← The David Pakman Show
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Josh
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- [01:52]
Josh
Well, another day, another disastrous interview for Donald Trump and and this time this orange demigod sitting down with NBC's Tom Yamas and I'll get to that in just a second. But yesterday was a special day in Trump world for all of us because while Trump was out there lashing out at reporters and threatening the world, metaphorically, he was soaking the world in gasoline holding the lighter. J.D. vance was sitting down with Megyn Kelly in what they are calling an interview. I didn't see it as an interview per se. I saw it more as, I don't know, a primer. A primer for a Vance presidency. And that's Where I'm starting today. I'm starting today by talking about J.D. vance and this interview with Megan Kelly. And I know everybody's gonna already start thinking it. Why are you talking about J.D. vance up front when Trump is spiraling, he's threatening war, he's attacking elections, he's embarrassing our entire country. And that's a fair question because JD Vance has just been a wet blanket out there this whole time. But the answer that we are looking at today is that first, J.D. vance, he's just as MAGA centric as Donald Trump. The same policies, the same instincts, the same cruelty, the same beliefs. But the difference is that J.D. vance is polished. He's delivering the same message without all the chaos, without the spectacle, without the necrotic hand. And for me, that makes him much more dangerous in the long term. And how does that play into everything? To me, it goes right to what's happening in November, the midterm elections. November 2026. We're seeing it right now. Trump is getting crushed in the polls. David's talking about the, the blue wave that's ahead. And I see it too. And the hope from Republicans is that someone like Vance can carry Trump's message without all the, the Stephen Miller lunacy and send that person, the J.D. vance character, out on the campaign trail. And frankly, beyond 2026, this is a tryout for 2028. We saw Trump talk about a Vance Rubio ticket and frankly, I don't even know if Trump's gonna make it to the end of his term. So we may see a JD Vance presidency even sooner. So what do they do? They parade out this puff piece audition interview. And it seems like it's a great way to get Vance off and running out in front of the masses. And look, before I get any further into this, let me be clear. Megyn Kelly didn't interview J.D. vance. She didn't challenge him. She didn't force him to reconcile any of his contradictions. She didn't call him to task on anything he said. Instead, this was more of a presentation, a coming out party, if you will, for, for J.D. vance. And look, don't take my word for it. Let's listen to exactly how Megyn Kelly herself describes the sit down interview.
- [05:00]
Megyn Kelly
I'll say my one observation that I want to share with you before we go, I'll try to raise this tomorrow too, if I remember is just how different he is. He'll talk about anything. Nothing's off limits. Like he, he went from subject to subject with ease. Think of our last Vice President and how stilted she was on everything.
- [05:23]
Josh
Of course, Kamala Harris has entered the picture. Okay, all right. Go on, Megan.
- [05:30]
Megyn Kelly
It was like her weird transgressions into Venn diagrams and burdens. And so, like, this guy was like, boom, boom, boom. He could make jokes, he make fun of himself, he could get serious, he could talk in depth on policy. He could, you know, be funny about Don Lemon and so on. It's just these. I'm not even sure these. These two are like the same species. She. She's like an alien being who doesn't totally understand the English language. I miss her. I'm not going to lie. I kind of hope she gets the nomination and that we get to see those two debate. But in any event, what a difference.
- [06:10]
Josh
I mean, come on, she sounds like she's swooning after, like, a first date. He's different. He's funny. And meanwhile, Kamala Harris is described as an alien being who doesn't totally understand the English language. That's. That's something. I mean, it. It's coming right from a movement led by a man who doesn't understand the Constitution, much less the English language. So what exactly is in this interview that had Megyn kelly gushing over J.D. vance? And look, it. It certainly wasn't details. It wasn't policy analysis. It wasn't outcomes or consequences that come with with a potential candidates interview. It was all window dressing. It was about trying to make sure that J.D. vance can sound calm. He can sound reasonable, like the adult in the room. He can sound presidential. And that. That's the test here. That's the entire performance. It exists in stark contrast with what's happening in the real world. Look, if Megan Kelly were a credible journalist, she would have pressed Vance on even the least popular MAGA positions. Flirting with war, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Greenland, threatening our allies in Europe, cozying up to Russia. American citizens being detained and disappeared and violating their first, second, fourth, fifth Amendment rights. All shredded. You've got Trump flirting with nationalizing elections, raiding the election offices in Georgia, and you have a sitting president linked to extremely damning documents involving horrific crimes against children in any other world. Just one of those issues shuts everything down. Here, they turn it into a yuck fest. Chuckling, smiling, softball, framing. That's all it was. They were humanizing this. This regime. I mean, look, she brought up a lot of these topics, but JD Gave total non answers. And Megan would happily accept these answers as if they're the truth. And look, I'll say this. I'll give J.D. vance, his flowers. He's good at walking a careful tightrope. He's good at this. He's a chameleon. He adapts to whatever his audience is, and he adapts to whoever's gonna reward him the most. That's why he's the vice president. He has zero fixed beliefs. And it actually reminded me of one of my favorite words in the English language. And it's a politician who is shrewd but really has no beliefs. It's called a snally goster. So we've got snally goster Vance out there knowing that he's got to be the one that carries MAGA to win in 2026 and to win in 2028. And so what does he do? He validates his base, but he distances himself from the chaos and the consequences of the president.
- [09:07]
J.D. Vance
Well, the president said very clearly, Putin should not have invaded Ukraine. We're going to try to work and bring that to an end. But there might be some areas of cooperation, too. His attitude is not, you're our friend, you're our enemy. We're going to go to war with our enemies, and we're going to be, you know, we're going to give our friends everything without asking questions. His attitude is we're about alliances, and you could have a country where we have a 90% aligned interest, but we're going to disagree on 10% of issues. Meanwhile, we may disagree with Russia on a lot, but we may agree on some things. And I do think that is a fundamental reorientation.
- [09:40]
Josh
I mean, listen to that. Listen to what he's saying. He's talking about a war where Russia invaded Ukraine. And Vance is talking about it, softening it up to make it a disagreement. And look, he goes on to talk about immigration the same way, because if
- [09:58]
J.D. Vance
you look even in very blue places like Memphis, Tennessee, or a number of other cities, you see the system working as it should. An immigration officer goes in, arrests an illegal alien. That person gets processed and deported. And if, God forbid, you have a mob forming, the ICE officers can call the local police and say, hey, these guys are threatening us. They're harassing us. They're maybe even assaulting us
- [10:22]
Josh
again. Instead of the Stephen Miller cruelty, you're getting this administrative inconvenience. He makes this sound like paperwork, these deportations, the acts of ICE and the dhs. He's making it sound like an administrative task. He's making morality into efficiency. And that's exactly how you normalize this extremism. And Megyn Kelly, she's Not doing anything. A real journalist would have stopped him right there and asked him why the mob was forming.
- [10:54]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
And.
- [10:54]
Josh
And we don't ever get that question. Instead, we get these chummy questions, like what happened with Don Lemon. Listen. Listen to this.
- [11:04]
Megyn Kelly
We mentioned the press a minute ago. Someone who claims to be a member of it is Don Lemon, who's been arrested now.
- [11:11]
J.D. Vance
The dumbest man in television.
- [11:13]
Megyn Kelly
Yeah, I mean, that seems he's under arrest because he stormed a church in the middle of a Sunday service, along with a lot of other rioters and disrupted people trying to worship. He's trying to cloak himself in the First Amendment, saying this is an attack on freedom of the press. And you say what?
- [11:31]
J.D. Vance
Well, I say first, Don, no one's objecting to you standing outside of a church and protesting. No one's objecting to you, to no one, saying, you can't protest the Trump administration's immigration policies or, frankly, our policies on anything else. What you cannot do is go into somebody's house of worship and prevent them from exercising their First Amendment right to the free exercise of religion.
- [11:55]
Josh
I don't even know what to say. They're brushing aside his credentials, just making fun of Don Lemon openly and making fun of him being a journalist. That's extremely rich coming from Megyn Kelly, especially in this situation. She's exhibiting exactly what she's accusing Don Lemon of. And look, personally, I watched the whole thing. I wasn't impressed. But I understand why it sells. I do. I understand why J.D. vance is getting paraded out there. Trump's poll numbers are sliding. Every press conference is absolute chaos. JD Vance makes that chaos feel more manageable. It's a lot less truth. Social rants from 3am and a lot more press release, a lot more presidential. So, look, why does this matter? Why does this little interview with. With Megyn Kelly matter right now? Because J.D. vance, to me, is a bigger threat to the United States than Trump is in the long term. And it matters now, because we're going to see a lot more of JD Vance, especially between now and November and then especially once the filing deadlines come and then once the primaries are over, because JD Vance is going to be the voice carrying the MAGA message to the masses. And look, yes, a blue wave is possible, and like David says, only if we make it happen. But we've got to consider November's not going to be a fair fight. Mail in, voting attacks, the postal service, sabotage, postmark manipulation.
- [13:33]
J.D. Vance
We.
- [13:33]
Josh
We've got election office raids. We've got the militarization and nationalization of elections being talked about. The Trump regime knows that these stances aren't popular. So instead of trying to persuade voters, they're trying to intimidate us and exhaust us. And JD Vance is just the window dressing. So to me, how do we combat this? How do we fight against this normalization that we're going to see from. From the Trump administration and J.D. vance, how do we win in November? And it's pretty simple. We've seen it work so far. You start local, you call your representatives, you write letters, you show up to town halls, you keep their atrocities, like the Epstein files and the videos of citizens being stripped of their rights and stripped of their lives visible. You keep them in front of them, and you make the outrage unavoidable. Because Trump's way, it doesn't win in the long term. And when he starts questioning the election legitimacy again, he's going to be at war with Republicans who aren't loyal enough. And that fracture is where we are going to take over and win. Now, ironically, later in that same day, we got Donald Trump on display. We saw J.D. vance, and then we saw an interview with a network that's not supposed to be as cozy. It's not Fox News, it's not Megyn Kelly, it's not Newsmax. But you can still tell that legacy media like NBC is afraid of Donald Trump. So on this NBC interview, Trump absolutely bulldozes Tom Yamas, using the interview just like he would on any of his campaign speeches. And look, I could do an entire show on all of the unhinged things he said in this interview. But there's two moments in particular that I want to highlight. The first is this IRS lawsuit, this ten and a half billion dollar lawsuit against the irs. I want you to listen carefully, very carefully, about what Donald Trump says his own DOJ is going to do. And then where this money ends up,
- [15:47]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
there's a new lawsuit by you and your family that you're suing the IRS for $10.5 billion for leaking your tax documents. Is this a good use of taxpayer money?
- [15:57]
Donald Trump
You can't leak documents. And any money that I win, I'll give it to charity, 100% to charities, charities that will be approved by government or whatever. I have another lawsuit with the United States. I sued because they broke into Mar A Lago.
- [16:11]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
But that's taxpayer money. It's going to get taken out of the system. I know it's going to charity. You're going to say if.
- [16:16]
Donald Trump
And I've won that case. I mean, I Virtually. They broke in the FBI illegally. Biden and his group. It wasn't Biden. He didn't know what he was doing.
- [16:23]
Josh
It was Biden. It wasn't Biden. He didn't know what he was doing. But that's not the problem here. The problem here is where the money is coming from and where it goes.
- [16:37]
Donald Trump
It was a group of very smart radical left people. They're very smart. They just, they've lost their way.
- [16:42]
Megyn Kelly
Right.
- [16:42]
Donald Trump
And they broke into Mar? A Lago. They broke into my home. They were. Went through.
- [16:46]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
Well, they had warrants.
- [16:47]
Donald Trump
My wife draws. They went through. You know, it's a double meaning. They went through Barons, my sons, everything. They went through the whole house.
- [17:00]
Josh
Stop here real quick. Really classy. Joking about his wife's drawers. Come on. I mean, absolutely unhinged. All right, keep rolling.
- [17:10]
Donald Trump
Hundreds of people. They, they, they went in with guns. Guns how would have been a blazing. Wait, wait, wait. I brought a lawsuit. Essentially, the lawsuit's been won. I guess I want a lot of money.
- [17:26]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
So Scott Bessant's the head of the irs. What I would have. The Justice Department, they're going to defend the IRS against you?
- [17:33]
Donald Trump
Well, there's never been anything like it, in all fairness.
- [17:35]
Josh
So are you going to, Are you going to tell debate?
- [17:36]
Donald Trump
Don't forget I sued as a private citizen because I sued between terms. I won three times. But are you going to pay you? I won three times, but I didn't assume. Unfortunately for this country, I didn't assume office to secondary. But here's the story. I sued because they broke into Mar? A Lago. That was before I became president. Now it goes along and it turned out that the suit is a very strong suit.
- [17:57]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
You're gonna tell them to pay you, though. You're the boss.
- [18:00]
Donald Trump
Well, what I would do, tell them to pay me. But I'll give 100% of the money to charity. I don't want any of that money.
- [18:05]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
You take it out of the system.
- [18:06]
Josh
So look, Trump is openly saying ten and a half billion dollars in tax money will go to charity or whatever, from the treasury, where it should be, to wherever Trump decides. We have deficits all over. We can't pay for the basic needs of this country because of his, his ICE actions, his DHS actions, and yet now he wants to take ten and a half billion dollars from taxpayers and just put it out into a charity that really no one's going to account for. It's the Trump crime family out in the open. And then this interview gets even worse to Me, because the Epstein questions came at the end of the interview and frankly, Trump brought it up himself. And look, with, with Kaitlan Collins, we saw Trump snap at her, talking about her smile with Yamis. We get this.
- [19:04]
Donald Trump
They asked me a question yesterday at the press conference about Clinton because of the testimony, the Epstein thing, which turned out that I have nothing to do. And they did about Epstein. And they said, do you think it's terrible what, you know, with the subpoenas and everything? And they're disobeying the subpoenas. And I actually said, it's a shame. You have an ex president and you have, you know, the president's wife and Secretary of state. And I said, it's a shame. It is a shame.
- [19:31]
Josh
Okay, standard line. He says he had nothing to do with it, but the Clintons did. All right, keep going.
- [19:38]
Donald Trump
It is a shame.
- [19:39]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
NBC News broke the story today. I don't know if you saw it, that the Democrats are already saying, if you bring President Bill Clinton and he has to testify, we're bringing President Trump. What do you say to that?
- [19:48]
Donald Trump
I think they might say that, you know, but they've already brought me. See, I've been brought. They had me indicted many, many times.
- [19:57]
Josh
So he swats this idea away, like attempting a coup somehow immunizes him from crimes against children. And when impeachment comes up, he brags about his success. But notice what he did. He walked away from the allegations right away. He went from being asked about Clinton's involvement with the Epstein files to immediately talking about how unfair the Democrats treated him, how he was impeached twice. That has nothing to do with the Epstein files. All right, let's see what else he has to say.
- [20:32]
Donald Trump
Many, many times. They didn't do that.
- [20:34]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
Do you think if the Democrats win in the midterms, at least one house of Congress, they're going to try to impeach you?
- [20:38]
Donald Trump
Well, you know, I've done a great job as president. They say I've had the best first year of any president in history. And I think I have. If you look, I said late wars, biggest tax cuts ever. Right now we have more under construction with the factories, the Carplay, you know, they're all moving back into the country. They were stolen from us over a 40 year period. They're all coming back from Germany, from Canada, from Mexico, from Japan.
- [21:01]
Josh
And then the interview concludes with a truly bizarre account, a truly bizarre statement about Bill Clinton. And we've seen the photos in the Epstein files. We've seen the innuendo, We've seen how cozy Donald Trump and Bill Clinton were earlier in their careers. But now you would think that if Trump is trying to distance himself from the Epstein files, trying to back out of it, he wouldn't say something like this.
- [21:34]
Donald Trump
I think I had the greatest first year that we've.
- [21:37]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
But you think they may come after you again?
- [21:38]
Donald Trump
Well, they'll find something like, I did an interview with you and because I did the interview, let's impeach him or
- [21:45]
NBC Interviewer (Tom Yamas)
something, anything out there that Americans are going to be surprised about that you're good.
- [21:48]
Donald Trump
Yeah, I'll do it. They shouldn't do it. And that's one of the things. I didn't do it for that reason. But it bothers me that somebody's going after Bill Clinton. See, I like Bill Clinton. I still like Bill.
- [21:59]
Josh
What do you like about him?
- [22:01]
Donald Trump
I like. Well, I liked his behavior toward me. I thought he got me, he understood me.
- [22:10]
Josh
I mean, this is not normal behavior. Look, it is somebody who doesn't want to talk about his thousands, tens of thousands of mentions in the Epstein files. But this is a, this is a man who is just trying to confuse everyone. It's the word salad, the Donald Trump standard of no substance. All right, guys. Man, it time flies when you're having fun. I'm Josh, filling in for David Pakman. We've got plenty of more to cover today, and if that's not enough, you can catch me over at Ring of fire weekends on YouTube. It's the Ring of Fire on YouTube. And then you can find me on my newly launched Facebook and IG pages at the Voice of the Left. I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to have you drop a comment, let me know what you think about me filling in for David. And we've got more content coming for you right here.
- [23:00]
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- [24:21]
Josh
All right, hang tight with me guys. This is going to be data heavy and I know, I'm already cringing. This is coming from a right wing source, but it's important because it ties directly with what the administration is claiming about their immigration policies. And to me, immigration is the biggest evidence that we see that this regime, the Trump regime, is not aligning their rhetoric with actual numbers. The actual numbers and what is happening with immigration, it doesn't live on the same planet that the Trump administration. So I want to walk through some of these numbers and what they actually say calmly, clearly and carefully. And I want to use a source here that's going to make, I mean, it's going to make all of us uncomfortable, but it's especially going to make the people on the right uncomfortable because the numbers are coming from an unexpected source. It's a white paper put together by the right leaning, the libertarian Cato Institute. They're not exactly a socialist knitting circle here. And this week we saw, and this is part of a series that the Cato Institute has been doing over the last few weeks. The Cato Institute released a major white paper analyzing the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets. And they went all the way back from 1994 through 20, 23, 30 years. I mean, this is a really deep dive, a really deep dive into the economics of immigration in our country. It goes through multiple administrations, multiple economic cycles, booms, recessions, deportations, everything in between. And the conclusions directly contradict a large portion of what the people on the right are saying about immigration. So I want to start real quick, just to recap for those of you who don't know who Cato is and why this matters. Cato is a right leaning, libertarian, conservative think tank. They are huge champions of free market economics. They're skeptical of big government, of government spending. They don't like centralizing economic control. They're not at all progressive and they are certainly not aligned with democratic messaging. Anything on the left, they are not aligned with that. Their interest here is economic efficiency through free Markets, which means to me, if they're publishing this 30 year fiscal analysis saying immigration is not a budgetary disaster, which is how this comes to light, it deserves attention because this is someone from the other side contradicting the Trump administration. So let's talk about what these numbers and what they're saying. Let's start with the big numbers, right? Between 94 and 2023, immigrants generated $24.2 trillion in tax revenue. Compare that to the government spending on those same immigrants. The government spent $13.6 trillion. That means immigrants in this country, just by being here and participating in our economy, produced a surplus of $10.6 trillion. So, I mean, that's a huge number. Now let's keep digging into this because it gets more important as we go on, right? So this, this concept of this surplus, it means lower deficits, lower interest costs on government debt. And Cato goes through all of that. They go into the debt savings and you bring this debt total benefit. So not just the $10.5 billion, you're looking at the entire fiscal benefit, including the debt savings, it raises it to $14.5 trillion over those 30 years. That's half a trillion dollars a year over the last three decades. And look, it's important to note here too. This is the best part to me, and this is like what you can take away and argue with all your right wing friends on Facebook or wherever. The White Paper doesn't just include immigrants that are here with documented immigrants. It includes the undocumented population as well. And the other surprising part is if you look through this, this wasn't just one year or a fluke or, or any weird spikes. Cato tracks the numbers year by year across the same period, across this 94 to 2023 period. Again, immigrants pay more in taxes than they receive in government spending and government benefits in every single year of their study. Not most years, not on average, every year. Cato even goes into what happens if we had the Stephen Miller dream scenario where there are no immigrants. They modeled the counterfactual here. They modeled what happens if immigration goes away, if it's dramatically reduced or eliminated. And the numbers are stark. Without immigration over the last 30 years, the US government debt would exceed 200% of GDP, double the current level. And look, we know this. We know we're taking away workers. We know we're taking people away that are doing critical jobs in the United States. We're killing farms. And we know that a smaller workforce means less tax revenue. And we know that undocumented Immigrants, they are paying taxes and they're not getting benefits. And with all that lost tax revenue, you have higher per capita costs and a greater reliance on the United States to take on more debt. So, yeah, Stephen Miller's dream would crush our U.S. economy. And there's another figure that I found surprising in this whole thing. Over their lifetimes, immigrants individually paid Almost or approximately $130,000 more in taxes than the average U.S. born resident. $130,000 More in taxes than the average U. S. Born resident. And that includes your federal, your state, your local, all taxes across everything. And it reflects this, this long term participation that we've had of immigrants in our labor force. It goes through the consumption taxes, the payroll taxes, all of it. So yeah, we see the talking point, we see the right saying everything from houses to benefits to entitlements, all of it is that immigrants burden our governments. And they are, they're specifically saying, and immigrants aren't. But the right is saying that the burden is specifically on your state and local government. So let's look a little bit more at those numbers, the state and local level. In that 30 year period, 94 to 2023 immigrants paid $9.6 trillion in state and local taxes and state and local spending was 4.7 trillion, net surplus, 6.6 trillion. Over the whole, the whole thing, the whole, all numbers put together. So when people are arguing the immigrants are draining local budgets, the long term accounting doesn't support that, it doesn't support their claims. And we know that the right's going to run away from the data, they're going to run away from the numbers and they're going to maybe say, hey, look, we're going to put these, these numbers, if, if they come to light, they're going to put them in buckets, they're going to say, well, it's one thing, not the other. But again, Cato was detailed here and I hate to give them their credit, but when we are talking about someone who should be on Donald Trump's side directly contradicting his numbers, his talking points, I want to highlight that. And the Cato Institute goes through all of the categories and the costs are real, right? Education, all of that, we're still seeing the immigrant, the immigrants paying more tax contributions than the costs over time. Now I will show what the right is going to say that they are going to point to. In this whole study, Cato highlights the mismatch between where taxes are collected and where the services are provided. I already said that a lot of these costs are occurring at the state and local level, while the biggest tax revenue is going to the federal government. That's a federalism issue. That's, that's an issue between our federal government and our state governments. It's a budgeting issue. And so when you see the Trump administration hammering these blue states, he's not dealing with fact. He's cutting spending for childcare. He's cutting spending across the board, especially in blue states, claiming it's because of immigrant immigration. The fact is immigrants are subsidizing non immigrants. And again, I mentioned earlier that this white paper includes undocumented immigrants. And here is a statistic that is going to surprise people. Non citizen immigrants, including the undocumented ones, accounted for approximately 44%, 44% of the total fiscal benefit in this study. That works out to about $6.3 trillion in surplus. So noncitizens and undocumented immigrants gave this country $6.3 trillion of surplus over the last 30 years. That is directly contradicting what the Trump administration is out there saying and trying to sell us on why they're invading our cities and why they're snatching people off the streets and why they're tearing families apart. They're saying it's because they are a drain on our economy and on our government budgets. They aren't. They aren't, you know, immigrants aren't using welfare more than anybody else. According to Cato's analysis, non citizen immigrants consume about 53% less in welfare benefits than US born residents, 53% less. And that includes all the programs that the right wing are citing in their, in their political arguments about public assistance. And it's because the lower participation here is driven by eligibility restrictions. They, you know, non citizens, they don't have the same eligibility for benefits that citizens do. We see the employment patterns, the demographic differences, we see education. I talked about that a minute ago. It's usually the biggest cost associated with immigration. Cato accounts for that. When, when all of this money is included, including education, immigrant households are still ahead of the curve. And it's just showing us this long term benefit, the upfront costs followed by a long term benefit. And in all of that, we are coming out ahead. And it's consistent with any of your basic human capital economics. Now, I want to point out that Cato didn't put this out because of altruism. They're not putting this out because suddenly they've shifted their ideals on how this country works and how the economy works. They published it because immigration aligns with free Market economics, we hear all the time that immigrants do the jobs that citizens don't want to do. And when you have a larger labor force, it supports growth. Higher productivity expands the tax base, the tax base. And we hear Dr. Oz asking for more productivity. Kids to start working a year earlier, seniors to work a year later. Well, here's your answer. If you want more productivity, more workers reduce the costs of government services. And when you restrict immigration, it constrains labor, it raises prices. Hey, there, right there is your inflation. And so when you start cutting out all the people who do the jobs, prices go up and economic output is slowed. And if you compare this to the dominant political narrative on the right, the MAGA talking points, immigrants are, they're blamed for the budget deficits, the strained public services, fiscal irresponsibility, fraud in daycares. But the numbers are real. And the numbers show trillions of dollars in fiscal benefit. Lower long term debt, higher tax revenues, reduced costs per capita. And that gap is glaring. But the right and reality not meshing, it's not accidental. It tells us exactly what we already know here. It's just like anything else in Trump's policy. Trump's not a conservative. The Cato Institute being a conservative organization calling out Donald Trump is like the NRA calling out Donald Trump for not being a Second Amendment guy. Trump isn't a conservative. His approach to immigration is not conservative. It's not grounded in free market economics. The tariffs, they restrict trade and American taxpayers pay the tariffs. Mass deportations shrink our labor force enforcement surges are increasing the government spending. And again, this DHS bill, the funding bill, is skyrocketing spending. And now you see investors, there's uncertainty, so investments are all over the place. Markets don't like chaos. The economy doesn't like the Trump chaos. So the data that Cato is presenting, it makes it clear that immigration supports our economic stability. They are a vital part of our economy. And if you wanted to point to one thing that has driven costs up in this economy and made our markets unstable and, and made jobs just disappear across the country, it is this immigration crackdown and this Trump style war on immigration is undermining our economy. And again, this study runs all the way up through 2023. So the recent immigration surges, all the stuff that Trump's blaming on Biden, the economic shocks, the COVID all of that, even with all of that accounted for, immigration made the country more money than our country spent on immigrants. And so that makes it extremely difficult, extremely difficult for the administration to justify that immigration is a cause for any of our problems. After 30 years of data, it's straightforward. Immigrants and immigration, they reduced deficit. They, they lowered the debt pressure and they expanded the tax base, producing a surplus for our country. And again, conservative accounting assumptions, conservative based Cato here. I, I think you guys should read all of this yourself. It is absolutely stunning. And you guys all out there, you need to look at this. And again, this is a perfect talking point when, when your, your angry uncle comes at you on Facebook or when you're at the dinner table, are you in politics? Show them the Cato study. So I'm going to cover this next story in our next block, but again, I'm Josh from Ring of Fire. You can catch us on YouTube. The Ring of Fire.com I'm filling in for David. And if you like the job I'm doing or if you hate me, go to my newly launched social media pages, on Facebook, on Instagram, at the voice of the left, I'm Josh. We'll be right back with more content.
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Josh
All right, guys, let's pivot here because, look, we were talking about policy and economic data, and yet there's another story about how this administration actually functions on the ground. And hint, it is absolute chaos. And it comes from a federal courtroom in Minnesota. And it is hilarious. I love this story. This week, a DOJ attorney named Julie Lee said something in open court that almost no government lawyer, any lawyer anywhere, ever says. She looked at a federal judge and said, the system sucks. This job sucks. Absolutely unbelievable. So, so who is this Julie Lee? So she was a Probationary attorney, career government lawyer. And she was temporarily assigned to help handle this massive surge of immigration cases. And when I say it's massive, I mean massive. We're talking 90 cases given to Julie Lee in just a few weeks. And that workload alone explains so much about how much and how often this administration is violating people's rights, especially in this immigration surge. This hearing, it wasn't though one of the routine hearings about any of these 90 plus cases. Judge Jerry Blackwell called this hearing for a very simple but important reason. We've seen it everywhere. The federal government is violating court orders, orders to release people, orders to follow procedures, orders with deadlines and actual written orders. They are not following them. And so according to the transcript, the judge says the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of individuals seen by this court have been found to be lawfully present as of now in the country. So it made the judge ask the same question we're asking. Why? Why doj? Why dhs? Are we having these issues where you're not complying with court orders? So the Department of Justice sends a probationary attorney, Julie Lee, alone, no supervisors, no senior attorneys. They're just her. Nobody with the authority to actually comply with these judges orders. And she had to explain the systemic failure of DHS and the doj. And look, when she was questioned, it was clear immediately she doesn't have the answers. Why? Because she's not getting answers from above her at all. And so finally she just gives up. She stops trying to dress it up. She tells the judge, what do you want me to do? The system sucks. This job sucks. I'm trying with any, every breath I have to get you what you need. And then the most hilarious line of all, I wish you would just hold me in contempt of court so I could get a full 24 hours of sleep. A DOJ attorney asking a federal judge to throw her in jail because she's exhausted. By the way, she also told the judge that she's previously tried to resign from dhs, but they couldn't find a replacement. So I gave them a specific time to get it done. If they don't, then by all means I'm going to walk out. And I find these quotes so hilarious, but they're also so brutally honest. It's because she wasn't melting down because of a court deadline. She's melting down the. Because the system is drowning her in this avalanche of cases pushed by this, this aggressive enforcement, no legal infrastructure to support it. Again, more than 90 cases here and no answers coming from above. She was the sacrificial lamb. And of course, it's saying everything about how accountability is working with the Trump regime. There is none. They don't care about court orders. They just offer up some low level overwhelmed attorney. And predictably, right after the hearing, Julie Lee was removed from the assignment. Why? Because she said the quiet part out loud and it's just more of this administration violating the law. Absolutely brazenly. She just to catch you up again, I'm Josh. I am filling in for David. He's off in Portugal. I think he's negotiating with those orcas that are sinking all the sailboats. But you can catch me on Ring of fire Weekends. That's YouTube.com the Ring of Fire. Or you can check out any of my social media pages. Instagram, Facebook, they're newly created he voiceoftheleft. But we've got a lot more content coming up, so stick with us.
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Josh
So you've seen us cover the Trump NBC interview already. And one of the things from this Trump NBC interview that really matters, even though something that when I first heard it sounded very casual at the time, was Trump talking about Joe Rogan. And it really does matter more than it sounds like it should. I'm Josh covering for David Pakman right now. You can catch me on Ring of Fire Weekends, YouTube.com the Ring of Fire. And look, Trump doesn't name drop people unless they matter to him, unless there's something to gain from it or he can attack them. Joe Rogan mattered in 2024 because he functioned as a distribution channel into young men who don't watch cable news. They don't open up the paper, if people even read the paper anymore. They don't read Op Deads and they don't identify with politics daily. So this so called manosphere, and it was a group of comedians and it was led by Joe Rogan, it wasn't just a sideshow, it wasn't just comedians asking questions on a podcast. It was a pipeline. And this pipeline worked. It worked tremendously well for Donald Trump. In 2024, Trump won the category of young men, men under 30 by double digit margins. So it was a real swing that happened. And certainly Joe Rogan played a huge role in that. It helped decide races across the country because the campaign, through these manosphere podcasters, understood the dynamic and they leaned into it, especially headed into November of 2024. So when we're hearing Trump talk about Joe Rogan now, it's not nostalgia or anything like that. It's because Trump needs him again. And we've heard Joe Rogan lately, we've heard him criticize Donald Trump's policies on immigration. We've heard him criticize kind of the overhanded, overre reach and the fact that the economy is not improving under Donald Trump. So Joe Rogan has appeared recently to drop his, his endorsement of Trump. And we're seeing the same thing with polls. Polling over the last year shows that Trump's approval rating with the under 30 to 18 to 29 group with young men, it's dropping sharply, down 10 points or so from where it was around the election and where it was around the inauguration. Only about 1 in 4, 1 in 4 men are saying that Donald Trump is delivering for them. It's roughly a quarter, roughly a quarter of the people that voted for Trump in 2024. These young men say they wouldn't do it again. And that erosion is super, super important because this was not a locked in group until this Trump campaign. And it was a collision of Charlie Kirk identifying with the issues that young men are facing and Joe Rogan reaching out to them, just asking questions. Rogan, we know this, he's not a policy communicator. He's a mood guy. When he starts questioning Trump or criticizing him, it signals a shift, a shift in mood, how people feel about what Donald Trump is doing. And look, the audience, they don't follow party loyalty, they follow tone, authenticity. So when Joe Rogan's tone about Donald Trump changes, young men's behavior is changing. And that's going to bring me to a deeper dive into some data here. After 2024, Democrats identified that they lost with young men. So they launched and it got a lot. It got panned through the media. They brought up the SAM project, the Speaking With American Men Project. It was like $20 million spent up front. It sounded like this watered down consultant product versus going toward actual activism amongst young men. But this study, this group, SAM has a persuasion goal, and we shouldn't hide that or deny it or walk away from that. We do need to understand that it is a persuasion goal. In the context of the data we're talking about. There was a huge sample in the last survey. They did 4,200 young people, 16 to 29, an oversample of more than 3,400 young men. And the data was weighted. They did all the scientific work to make sure that this data was correct. They ran focus groups. They were in virtually all the states, I think 40 of them, recruiting people based on various experiences and political identities. They were everywhere. And what the data is showing isn't that young men suddenly became conservative. Let's look at what this data actually shows. About 84% of young men report carrying a lot of stress in their daily life. 77% feel like they're on their own without support. We see the same numbers saying that men are judged harshly for showing weakness. It's that machismo, that macho man feeling. And they feel like they're being criticized for not having enough of it. And here's important part. 57% say they held back their opinions out of fear of social backlash. And so young men felt left behind. So that's where Trump, Joe Rogan, Charlie Kirk, they picked these men up. These young men, they picked them up when they felt like no one identified with them at all. And then we talk about the economy, because the economy is important. It's not improving. And these young men identified the economy as a major, major issue for them. 38% saying that they're just getting by and not really saving any money. 31% report being homeless or near homeless at some point in the last five years. There's 28% of them have more than one job. And a majority of them say that rent, housing, affordability, day to day thinking all of this is not secure. And this is the environment that Trump walked into in 2024, and he didn't Win them by persuading them on tax policy or tariffs. He validated their feelings and turned it into anger. And he used that anger to promise disruption. Disruption from a system that left them behind. And he framed himself as this, this person that was willing to break that system and unrigged the system against them. Of course, just like with everything, the Trump promises didn't help. Housing's not cheaper, rent's not cheaper. Old fashioned groceries are still expensive, Job security sucks. Trump didn't make their life any easier. And so these young men, they're seeing the outcomes not match the branding that they were promised. And this data is showing us that, that this economic instability and the fact that these men feel left behind are major factors in what they are going to do moving forward. 2026, 2028, whoever can reach out to them and have credible leadership and give them stability, economic breathing room. Those are things that these young men are looking for. And then there is an element of foreign policy that lines up with all of this. Younger men, especially Gen Z, are completely opposed to war. And you know, Trump, the peace president begging for the Nobel Peace Prize, promised them no new wars. No new wars. They grew up watching war after war, debt, instability, trauma, their friends coming back from war absolutely devastated. So when Trump broke the promise of peace by going to Venezuela, threatening Greenland, threatening Iran, all of this matters to Generation Z. It adds to their anxiety. And we as Democrats need to capitalize on this. Not by capitalizing or furthering the chaos, but by we need to stop treating young men as this moral problem. We need to stop treating them like they are this irresponsible class. They are people that we can reach. They're people that aren't rejecting our system of democracy. They just are responding to fear and instability. So what do we have to do? We have to talk about reality in plain language. We have to, we have to reach out to them about wages, about housing supply, rent stabilization, jobs, cost of living. They don't need lectures about identity. They don't need lectures about girls in a different locker room. They don't need that. They need their lives to be more predictable. And then Democrats have to show up in the same media ecosystem, right? Long form conversations, podcasts, non traditional platforms, not scolding, not talking down to them, not pandering to them, just direct engagement that actually respects the fact that this group of young men is intelligent and they have lived a problematic experience, one thing after another. And then we need to come across as the competent party, the competent answer to all of this chaos, as the Democrats. We need to exhibit strength. All right. We need to exhibit that we are going to be the stability going ahead where Trump is chaotic. And finally, we just need to deliver something tangible, just something. And all these studies show that we're doing the right things, right small wins. We just have to win on housing debt, training, pipelines, any of this. And we will fulfill the promise that Trump never could. All right, guys, again, Josh, I am filling in for David Pakman here on the David Pakman Show. I am from Ring of Fire Weekends. We will be back for our members with a bonus show. I'll be joined by Patrick, the ever present producer for the David Pakman Show.