The David Pakman Show - 1/27/25: MAGA cracking as Trump lies and JD Vance snaps

Episode Date: January 27, 2025

-- On the Show: -- MAGA is already starting to crack, just a week into Donald Trump's second presidential term -- Donald Trump has already earned himself impeachment after just days in office, but trying it would be a futile effort -- Confirming that he will be terrible for Palestinians, Donald Trump is caught admitting that his plan is to "clean out" the Palestinians from Gaza -- California Governor Gavin Newsom humiliates Donald Trump on the runway upon his arrival in California -- Vice President JD Vance snaps when pressed on when and how the Trump administration will lower grocery prices and we explore why lower them is quite difficult -- Donald Trump delivers a terrifying, confused and unhinged speech in Las Vegas, Nevada -- Doctor Phil is now disgustingly attempting to cash in on immigration raids, monetizing them for clicks -- MAGA cultists are pushing to put Donald Trump's face on Mount Rushmore -- On the Bonus Show: Top Republicans urge Trump to rethink stripping security from ex-officials, Trump slaps another country with "emergency" tariffs in trade war, Trump signs executive order to release more JFK, RKF, and MLK assassination files, much more... 😬 Remi mouth guards: Get up to 50% OFF with code PAKMAN at https://shopremi.com/pakman 📖 Buy “The Snooze Who Refused to Choose” at https://wobblewand.com ☕ Cambio Roasters: Get 20% off with code PAKMAN at https://cambioroasters.com ⚠️ Ground News: Get 50% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 😺 Smalls cat food: Use code PAKMAN for 50% off & free shipping at https://smalls.com 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- Pakman Discord: https://davidpakman.com/discord -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave a Voicemail: (219)-2DAVIDP

Well, welcome to the show, everybody. It has been quite a journey to make it in for the show today, but I'm glad to be here. So much over the weekend to discuss, and where I want to start are the growing sort of cracks of MAGA. It's like walking on an ice pond, and you thought it was frozen solid, but now you're out in the middle, and you're starting to see the hairline cracks in the ice.

There's a very good new article in The Atlantic by Ali Breland, and it's called MAGA is starting to crack. If you've been watching this channel for a while, you know that this is exactly what we've been predicting since the election of Donald Trump in November of last year, where the MAGA coalition, which seemed like this unbreakable monolith of right-wing unity, we expected to start showing some fractures when the campaign ended and when the supposed governance would start, whether there's really governance happening or just kind of flailing around in the dark is a different question, but the supposed governance would start. And it is fascinating to watch, not just because it's very quickly becoming a political train wreck, but because my hope is that there will be some lessons in here for the left. If the

left cannot learn from what's going on here, then sort of like, what the hell are we doing in a sense? So here's the deal. Trump's back in the White House. You would think that the MAGA crowd would be popping the champagne bottles, and they sort of are, but beneath the surface, there is this growing rift between the two factions that we've identified, the nationalist right wing, which includes Steve Bannon, your Laura Loomers, the people who have been with Trump since the escalator Mexican rapist days, and then the tech right, what we might call Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Andreessen, the Silicon Valley billionaires who have hitched their wagons to Donald Trump's sizable caboose. Now, these two groups are kind of like roommates who it seemed like a good idea

after they met at orientation, but it's September, the classes have started and all of a sudden you can't agree about a damn thing. Who uses the freezer and whatever else? So on one side, you've got the nationalist right that wants to slam the door on immigration. They don't like H1B visas. They want to prioritize American born families. They love't like H-1B visas. They want to prioritize American-born families. They love the deportation raids, the crueler the better. And they want to sort of turn the clock back to some mythical pre-internet era of prosperity. Now, on the other side,

you've got the tech right, and they want a deregulated economy. They want a steady flow of immigrant labor to keep their companies running. They have this futuristic, globally connected world in mind. And these are two visions that don't exactly mesh. Now, I'm only going to mention this. I'm not going to go into it now, but this does point to the broken nature of the left-right spectrum. This is something I'm going to be saying more about in the future. You know, in some sense, Milton Friedman, the Jewish capitalist economist, and Hitler were both considered right-wing. But there's very little in common between a Milton Friedman and an Adolf Hitler. And as such, the kind of traditional left-right spectrum is broken.

And so even though nominally we say Elon Musk is on the right because he supports Republicans and Steve Bannon is on the right because he's a Republican strategist and Trump is on the right because he's a Republican president, the left-right terminology is increasingly not working for us, particularly with the way that politics and the spectrum has shifted lately. But let's put that aside for now. At least for now, we will keep using these terms. The cracks are showing within the right. You look at Donald Trump's pick of Sriram Krishnan, this Silicon Valley venture capitalist, as an AI advisor. That infuriated a whole bunch of people, including people like Laura Loomer, who are in the we

need Americans in charge sort of ideology, even though Krishnan is American. And then you've got Elon Musk, who is saying, no, this is exactly who we need, and he's going to push for H-1B visas and all of this other stuff. And meanwhile, Steve Bannon says Musk is evil and they've got to get him out of Trump's inner circle, which may be happening as there are rumors that Elon was recently told, you're not going to have your office in the West Wing. We're going to put you across the street. So the cracks are there. Now here's the thing. During the campaign, these groups could kind of paper over their differences because there was a very clear common enemy, the left, the woke mob, the DEI, whatever. They've now won. And that is no longer functioning as the sort of glue holding them

together. It's kind of dissolving. And this is where the right wing's big tent strategy is kind of starting to fail. It's one of their greatest strengths, but it's also becoming an Achilles heel because people with genuinely diametrically opposed views on so many issues are now all supposedly going to be singing kumbaya under Donald Trump, but it's not working and the infighting has started. Now, this is where it gets me to what the left should learn from this. First of all, the right's ability to build a coalition, even with these wildly different factions, is something the left should study. The purity tests on the left have been extraordinarily damaging. I've talked about it before.

We've seen how effective the big tent come on in strategy can be for winning elections. But second, and maybe more importantly, the left needs to figure out how to stay united after you win, because we are seeing that they figured out a way to win, but now they are cracking. And the first step is we've got to get some wins again, but then how do you keep the coalition together and actually accomplish some stuff rather than squabbling over policy while the other side comes back, regroups and gets stronger. Now, here's the thing. When Biden won, they immediately went to work building media ecosystems, coalitions and so on.

And now they came back and won everything. They're having trouble governing, but they did come back and win everything. The takeaway should be we need to do what they did in terms of we don't take two or four years off now. We actually get to work. That part we should learn from and do. But also keep in mind that you don't want the coalition you build to end up turning on itself and making it so you can't accomplish a damn thing. Now, that remains to be seen with Trump. Does he accomplish anything?

If we don't learn from this, we are going to be stuck watching the other side implode while we're figuring out how to get our act together, and we can't actually get any substantive wins out of it. So let me know what you think. Tell me what you think about these cracks. And we do have to talk about another important term. That term is impeachment. Donald Trump already deserves to be impeached just for what he's done in this second term. Now, I'm going to tell you right now, I'm not calling for his impeachment. It would be futile. It would be pointless. It would be a waste of resources because it's not going to happen with Republicans controlling the House and Senate. But Donald Trump's second term is barely a week old, and we are already witnessing actions so egregious and so blatantly unconstitutional

that in a sane world, impeachment would not only be justified, it would be the correct, obvious thing to do. In seven days, Donald Trump has sort of reignited the same authoritarian impulses that defined the first term with fewer guardrails and fewer people around him willing to say, hey, this is not a good idea. First, I want to talk a little bit about the purge. Within hours of taking office, Donald Trump fired every inspector general who dared oversee his administration's spending. He then replaced the attorney general with a hardcore loyalist who once accepted a donation for Trump, and then poof, like a miracle, her interest in investigating

Donald Trump's Trump University disappeared. That's Pam Bondi. If that sounds familiar, this is not just about staffing changes. This is a direct assault on accountability, which Donald Trump hates. The Constitution gives Congress oversight authority for a reason. And when a president systematically dismantles, checks on his power, that is absolute and total textbook abuse of office, which is a core impeachable offense. We then go to obstruction. When Congress demanded documents related to Donald Trump's sudden withdrawal of

NATO funding, which is a move that we all know simply emboldens you-know-who Vladimir Putin, the White House said, we're not going to provide you the documentation. We're not delaying it. We're not going to negotiate with you. We're just not going to do it as if it were still 2019, except it isn't. Trump knows the playbook, which is you stonewall and you delay and you run out the clock. And when you have got the House and when you've got the Senate, who's going to do a damn thing? This shouldn't be a partisan issue. We should really be thinking about this in terms of Article 2 of the first impeachment against Trump, which was centered on this exact conduct.

Doing it again in the second term doesn't make it legal. It makes it a pattern. But the other pattern that we're seeing is that Trump ultimately isn't held accountable. You then have Donald Trump's oath of office in his inaugural address. address, he pledged to faithfully execute the law. Except on day, late on day two, early on day three of this second term, Donald Trump openly ordered ICE to ignore court-issued deportation stays, saying we're not going to let liberal judges run this country. What we have is a president in Trump who's cherry-picking which court orders are we going to follow and which aren't we going to follow. His followers say he's being strong. This is just a direct attack on judicial independence, which is another pillar of our

democracy. And when Trump willfully violates his oath, impeachment should be congressional duty. Now, I know some of you are going to say, David, this is just politics. Impeachment is too divisive, to which I say, no, this is really not about policy differences. Policy differences, I understand. Policy differences are, you know, we're not so interested in funding certain welfare programs, or we believe that the top tax rate should be lower, or we want to restructure the estate tax in this way. Those are policy differences. This is about weaponizing the DOJ, defying Congress, ignoring courts with no consequences, and that pushes the office of the presidency towards this kind of autocratic authoritarian fiasco. It's not hyperbole. It's history. It's what the country is sort of built on. So my analysis today, because I know I'm going to get emails, David, you're wasting your time calling for Trump's

impeachment. I'm not calling for Trump's impeachment. Given the Republican control of the House and Senate, any impeachment effort would fail. It requires this two-thirds Senate majority. It's mathematically impossible in the current political landscape. This is a thought experiment, a reminder to underscore how Donald Trump's actions, if unchecked, mirror the very same abuses of power that we saw in the past. Nixon's Saturday Night Massacre, Erdogan's post-coup purges. It's that type of thing that we're talking about. And that's what I'm highlighting. The severity of this, I am not proposing this futile political maneuver of trying to impeach Donald Trump again.

If we simply say, what are the constitutional standards, and we apply them to Trump, we expose the double standard in Republican rhetoric. Many lawmakers defended Trump's first impeachment or defended against, defended Trump during that impeachment as this is overreach. Now that the offenses are even graver,

they don't even want to think about it. They don't even want to talk about it. We have completely eroded our institutional safeguards. A president is effectively, if you're Trump, you're a Republican, allowed to openly defy courts,

weaponize agencies, purge oversight officials with no meaningful consequences. And this is why this second term is so dangerous. It's not just because of what he will do. It's because of the precedent that he is setting now, partially riding on the coattails of the precedent that he set during the first term. So that's where we are. After the break, we'll start digging into policy. Trump has now put out his idea for what to do with Gaza. It's ugly. He's now put out his idea of what to do with prices. It's moronic. So we'll take a very quick break. And that's coming up right after this. and it can lead to some expensive dentist bills. The solution can be a mouth guard.

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use code Pacman for up to 50% off. The link is called the snooze who refused to choose. This is a whimsical story that takes you into snooze town where the snooze would much rather nap than make decisions. But when the town's troubles grow and young voices plead for help, the snooze faces a choice he can no longer ignore. It really is a heartwarming tale that introduces kids to the importance of voting, the power of small voices and the courage to take action in their communities. Every month Winchester wobble wand releases a new book, so there's always a new adventure to enjoy. Each book includes a design contest where readers can showcase creativity and win $500

for their hand drawn illustrations. The David Pakman show, of course, is directly supported by our audience. I can't thank the several hundred folks enough who signed up on Inauguration Day slash Martin Luther King Day. Unrelated events with regards to Trump, of course. Thank you so much. If you did miss that discount, I mean, listen, what am I going to say? No. If you want to take advantage of it, just email info at David Pakman dot com and say, hey, I'd like that inauguration day MLK day code and I will send it to you. All right. We have yet another stark reminder that elections have consequences in more ways than one. Elections have consequences and the winners get to do stuff. Yes, that's something that we understand and we are living with. And then on the other hand, there is a difference between what candidates will do, even if they are all too far right for you. And we now have audio of Donald Trump's plan with regard to Palestinians in Gaza. And it's disgusting.

I don't know how else to say it. Trump talking about cleaning it out, cleaning it out of Palestinians, mind you. And he wants Egypt to take people. He wants Jordan to take people. We have the audio. Let's take a listen. I'm talking to General El-Sisi tomorrow, sometime up there. And I'd like Egypt to take people, and I'd like Jordan to take people. You're talking about probably a million and a half people. And we just clean out that whole thing. It, over the centuries, that's had many, many conflicts outside. And I don't know, something has to happen. But it's literally a demolition site right now. Almost everything's demolished.

And people are dying there. So I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing in a different location where they can maybe live in peace. Temporarily or with anything? It could be either. It could be temporarily. It could be long-term. Now, as a bonus, Donald Trump has also lifted sanctions on Israeli settlers who have forced Palestinians off of their land in the West Bank. As another bonus, the Trump administration has officially lifted the hold on these 2,000 pound bombs for the Israeli military. And we have to just account for the reality that some of these people who seem to be saying, Harris is not good

enough on this issue. Biden's not good enough on this issue. I'll vote Trump or I'll stay home or I don't care. It's time to acknowledge that even if you believe you were morally right, Trump is way worse for the Palestinians. Now, I know that many of you will say, oh, but neither is good enough. Well, that may be. And you might say, you know, one cup of water or two cups of water a day, neither is enough, so screw it. Well, I'd rather have the two cups rather than the one cup. Now, I want to be really clear about this.

I don't believe that Kamala Harris lost because of Gaza. The polling simply doesn there are some people in my audience who do believe that. And if you are one of those people, if you believe that that's why Kamala Harris lost, and you didn't believe there was a material and relevant functional difference with regard to what will happen to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank

if Harris wins versus if Trump wins. I hope you are seeing the result. Biden had paused the transfer of these 2,000 pound bombs to Israel. I know many of you like that. Biden has, I'm sorry, Trump has undone that. Trump now says that he is going to look for the clean out of Palestinians from Gaza, where that was the opposite of the policy idea of Biden and of Harris. So I don't doubt that some of the protesters were sincere, but several of the semi-permanent Gaza protests, the one outside of the Israeli embassy in D.C., for example, they've stopped. And so even though a lot of these folks said, no, we would protest whoever is doing the wrong thing.

Well, by your standard right now, Trump is doing the wrong thing. But the vast majority of those protests have stopped. A whole bunch of the subreddits that I was looking at, political subreddits, they were chock full of anti-Biden Harris stuff because of Gaza material. The number of posts and comments talking about that has cratered, but circumstances are getting worse under Trump for the Palestinians. So sadly, what this suggests to me is that at least some of this was astroturfed by anti-democratic activity. And some of it, of course, was genuine people.

But at the end of the day, we got the worst possible choice for Palestinians, and that's Trump. And sadly, I wouldn't be shocked if they figured out some way to blame Joe Biden for this. Why do I say that? Well, because they always do. Stunning video from a California airport runway where Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed alpha male, was absolutely bodied by California Governor Gavin Newsom. This is wild, wild stuff.

In this video we're going to look at, you are going to see a number of very interesting things, and if you're only listening today, I'll describe it for you. You will see Gavin Newsom going to do the Trump handshake, and Trump wants to do his handshake game, the jerking game. And Gavin Newsom just doesn't allow it. And Trump tries it again, and Newsom is the one who pulls Trump in. You see Newsom taking a dominating stance,

and Trump leaning forward like he's recreating Michael Jackson's smooth criminal music video. Melania, if I'm honest, seems to identify exactly what's going on and Newsom is really giving it to Trump and Trump just taking it. Take a look at this. This is, you know, I don't really care about these kind of faux masculinity games that a lot of these right-wingers love to use to evaluate the size of one's manhood, but Trump cares about it and the people around Trump care about it. And it's difficult to see this interaction as anything other than Gavin Newsom dominating and Trump allowing himself to be dominated. Do I think this matters when it comes to policy? No.

Do I think that this undercuts one of the main reasons that a lot of Trump people support the guy, which is because he's tough and he says what he believes and he doesn't get pushed around by anybody? Yeah, it undercuts that very much. And moments later, Donald Trump staggering into Melania Trump after patting Gavin Newsom on the back. Take a look. All right. So that was basically the way it all went. And then at some event in Pacific Palisades, Donald Trump with a rant about water and trees that sounds very much like something you'd expect to hear in a Dr. Seuss book. Take a listen to this.

The trees were okay because the trees are loaded with water. They suck that water out of the ground and this was an inferno, just like, I would say, no different than this. And it was also the wind that caused a lot of problem. I mean, you had tremendous winds that there's not a lot you're going to do with. It was up to 100 mile an hour winds. It's unheard of. But when I was in Paradise, I noticed that the trees, they were dark on the bottom, but they were absolutely living and they lived because they're soaking wet. But the trees that were on the bottom, but they were absolutely living and they lived because they're soaking wet. But the trees that were on the ground within 12 to 18 months, they say 18 months at a maximum. You have to cut them up, take them away because they're matchsticks. But we saw that. You saw

that with me. I commented at the time. I said, look at this. The house is burned down and the tree is standing. And it's other than being a little different color on the bottom and it went through an inferno. It's amazing. It's soaking wet. So I think they have to do it. It's called management of the floor. And when the gentleman from Austria and also Finland and other countries, they said we manage the forest floor very, very carefully

and we don't have forest fires. They just don't have them. So I'm sure you're going to do the same thing. Yeah, I mean, it really sounds like a Dr. Seuss story. The trees are full with water they drink. They sip and they slurp faster than you think. Nutty stuff. And as I've said before,

we've delved into the forest management stuff, the raking the floors and all of it. There is no doubt that forest management is a factor in general when it comes to wildfires. Trump is in way over his head here, does not seem to understand what's really going on, how this stuff really works, and of course so many other factors related to wind, related to climate change, related to insurance and the insurance industry and how it's functioning and allowing people to end up living in some of these places where really we shouldn't be building houses at all. There's so much of it. But Trump's got a hammer.

That's all he has. So everything is a nail. There's so much of it, but Trump's got a hammer. That's all he has. So everything is a nail. It's liberals. It's liberals like Gavin Newsom controlling forest management. This is all that's to blame. And of course he couldn't be more clueless about it. So good for Gavin Newsom for standing up to Trump. Newsom was not involved, invited rather, to some of these other events. You know why? And Trump really looking pathetic here. Did you know that Americans use over 20 billion K cups every year? The little plastic cups that go in Keurig machines that is more than 50 million single

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The trust and transparency in the media. Okay. So grocery prices, of course, are a major area of focus. Donald Trump and J.D. Vance running on we will lower grocery prices. We will lower them quickly. We will lower them significantly along with energy prices and prices for everything else. And, of course, we will achieve all of it by putting tariffs on everybody. None of it ever made sense. J.D. Vance was interviewed by Margaret Brennan

over the weekend, and J.D. Vance snaps when she points out that nothing that Trump has signed so far in terms of executive orders is doing a damn thing to bring prices down. A friend of mine, sort of jokingly, but also not really, a friend of mine loves those Vital Farms pasture-raised eggs. Hell of an egg. Beautiful, rich orange yolks. Sorry, I'm getting out of my... Okay. A friend sent me a picture that those Vital Farms eggs, which used to be $7.79 at his grocery store, are now up to $9.59. Now, the reason it's sort of tongue-in-cheek is that some of this has to do with bird flu, which, by the way, Trump is not taking seriously. Some of this has to do with seasonality. But the point is, it seems as though egg prices continue to increase under Donald Trump. They're certainly not decreasing. And in his defense, it's only been a week. I had no

expectation that Trump would lower prices of eggs within a week. In fact, I don't think he's going to lower them at all. Here is Margaret Brennan interviewing J.D. Vance. Here's what he had to say. You campaigned on lowering prices for consumers. We've seen all of these executive orders. Which one lowers prices? We have done a lot. And there have been a number of executive orders that have caused already jobs to start coming back into our country, which is a core part of lowering prices. More capital investment, more job creation in our economy is one of the things that's going to drive down prices for all consumers, but also raise wages so that people can afford to buy the things that they need. If you look at our slate of executive orders, no, Margaret, prices are going

to come down, but it's going to take a little bit of time, right? The president has been president for all of five days. I think that in those five days, he's accomplished more than Joe Biden did in four years. It's been an incredible breakneck pace of activity. We're going to work with Congress. We're, of course, going to have more executive orders. And we're going to try the way that your lower prices is that you encourage more capital investment into our country. All right. So of course, it is not true that Trump has accomplished more in his first five days than Joe Biden accomplished in four years. I don't even want to address that. You really can't

lower grocery prices by executive order. In fact, it's difficult for government to lower grocery prices at all, but I'm going to tell you some of the things that can be done. The government can influence certain factors, but it simply does not control the entire supply chain. Farmers grow the food, distributors transport it, retailers set the final price based on costs and profit margins. Global markets, of course, influence the cost of commodities, the price rather, of commodities, wheat, corn, soybeans, and other things. So you might be able to use some executive order to provide a temporary subsidy, maybe a temporary price freeze.

But these are band-aid solutions, which often can have unintended consequences. They can distort markets. It's these MAGAs who say, you don't want to distort a free market. You can cause shortages. Executive orders cannot directly lower prices because it is market forces that largely determine those prices. I talked about the transport from the farmers to the grocery stores. Well, that's transportation. That's gas prices. That's so many. It's labor costs for the drivers and so many other things. There's really

no magic wand that a president can wave and say cheaper avocados. If only it were that simple. Now, if you want to take a serious look at how to lower grocery prices, or maybe more likely is slow down the rate at which prices are growing, you've got to address supply chain issues. You've got to deal with supporting domestic production to reduce reliance on imports. You need to do something about corporate price gouging. You've got to enforce antitrust laws because we have so much monopolistic behavior when it comes to food. You need to investigate price hikes to see how much of it is really based on production cost increases versus how much of it is just price gouging. You would want to do some targeted subsidies for staple foods while understanding that subsidies big picture are not going to be the solution.

You need to explore what's going on with fuel prices, and part of that is saying, hey, you know what? Rather than being subjected to global oil markets, we should do domestic green renewable energy. That's how we will sustainably reduce energy prices. Probably doing some expansion of SNAP, also known as food stamps, to make sure certain folks can continue to afford groceries. That won't lower prices, but it will ease the burden on certain consumers most affected by the high prices. And this is the sort of thing

that we're talking about. You do have to deal with climate change and acknowledge that that's a factor here. You need to push for sustainable farming practices, subsidize the farming practices we want, rather than saying, I'm going to put a short-term band-aid on eggs or whatever the case may be. And then we've also got to deal with food waste. We've spoken about this on the bonus show many times. 25, 30, up to 40%, depending on how you calculate it, 25 to 40% of food in the U.S. is wasted.

Now, that includes stuff that's left in the fields as well, because it's already not. Sometimes stuff that looks okay today is left in the field because by the time it gets to where it will be sold, it'll be overripe. And then the grocery store ends up throwing it out anyway. So a lot of that stuff is left in the field. So all of these things have to be looked at. From the get-go, it was never believable that they were going to be able to do this thing they said they were going to do. And J.D. Vance is increasingly contending with that. I do not expect grocery prices... He had five days as of that interview.

I don't expect... or six days. I don't expect grocery prices to be lower in a month. Now, can Trump do something to eventually put some downward pressure? He can. It doesn't seem like that's actually what he's interested in doing. A gelatinous, swollen Trump delivered a nuttier-than-squirrel-poop speech at a Las Vegas casino. And this, we wondered, were we beyond the hyperbolic, disoriented, weaponized Trump speech

now that he has no more campaigns to run and he's in the Oval Office? The answer we learned over the weekend is no. Here is Donald Trump in Vegas telling the crowd, other countries are emptying prisons into our country. But of course, there's a problem with Trump complaining about that. About that, I said they're just going to everybody's going to empty out their prisons into our

country. I said that I do that if I were heading up any one of the many countries that you know about, not just South America, all over. They take their prisons and mental institutions and they empty them out into our country. Can you imagine a person doing this? Can you imagine somebody doing that to our country? So what's the problem with Trump complaining about that? Well, Trump is emptying our prisons into other countries. That's his whole new deportation game. But he's complaining about other countries empt That's his whole new deportation game. But he's complaining about other countries emptying prisons into our country,

which of course is not actually happening. Trump then again bringing up this failed idea that the country used to do really well economically when we had a lot of tariffs. Listen to what he had to say. You know, they used to do numbers and then we went to tariff, a lot of tariffs. Listen to what he had to say. You know, they used to do numbers and then we went to tariff, a tariff system. And the tariff system made so much money.

It was when we were the richest from 1870 to 1913. Then we came in with the, brilliantly came in with an income tax. No, we don't want others to pay. Let's have our people pay. And then you had the depression in 1928, 1929. I call it 1929. That was a bad time. But, you know, you didn't have tariffs and you had tariffs that ended in 1913. But it's it was the richest our country ever was. That was President McKinley.

In fact, we're renaming the mountain Mount McKinley. So Donald Trump is mostly referring here to the Gilded Age. He's referring to a period that was known for extraordinary materialistic excesses and widespread corruption. And, you know, a lot of them talk about going back to the glory days, one way or the other. When they talk about that, it's often the 1950s. But in terms of corruption and in terms of inequality, they seem to prefer the Gilded Age. And that is a really scary thing, that that's the time they hearken back to. Now, Donald Trump did also talk about the January 6th criminal rioters who he pardoned in direct contravention of the concept of law and order. He's referring to them as hostages

still. Hundreds of political prisoners who had been viciously persecuted by the party. Hundreds of people were persecuted, including Christians, pro-life activists to Washington, D.C. police office just yesterday, whose lives were destroyed from chasing down a dangerous, illegal alien criminal. And of course, I was very proud to pardon the J6 hostages. This is not law and order. This is rewarding anarchy and promoting vigilantism. Be a vigilante, commit crimes, hurt people, destroy property, and then I will come in and save you. And as far as strategy goes for Democrats, if Democrats can't turn this, Trump talking about the hostages who he saved, if Democrats can't turn this into

massive wins in 2026, Democrats might have to give up as a political party. If you can't turn this into a win, I don't know that you can ever win again, truly. Trump, as usual, alluding to, they don't let me say X or Y anymore because of woke political correctness, talking about a beautiful waitress. Take a listen to this. That's what happened. I'm telling you, a young waitress, I won't say beautiful because you're not allowed to say that as a politician. Used to be you could say a young, beautiful waitress. This was a young, beautiful waitress, but I won't say that because I feel like I want to continue my political career. If you call, if you call, the governor won't say it.

If you call a woman beautiful today, it's the end of your political career, so I won't do it. But a young waitress, I think you could call young. You're probably not even supposed to say young. Probably supposed to say a waitress. But a young waitress came up and I said, how are you doing? And in my restaurant, in the hotel, Trump. It is, of course, not the case

that you were not allowed to say, she was beautiful, she was young. In the abstract, that's not the problem. The problem is with Trump saying it when we all know that he's been found liable of sexual assault, credibly accused of it by dozens of women, and allegedly would go into the locker rooms of whatever pageant he owned. He would go into the locker rooms and ogle, ogle, ogle underage girls, girls as young as reportedly 15 years old. That's why it's cringy when Trump says this stuff, wearing it as if it's a badge of honor.

Donald Trump announcing he withdrew from the World Health Organization and the crowd cheered. They withdrew from the World Health Organization. Where we paid $500 million a year and China paid $39 million a year despite a much larger population. Think of that. China's paying $39 million to have 1.4 billion people. We pay 500 million. We have nobody knows what the hell we have. Does anyone know? We have so many people pouring in. We have no idea. Do you think anyone in that crowd has any idea what the W.H.O. even

does? And even more so, I bet if you listed to most of these MAGAs the things that the WHO does, most of them would probably say sounds pretty good, right? I mean, they monitor health trends, they support research, they offer technical assistance, prepare for outbreaks, combat disease. It's not exactly terrible stuff. And then Trump also talking about taxes, saying if the tariffs work, we might be able to get rid of all taxes. Check it out. To the border. Yeah. She said no tax. And then how about just no tax? You know, if the tariffs worked out like I think, a thing like that could happen if you want to know the truth. You know, years ago, 1870 to 1913, we didn't have an income tax.

We had what we had as tariffs where foreign countries came in and they stole our jobs. They stole our companies. They stole our product. They ripped us off. And, you know, they used to do numbers. And then we went to tariff a tariff system. And the tariff system made so much money. It was when we were the richest from 1870 to 1913. Then we came. That would not work. That would not work well at all. And of course, it's not even going to be a possibility because the tariffs are going to be so damaging if indeed Donald Trump does them. Finally, Donald Trump talking about swollen and enlarged countries. This is really, really weird. The United States has the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth.

And we may be a very substantially enlarged country in the not-too-distant... Isn't it nice to see, you know, for years, for decades, we're the same size to the square foot. Probably got smaller, actually. But we might be an enlarged country pretty soon. And one of the things we're going to be doing is drill, baby, drill. So Donald Trump is confused as ever.

The crowd clapping for anything. Trump non-sequitur after non-sequitur. They clap. They love the entire thing. And the primary takeaway from this speech, he is not stopping the delusional ranting cult speeches and rallies, even though he has no more campaigns to run. He won. It's been a week since the inauguration and he's already doing the whacked out rallies. is smalls who make cat food with human grade ingredients. Smalls uses protein packed recipes with no preservatives or artificial flavors using ingredients that you'd find in your own fridge.

That's why cats dot com named smalls the best overall cat food and smalls works with the Humane Society. They've donated over a million dollars worth of food to help cats, and they Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 of the House. The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com. and use promo code Pacman at checkout for 50 percent off your first order plus free shipping. The link is in the description. Did you know that countless commercial databases and people search sites are storing your personal information? Anyone from an employer to a former partner can use these platforms to get details about your online presence, your home address, phone number, email, license plate, family members, financial information, even political views. Europe has laws that offer some protection, but in the US, the data is widely accessible. Even the FBI will buy this information from companies to spy on people without a search warrant.

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So recently, disgusting Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace put out an excretion on X where she said she would like to see live streams of the ICE raids and deportation raids that are going on under Donald Trump. And her wish has sort of been granted by Dr. Phil, who is now paywalling or putting behind an app download video of him going on these raids with Tom Homan and monetizing it for clicks and for attention. Now, I want you to remember, Dr. Phil was on my show and he told me, I'm not really political. I'm not really right wing. I'm just about families and I'm about common sense or whatever. And of course, I pointed out to him in that interview, which many of you found incredibly disingenuous of Dr. Phil, that every aspect of everything he says is just dripping with reactionary sort of underpinning. So, okay, Dr. Phil is going on these raids. He puts out a tweet where he says the first arrest in Chicago with Tom Homan was a convicted sex offender and internet predator from

Thailand. For full live coverage of the operation, download the Merit TV app. And then we're going to look at the actual video. Here is Dr. Phil interviewing This individual Who has been detained by ICE Check it out What's your name? Seda Seda what? Do you have a person on that team?

Sam Seda Sam? Yes Where are you from? Where I was born or where I'm from? Where are you born? Thailand You've been deported before from the United States?

No. Never been deported? I've been in the system until B&B. Yeah? Yeah. What have you been charged with? Charged with? Before?

I'm not the center, I'm not charged by law. Yeah, are you a citizen? My mom's a sinner. I'm not touching my lawyer. Yeah. Are you a citizen? My mom's a citizen. Your mother's a citizen? Yes. But you're not? Nope. But you've never been deported before?

We got the Phil. We got the Dr. Phil. Yeah? How do you know me? No, I seen Dr. Phil, you know, on TV. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is an example of sanctuary cities, right? We got an illegal family convicted of sex crimes

involving children. And he's walking the streets of Chicago. Again, the downfall, the problem with a sanctuary city that people like us walk in the street rather than law enforcement working with federal agents, this is what we're dealing with. Yeah. You've been charged with sex crimes with children? Not really.

Not really? And never been deported? Nope. Huh. Let's take them in process and lock him up. Got it, sir. Okay. So this is downright grotesque and I want to talk about why. Now, I want to be clear as I get into this. I have never argued, oh, they're not allowed to enforce immigration law. If you're here illegally, you can't be deported. No, listen, if you're an undocumented person, you're subject to deportation, that's legal, all of that stuff.

What I have argued is that this way of sort of approaching the issue always ignores the reality that both documented and undocumented immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than natural-born Americans, that entire industries depend on immigrants, documented and undocumented. Of course, we have a process for adjudicating all of these things and it should be done. But this is the dehumanization aspect, the grotesque, turn this into a show sort of thing. So let me start by addressing the obvious. Exploiting human suffering for entertainment and profit is morally bankrupt. These immigration raids, while legal, are trauma inducing, life altering events for the people involved. Families are torn apart. People are detained. Lives are upended. And Dr. Phil is inserting himself into the

situations, not to help anybody, not to advocate for anything, but to create content he can monetize. And it is a blatant exploitation of very vulnerable people where privileged Dr. Phil is turning human pain into spectacle. And that is completely reprehensible. Now, secondly, this is a complete and total misuse of his platform. Dr. Phil has a massive audience, and with that comes responsibility. Instead of using his influence to educate, to inform, or to advocate for meaningful solutions, he chooses to sensationalize and profit from deeply polarizing issues and people at their most vulnerable. Enforcing immigration law is a complex and nuanced topic. It deserves thoughtful discussion. It doesn't really lend itself, or it shouldn't,

to TV-style drama designed to generate clicks and add revenue. And then thirdly, this kind of media stunt normalizes and glorifies ICE raids by framing them as entertainment. It only further desensitizes the public to the very real harm that they cause and completely shifts focus away from the systemic issues that are at play. Like, for example, the fact that we need comprehensive immigration reform. It just makes it this voyeuristic experience that's going to get us nowhere. It erodes empathy, and it reinforces the idea that the raids are obviously justifiable, but also entertaining or exciting to watch. Finally, we've got to address the power dynamics here, which are really just dripping with disgusting, it's gross.

Dr. Phil is a wealthy, privileged individual who is inserting himself into situations where people have no power and no resources. These are often marginalized folks. It doesn't mean that their crimes should be ignored. That's not what I'm saying. But these are marginalized folks who live in fear of deportation. And now, in addition to the legal problem that they're having, they are being used as props in a media circus. So it's hard to think of a more exploitative and dehumanizing situation. Finally, I am not a socialist.

You all know that. This is a clear example of how the profit motive can corrupt even the most serious issue. We know that when we see all of the crap around abortion and family planning clinics and all of it. But profit becomes a driving force behind how we engage with a topic like immigration. We completely lose sight of the humanity involved.

So this is a completely tasteless stunt by Dr. Phil. It reflects broader societal issues and even human suffering becomes a commodity. How can we package human suffering, make money off of it, and there we go. So I don't know if this crap is going to continue, but it's deplorable, and I encourage you to reach out to Dr. Phil

and to Merritt Street Media about it. There are no official codified rules for adding a president to Mount Rushmore because it's not an active project. Mount Rushmore is considered complete, but MAGA cultists are trying to put Donald Trump on Mount Rushmore. This is something that they are actively trying to do. Donald Trump's aide, Corey Lewandowski, has said, what about adding Trump to the existing Mount Rushmore? Other suck-up Republicans in Congress are saying, we should add Trump to Mount Rushmore.

I want you to think about the absurdity of this and how it's yet another reminder of the bottom-of-the-barrel, cultish nature of these people. Mount Rushmore was completed in 1941. It was carved to honor four presidents. The presidents were chosen for genuinely significant contributions to the history of this country. George Washington, the nation's founding. Hard to deny that. Thomas Jefferson, the expansion of the country through the Louisiana Purchase. Complicated history there, but unquestionably significant. Teddy Roosevelt, preservation, conservation efforts, and economic growth. Abraham Lincoln, preserving the Union, abolishing slavery.

What on earth has Trump done that would even remotely put him in that category? If you said, well, what are the factors we should consider if we're thinking about someone for Mount Rushmore? First of all, national significance. We would want someone who had a profound lasting impact on the country that was positive, comparable to those on the monument. You could say, well, Trump may indeed have a long-lasting impact on the country. The abomination that has been his eroding of norms and flouting of checks and balances, not something we should celebrate. Number two, consensus.

If you're going to add a face to Mount Rushmore, and of course this is all just pie in the sky because Mount Rushmore is a completed project. If you're going to add someone to Mount Rushmore, there should be some amount of public and political agreement, which at its core would be very difficult this day and age because of the polarization that we have. Number three, you also would have to deal with the logistical and legal challenges because as a completed monument, Mount Rushmore is under federal protection. And if you're going to modify it, there are significant legal hurdles, environmental regulations, opposition from

preservationists, Native American groups, because remember that the site holds cultural significance for the Lakota Sioux. Number four is the practicality of space and feasibility. Geologists and sculptors have noted that what's left there, it's just not suitable for additional carving. There's not enough sort of quality stone, and there's really not space. And then finally, if you are going to do any more of this, I don't know how you justify this in the context of the disputes over the Black Hills, which is this sacred area to Native Americans. So maybe I'm taking it more seriously than it deserves because it's a completed project and there's simply not going to be consensus. But the important sort of aspect of this to me is that, once again,

these are cultists who see Trump truly as a legend. And it does remind me of the way that the Manson family saw Manson. It reminds me of the way that the People's Temple people saw Jim Jones. It's an adulation that knows no end. And what's really interesting, if we go back to the beginning of the show, is that even though the cultists are still all there behind Donald Trump, there are real cracks in MAGA. The tech bro right and the ultra-nationalist right, increasingly at odds with each other. If the left can learn anything from this, it's that we've got to learn to exploit these cracks, and I hope that we will.

Now, on the bonus show today, we are going to talk about some Republicans who are telling Trump, stripping security from ex-officials like Fauci and others, it's a bad idea. It's a bad idea because it could come back to bite you and it could be a disaster. Number two, Trump is now, or he did and has already rescinded emergency tariffs on Colombia. Now that's not Columbia University. It's the South American country of Colombia. But that didn't stop the Trump White House from putting out a statement with the incorrect spelling referring to the university. It's completely whacked out. And then finally, the release of the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassination files, but nothing about Jeffrey Epstein. Why is Trump not releasing the Epstein stuff? That and much more on today's bonus show.

Sign up at joinpacman.com and make sure to pre-order my forthcoming book, The Echo Machine, at davidpacman.com slash book. Approaching 6,000 copies pre-ordered. Incredible, stunning stuff. Thank you.