David Pakman (12:38)
You know, what's so ironic about this? What's so ironic about this is she says, you know, we need a country where women won't be harassed or raped. And Donald Trump, her husband has been accused of harassing and sexually assaulting dozens of women. But she says we need a country where that doesn't happen. Well, your husband is one of the people accused of doing that. She argues that. She argues that as a matter of principle, it's great that Trump closed the border so people stop coming in. But she's one of the people that came in and for a period of time, she was working here without authorization to work. Her parents came here through the very chain migration the that Trump has criticized. She is, she and her husband are everything that she is criticizing. And it is incredible that the irony is totally lost on your average maga. We're going to take a break. We've got a phenomenal show today. Make sure you're getting my Daily Podcast, Apple Podcasts, Spotify Player fm, Dog Catcher, Podcatcher. You know, I could just go on listing. I'm not going to do it. We'll take a quick break and be right back. For a lot of people, managing money doesn't fall apart because of one mistake. It's a gradual process with expenses and subscriptions and bills adding up over time. And without a clear system, it's easy to lose track of where money is actually going. And that is where Rocket Money comes in. Our sponsor, Rocket Money is a personal finance app. It'll help you find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitor your spending, help you lower your bills so you can grow your savings. It will pull checking, savings and other accounts into a single dashboard. It'll give you a clear view of your financial picture without needing multiple tools. And the app will automatically categorize transactions. 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Earlier this week, I said something that made some of you uncomfortable about what happens when you deputize ICE like a domestic army and send them into communities to provoke confrontations, which is what they're doing. And some people twisted the things I said into me saying protesters are violent, which is not what I said and not what I believe. I'm talking about my segment earlier this week where I said, the way this is all shaking out, ICE agents are going to end up getting killed. So let me explain further here. Most protesters are, of course, peaceful. Most protesters aren't even protesters. I mean, I think it's important to say Alex Preddy wasn't even really a protester. He was just there observing and then tried to come to the fence. The defense of a woman who was pepper sprayed. But it wasn't even really part of a protest. But even if it were, and there are protests, the protesters are peaceful. And most people filming ICE are peaceful. And most people confronting federal agents are unarmed. And they're trying to document what they see as abuses. And even if they were armed, they might be legally armed, like was Alex Preddy. The problem here is not protesters. The problem is scale and escalation created deliberately from the top down. So far, it has been civilians who keep ending up dead, including Alex Preddy and Renee Goode, and people who have died in ICE custody as well, which we shouldn't forget. We have videos of people being shoved and beaten and, and shot and then smeared as violent after the fact. And this is documented rather than hypothetical. We know it's happening because we have it on video. But the uncomfortable truth is that you can't build a system of constant physical confrontation and pretend that the violence is only going to go in one direction forever. That's the point that I'm making. Humans don't work that way. Probability doesn't work that way. What people mean when they talk about stochastic outcomes where there is no central order. No one's saying, go shoot an ICE agent. A system that creates a huge number of confrontations, statistically predicts someone will snap. And that doesn't require a plan, a leader, an organized movement, or so called protesters that plan to be violent. Now, some of you might be saying, oh, stochastic. You've talked about that before. Stochastic terrorism. Stochastic terrorism is when leaders normalize violence and dehumanization in the abstract, and then a random actor takes it Literally and goes out and attacks someone. What we are seeing here is even broader than that. This is stochastic escalation. Flooding cities with armed agents, shoving people, spraying people, threatening people for speech. That creates a paramilitary theater, and it makes violent incidents more likely. It's not a moral claim about what should happen. I'm against all of the violence. It's a descriptive claim about what tends to happen in real societies. Critics want to pretend I am saying protesters are. Are wanting to be violent or will become violent. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that federal policy that deliberately creates physical conflict as a governance strategy is going to lead to unpredictable outcomes where the violence will go both ways. Think about an escalation loop, where the administration sends agents everywhere. People protest, agents escalate, someone gets hurt, anger grows, so there's more protests, so more agents are sent. Someone fires a gun and the government says, that's terrorism. We're going to crack down even harder and send more people. That is how democracies spiral into security states through a feedback loop of fear, violence, and repression. And political theorists have warned about this for a very long time. Hobbes argued that chaos justified authoritarian power. And modern authoritarians learning to manufacture chaos for political gain is only going to feed that loop. Order through fear is one of the oldest tricks in politics, and it is very effective. If an ICE agent is killed, Trump does not lose politically. He wins because he gets an emergency. He gets a propaganda moment. He gets a justification to send even more troops and do more speech restriction and centralize power even more. This is why chaos is politically useful to authoritarians, because it lets them present repression as bringing stability. Things are so chaotic. I'm going to bring you stability by repressing speech, by repressing rights. This is why I said escalation is the policy and not just an accident, because you can't separate what happens in the streets from the incentives at the top. We are already seeing agents telling people they will be punished for speech. We had the clip on Wednesday. If you raise your voice, I will erase your voice. That's what a Border Patrol agent said to someone. That should alarm anyone who cares about basic constitutional rights. Federal agents threatening punishment for speech and is not law enforcement. It's intimidation, and it is authoritarianism. So when I say this isn't going to end well and an ICE agent is going to get killed, I mean it literally. I'm not. I'm not being rhetorical. This will not end well for protesters. This will not end well, for immigrants, this will not end well for civilians caught in the middle. And it probably is going to lead to some ICE agents being thrown into these confrontations and ending up on the wrong side of it statistically because of the chaos that they are generating. This is what happens when a government chooses confrontation as governments. Instead of, hey, let's de escalate, let's have democratic accountability, let's actually do what we said, which is we're just going after violent people who are here undocumented, who have committed other crimes, not people just working and parents. And this, this is how security states are built. You manufacture an emergency and then you use the reaction to it to manufacture another one and another one. Violence is wrong against civilians, against ICE agents, against anybody. Escalation makes violence more likely. Pretending otherwise is fantasy. So this has to stop. This is how systems break. This is how ordinary people get crushed in the middle. But we also have to be aware about the predictable and expected consequences of such a policy being escalated and carrying out in an increasingly widespread and out of controlled way. Donald Trump posted something completely unhinged on truth social threatening Iran with what he describes as a massive armada and warning that the next attack would be way worse than previous strikes. The winner of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize wrote that the fleet is ready to act with speed and violence and warned Iran that time is running out. He marketed himself as the antiwar president Tulsi Gabbard, who was the only anti war Democrat, then became a Trump supporter and said Trump's really the only anti war candidate and he was going to end endless wars and keep us out of wars and whatever. And there, I guess there are people out there who still believe he is the peace candidate. He posted the following quote, a massive armada and is heading to Iran. It is moving quickly with great power, enthusiasm and purpose. It is a larger fleet headed by the great aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln than that sent to Venezuela. Like with Venezuela, it is ready, willing and able to rapidly fulfill its mission with speed and violence if necessary. Hopefully, Iran will quickly come to the table and negotiate a fair and equitable deal. No nuclear weapons, one that is good for all parties. Time is running out. It is truly of the essence, as I told Iran once before, make a deal. They didn't and there was Operation Midnight Hammer, a major destruction of Iran. The next attack will be far worse. Don't make that happen again. Thank you for your attention to this matter. So here's what's going on. Trump will often bomb or threaten to bomb people when he's dealing with a domestic crisis. Many of you wrote to me and said, David, the threats against Iran are because Trump has the ICE fiasco to deal with, the tariff fiasco to deal with, the price level fiasco to deal with, the health fiasco to deal with. You get the picture. I have no idea whether it's deliberate to distract or not deliberate, but it doesn't seem to work. People don't seem to be getting distracted from the domestic fiascos when Donald Trump threatens a foreign country. Now, in reality, Trump is not the peace president. He has launched strikes, he's threatened regime change, he kidnapped Maduro, he escalated military confrontations. And today it's another threat for another conflict in the Middle East. And it comes with rising tensions with Iran. Reports that U.S. warships and aircraft are being deployed in the region, as Trump says the USS Abraham Lincoln carrier group. And Trump even references the prior US Strike on Iran and warns the next one will be even worse. So, anti war president, that idea that's gone, put that in the toilet and flush it 10 to 15 times. But what is especially striking is that this is all happening. I won't say it's to distract from, but it is happening concurrent with domestic chaos, scandals, narratives about Trump's administration that are collapsing, and he starts threatening foreign countries. Now, maybe it sometimes feels deliberate, like a distraction, sometimes, maybe it feels like impulse, but there is a consistency to it, which is that Donald Trump escalates rhetorically on Iran, Venezuela, China, whoever, and then sometimes the conversation would shift away from the domestic crises. The problem for Trump is that whether it's deliberate or not, it doesn't seem to be distracting people right now. People are so. In general, Americans care less about foreign policy than domestic policy because domestic policy is about the right here. Polling for decades has told us that. But it's also not working to go, oh, we might. An armada is going to Iran. It's also not working because the American people are so enraged and disgusted, more than 50% of us, with what is happening domestically in this country. The health care premiums that have skyrocketed, the prices which were supposed to come down, but just kind of keep going up. Not that fast, but they keep going up. The ICE fiasco, which is just a complete perversion of what Donald Trump said he was going to do originally, which is we're going to get undocumented violent criminals out. They're killing citizens, folks. They're killing citizens at this point in time. The health crisis and the COVID up that goes with it, the Epstein files, I could go on and so it doesn't seem to have the political power of distraction. Whether it's deliberate or not from the Trump administration, people are focused like a laser beam on the domestic issues right now. Now, I do think it's important just to remember that the anti war branding of Trump about himself was very hollow. And I know that there are people who fell for it. There are people on the right who fell for it and said, oh, Hillary will start four wars, Kamala will start five wars. They fell for it. But there were also some people on the left who fell for it and said, you know, I got to give Trump credit. My big thing is anti war. Trump's the guy with the real anti war rhetoric right now. And I warned you, and I said, he is. He has never been anti war. In principle, he was anti war in slogans, he was anti war in campaign speeches if he perceived it would be useful for him. But in practice, he has embraced military strikes and saber rattling and unilateral action. If the sissy Europeans don't want to help us, and his base wanted a president, I guess, who convinced them that he would stop the endless wars, but they got someone who is doing very much the opposite. And the craziest part is that it doesn't even serve Trump at this point, because people are exhausted, markets are nervous, allies are skeptical. People are wondering, why are my friends and family, whether they're immigrants or not, getting wrapped up in these operations, and why haven't the prices come down? And why is health care doubled? This is not strategic foreign policy, and it is not a functional domestic distraction policy either. The things we can say are that this is extraordinarily impulsive, performative to a great degree, and really dangerous for the long term stability of the United States. Anti war, Trump? Give me a break. Scams and identity theft rarely start with a hacked password. They usually start when your personal information is easy to find online. Your address, phone number, relatives, employment history. That information lives on countless data broker sites on the Internet, accessible to almost anyone unless you actively remove it. Our sponsor, Incogni, is a service that handles that for you. Incogni doesn't just focus on one category of sites. It works to take down your personal data wherever it appears online, reducing the raw material scammers used to impersonate you or target your family. Incogni will automatically handle removals across hundreds of known sites. But the most powerful feature is custom removals, which is included with the unlimited plan. If you find your info anywhere, even an obscure directory, a business database, something new you Paste the link into Incogni. Their team will work to get it removed. That level of coverage really matters. Even a single exposed profile can lead to fraud, harassment, identity theft. Incogni's removal process is independently verified by Deloitte. And you can get 60% off when you go to incogni.com/pacman and use the code PACMAN. I'm increasingly convinced that the top administration officials are going to have to be perp walked if we are going to get any real accountability here. Now, this is not lock them up without due process stuff before everybody gets that. What was that phrase Scott Jennings used before you get your knickers in a twist? I am not suggesting that due process is denied to anybody, but let me zoom out and kind of explain what I mean here. This is bigger than one shooting, this is bigger than one city. This is bigger than, like, a chaotic couple of weeks or months of raids. Fundamentally, this is a question of is there accountability at the top? The ICE deployments are not random events. They're not accidents. These are policy choices made by Trump and his top officials. You don't flood cities with heavily armed federal agents and escalate confrontations in civilian spaces and, and then act shocked when people get killed. It is the foreseeable outcome of militarizing immigration enforcement and turning it into a political spectacle which is now backfiring significantly. This is where people like Greg Bevino and Kristi Noem come in. They are not commentators. They're not random surrogates. They are running operations. They are defending them. They're justifying the tactics. Bevino, before he was demoted, was out there throwing gas canisters, struggling to open them, by the way, but throwing gas canisters. Kristi Noem has participated in these raids. Sort of superficially right for optics, but she's there, she's out there. She knows what's going on. And when the state kills people as a result of policy, responsibility doesn't stop with the person who pulled the trigger. Now, you might be laughing and saying, david, even the person who pulled the trigger isn't being held responsible. And of course, for now, that is true. But my point is that there's a chain of command. It's basic rule of law thinking there is a chain of command that is not just one person. If investigations show criminal misconduct, these people should be subpoenaed, they should be investigated, they should be charged if appropriate. And, yeah, they should be perp walked. Now, we've done this before, and, and other democracies have done this before. After Watergate, it wasn't just low level staffers. Nixon's top aides went to prison. H.R. halderman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell. The message was simple. Power doesn't immunize you from consequences. After the Iraq war, torture scandal, not as good of an example. But you had military officers and intelligence officers who were investigated, some were court martialed, and I believe that there were some convictions. It was not nearly enough accountability, whatever it was, and my memory is not perfect of it, it was at least a recognition that just following orders isn't a defense. And I think that that's an important thing. In South Korea, we talked about this on the bonus show. Presidents and top officials have gone to prison for corruption and abuse of power. It's taken seriously. In France, former presidents and prime ministers have been prosecuted and convicted. In Brazil, top political leaders have been jailed in these anti corruption investigations. In Germany, after reunification, East German officials were prosecuted for state violence and for border killings. That sounds familiar. In my birth country of Argentina and the neighboring Chile, military leaders were eventually prosecuted for dictatorship era crimes. This is what semifunctional systems do. They treat state power as something that requires accountability rather than a loyalty test. For Trump, it's just the loyalty test. That's all that really matters. If we had an administration that truly respected democracy, Republicans would be screaming about we need tribunals and we need handcuffs, and they would be running graphics with mugshots and chanting lock them up. So I think we need to be consistent. You don't get to militarize immigration enforcement, flood communities with federal agents, normalize lethal force in civilian settings, and then kind of shrug and get to move on. If Trump's administration is setting policy that predictably leads to civilian deaths, which is what happened, it has to be investigated at the highest level. And if it stems from top officials encouraging reckless tactics, which we believe it does, lying about events, which they're doing all the time, obstructing accountability, which they're doing all the time. You need to start with the subpoenas, with the indictments, and with the trials. If they're acquitted, cool. I don't want to lock up anybody unless they actually are found guilty or take a plea. But we need to have that. And this is not about revenge politics. This is just a very basic principle. A government that harms people has to answer for it. That that's the principle. The alternative is what happens in authoritarian systems. The people at the top are protected, everybody else is sacrificed, and they treat civilian deaths as acceptable collateral damage. And they Move on. And they dare you to complain or protest. We can't do that. It's not American. We cannot let Trump's top officials off the hook because accountability is inconvenient politically right now or because the news cycle moves on. As a starting point for this, Democrats need to take the House in November. It's like a mere tiny little starting point. If wrongdoing happened, we got to drag the people responsible into hearings, and then if there are criminal referrals, we drag them into courtrooms and we do it in the public record. Not because we love it, not because it makes us feel good about the country, but it makes us feel worse if they go with impunity. So while I wouldn't go, it's so awesome that we have so many top officials that need to be indicted. No, but it would be good if those who deserve to be indicted get indicted, because otherwise we have no accountability whatsoever. Donald Trump is out there insisting his brain is perfect, and while doing that, he forgot the word Alzheimer's. This is. It's Kafka esque. Dare I say Mel Brooks couldn't write a better comedy than this. Donald Trump was talking to New York magazine about his father's health, his father, who famously had Alzheimer's. And he said his dad had no major problems except one. And then Trump glitches out mid sentence. Here is the exact writing from the piece. Fred Trump died in 1999 at age 93. He had, Trump said, a heart that couldn't be stopped. With almost no health conditions to speak of. Throughout his long life, he had one problem, Trump said, at a certain age, about 86, 87, he started getting. What do they call it? He pointed to his forehead and looked at his press secretary for the word that escaped him. Alzheimer's. Levitt said, like an Alzheimer's thing? Trump said, well, I don't have it. Is it something you think about at all? I asked. No, I don't think about it at all. You know why? He said, because whatever it is, my attitude is whatever the President of the United States, who we suspect is suffering from cognitive decline, is telling us, he definitely doesn't have Alzheimer's, while forgetting the word for Alzheimer's. Now, that's not proof of anything, but you really can't script this. I mean, it's like a late stage absurdism of sorts. Now, I want to be very clear about a couple different things. This is obviously not a diagnosis. A single word lapse doesn't prove anything. People forget words all the time. You know, stress and age and fatigue. It happens to a lot of people. Happens to everybody. But the context is important. Trump is the one who turned cognitive tests, brain injury tests, into a personality trait. He's the one who constantly brags about acing them. He's the one who made person, woman, man, camera, tv into a campaign slogan. So when he forgets the name of the disease that killed his father while claiming to be cognitively perfect, it is sort of weird and, I would argue, relevant. And it's an uncanny pattern overall. So far, so many of the things Trump says as accusations and end up being admissions. Covid is a hoax. And he gets Covid and he responds severely, like he was severely sick from it. Biden, you know, and from the MAGA movement as well. Biden is covering up pedophilia and this whole thing. Trump's name shows up repeatedly in Epstein documents, and it's Trump who has worked to cover up the full release of the Epstein files. China and Russia will invade Greenland. Or is it Iceland, if I don't do it? And he ends up confused between Iceland and Greenland and then says, we need to invade because otherwise they will. Well, how. How does that make it any better? So when Trump spent years yelling, biden has dementia. And then Trump goes, I definitely don't have. What's that thing called? Oh, yeah, Alzheimer's, obviously. We all go, man. Does Trump have it? Is Trump actually the one who has it? It's not a medical diagnosis, obviously, but psychological projection is one of Trump's defining traits. And so many of the things he has projected onto others are things that apply to him. Now back to this New York Magazine profile piece. It goes further. Trump's niece, Mary Trump, says that she sees in Trump the exact same deer in the headlights look that she saw in. In his father as he declined. Not a diagnosis, but it's not nothing. That's someone who is there. Trump says, I don't think about cognitive decline at all. My attitude is whatever genetics will save me. Except we know Trump does think about it because he's regularly bragging about his cognitive tests. And by the way, why is he getting cognitively tested so often? Our guest earlier this week said he believes Trump is getting regular MRIs specifically to track what is going on with his brain. The bottom line here is presidential health matters. Cognitive fitness matters. Transparency also matters. We don't know the truth about Trump's physical health. We don't know the truth about Trump's cognitive health, but we do know that he's not transparent. And when the oldest president in American history publicly forgets basic words while insisting that his brain is perfect. It's kind of weird and it's something that we would talk about not because it proves anything, but because pretending it means nothing is definitely not appropriate. Tell me the truth. Do you think Trump has Alzheimer's? Leave it in a comment. Send me an email info at David Pakman Dotcom if you were shopping for a new mattress, I would recommend you start by looking at Helix Sleep, the mattress I've been sleeping on for years. The only one that I recommend because they custom tailor it to your needs. I took their sleep quiz. It took a minute or two. I said, oh, you know, I like to sleep on my stomach. I tend to feel hotter in the middle of the night rather than colder. I like medium firm and Helix just nailed it. Matched me with the perfect mattress. Most people don't even know where to start when you're looking for a mattress. And Helix just makes it easy. There is really no substitute for the mattress that's right for you. Your body will thank you. Delivery was fast. Setup was easy. You do get 100 nights to try it out. They'll even take away your old Mattress. Go to helix sleep.com/pacman and you'll get 20% off site wide. The link is in the description. Look at what these people are saying about me. Friday Feedback for the week. And by the way, a lot of people asking, david, where did you get that MAGA hat? I've been occasionally during the week wearing a MAGA hat that says make truth go great again. This is one of our items. This is available on in our online store store.david pakman.com and I will say a little bit more about what's going on with the merch in a moment. All right. Justin wrote in and Justin says orange man bad. This whole thing is Joe Biden's fault. It seems you hate democracy. Biden encouraged illegal immigration and Trump was democratically elected to fix the problem. Now you cry dictator. He's called the president. He is in charge. Like a dictator, but democratically elected by the people. That. That is not true. It's not. You don't get to be a dictator just because you were democratically elected. There are supposed to be checks and balances. We have Congress, we have a court, we have more. But okay. This person is not going to understand. Poor Renee. Her wife screamed, why did you use real bullets? Wow. Just wow. So brainwashed. So sad. It's. You don't help. I don't agree with how you put things. However, I do watch a lot of your videos. So in case you wonder why so many people aren't subscribed, Florida seems to be taking the correct approach. Well, you know what, Justin? I sometimes do wonder why are so many people not subscribed? And then I remember that a lot of people believe absolute and utter bullshit like you do, and I go, that's why so many people aren't subscribed. So listen, if you want shows that aren't going to blow smoke up your whatever and that aren't going to sugarcoat and are just going to be honest, this is the show for you. And there are others as well. And I would invite you to subscribe and I would love it if you subscribed. However, if that is not what you what appeals to you, if you just want unhinged praise of Donald Trump and irrelevant criticisms of Joe Biden, guilty as charged, this show is not going to be for you. All right, Sian wrote in and says, since I started wearing your merch. Hi David. I recently ordered and subsequently started wearing one of the show sweatshirts. And I have had several really nice interactions from people who are fans of yours who wide ranging demographics. Old, young, white, Latino. They were all pumped to see and approach a fellow fan. And to me, it speaks to the quality of your work and your character. Anywho, glad to have you as a rational voice and I look forward to future Parkman. Oh, no future Parkman show episodes. All right, let's assume that that was just an erratic autocorrect. I have heard from so many people who have said, david, I was wearing your T shirt at the gym. I was wearing the fake MAGA hat that says make truth great again out. And people approached me and we had great conversations with mutual fans of the show. I love that. I love that. You know, we, we make very little money with the merch. Like the profit margin is often like a couple percent. In fact, we had stuff mispriced at the beginning and we were, we were losing like a dollar for every T shirt we sold, which is not a good way to run a business. Okay, but these are really conversation inducing pieces and I love hearing from people that they are having those great conversations. All right, OC Kings fan wrote on the subreddit, what happens if Nicolas Maduro is found not guilty? Maybe a stupid question. So forgive me, but given the thin evidence and lack of procedural knowledge by Trump's DOJ in other recent indictments, it's pretty conceivable that a jury will come back with a not guilty verdict in the Maduro trial. What happens then? Do we say, whoopsie, guess you can go home now? Does he retake power? Does the Trump administration ignore the verdict and put him in Guantanamo or an ICE facility? Generally genuinely curious. So here's my expectation on this. I talked to a couple of lawyers. The lawyers I spoke to said their expectation is that if, as if this legal process against as the legal process against Maduro goes forward, if prosecutors start to get the sense that it is, it is thin, that it's not a case likely to yield a conviction, that they may push for a plea deal and it may be a more and more favorable plea deal and it could even be you get to go back to Venezuela but you can never hold power again or something that is relatively pathetic and has very little teeth. I think it is completely plausible that there is not a conviction of Maduro because it does seem like the case against him by the law. Remember, I think Maduro is terrible. I'm not a supporter of Maduro. For all the people writing me these notes, David, you Maduro supporting socialist Marxist what I am against Maduro. I'm also against the US doing these incursions and deciding who is the next leader of Venezuela. That doesn't go well. But I'm not a Maduro guy. But the evidence against him does seem relatively weak based on the letter of the law. And I think it is completely plausible. I'm not going to say that he is acquitted, but that there is no conviction and that a very favorable plea deal is offered as prosecutors determine we are not likely to get a conviction here. Devourer of Redditors is pushing for Schumer Jefferies 2028 I think this is satire. I don't know. The post is I'm tired of all these do nothing corporatist Democrats. We need some strong progressives who aren't afraid to wield their political capital for all it's worth. We need an fdr, an lbj, a JFK probably, if he weren't assassinated. And that's why Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are the winning ticket in 2028. This sentiment was not welcomed with open arms on the subreddit. You might not be surprised to hear. I assume that this is satire. I don't think someone who wants strong progressives unafraid to wield political capital would say that Schumer Jeffries is the right ticket. But maybe there's something missing here and it is serious. Fanatic Watch wrote on the subreddit. I'm not worried about America's future. When Trump gets out and a new president replaces him and reverses many of his antics, a lot of leaders worldwide are just going to move on to and think of the Trump era as just a one off mishap and nothing more. Most Europeans are smart enough to realize that Americans by large don't share the same worldview as Trump and that the American market is too big to ignore. I am not so sure. Listen, this is an optimistic perspective, which is as bad as Trump is. And as much as Trump has ruined relationships with allies around the world, as disastrous as he has been, on some level, other countries value the relationship with the United States and are going to come right back to us when Trump is gone. That would be great. The reason I'm skeptical is that a lot of other countries take their deals seriously. They don't break them on a whim like Donald Trump did with the Iran nuclear deal or whatever else. And so when China reorganizes its soybean imports to come from other countries, not the United States, I don't know that China is going to be as willing to go. All right, yeah, forget that. We'll cancel that deal with Brazil and whoever else and we'll just go back to the United States. I'm just not sure that that's going to happen. So this is a, an optimistic perspective, but I don't know that it is an accurate one. AMC Martin wrote on YouTube. It's not fair that Trump can forget his president, but the rest of us can't. Yes. No, I have nothing to add to this one. This one is a nice one that combines disdain over Trump's authoritarianism with concerns about Trump's cognition. I have nothing to add. Just like, very well done and nicely nicely executed. Mike Tyke wrote on YouTube. I love the pathological way that this country tries so hard to keep the panic level low. On the wrong track, really. Never mind just leaving the track. The country has derailed, left the track, gone over a CL cliff and crashed and exploded at the bottom of a freaking ravine. Yeah. You know what's really wild about being in the United States right now? You know, you look at the country on a map. Some countries don't have maps. No, sorry, sorry. That's, that's, that's an old classic. You look at the US On a map, it is a massive country, geographically, over 340 million people. And we have a lot of people in this country who agrees that the country is out of control. The problem is some of us believe the country is out of control because of Donald Trump. On the other hand, there are Trump supporters who believe the country is out of control because of Biden and Trump is going to be the only thing that fixes the country. And so that is why we don't have, you know, that the shock from Europeans and South Americans who write to me and they go, what on earth is going on in this country, David, in the United States, what is happening? They are not cognizant of the fact that there are tens of, you know, a lot of these countries have 5 million people. There are tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump, think he's doing a good job, don't have any concerns that his brain is failing. Don't have any concerns that he's an anti democratic authoritarian. They're just like, yeah, this is the guy to fix the problem. And if that's where you start to be, tough to talk your way out of it, very, very tough to talk them out of it for sure. We have a phenomenal bonus for a show for you today. Sign up@join pacman.com get instant access. It's the best, it's the most direct, it's the most efficient way of supporting the David Pakman Show. I tip my hat to you. It didn't screw up my hair that badly. I'll see you on the bonus show.