing ovations.
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Bernie Sanders
You.
- [37:31]
David Pakman
You start giving prizes to absurd stuff. And so when Trump's own face goes, I don't even know that I would have said that out loud, you start to see other people believe it, and you go, man, they've. They've really done it. That's actually one of the classics, which is, the cult leader starts going, I don't even know that I would have said that, but I'll accept it. It's. If that's what the followers are willing to say, say the con has taken on a life of its own. The only thing that would make this worse. And I really hope it doesn't happen. I really hope it doesn't happen. If they give him the Peace Prize, oh, boy, that will be yet another layer of insanity. But I. I do think, you know, we talk about institutions, and are they robust? Are they not? Can we count on them? I would be surprised. Even I know it's 20, 25. I would be surprised if they give him the Peace Prize. What do you think? Let me know info@david pakman.com or leave a comment. Do you think the Nobel committee would give this guy a Peace Prize? I'm leaning no. Did you know that 80% of New Year's resolutions fail by February? Lumen is something you can do for your health that's easy to stick to. Our sponsor, Lumen, is the world's first handheld metabolic coach with a single breath first thing in the morning. Lumen measures your metabolism. It tells you, are you burning fat or are you burning carbs? And it'll give you tailored guidance for nutrition, workouts, sleep, and stress management. No more cookie cutter. One size fits all nutrition plans. Lumen lets you know what is happening in your body in real time and will build a personalized health plan based on that data. Lumen gives you daily macro recommendations based on what's happening with your metabolism so you can really fuel your body with what's best. Right before a workout, breathe into Lumen and it'll tell you if you're burning carbs or fat. Lumen will tell you if you need to carb up before a workout for an energy boost or if you're good to go, get 15% off your lumen by going to lumen me slash Pacman. The link is in the description. There was a time when public education meant learning math, science, history. But now we are seeing Bible verses in biology class, we're seeing 10 commandments on the wall, religious chaplains taking the place of trained counselors. And it's all funded by taxpayer money through voucher programs that are sending public dollars to private religious schools. This is part of a broader effort to inject religion into public education. I'm against that and it often is coming at the expense of real academic standards and the well being of the students. Now, our sponsor, the Freedom from Religion foundation, is fighting back. FFRF defends constitutional principles, takes legal action when schools cross the line, and protects students from religious coercion in public classrooms. If you believe in facts in protecting education and keeping religion out of public schools, I can tell you this is an organization very much worth supporting. To get involved, go to ffrf.org school or text David to 511-511- Message and Data Rates may apply. The link is in the description. Donald Trump gave a Newsmax interview so horrible that even the interviewer seemed a little confused as to what is going on with Donald Trump. If you think by now Trump has a coherent message on the Epstein files, you're wrong. He still doesn't have such a message here. Trump was asked about the release of the Epstein files and he's still going with this thing. I want to release it, but people, people could get hurt. People like Trump could get hurt. Right. Your deputy attorney general sat down with.
- [41:41]
Bernie Sanders
Ghislaine Maxwell for nine hours.
- [41:43]
David Pakman
I'm just wondering when the American people get to hear what she said during that interview.
- [41:48]
Bernie Sanders
Well, I don't know because I haven't spoken about it. But he's a very talented guy, Todd Blanche, and a very straight shooter.
- [41:55]
David Pakman
Yeah.
- [41:56]
Bernie Sanders
And I think he probably wanted to know, know, you know, just to get a feeling of it, because we'd like to release everything, but we don't want people to get hurt that shouldn't be hurt.
- [42:05]
David Pakman
Yeah.
- [42:06]
Bernie Sanders
And I would assume that was why he was there. I want to release everything. I just don't want people to get hurt. You can't have people associated.
- [42:15]
David Pakman
All of a sudden, people getting hurt matters to Trump. Release the MLK files. MLK's descendants said, we don't necessarily want this stuff released. Doesn't matter. Release it anyway. But now, only when it comes to Epstein, you don't want people getting hurt. And when I hear that, I hear you don't want people like me getting hurt. Who could get hurt if these files were to come out? Trump asked about Ghislaine Maxwell. Is clemency on the table for her? See if you can pick up the interesting thing Trump does in answering this question. Let me ask you, Mr. President, just about pardons.
- [42:54]
Bernie Sanders
I've got three names and the first.
- [42:56]
David Pakman
One, look, the media didn't care about this story when Joe Biden was in office. Suddenly they care about this story again. Ghislaine Maxwell, serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking. For sex trafficking. Is clemency on the table for her.
- [43:10]
Bernie Sanders
In exchange for testimony? I'm allowed to do it, but nobody's asked me to do it. I know nothing about it. I don't know anything about the case, but I know I have the right to do it. I have the right to give pardons. I've given pardons to people before, but nobody's even asked me to do it.
- [43:27]
David Pakman
First of all, one of the biggest sex trafficking cases in history, and Trump knows nothing about it, despite the fact that it was one of his former friends doing the trafficking, who then was arrested while Trump was president and died by suicide in his prison cell while Trump was president. And Trump knows nothing about it. If you believe that, I'm sorry, you're probably pretty far gone. But notice that Trump was asked about clemency and he brings up, I have the right to give pardons. Well, you weren't even asked about a pardon. You were asked about clemency. By the way, everybody knows Trump's allowed to do it. The question is, why would he do it? And what I would love to hear is follow up along that. Trump interjecting in the middle of the pardon talk his goals with pharmaceuticals, and he again, struggling visibly with basic math, says he wants to get drug prices down by 1200%. Show me the arithmetic on that, sir.
- [44:33]
Bernie Sanders
His group, Marty McCary, is fantastic. And, you know, I want to get the drug prices down by. By 1000%, 1200%. You know what I mean by that? I want to get them down so, like, we pay the same as other countries, because we pay sometimes 10 times more than Germany and France and other countries. And it's not fair. And we've gone to war with the drug companies and frankly, other countries on it. And I think we're going to be very successful. Fairly soon. We'll have drug prices coming down by 500 600, 800, even 1200%.
- [45:08]
David Pakman
If you don't want to answer, prices will come down by 1200%. Could, could you show me the math of that? Is there any way that you could do that, sir? Pardon talk continued. What about Diddy, Sean Combs, would you pardon Diddy?
- [45:27]
Bernie Sanders
I don't know, but nobody's even asked me to do it. Sean Diddy Combs. Right.
- [45:33]
David Pakman
Would you consider pardoning him?
- [45:34]
Bernie Sanders
Well, he was essentially, I guess, sort of half innocent.
- [45:37]
David Pakman
Yes.
- [45:38]
Bernie Sanders
I don't know what, they're still in jail or something, but he was celebrating a victory. But he seems, I guess it wasn't as good as a victory, probably. You know, I was very friendly with him. I got along with him great.
- [45:54]
David Pakman
Okay, let me just pause here. Why would Trump bring that up? Remember, loyalty is the currency. What can I do for my friends? Are they still my friends? Did they talk good about me? Did they talk bad about me? That Trump always, you know, when I think about whether to pardon him, he. I was friendly with him and seemed.
- [46:13]
Bernie Sanders
Like a nice guy. I didn't know him well, but when I ran for office, he was very hostile. He said some not so nice things about you, sir. And it's hard, you know, like you were human beings, right? It. And we don't like to have things cloud our judgment. Right. But when you knew someone and you were fine, and then you run for office and he made some terrible statements. So, I don't know, it's more difficult. It makes it more. I'm being honest, it makes it more difficult to do.
- [46:44]
David Pakman
But it's not about whether there was prosecutorial misconduct. It's not about whether Trump feels the law was incorrectly weaponized against Diddy. It's. He did say some things about me when I was running that I didn't really like. And that, that is really. I'm just not sure. We used to be friends, but now we're not. This is, this is the barometer. This is the rubric for someone like Trump. We then get to Jorge Santos. Is there anybody that Trump won't pardon? What about George Santos?
- [47:14]
Bernie Sanders
Okay. And what about George Santos? Boy, he just went away seven years, you know, he was, he lied like hell. Yeah. And I didn't know him, but he was 100% for Trump. But I didn't, you know, I didn't. I don't. I might have met him, maybe, maybe not. I don't know. But he was a congressman and his vote was solid. It sounds like a lot. He got in. You know, you could blame the other Side for not checking him out. He didn't do all those things that he said. Missed it. Everybody. Well, you could say the media missed it. Everybody missed it. They found out about this stuff after the election was won. So nobody's talked to me about it. So they really, you know, they haven't talked to me about the two. They have talked to me about Sean, but they haven't talked to me about the two. But again, with him, I have the right to do it. Nobody's asked me. But it's interesting. He. Is it seven years. Seven years.
- [48:10]
David Pakman
He just went away. Yep. You know, he was a big MAGA guy. That is. It tells you everything you need to know. It's about Trump, and it's about the most valuable currency in the world for Trump, which is loyalty. Just absolutely wacky stuff. Finally, Trump wrapping the interview. And as deranged and dilapidated and delusional as his comments about pardons were, this word salad about the jobs numbers is actually what's freaking people out. Because as usual, it's not clear Trump understands anything before the message.
- [48:47]
Bernie Sanders
I have to say that I think that these numbers were incorrect today. Not that they were horrible. I've seen much worse numbers than this, but I think that these numbers were incorrect today because nobody saw this coming. Nobody saw the. The smaller numbers not only announced, but going back and restating her numbers because she made a mistake, you know, that was the bigger numbers. So I think they're wrong. Very importantly, we have prices down. We have energy way down. Inflation is almost nonexistent. It's way down from what it was. They had the highest inflation.
- [49:22]
David Pakman
Note that the inflation rate is roughly the same as when Biden left office.
- [49:26]
Bernie Sanders
I really. Essentially, in the history of our country, they say 48 years. I would say it's much beyond 48 years. The price was a mess.
- [49:32]
David Pakman
June of 2022, it was over 9%.
- [49:35]
Bernie Sanders
Right? Right. So he left office.
- [49:37]
David Pakman
It was 1.4%.
- [49:38]
Bernie Sanders
That's correct. And now we have it down again. We brought it down, but prices are down. You know, when I hear the demo.
- [49:44]
David Pakman
And of course, remember that prices are not down. Prices are not down. Question. Do you think Trump doesn't understand that? Imagine that. I say to you, hey, we're starting with a price level of 100 and the price has now gone up 5%. Math is easy, right? Okay. We went from 100 to a price level of 105. If I get the rate of inflation down from 5% to 2%, prices don't go down. They still go from 105 up 2%, which would be like 2.1 to 107.1. The rate of increase has of increase has slowed down, but prices are still going up. Notice that Trump is telling you things that are impossible in the same clip. He's saying we've gotten the inflation rate down, not deflation. The inflation rate is lower. Now. It's not true, but imagine that it were. Well, then he goes, prices are down. Wrong. You just said you've gotten the inflation rate down, meaning prices are still going up but more slowly happens not to be true. But why let a good statement get in the get in the way of the truth? I don't know that Trump even understands what inflation is. That's my takeaway here. Does Trump realize that when the inflation rate comes down, prices still go up? Let me know in a comment. Let me know in an email at info@david pakman.com MAGA spokespeople are collapsing under the pressure of Donald Trump's economic lies. They are barely able to hold it together because Trump is straight up gaslighting the country and his followers about what's going on in this economy. And his defenders are now melting down on live television. You know it's bad when even Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council of the United States, gets into an exchange about the jobs numbers. Remember, Trump didn't like the disastrous job numbers. The so he fired the person who compiles the numbers. Don't want to be pregnant. Just don't take a pregnancy test. Don't want Covid cases. Slow down the testing. Right. That's the approach here. So Hassett was asked, trump claims the numbers were wrong. Do you have evidence? And Hassett says the numbers are themselves the evidence.
- [52:12]
Bernie Sanders
All right, but bottom line, were the numbers wrong?
- [52:15]
David Pakman
Do you have any hard evidence that.
- [52:18]
Bernie Sanders
You, the American public, that these numbers, these revisions that were reported, and there were plenty of revisions under former President Biden, including right before the election. Do you have any hard evidence that these numbers were wrong? Yeah, there is very hard evidence that we're looking at the biggest revision.
- [52:36]
David Pakman
It's rock hard.
- [52:39]
Bernie Sanders
Look at the number itself. It is the evidence. But you're saying it's an outlier is not evidence. It's a historical, historically important outlier. It's something that's unprecedented. So unprecedented it's still not. I've been looking at it for 40 years and I'm like, it must be a type.
- [52:52]
David Pakman
The argument is, I believe this has never happened before. Therefore, by definition, it must be a lie. The Books must be cooked. The problem is that not only is the assumption not valid, sometimes something worse than ever before happens. That's just a reality. If you look back at revisions, In March of 2021, Biden was president, there was a downward revision of 146,000 jobs. That's a bigger. Because, remember, we saw here, we saw a revision of down to 58k over two months. In March 2021, Biden was president, downward revision, 146,000 jobs. So the claim we've never seen such a big revision is a lie. But what do you think they said back in March of 2021, the month after? Right. When the numbers were revised down? What do you think they said when March numbers were revised down and Biden was president? Did they say, oh, the commissioner of the Bureau and Labor Statistics is clearly cooking the books. We've never seen such a big downward revision? No, they said, look at these numbers. We trust the numbers, we believe the numbers. What a terrible job Joe Biden is doing. So their argument is the data must be a typo. That's it. That's it. This is all because we were told there would be a booming economy by now. And it turns out that those inflated jobs numbers that Trump bragged about, which weren't so good to begin with, were wrong. They were really wrong. And the defense from Kevin Hassett is, I looked at a chart, I misread it, by the way, and I believe that it's just a typo. No data, no alternate numbers, just a denial. And this is the best that they've got. They spent years pumping us with propaganda like, almost like they were injecting bleach. They were injecting propaganda. Trump's economy, it's going to be like nothing we've ever seen. And now that we're seeing the numbers and reality is sort of setting in here, they're sputtering on air. They're stunned. Anybody has the audacity to ask for proof, and it's very revealing. This is what happens when a political movement builds its identity around a cult leader instead of around facts. If you build a movement around facts, when the facts change, you just adapt to the facts. When you build a movement around a cult leader, when the facts change, you need to find better facts that are going to placate the cult leader. And when the facts fall apart, the spokespeople do, too. Here's another one. Kristen Welker asking Hassett, is the president going to fire anybody who reports data that he doesn't like? Good question.
- [55:41]
Bernie Sanders
The President prepared to fire anyone who reports data that he disagrees with? No, absolutely not. The President wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they're more transparent and more reliable. And if there are big changes and big revisions, we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example, that we want to know why.
- [55:59]
David Pakman
We want people to explain it to us. There you go. Of course, there is no evidence that the people Trump selects will give us more reliable information. In fact, I would be very suspicious of that. Imagine if we had allowed Trump's people to give us information about the 2020 election. They would have said, well, Trump won. He gets to be president. So we know from experience Trump's people giving us the information isn't great. Finally, those sirens you were hearing in the background of the interview. Massive protests in D.C. happening to sort of enhance the dystopian mood of these extraordinarily authoritarian interviews. President Donald Trump is getting ripped to pieces and is suffering a historic meltdown in the wake of jobs numbers that just don't paint a great picture picture of this economy. We've moved beyond the denial. We are, in a way, getting beyond even the spin. And what Donald Trump is now doing is a full blown attempt to erase reality in real time. The latest jobs report drops and it's bad. We've addressed that. Markets fall, confidence is rattled. What does Trump do other than firing the person responsible for reporting and compiling the numbers? He explodes on truth, social truth, Central Trump, quote, too little, too late, Jerome, too late. Powell is a disaster. Drop the rate. The good news is that tariffs are bringing billions of dollars into the usa. Of course, tariffs aren't bringing any money into the usa. They are just moving money from the companies that import foreign goods to the Treasury. That's all that's going on. Then Trump launches into a delusionally paranoid monologue, accusing former BLS commissioner Dr. Erica McIntarfer of faking the jobs numbers in order to help Kamala. He says the numbers were rigged. The truth is the economy is, is booming. Trump saying, quote, I was just informed that our country's jobs numbers are being produced by a Biden appointee, Dr. Erica McIntar, the commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the jobs numbers before the election to try and boost Kamala's chances of victory. This is the same BLS that overstated the job growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000, and then again right before the 2024 presidential election in August and September by 112,000. These were records. No one can be that wrong. We need accurate jobs numbers. I have directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee immediately. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified, which means someone that will give Trump the numbers he wants. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate. They can't be manipulated for political purposes. McIntyre for said there were only 73,000 jobs added, a shock. But more importantly that a major mistake was made by them. 258,000 jobs downward in the prior two months. Similar things happened in the first part of the year, always to the negative. The economy is booming under Trump despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with interest rates, where they lowered them twice and substantially just before the presidential election, I assume, in the hopes of getting, quote, Kamala elected. How did that work out? Jerome Too late. Powell should also be put out to pasture. Thank you for your attention to this matter. And finally, Trump saying, quote, in my opinion, today's jobs numbers were rigged in order to make the Republicans and me look bad. Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 presidential election and then those numbers were taken away on November 15, 2024, right after the election when the jobs numbers were massively revised downward, making a Correction of over 818,000 jobs A total scam. Jerome Too late. Powell is no better. But the good news is our country is doing great. So the key line here of all of this is, in my opinion, in Trump's opinion, jobs numbers were rigged. In Trump's opinion, the economy is doing well no matter what the jobs numbers say. In Trump's world, facts are treason if they don't make Trump look good and objective. Reality becomes an enemy combatant if it's counter to what Donald Trump wants you to believe. He can't explain why job growth has stalled. He can't explain why the tariffs are leading to higher prices. He can't explain why the Fed isn't jumping in to bail him out. So instead he builds this fantasy that everything's great. The tariff, money comes from other countries, grocery prices are down, and job creation is at historic highs. Even if he can't get anyone to actually say that they can find a shred of evidence of any of that. The most tragic part of all of this, and I hate to admit it, I wish it weren't true, but the most tragic part of all of this is that it is convincing a lot of MAGA people. You look on Twitter x, you look at the excretions that a lot of magazines are putting out and They've fallen for it. They really believe that the BLS commissioner cooked the books absent any evidence of that. And the funny part is you can get corroborating information. You can look at different reports that focus on, for example, just manufacturing numbers and you see that the component parts of the BLS report are corroborated elsewhere. What you have to believe, to believe the numbers from the BLS are wrong is that they can't do math, they can't do arithmetic, addition. But if you go and you find underlying data and you take a basic estimate, you find that these are exactly the right numbers. We are going to have to now battle not only a declining economy, not only an administration that simply can't accept things might not be so good. We're also going to have to fight the magazines who are going around saying the economy really is great. The thing is, for people for whom the economy isn't great, I don't believe we're going to fall for it. Every few weeks there's another headline about a massive data breach. Your bank, hospital, a retailer you shopped with five years ago. And chances are that your passwords and personal information have already been leaked in a data breach like this. Or that they will be. This is why I use Aura, one of our sponsors. Aura is all in one digital security to help you stop identity theft before it happens. They will continuously monitor the dark web, alert you if your email, password, Social Security number have been exposed. They don't stop there. If someone tries to use that information to open a credit card or access your accounts, you will get a real time fraud alert. And Aura also includes powerful antivirus Protection of password manager 24. 7 US based support. If something ever does go wrong, and if the worst does happen, Aura still has you covered with up to $5 million in identity theft insurance. I don't want to leave myself or my family vulnerable, which is why I use Aura. You can try it free for 14 days at aura.com/pacman. 14 days is more than enough time to let Aura show you if your personal info is already out there and what to do about it. The link is in the description. Are you planning any exciting trips? I've got a couple lined up and one thing that I've learned is that being able to speak even a little bit of the local language can make a huge difference both for your experience and how you interact with locals. And that is why I use Babbel. Babbel is the language learning app that gets you talking quickly. It has 10 minute lessons, crafted by over 200 language experts. They're really built around real world conversations, the things you would actually say when traveling. Ordering food, asking for directions, chatting with locals. No gimmicks, no fluff, just practical language skills. And the best part is that you can start speaking in just a few weeks. I've used Babel to help me get ready for trips abroad. It does a great job. I just arrived with a little confidence that I can navigate a new place with some basics without having to pull my phone out every five seconds. Babel also has advanced speech recognition which helps to fine tune your accent as you go. It's like having a tutor in your pocket and babble is giving my audience 60% off subscriptions at babel.com/pacman the link is in the podcast notes Rules and restrictions may apply. The level of visible, palpable desperation in the context of the collapsing jobs economy is now making Trump say things that don't make any sense. And it's making even MAGA people start to wonder, is this the right path? Is it really the right path to ignore a jobs report that by all accounts is accurate and jump on the Trump bandwagon of the woman who oversaw the report? Report was partizan and should be fired. This is the press conference that has sort of sent terror down the spines of some in MAGA because they are starting to realize this might not be sustainable, never mind acceptable in terms of winning future elections. So here is a very confused Donald Trump mixing up jobs and dollars, claiming that the now former commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics had a reduction of $800,000 before. Of course Trump means jobs. He's confused, he's disoriented.
- [66:25]
Bernie Sanders
Why did you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Because I think her numbers were wrong. Just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election. Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden slash Kamala. And she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected. Then right after the election, I think on the 15th, November 15th, she had an 8 or $900,000 massive reduction. Said she made him.
- [66:53]
David Pakman
He doesn't know what he's talking about. She had a reduction of $900,000. Trump's trying to talk about it was a reduction in jobs, but he's confused. But the substantive and primary question is why does Trump believe these numbers were phony? When Kevin Hassett was interviewed over the weekend, he said, well, the fact that there was a revision is the proof that the numbers were Messed with. But of course, there's always revisions. And when the revisions are in the favor of MAGA, like when Biden had a big downward revision in March 2021, they say, look at the number. They don't question the numbers when the numbers favor them. And so Trump was asked again about the phony numbers. And Trump goes, you know, I believe the numbers are phony, and I fired her, and I was right to do it.
- [67:43]
Bernie Sanders
But today we're doing so well, I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election, and there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her. And you know what? I did the right thing.
- [67:56]
David Pakman
Trump has evaluated his own firing in a completely objective manner and has determined that he was correct to fire her. Let's pat each other on the back and give each other medals. Now, final question here. Trump was asked more broadly, if you get numbers you don't like, should the people who assemble those numbers be worried about getting fired? And Trump just kind of go, I think he's kind of saying yes. If it's, you know, he's always kind of dancing around the answer, but I think he is saying yes.
- [68:28]
Bernie Sanders
If any government official going forward is.
- [68:31]
David Pakman
Presenting data or information you don't like.
- [68:34]
Bernie Sanders
Should they fear for their job? I've always had a problem with these numbers. You know, I was thinking about this morning before the numbers that came out. I said, who is the person that does these numbers? And then they gave me stats about before the election, I had a similar problem. Problem. I mean, she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats, it was, like, unbelievable. And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers with, I think, almost 900,000 corrections. I think nobody had ever seen anything like it. Well, today she did the same thing with the 253,000, whatever the number was. No, no. We need people that we can trust. I mean, you quite. Your question is a very good one. We need people we can trust.
- [69:19]
David Pakman
You know, it's funny, if you sit back for a second and you consider that on the one hand, Donald Trump is saying the job numbers are fake, the jobs numbers are really good, but we got this fake number from the former commissioner of the bls. Trump is also saying, I really need Jerome Powell to cut federal interest rates right now. So if you put together Trump's messaging on the economy, it's incoherent. Trump's messaging is, the economy is so good that I'm firing the person who reports numbers so bad that they couldn't possibly be true. And also I'm begging the Fed to cut rates at a speed and down to a level that you only hear about during recessions. If the economy is really as good as Trump says, why would he be begging the Fed for a funds rate that you see during recessions? But maybe I just don't understand something about rates and job numbers and the entire thing. This is not even as bad as it got for Donald Trump over the weekend. We are going to take a look at other interviews that he did, but you stick a camera and a microphone in this guy's face and his authoritarian instincts, his I'm smarter than everyone reflex can't be suppressed. There's some behaviors Trump can control. He cannot control his instinct that he's smarter than everybody, he knows more than everybody, and he should be the sole person in charge of everything. If you were to ask him. All right, this is a very big deal. We have a leaked memo from Donald Trump's own Department of Homeland Security. And this exposes something absolutely terrifying. This memo is the blueprint for really turning the military of the United States inward against us, against me, against you. Now, we've already seen a lot of this buildup. We saw military planes deporting migrants with no due process. We saw the National Guard in Los Angeles. We saw Marines patrolling American streets. That was really just a warm up. This memo lays out the next phase of this where DHS officials are pushing the top brass of the Pentagon. So I'm talking about the Joint Chiefs, northcom. They want him to get serious about one thing. Treat immigration like terrorism treatment. Treat immigration like Al Qaeda, like isis, and use the full force of the American military to do that, not just at the border, but in cities across the country and for years to come. Now the document even says this stuff out loud. DHS wants the military to feel, quote, the urgency of the homeland defense mission. That's not border defense, that's boots. Inside the country, on the ground, on the streets. We heard this rhetoric right after 9, 11, but now they're using it against people that are fleeing poverty in other countries, not people that are flying planes into buildings. And they're manufacturing a sense of sort of national trauma to justify a domestic forever war. Remember the endless global war on terror? It goes on forever. What about the endless domestic war against terrorism, which is immigration that they want to rebrand in that way? Don't take my word for it. The memo equates migrant gangs to terrorist cells operating inside the United States. And the kicker is that they know it's dangerous. The Memo itself says that they're not writing down a lot about this plan because it's a very sensitive plan that the country might react negatively to, which means they know that this crosses the line, but they want to do it anyway. This is the Trump Doctrine. Now. We're going to take fear and we're going to weaponize it. We're going to militarize domestic policy, we're going to gut civil liberties, and we're going to keep it vague enough that the full plan can't really be pinned down until it's too late. If you think it sounds extreme, remember that ice is getting $100 billion and the military is being asked to detail personnel inside ICE and cbp. What do you think happens when this money is spent? They are trying to make the L A crackdown really look like just a template. It's not an outlier. It's the playbook. Here's what we were able to do in L. A. Gavin Newsom. The governor didn't want it. We did it anyway. Karen Bass, the mayor didn't want it, we did it anyway. It was like a three block by three block radius. But we convinced a bunch of people that we needed troops there. And all of it, I guess, is they can't actually deal with the root causes of immigration, so they need a new bogeyman. And importantly, oftentimes I will say something like, hey, you know, there's a lot of different aspects to this immigration thing, but the US Is a wealthy enough country that we could be working with the source countries of undocumented immigration to mitigate the conditions that cause people to want to come here in the first place. I know that this is hard for a lot of MAGAs to acknowledge. Most people around the world don't want to move to the United States. The magazines operate under the belief that if anyone could just come here, the world's 8 billion people would all come to the United States. The truth is, a relatively small number of people want to come to the United States, and most of the people that want to want to because of the economic conditions or the safety conditions in their country. Political instability, economic instability. So sometimes I'll say we could work with those countries and try to make the situation better, then people wouldn't try to come here. We wouldn't need to spend the money on the detentions and the deportations and all of it. And people will write in and go, david, why would we give other countries money? It doesn't make any sense. They haven't earned that. Well, do you care about this strict father morality, or do you just want to do what solves the problem? The best way to deal with the undocumented immigration issue is reduce the desire for people to come here in the first place by making things better in their country. Republicans don't want to do it, or they can't do it, or they think their base would punish them for it. So instead they're going, oh, we need to treat immigrants like terrorists. Let's deploy the military. The most dangerous part of this is that if the military becomes normalized as a tool of law enforcement, it's very difficult to go back on that. You can't unflip that switch. Historically, when the military is ingrained as doing domestic law enforcement, the only way that that gets stopped often is when the entire regime falls. And that's very ugly. It can be bloody, Literally, it can be bloody economically. So that's a terrifying direction for it to go. So we're beyond. This is theoretical. It's really operational now. The people sounding the alarm include defense experts who understand, like, if we divert the military for this, our national defense is going to get weaker. Legal scholars who say that the legal aspects of this are an absolute abomination. Former military officials are saying this is not what the military is supposed to be used for. And they are all saying this memo is a step towards authoritarianism. If you want to know what it looks like when democracies start to erode from the inside out, it's classified meetings where the DHS and Pentagon say, here's what we're planning. It's so radioactive and so volatile, we should limit how much we write about it. You want to know what a ticking time bomb looks like? This is it right here.
- [77:10]
Bernie Sanders
And.
- [77:10]
David Pakman
And this is why when people call in and go, david, I'm thinking about leaving the country. Who am I to say, no, Stay. We obviously need people to stay. If we all leave, we cede power to the worst people. But who am I to say, no, you should really stay instead of leaving where you might be safer with your family. I get why people are doing it. This is a disaster. Have you ever watched somebody lie so confidently that you start to wonder if they believe their own lies? Well, Newsmax took one look at July's absolutely catastrophic jobs report, and they said, oh, this is good news all around. Good news all around. I'm not kidding. Jobs growth collapsed to 73,000. The explanation, or the expectation, was 110-000. So 73 instead of 110 is about a 33% shortfall, not a small miss. The previous two months were revised downward by a combined 258,000 jobs. Biggest downward revision since the early days of COVID which, by the way, we've seen Biden have downward revisions too. They had no issues with the numbers. Then markets plunged, recession fears spiked, and Newsmax says a few fewer jobs than expected. Not really bad and pretty good news all around. It's sort of like, hey, your house didn't burn down. You've transitioned it into open air living. Or it's like saying, oh, failing the test isn't a big deal because your name was written perfectly at the top of the page. And the kicker is they don't even mention the downward revisions because the truth is inconvenient when your job at Newsmax is to protect the image of a Trump that is completely unraveling on social media. Take a look at this. Month of July unemployment rate ticks up 1.10of1 percentage point to 4.2 73,000 jobs created. Unemployment rate is expected.
- [79:08]
Bernie Sanders
Jobs a little bit below what Wall street expected at 110,000.
- [79:12]
David Pakman
But I would say mostly in line with expectations.
- [79:15]
Bernie Sanders
Yeah, good, there we go. News all around. All right. Well, we'll have more on that throughout the day.
- [79:18]
David Pakman
And remember, you can always go, yeah, good news all around.
- [79:22]
Bernie Sanders
For more Brick King news now, let's get back to the newly declassified documents and more proof of what President Trump.
- [79:28]
David Pakman
Has always said, what many conservatives always knew. Russia, Russia, Russia. An election scheme of the Hillary Clinton campaign. There you go. Forget about the fact that jobs numbers are reaching recession era levels. Forget about the fact that Trump is blatantly lying to you. Good news all around from this disastrous jobs report. And let's get to the real story. The real story, which is Obama and Hillary did the Russia hoax. I can't even keep up at this point in time. Now, the problem is if you are a Newsmax viewer, and I know that's hard to imagine, I have a couple of friends who say my dad watches Newsmax and they just accept it. They accept it like it's real reporting for viewers who don't check the facts. They walk away from this thinking Trump is the jobs guy. The data says something different. It's gaslighting, you know, in 4K with makeup and whatever. But they walk away thinking Trump is doing such a great job. Now, if this same report had come in under Biden, they would be saying, we forget about a recession, we are in a depression. They would be screaming from the rooftops. They'd be running B roll of soup lines from other countries decades ago and saying this is the end of the end of the end. But under Trump, they characterize this as good news all around. It's the people on the Titanic as it sinks who say, I love that we're given the opportunity to go for a swim here. That I just absolutely love it. And so our challenge, and you know, I'm going to address this in a broader, in a broader context, the challenge for Democrats, quite frankly, is going to be you. Most of the people. Let me, let me. Okay, let me back up. I think that a large share of the people who voted, Kamala, understand that these are the real jobs numbers they get. 73,000 isn't good. It was supposed to be 110. It's 73. We're losing hundreds of thousands of jobs to downward revisions. This isn't good. So the question is, what, if anything, can Democrats put together to actually motivate people who wouldn't vote to make sure that they're going to vote these people out next November? Not this November. Next November. But bigger picture, how does this open the door for Democrats to frame themselves as actually having a coherent not only message, but plan? Because this is some of the worst propaganda I've ever covered ever. And I've been doing this a while, but I've also, I don't know that I've ever seen Democrats less equipped to really deal with this in a substantive way. So we're going to be expanding on that because that's going to be a big problem.