Bulwark Takes - Trump Just Hit His Worst Approval Number EVER (w/ David Pakman)

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Ready to be seen? Check that appointment off your to-do list with Zocdoc:https://zocdoc.com/ bulwarktakes #sponsoredTim Miller and David Pakman take on Trump’s plummeting poll numbers, the White House putting Pakman on its official “Media Offenders” list, and the creators who Pakman says are now afraid to interview him because they fear becoming targets themselves. They also discuss how algorithms reward outrage and misinformation, the coming flood of synthetic political content, and Pakman’s new book, Pay Attention, about what the attention economy is doing to our politics and our brains.David Pakman’s new book, Pay Attention: How the Algorithms and Media Wars Are Suppressing Truth and Rewiring Your Brain:https://davidpakman.com/davids-books/The David Pakman Show:https://davidpakman.com/

Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller with Bullwork Takes. Delighted to be here today with the host of the David Packman show. He's also the author of a new book called Pay Attention, How Algorithms and Media Wars are suppressing truth and rewiring your brain, which is out tomorrow. It's David Packman. Good to see you again. Brother. How you doing it? Tim, always good to see you. Thank you. Congrats on the book. We'll get to it in a second. It's a slog. Doing a book's a slog. So I give you props for doing it while you're grinding out the content.

I want to first start with a couple news items. As we're just starting to tape here, I saw something very exciting. It is the very first poll where Donald Trump has hit the 20s in favorability. This is the lowest approval. He's recorded with any pollster in either term. American Research Group has been 29 approved, 68 disapprove. I'm wondering where your hopium level is right now. You know, I know that sometimes, and this is kind of, I guess, related to the book a little bit.

You know, sometimes you have to guard against kind of what you want or what you know the audience would want versus like your sober analysis. Is your sober analysis here that Trump is in as bad of a position as it looks like in this cult? Well, I am completely sober right now. So it'll be that kind of analysis. I always suspected the rock, rock bottom is like 27. I don't think he could go really lower than 27 just based on like the true cult-like believers, et cetera. So 29 is very interesting.

And it's starting to kind of get there. I mean, listen, I care primarily about what happens after these midterms. And I think the most important thing is neuter this guy such that he can play no role in continuing the legacy of MAGA into and beyond 2028. And the better Democrats do in November and the lower that Trump's approval is, the worst positioned he will be to play Kingmaker in 28, which, of course, he's going to try to drag out as long as possible because he knows this is his last hosting gig to use like the reality show, you know, terminology. He's going to turn it into a reality show for as long as he can.

If he's in the 20s, the degree to which he can help anybody starts to become, it starts to approximate zero is the way I would say. And so I think it's interesting, you know, 29, 31, okay, but his ability to play a role in 28 is what I'm most interested in. Yeah. And I also think the degree to a degree to which people bend the need of them. You know, I just think that like when you talk about all these outside institutions, you know, we've seen CEOs, universities. And like, there's going to be corruption all the up to the last minute.

And there's going to be chicanery where he tries to hold onto power and make enough as much money as possible for his family to the last second. But yeah, again, his ability to do that, you know, I think it's partially limited by Congress checking, but also partially limited by like the perception. Like, oh, this is a weak guy and his movement is over. And I think that if that starts to congeal, you know, then other players start to act differently, you know, which isn't a profile in courage,

but whatever. Like we are, we are where we are. I mean, Nate Silver, who has not been like super resistance, whatever, Trump derangement syndrome guy at all, he right now has the Democrats winning 53 sentence seats, which would be really insane. And that has a full sweep of the kind of Ohio, Texas, Iowa, Alaska quadrant, which is pretty notable. The other thing is, I've said for a while, I think Trump wants the next Republican nominee, whether they win or lose in 2028, to do terribly. And the reason that I think that's the case is Trump's ego is not suited to calmly leaving and then having someone replace him who's really popular, well-liked, and does anything

that people are proud of. And so because Donald Trump wants to be- Which is different than maybe how it would have been last time because he would have been scared to jail. Yes. With this time with immunity and all that, yeah. Absolutely. I think Trump wants to be able to leave and either the 28 nominee loses and Trump goes,

see, I was special. I really was the only one who could do it. Or if the Republican nominee wins in 28, Trump wants them not to do well so that Trump can go, I told you guys, I was the only one who could do this. So that, I think, is going to be exacerbated by this low approval rating that Trump has, where he may be even more interested in kind of tearing it down on the way out. That's higher on the hopium scale than I thought you'd be. So that's good to know. On the media cracked industry, this is also kind of related to the book and, you know, trying to, trying to identify truth and the challenge in a liberal democracy of being able to identify truth. We have on Friday, you know, Trump kicks out MS now, CNN and Politico, you know, from the White House Press Corps. We have this morning

before we started taping, interestingly, the TV networks, kind of standing in solidarity and saying that they will not pool the president's events. This even includes Fox News if he doesn't reinstate CNN and that and us now. Just wondering what you think about that and like the state of play and like how worried you are that we're moving, even potentially among presidents of both parties and talk more of a propagandistic news core covering them. I'm very worried about that. I mean, Trump put me on an official list at whitehouse.gov.

You know, there's a section now on whitehouse.gov that says, congrats. My colleague, Adrian Caraschia is on there. So you guys have it together. My mom is very proud. I have to tell you, Tim. So listen, I mean, it's like you've got these three parts. You've got the lawsuits against Stephanopoulos and 60 minutes, et cetera. And basically either because they want a merger approved or because they're just worried about ongoing litigation, they're giving Trump money. So that's like number one. Number two, you've got the targeting of people like Adrian and myself and Brian Tyler Cohen, et cetera, on an official whitehouse.com website. And then now you have this. It is the 20th century authoritarian view of the press, which is you publish things I like and you get access and adulation. And if you don't, we might sue you. Maybe the next thing would be criminal charges. I don't know. Or we will put you on a list and hope that other people get scared off. And I'll tell you something, Tim, there are a couple of creators who said,

as I have been doing this book tour, I don't want to interview you solely because you're on that list. And I am worried about ending up on that list. And I don't have money if I get a defamation. Now, I think maybe it's a little exaggerated. But like, Like, that is the self-censorship that it is all designed to push. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about the book. Give us the elevator pitch.

Well, the elevator pitch is you've got to understand the incentives of the digital platforms we exist on. Once you understand that the incentives are keep people on these platforms, you realize you aren't getting fed stuff because it's true or because it'll make you a better voter or a more informed member of society. That is not why. You are getting fed stuff that makes. you angry or afraid, if it identifies a scapegoat or a villain, even better. And the whole point is keep you on the platform, keep you sharing content. That means the left is at a disadvantage. And the left is at a disadvantage, I argue, not because the right has like figured out how to talk on these platforms, but because the rights messaging is just more naturally suited to creating fear and anger

and identifying scapegoats. That's interesting. This is one way to combat this that I kind of vacillate on that you hear from left creators, left strategists, is that the left just needs to be better at that part. I just accept the world that we're in and the left needs to be better at creating bad guys, creating enemies. And a lot of times then the outgrowth of that is, you know, focus their messaging more on, you know, the billionaire class and the Epstein class. and like what they're doing to hurt people. And like that would maybe be better than what we've seen from more establishment Democrats who are like less comfortable with like making those kinds of,

to say that slightly in a pejorative manner like demagogic arguments about foes. Like what do you think about that? Is that one of the things you think is worth contemplating? That's not really the argument that I'm making in the book. I mean, I think that there is a debate as to whether the focus in, terms of public outreach should be more economic, more about corruption, more about the Epstein class. I think that that's a perfectly legitimate debate. I think it definitely shouldn't be about the social issues that are losers at the get-go and that by even engaging in them, you're already

seeding the framing to the right. Like that, I definitely shouldn't be that. The argument I make in the book is more about the left needs to understand how to frame and talk about issues in an emotionally salient and authentic way. And so like if you take housing as an example, which is very anodyne and boring in a sense, it's like about zoning and it's about the interplay between federal state and municipal and all this other stuff, you've got to find some way to grab people by the emotional core of the issue. Like, hey, if you live in L.A. and you work full time in L.A., it shouldn't be unaffordable to where you go, I have to move two hours. away. Like, that's maybe the emotional core of the issue. And then you get into the zoning and the

other stuff. So it's more about that. And a lot of the rights messaging just naturally lends itself to that. Yeah. I do wonder if maybe the right got trained a little bit on decades of talk radio, you know, because I think about this. And I think about how, you know, in a lot of ways, like Rush understood the Republican electorate better than the Republican politicians did. And like eventually there ends up being, you know, Trump is the avatar of this, kind of the overthrow of the old establishment. I remember, I was talking to Bill Crystal a couple weeks ago about the Harriet Myers nomination for Supreme Court, which is like this silly story from another time. But it's like, the Republican talk radio was like aligned against it immediately.

Right. And like Republican politicians were kind of like, you know, doing the more traditional old thing of like, we should trust the president and she's called. And then like eventually they start to like follow that, you know. And so I think a lot of the Republican politicians now were like trained on this. Like they grew up like listening to rush watching bill o'Reilly, etc. And I think that a lot now you see the Democratic candidates sometimes feel like behind content creators in like being able to talk about things and frame things in a way that resonates with the base because they don't have as much practice on it. I think that's absolutely true. But if you take an example like the COVID vaccine, when Tucker and Brett Weinstein and

whoever else go, 10 million people died from the vaccine. I don't think it's that they learned how to talk that way necessarily. It's like that is a crazy idea, but it's short. It immediately makes you go, I'm furious with whoever did that to us. I'm afraid a family member is going to do that and you're going to share it. You're going to engage with it. If I come in and I go, hey, guys, you want to know the truth about the COVID vaccine? Not so good at preventing transmission, but like it'll probably keep you out of the hospital, very safe, but your arm might hurt. I'm explaining, I'm losing, it's boring. I'm telling the truth, but it does not matter on these digital platforms. The 10 million people died of this thing is just naturally going to do better. Look, you didn't do campaigns

before this. You came up for this in the media standpoint. But like in some ways, like you're running like a running focus group because you see what the reaction is to the topics you talk about and to the way that you frame the topics. And so I talked about how that experience, kind of has informed, you know, your suggestions on this. It's sort of like every single day you iterate a little bit and like you try some different titles and thumbnails or like, let me bury the lead versus like go right up front with what the main point of it is. And you just like are constantly making all of these little tweaks.

And like my advice to the, I'm not like a big strategist guy, but like my advice from just doing it for a while is we should really always be framing every issue as compelling as we can up to the point at which we're being dishonest. So like, imagine a Caroline Levitt press conference. She's gone now, but like, you know, she used to occasionally do press conferences. If I go through the trouble of putting a video together and then I call it government official speaks to the media, that's a bomb. That's just, that's not going to do well. That's extraordinarily boring on YouTube. If I go the complete other direction and I go, Caroline Levitt feints after smoking pot, it'll get a lot of clicks once, but it's untrue. And,

I'm losing credibility with my audience. You can try that trick once, but you can't do that more than once. So, like, where we kind of end up landing is, like, Caroline Levitt spends another hour lying to the press. It's more interesting, but I can defend it, and I can explain what the lies are. So, like, I think you always have to be thinking and, like, what is the line of dishonesty

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Ready to be seen? Head to Zockdoc.com slash bulwark takes to get started and check that appointment off your to-do list. That's ZOC, doc.com slash bulwark takes. You also talk a bit in the book about this question as a creator that you have to deal with audience capture and like how. you think about that and how that rewrite you and like what that looks like. You know, talk about the kind of your experience, like thinking about that and what do you think maybe implications are for other people who are either consuming this content or who are running for office. So basically audience capture in short means your audience has captured you and they are now

directing what you're talking about and how you're talking about it in a way that may not reflect your authentic views or interests. So like, for example, sometimes you'll see these creators. we won't name anybody who go, listen, I'm on the left, but like, here's one little thing where I kind of think Democrats are going wrong about. And then that attracts this influx of right-wing people who go, that, that's the thing. Eight months go by and now you're a right-winger. You're speaking at right-wing groups. You've left the left, right? I think that that's a form of audience capture that can't possibly be an authentic change in someone's political views. Like, if you're in your

late 30s, early 40s, and you do this 180, I really struggle to believe that you've just had an awakening. I think that that is, like, cynical and the result of being captured by your audience. What I also say in the book, though, is seeing feedback that is authentic from your audience is useful. And it's fine if that informs what your audience cares about, for example, and you, like, consider it in the coverage that you do. So I think, like, all of these things are a balance. You don't want to be captured by your audience into only doing that first thing I mentioned. But if your audience isn't resonating with the way you're talking about certain issues or finds that you're being dismissive of some angle, like, I think that that's really useful feedback. It's up to the creators to kind of decide like what's useful.

Yeah. I think about this. When I wrote my book a couple years ago, like the one kind of quasi compliment I gave to Breitbart was it was at that time, you know, this is what 15 years ago now. like the conventional wisdom of people in the media or in politics was like don't read the comments actually even like the commenters are crazy they're not representative um and you know just you focus on whatever your policy beliefs are and don't let yourself get sullied by what's happening down there the bright bart guys basically inverted that and they were like no we're going to feed the commenters like we're going to find these people that are unhappy and unsatisfied and we're going to feed them a bunch of material that they would would resonate that resonates with them. What the result of that was was a lot of pernicious stuff, but like they ended up centering a lot of topics that like for right wing people, like they thought were legitimate and that we're not getting enough attention by the establishment. And that was a lot a way to drive them to power. Now you can see how that goes bad.

Then once you start doing that so much, you start indulging their conspiracy theories. And to me like that is the balance, I think. Like, you know, like getting feedback from people are like, hey, we're really upset about this thing. And we notice. that the main news outlets aren't covering it. Okay, that's one thing. It's another thing that when audience capture is, you know, like we saw a bunch of this during like the, like after the Biden debate or something where it's like, that was great actually.

Like we don't want to tell people something that's bad or, you know, like indulging in conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk or whatever. Like, you know, to me, like that balance is real. Like, how do you think about that in your own platform? I think that's right. But I think the Breitbart example is not totally analogous like to what I do and to what you do because there is this kind of. parisocial aspect to the creator work that we do. Whether Breitbart is cynically doing what you

described or doing it because they've come to learn in a completely good faith way about things their audience is interested in, it kind of doesn't matter. If I do it cynically, the lack of authenticity, I believe, comes through and the audience identifies that. And so like there were, you know, I remember creators who kind of came into being their reason for existence was we support. Bernie. Cool. When Bernie was no longer still in the primary, they attempted to transition into stuff that was not really authentically interesting to them. And it kind of shows through and audiences identify it. And so I think like the authenticity component is so critical. I agree. What, um, talk some of the algorithms themselves and what your concerns are. You cover this

also in the book with regards to AI in particular, um, and the content that is coming. I have some thoughts well i'll just give you an open open-ended chance to cook on that for a second i'm already dealing with synthetic AI competition to what i do and so last week an entire channel sprung up on youtube called the daniel carter show if you search for it it's gone but it was basically a guy who looks a lot like me they softened his features a little bit and made him a little more traditionally attractive i have to say um you're handsome what did they do what changes did they make well he had better hair that's hard to believe hard to believe i know maybe he maybe he's you some thoughts for any future Botox work. Exactly. Exactly. So it kind of like, it sort of looked like me and the studio kind of looked like mine. And they used an AI voice cloner where the voice literally sounded like me, but they fed it scripts. And this stuff was getting views. And some viewers found it. And what's interesting is YouTube knew to recommend it to my existing viewers. So like it detected that the subject matter was probably interesting. So that's one.

example. If there's a thousand of those going up every single day, it's of course going to exceed my ability to find them and to tell our YouTube rep, look, this is using AI to steal my likeness and my voice, et cetera. So I think like the bad side of what's coming is that that is going to be scaled up almost infinitely because of the technological side. The other side of it, which I think is like a little optimistic, is I'm seeing way more interest in like real interpersonal connections, especially like post-pandemic, especially as like the theme on Facebook is, I'm not going to friend every random person I meet. I want to actually be in touch with people I really have a relationship with. I'm doing some book events in person.

And like they're all like the request for tickets is four or five X what's available. I'm seeing people want to connect in the real world in a more authentic way. So I think that although the capacity to scale up these synthetic influencers is going to go totally nuclear, I think audiences are going to reject it to the extent that they can identify. that it's AI. And this is the huge thing. I mean, and thinking about how to regulate it. And this is like slightly different than, you know, Gavin Newsome this weekend announced, you know, a new bill that he supported was just a California influencer law, which basically made people disclose. If you're an influencer on Instagram and you're getting paid by candidate X, like just like on a regular

television ad, you have to say, I'm paid for, this was paid for by candidate X, right? And to me, there's like a little bit of a comparison between this and AI. I mean, there's, There's a lot of differences, but like in the challenge about how we deal with it going forward, right? Which is that there's just a lot of artificial stuff out there in people's feeds. And there are no editors. You know, it's not like watch the nightly news where they get to sift through this sort of stuff. It's just it's just the algorithms and the people. And if you're getting a fee of a person that you like the stuff that they're saying and then they start taking money from a candidate, you don't have any way to know.

You know, or simultaneously, you know, if you get this AI, you know, whatever. David Fartman or whatever it was called in your feed and it looks like you and you start watching it like some people are going to be confused some people aren't but I have had people at our events come up to me and say I haven't had it for me yet I don't know maybe I'm not handsome enough but like I saw a fake I forget who it was I don't know Nicole Wallace or something or George and I was tricked you know I've had people tell me that they were tricked and so I don't know how do you think about how to try to control that you know without infringing people's free speech rights, you know, without, you know, trying to kind of limit the growth of independent media.

Yeah, that's the trick. I am really skeptical. One of the problems with regulation around any kind of technology is that it is usually five years behind and based on misunderstandings that lawmakers have about how things work. So, for example, there was this old case I remember covering in New York State that was a, I guess now we call it CSAM. It used to be called child porn, but it's like pornography implies consent, so we don't use that term anymore. So it's child sexual abuse material. And there was this technicality, whereas the law was written, it was about what you downloaded. And because some alleged perpetrator only looked at things in his browser, by the letter of the law, he hadn't downloaded anything. And so like one guy went free because of that. So then it took like years and they kind of like redefined the definition. But it was like too little too late. And then we had like five new problems. So my instinct, is that especially on something that's moving as quickly as AI, it's going to be really hard to solve this problem by regulation. That doesn't mean that there shouldn't be some regulations.

And it's good that a bunch of governors. I think Pritzker is also doing something on this and some others. I think that that's great. We basically need a more educated population, quite frankly. And part of it is understanding, like, even with the algorithms, people go and they open up TikTok and they go, I'm seeing these five videos. It must be because they're either true or useful to me.

some way. And it's like, no, you have to understand why you're being shown that stuff instead of something else. And so a lot of it, I think, it's so boring and I don't know how you do it, but like it's about educating people to understand. The technology is more than good enough to trick you. Here's me, the former Republican now coming in on the side of more regulation. But I just, I like, because like that's generally not, you know, my inside. And I think that my view on regulation just across anything is it should be simple. Right. And actionable. right and like we should do it like it shouldn't you shouldn't create unnecessary complications and and that then create unintended consequences right and for me like the simplest way to look at this is like if you're paid to do an advertisement you need to say it oh right yeah if it's artificial there needs to be a like a you know a disclaimer that says this is an artificial person i don't and i don't know maybe that i'm sure they're going to there'd be first amendment challenges a lot of complications there and maybe then we end up into the place you're talking about with the c sam thing where it ends up getting written and it gets so complicated. They're loopholes. But I don't know,

man, I just think that we're really at an inflection point on this stuff. And I get really worried that even as soon as 28, you get to a period where people are, that the stuff that people are consuming about the campaign is more fake than real. The technology is already more than good enough to do robocalls with cloned candidate voices. And this was like tested in 24. There was like one instance of it. Someone I think cloned Biden's voice in New Hampshire or something like that. That's right. It's two years later. The technology is so good. My team that edits my videos, they can't tell the difference. The Daniel Carter one wasn't so good, but like we've done tests with other voice cloners. My own team can't even tell the difference. So of course, a voter on a phone line is going to struggle to do that. I agree with you on the regulation. The only thing about it is like, imagine the U.S. passes a law. Anything synthetic has to be disclosed. Okay, cool. What about the stuff that's made in France and appears on. So what do we do about that? Yeah.

I don't know, man. It's all, it's extremely complicated. And I just, like, there's a total lack of seriousness about dealing with it right now. And this is another way where the imbalance comes where on the right, like you're saying, like the way that they manipulate the algorithms, it's just like it's inherently more particularly conspiratorial right coded, right? On the one hand. Also, because of that reason, they're not at all incentivized to create new rules about this. You know what I mean? Absolutely.

I mean, it's sort of like the, we're going to do campaign finance reform. Yeah, but didn't you get elected under the system we have? How incentivized are you to change that? And you've got to find people who truly are. Yeah. All right. One more. Just, you know, from one influencer to another.

I guess I'm a content. What do you keep saying? Creator? I guess I'm a creator now. It was hard of me to self-identify as a journalist. And then I was like, I'm not really that. And then I'm like, now I'm a YouTuber. And now I have to deal with creator.

I, you know, I'm just trying to. It's about my identity I'm working for it. I'm okay with you identifying whatever feels, you know, authentic to you. Thank you. I don't know. I just like, how do you, I think about the personal challenges with all this? And part of it is about like staying in your integrity, you know, and balancing that between working the algorithm.

And another part for me is like you do just, I'm sorry, you can't pretend like the algorithm doesn't exist. Like you have to think about it, both for, you know, when it comes to attracting people so that, you know, they're going to see your material. but also for like thinking about the strategic ways to get to new people because the algorithm is also so good at like finding other math like the types of people already listened to your content like finding matching types of people and so that's fine but then you end up in a bubble and in a cocoon and it's like part of the work I part of the work that I find valuable is like sometimes reaching people that are not like already also listening to you and Brian Tyra Cohen and other stuff like also getting to other people so you have so I don't know and like how do you just kind of like think about that like maintaining your integrity realizing the algorithm exists trying to get to as many people as possible you know without having it i don't know sully what you're doing i think that being on multiple platforms is the best way because like i'll hear from people who go listen david i like your content and i like your analysis but these youtube titles and thumbnails just piss me off and i go hey we i have a solution i have an audio

podcast it's 75 minutes long there's no thumbnails there's no you don't have to it's the same content, like that may be the right platform for you. So I do think, like, to a degree, we're creating for the platforms. If we zoom out just a little bit, though, Tim, I think one of the things that happens really naturally, algorithmically for the right, is that people get funneled down into useful political stuff for the right from broader interest. So, like, I'll give you an example. Mom goes on Facebook for crib recommendations, finds one of these mommy blogger groups, gets crib recommendations. Cool. The algorithm knows a lot of of the people who start there get interested in how to decline vaccines when you speak to your pediatric.

Or there's cat litter in the schools because too many kids are identifying as cats. Exactly. And there really isn't like if you start looking up business content, there's a pipeline to Jordan Peterson. If you start looking up how to wholesale real estate, there's a pipeline to the Tate brothers. There isn't really this. Sports to bus in in the boys, you know? Right. There isn't that real pipeline on the left. And I don't think we should be dishonest to create it.

But like we should be thinking about pulling in people who are not looking for political content. That's the takeaway. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. All right, brother. Anything I didn't ask you? Anything else you want to pitch? No. We really did it all.

I appreciate the book. Out tomorrow. Pay attention how algorithms and media wars are suppressing truth and rewiring your brain. David Packman, enjoy the book tour. We'll see you soon, brother. Thank you. Always good to see you.