The David Pakman Show - 2026 Is Already Insane

Episode Date: January 11, 2026

-- On the Show -- Donald Trump faces a hard power cutoff in the 2026 midterms where losing the House would effectively halt his legislative agenda and severely weaken his leverage -- The United States dollar suffers its largest annual decline in nearly a decade due to Donald Trump's tariffs, attacks on Federal Reserve independence, and destabilizing foreign policy -- Corporate bankruptcies hit a 15-year high as Donald Trump's tariffs raise costs, squeeze margins, and push construction, manufacturing, and consumer businesses into collapse -- Gen Z men rapidly turn against Donald Trump as new polling shows collapsing approval driven by economic frustration and disillusionment with culture war politics -- Donald Trump remains in office despite actions that would remove leaders in functioning democracies, exposing institutional failures -- AI-generated impersonation scams are eroding trust and preparing the ground for large-scale election disinformation -- The Friday Feedback segment -- On the Bonus Show: The 10 most outrageous things Trump did in 2025, and much more... -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com -- Get David's Books: https://davidpakman.com/echo -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow (00:00) Start (01:29) Trump's 2026 power stakes (06:51) Dollar collapse under Trump (14:15) Corporate bankruptcies surge (18:19) Gen Z abandons Trump (24:18) Democracy fails to check Trump (32:02) AI impersonation attacks (39:17) Friday Feedback   

Welcome to 2026. This is not a normal moment and 2026 is not going to be a normal election year. Today we are going to look at why the 2026 midterms are the real deadline for Donald Trump and Trumpism, not just politically, but mechanically because if Republicans lose the House, Trump's presidency is effectively done. If they don't, he gets two more years of real power and the ability to shape 2028. We are also going to talk about the dollar. This is something. Republicans used to scream about, but under the current administration, the dollar is collapsing and it is hitting prices and it is related to the policies of this administration. We are also going to go beyond record GDP headlines to look at the surge in corporate bankruptcies

and other potential signs of trouble. And also young men, one of Donald Trump's crucial 2024 groups, are bailing quickly. New polling shows that buyer's remorse is really. setting in. And finally, scammers using AI to impersonate a lot of your favorite content creators, including me, fake videos, fake voices. I believe it's a preview of where disinformation disinformation is headed. It is the start of maybe the most consequential midterms I've ever covered. I'm glad to have you with us. Welcome to 2026. Well, my friends, you made it. If you are hearing this message, you made it into 2026. I believe this will be one of the most

most consequential years politically as far as midterm elections go, probably that I have ever covered. I've said before, you know, the 2012 election, I thought Obama was the better candidate than Mitt Romney, but I didn't believe that it was existentially important as an inflection point in the way that I think the 2026 midterms are going to be. And we have to start with the question, do you realize what's coming this year, the importance of this year? Most people hear midterms and they go, yeah, it's another election.

Some seats flip, cable news argues about it for a week, and then we kind of move on and nothing really changes. I don't think that that's what 2026 is. 2026 is a potentially massive inflection point, a power cutoff of sorts. And it may be the most politically important moment of Donald Trump's second term. If Republicans lose the House in 11 months, Trump effectively stops governing. He doesn't slow down. It's not. Trump is facing challenges.

He's done. No major legislation, no sweeping tax changes, no big immigration bills, no structural rewrites of the government. What he will be left with are executive orders, lawsuits, and noise. He'll keep the microphone. He'll lose the leverage. And this matters because authoritarian projects don't age well. They don't like divided government.

They require momentum and constant pressure and institutions that are either aligned or too afraid to do anything about it. If Democrats take the House, investigations come back, subpoenas come back, budget brinkmanship stops working in the same way. And the fantasy of total control runs into math. And that is why 2026 is far from symbolic. It is strategic and mechanical. Same president, but it would be a completely different reality if Democrats take the house.

Now, on the other hand, if Trump keeps the house, he gets two more years of very years of real power. He gets to push. He gets to threaten. He gets to extract loyalty. If he loses it, he becomes something else. He will be louder and angrier and more online, but more boxed in. And this really goes beyond Trump himself. 2026 doesn't just decide the rest of Trump's presidency. It will shape 2028. Trump wants to be the kingmaker. That's the end game. It looks like he's leaning J.D. Vance. He wants to decide who inherits the party. The assumption in Maga World is that if Trump retains his position at the top of the Republican Party, he will get to decide and he will probably pick J.D. Vance. But Trump's power is the kingmaker depends on perceived strength. And if he loses

the house in 2026 and has nothing to show for for two whole years heading into 28, he is going to be weakened. He's going to be a president that got checked. The leader who's a judge. stalled, the guy who couldn't deliver in his final two years in office. And that's going to change how seriously any endorsement Trump makes is taken. So if you are someone in the Republican Party thinking, I want to run in 2028, you want arguably a weak Trump. So his endorsement of J.D. Vance, which seems inevitable, but maybe won't be, won't matter quite as much.

It will determine who wins the House will determine which factions start to break away. It will determine whether the party elites feel that they still need Donald Trump. And so a diminished Trump will be unable to crown successors. He will instead be fighting it out with rivals. And Trump understands this. And that's why everything feels so rushed. The rhetoric is escalating. The pressure on institutions is frantic.

And Trump understands that his window is not four years long. It's closer to two. 2026 hits, the direction locks in. When the house, you govern through 2028 and pick your successor. You lose it. The rest of the term is playing defense. And the part that people miss is that this is a sort of fork in the road. Trump can either spend the back half of his presidency, the back quarter of his presidency,

reshaping the country, or he can spend it raging at the walls, throwing ketchup while Congress ignores him. And it decides whether he enters 2028 as a kingmaker or as a very loud orange guy with declining control. The next election could be fought on Trump's terms or it could be fought with Trump yelling from the sidelines. This is not another midterm. We either accelerate in this dystopian authoritarian direction or that stals.

Trump is acting like he knows it. Trump seems panicked. And we are going to be looking at the potential outweigh. comes of this election very closely. We have time. It's only the first show of the year. But those are the stakes. And that is why it is so important that we not lose sight of it. And part of that is going to include activating as voters. Part of that will include supporting the candidates you want to see when. And yeah, part of it is going to likely also involve supporting the independent media that you think is doing a good job. Hopefully this is one of those shows. If not, well, hopefully

there are others you do think are doing a good job. One of the favorite lines from right wingers when a Democrat is in office, no matter how good the economy is, is to say, but the value of the dollar has collapsed. We might hear, you know, job creation is up and unemployment's down, wages are up. Inflation has been nominal. The stock market's solid. And they go, but the dollar lost value. So the Democrat in the Oval Office is terrible. Now, usually it's not true, but something fascinating is going on right now.

The U.S. dollar is on track for the biggest annual decline in the year of Trump's presidency, which of course goes until January 20th, the biggest annual decline in almost a decade during the first 12 months of Donald Trump's presidency. It is not because of global business cycles. It's not because of a natural disaster or a pandemic. or because of things beyond Donald Trump's control. The dollar is down significantly because of Trump's tariff trade war, his attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve, and the relative strengthening of other currencies

against the dollar because of Donald Trump's foreign policy instability. As you can see, looking at this chart of the dollar versus 10 major currencies this year, it is down and it is down pretty big. According to the telegraph, the U.S. dollar is down more than 8% against the basket of 10 major currencies. That makes this the largest annual drop since 2017, and it is happening during the first year of Donald Trump's second term. Now, why this matters? Because when people hear, oh, the dollar is down, they might think, oh, that's like a Wall Street thing. It doesn't really affect me. Oh, no. The strength of the dollar affects everything. A strong dollar means Americans

can buy more with their money, really simple. Imports are cheaper, energy costs are lower, inflation pressure is reduced. A weaker dollar means the opposite. Imported goods get more expensive. Fuel costs go up. Food prices go up. Harder to control inflation, especially for middle and working class households. So when the dollar falls, it is not some theoretical, academic, abstract thing. It hits people at the grocery store, at the gas pump, on rent. And the reason that this matters right now is why the dollar is falling. Like I said, It's not a hurricane. It's not a pandemic.

It's not an unavoidable global turn down. It is the telegraph says that it is Trump's causes. The tariff trade war. Major reason the dollar is taking a hit. Tariffs raise costs. They slow trade. They make the U.S. look less stable to investors. And his repeated attacks on the independence of the Federal Reserve also hurt the dollar.

Markets rely on the Fed being insulated from political pressure. All Trump's done since he got into office has put political pressure on the Fed. And so when he goes, oh, I might fire Jerome Powell or I might not, but he's too slow. He's too late. Why don't you reduce the rate, the federal funds rate? It's chaos. And that is unpredictable for alliances. And other countries go, eh, maybe we'll move out of the U.S. as our reserve, U.S. dollar

is our reserve currency. Maybe we'll go a different direction in terms of trade. And the instability that we have seen is pushing investors towards other currencies. That is a big part of this. Now, the thing to understand about currencies is, like, for example, if I say gold is up, gold is up. Okay. Currencies move relative to other currencies. And so if the U.S. dollar looks not so good, other currencies look safer by comparison.

And that's what's happening right now. There's growing concern that the dollar could lose its status as the preferred safe haven, currency. And that would be a disaster for the American economy. It'll erode trust in American governance. It will make it so that other countries say, well, if we're already moving off of the US dollar as the reserve currency, maybe we'll also more proactively seek trade with countries that are also not denominated in US dollars. So this is potentially a major, major problem.

Most of the time when the right would go, oh, the US dollar is collapsing. It wasn't really collapsing. They were like expected fluctuations, but we had strong job creation. We had rising wages. We had low inflation. Markets were stable. Most of the time, the effect of the fluctuation in the dollar was not highly salient to what is going on day to day.

Right now under Trump, that argument has disappeared. And we are seeing that the concern about the dollar is not only very real, but it correlates with presidential policy. So Trump is delivering the opposite of what he promised. investors want stability, predictability, and competence. Trump also isn't delivering that. And we now have a very real, tractable, specific issue with the U.S. dollar. And it is yet another example of they love to always say the real indicator to look at is this other thing. And when economies have been good under Democrats, they go, but the U.S. dollar were getting crushed. And it wasn't true. And as it often happens

with this movement, allegations and accusations become confessions. The U.S. dollar now is a major problem. Is Fox business talking about it? I certainly haven't seen it. So we're going to be keeping a really close eye on that in 2026 as we go forward. Make sure you are getting my daily substack at substack. Davidpackman.com. Check out the merch store at store.davidpackman.com. It is great to have you here in 2026. The show will continue in a moment. The David Packman Show is an audience-supported program. And the best, most direct way to support the show is by becoming a member at join

packman.com. You'll get the daily bonus show, the daily commercial free show, and plenty of other great membership perks. Get the full experience by signing up at join packman.com. In 2026, the David Pakman show will remain an audience supported program. I would love to have your support in this critical year. The best, most direct way to support us is by signing up on my website, join packman.com. I don't know how many people in the audience know this.

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But the most direct way is at join packman.com. We do an extra show every day for our members. We offer a commercial free audio and video feed of the show for our members. And the show is made available earlier to our members than to anybody else. Sign up today. Appreciate your support. Corporate bankruptcies in the United States just hit a 15 year high, not during a recession or market crash, but right now.

Between January and November, over 700 companies filed for Chapter 7 or Chapter 11 bankruptcy. That's a 14% increase from last year. And it is the highest level since 2010. There is one primary reason why. And it is the blanket tariffs put in place by a president who is the color of a traffic cone. Not too many. Meet that description. Trump keeps pointing to headline numbers.

GDP growth was good and stock market is doing fine and strength and all of that. But underneath it, there's a growing number of businesses collapsing. And tariffs have driven up costs across the economy. The imported materials cost more. The components cost more. Shipping costs more. You add high interest rates in lingering inflation. And suddenly a lot of companies just can't breathe.

The worst damage is hitting industrials, meaning construction, manufacturing, and transportation. The very sectors Trump said he would save. consumer facing businesses are getting hammered, especially discretionary products and services. When prices go up and wages don't keep up, people pull back. And when demand drops, businesses don't last very long. This is the contradiction that economists continue to point out. In the aggregate, the economy looks okay. But the gains are very unevenly shared.

And a small number of companies and investors are doing great. And a lot of others are just absorbing the pain. Now, this shouldn't surprise us. Trump is not a good business person. He would do better or would have done better financially had he simply invested his inheritance in a stock market index fund all along and never done anything. But when you look at what he has done, putting aside that he's a convicted felon, he ran casinos into the ground. He stiffed contractors, treats bankruptcy like a personal financial strategy, and he's doing the same thing to the country. He governs the way that he ran

his companies impulsively and vindictively and without understanding that there are second and third order effects to what you do. And the part, as if this shouldn't be concerning enough, the part that should really worry people is that this kind of economic self-destruction lines up with the interests of our adversaries. Putin struck gold with Trump. China struck gold with Trump. A U.S. president that weakens alliances and starts trade wars with allies and destabilizes supply chains, you couldn't design a better asset if you tried. And it's not only Russia and China. lot of foreign governments, including many in the Middle East, that would love nothing more than to see the erosion of Western economic dominance.

Because when the United States is weakened from the inside, you don't need cyber attacks if you're an adversary. You don't need tanks. You don't need missiles. You don't need bombs. You just sit back as the chaos and division and bad policy sort of does the work for you. And if you go back to that infamous book, the foundations of geopolitics, the Russian geopolitical playbook, long-term investment in destabilizing the United States while undermining trust

and encouraging countries to experience self-inflicted wounds as democracies tear themselves apart is right out of the playbook. And so the long-term efforts of Russia and others are paying off, and I hate to acknowledge that. Instead of acknowledging the damage, Trump says, oh, we got a scapegoat judges and immigrants and whoever tries to get in the way of what I'm trying to do. He lashes out. He blames everybody else.

He doubles down. So we end up with this bizarre situation. Some headline numbers that look okay, 4.3% GDP. Stock market is doing okay. But we've got record bankruptcies. At the personal level, we see a growing percentage of people with car loans becoming 60 days delinquent, which can be a leading indicator of forthcoming economic problems. And Trump is celebrating as a record number of large businesses are collapsing.

Not a sign you might hear much about, but an important one. Young men are bailing on Donald Trump. For the last year, we've heard story after story about how young men went maga. They shifted right. They helped put Donald Trump back in the White House in 2024. And that was true. There was a moment where that really reflected reality. Young men, especially Gen Z, moved towards Trump in a way that surprised a lot of people and scrambled a lot of assumptions.

and a lot of it had to do with the manosphere, which we've talked about. But that very same group is now pulling away and they're doing it quickly. We have new polling showing Gen Z men are breaking with Trump and the Republican Party less than a year after helping put him in power. Trump's approval rating with 18 to 29 year olds is now 32 percent. And young men favor Democratic control of Congress by a 12 point margin. This is a Harvard youth poll. That is not a statistical bit of nor.

that you can ignore. That is a real shift. And if you acknowledge that young men were one of the reasons Trump won in 2024 and one of the reasons Republicans won, if they leave, you would be correct to be worried about what's going to happen in 2026 and 28. Now, you have to understand what Republicans have done, which has spent years building an ecosystem aimed at that group. The podcast, the YouTube channels, the influencers, grievance politics. You can't find a girl. It's because of Democrats and leftism and vote Republican in order to fix that. And young men were told successfully to a degree that they were victims of a rigged system where institutions, employers, the media, women, as it applies to heterosexual young men,

they are all against you and screwing you. And for a lot of voters, especially younger ones, that landed. Governing is different than messaging, though. And now they are in power. And what's striking about the new polling is that it's more than just a cultural backlash. It's about a disappointment. Young men say the system still feels unstable, unfair, and unresponsive. And Trump's not fixing it.

He said he would, but he's not. Democratic support among young voters is ticking up slightly and Republican support is sliding. Now, if you look at Gen Z, there is a split within Gen Z. You look at younger Gen Z men versus older Gen Z men. The younger Gen Z men are even more anti-Trump right now. And the suggestion from researchers is that this is just because of the lived experience. The younger Gen Z voters didn't fully experience Trump's term in a political way. Now they're experiencing it.

And they're like, wow, this is not good. They're against Trump's ice crackdowns. They're against eliminating vaccine requirements. They oppose the mass firings of federal workers. And so we can kind of simply call it a buyer's remorse. And I think that that's true. there was a fantasy version of Trump that they fell for. It's circulated through the Manosphere, but it doesn't comport with reality.

And the Manosphere, by the way, is also changing. We've talked about that. A lot of the Manosphere influencers that helped get Trump elected are kind of starting to distance. I mean, look at Joe Rogan. First of all, Joe Rogan's political influence, I think at this point is not what it was, partially because he damaged himself so much with the Trump endorsement. But you've got the Taint Brothers once treated as royalty in online space. They're more associated with legal trouble and embarrassment than they are with power.

The promise that following those guys would lead to success and wealth is wearing pretty damn thin. And at the same time, life is getting more real for that cohort. They are starting to age into full-time jobs, rent, mortgages, child care, healthcare costs. And they're seeing, wow, this is not going very well. They feel it in their pocketbooks. And if you look in places like Indiana, for example, there are a lot of Trump supporters there, young Trump supporters who are not convinced that America is great again.

It's not landing with them that Trump has made America great again. They can't afford childcare, groceries, homes, et cetera. Now this doesn't mean that young men suddenly love Democrats. A lot of young men distrust both parties, and I actually understand why they would. But the direction of travel is what matters here. The momentum is what matters here. Trump was supposed to be the answer for young men who felt left behind. And instead, many are realizing that the chaos and the crackdowns and the constant culture

war don't really improve their lives. The hype has worn off. The consequences are here. And once you're living under Trump again, a lot of these young men are learning their lesson. Now, as is always the case with these phenomena, can Democrats convincingly and robustly make the argument, okay, you've found some stuff you don't like here. what about voting for us in 2026? And that is not a foregone conclusion or a guarantee.

So Democrats are still going to have to fight. They're still going to have to make the case. We actually can make things better for you if you vote for us in 2026. And I think it's dangerous to assume that that is going to be automatic. And so we're going to track it extraordinarily closely. But the themes here are not only is approval for Trump falling, but even in the cross tabs, When you look more deeply at the groups that built some of Trump's key support in 2024, they are bailing out.

The question will be, will voters hold the right party accountable in 2026? And sometimes the answer is no, they won't. If you like this show, I would love for you to get my substack writing. Each day, I'll send you a rundown of what's on the show, what's happening, what matters, why. It's free. No spam. Substack is also the only place where we own our data. So if we get censored on social media or on any platform, Substack's going to be the only

way I can tell you what is going on. Sign up now at David Pakman.substack.com. There's a belief that a lot of Americans are still clinging to. I was clinging to it for a while. I know people in my audience are still sort of holding out hope. And it's because we are in a moment of outrageous dystopian authoritarianism in Washington, D.C. And the belief that many of us did and some of us are still clinging to is that if things get really bad, we have a system developed to eventually correct itself. If a president crosses enough lines, we have guardrails, they're going to kick in, institutions will step up, accountability is going to happen.

And if Donald Trump's second term so far has made anything clear, it's that if the United States were a fully functional democracy, Donald Trump would no longer be president of the United States. States. And I don't mean that he would eventually be voted out. I mean that in a fully functional democracy, Donald Trump would have been removed if the guardrails still had any teeth. This isn't that Trump's ideology is different than mine. Of course it is. But George W. Bush's ideology was different than mine. And you can name other presidents whose ideologies were different than mine. This is not about that. This is about a basic sort of set of standards. And in functioning democracies, leaders are removed for abusing power. Leaders are removed for undermining elections.

Leaders are removed for using state authority for personal retaliation. That would be a normal basic thing. In other countries, it happens. Governments fall over scandals that with Trump, they wouldn't even be top 10 controversies. But here in the United States, the abnormal has been normalized. And I have started in 2017, I was talking about hyper-normalization. And now we have to resist becoming accustomed to what is very much not normal. But let me give you some examples just from this year.

Forget about the period when Biden was president and all the things Trump did during that period. Forget about Donald Trump's first term. Just not hypothetical, 2025 under Donald Trump. Now as we move into 26. Trump didn't just threaten his political enemies. He followed through. He installed loyalists and personal attorneys with no meaningful prosecutorial background into the DOJ and use those appointments to pursue indictments of political rivals. That alone would end a presidency elsewhere.

We look at civil service through executive action. Trump effectively dismantled decades of protection for career federal employees and reclassify tens of thousands of civil servants so they, could be fired for failing loyalty tests. And there was this period where hiring was going to require writing a pro-Trump essay. And so competence stopped mattering. The law stopped mattering. And the only thing that mattered was personal allegiance to Donald Trump. That is total authoritarianism.

And that is something that should get a president in a democracy removed. We've also seen something that should still shock people, even if it doesn't. seized operational control of local law enforcement in Washington, D.C., and deployed the National Guard into Chicago over the objections of local leaders. That is not law and order. That is a president testing the outer limits of federal power and daring institutions to stop him. They didn't, and it didn't stop there. Trump issued executive orders targeting private law firms that represented political opponents of his and stripped them of federal contracts revoked security clearances. The message is unmistakable. You represent the wrong people, even though this is

what lawyers represent people, but you represent the wrong people as far as Trump is concerned, the government will punish you. Any one of these actions on its own would trigger removal proceedings in a healthy democracy. I don't think we have a healthy democracy because doing all of that stuff, not just one of those things, has not even slowed Trump down. So the question isn't really why is Trump like this? That's a question about personality and authoritarianism and the people that have sort of roped him into this political movement that he's a part of. The real question is why the system hasn't stopped him. And it's a kind of uncomfortable question to answer because we have to accept the system's not functioning the way we were

taught it does. We were taught that we had guardrails that would prevent this. And we see impeachment becoming sort of a partisan ritual where Republicans just go, yeah, not interested, don't care what he did. I'm not interested. Congress has largely abdicated its role, choosing political survival over institutional responsibility. And the courts move really slowly and are very deferential to Donald Trump and will often allow sweeping actions, even if they later review and say, yeah, that wasn't good. The delay, the slow speed is a form of permission. Whenever this comes up, the defenses are always the same. But Trump was elected. Yeah, he was elected, but elections don't grant immunity. This would destabilize the country. What I would argue is destabilizing,

is teaching future presidents you can get away with everything because nothing has consequences anymore. That's the precedent that is being set right now. If Trump can dismantle federal agencies by fiat and ignore court orders he doesn't like and weaponize the IRS against universities and nonprofits that disagree with him, then the next president can at least do that and probably more. And the one after that could get away with even more. So this really isn't about Trump being uniquely evil. It's that the system has failed a basic stress test.

We can talk about whether Trump is uniquely evil or uniquely bad. What I mean is this conversation isn't really about that. A functional democracy wouldn't be arguing is accountability too political. Would it be too partisan to try to hold them accountable? It would have acted. And we don't have that in this country. This standard applies no matter who is in the Oval Office. If a Democratic president behaved this way, removal should be the expectation.

It happens to be a Republican president. And that should also be the expectation. Once accountability becomes optional, democracy becomes. performative. What Trump's second term has exposed isn't just his authoritarian instincts. We saw those during his first term. We saw that during the period between his terms when Joe Biden was president. A system that relies on good faith alone collapses when someone decides they no longer act in good faith. And if anything has been revealed during the Trump political era about the framers of the Constitution and the founders of this country, it's that they made a good faith assumption that was

wrong, which was nobody with the bad faith of Trump will ever be elected. The people would never elect such a person. And they did. And now we have to contend with the fact that Donald Trump is still in office. And it really tells us something unsettling about the country we're living in. The low-hanging fruit, the easy criticism is it tells us something about the people that voted for Trump. And it does. We've talked about that. There was a refer there. We've had a national IQ test here. And we failed it, unfortunately. And we already know that. But it also tells us something about the way the country is set up. And the guardrails we believe we have. They're not strong enough. And we are seeing it every day under Donald Trump. All right. I want to talk about something that is already

happening to me. This is not happening in theory. This is not something that might happen in the future. it is happening right now. If you watch political content on YouTube or TikTok, there is a decent chance you've already seen it. The AI generated videos of me. You've also maybe seen videos of real political figures where maybe the voice is fake or the face is fake and they're not random. And it is an AIification of news and politics, both the content creators and the elected

officials. Our feeds are already being flooded. with AI generated content impersonating anti-Trump and never Trump voices across the political spectrum. It's happening to our content. It's happening to Brian Tyler Cohen. It happened to Brian Tyler. It happened to Tyler Bryanson.

It happened to Tyler Cohen. It's happening to all of them. Rachel Maddow, George Conway, Robert Reich, many others. What is striking is the timing. As I've been researching and writing a chapter for my forthcoming book about how AI will affect the news and politics space and how media manipulation is going to be hit by this and the collapse of trust online, this started happening more and more. I was deep in the weeds on this issue.

And in the book, I initially was writing it as this is 12 months away, 18 months away. And as I've been writing, it started happening. I am regularly sent videos that are sort of of me. It's either me with the background replaced with something else, or it's me saying things I didn't really say with a cloned voice. It's repackaged. Sometimes the set is different or the visuals or sometimes it's my actual voice. Sometimes it's a very good imitation to the algorithm. It just looks like new content from David Pacman, even though the substance isn't. It's not really me. And it works. Some of these videos, I'm not going to show, I'm not going to promote specific ones.

I don't want to give them attention. There are videos of fake Pacman that have racked up hundreds of thousands of views and channels built on AI videos of me that have added thousands and a couple of them tens of thousands of subscribers. The subscribers lead to monetization and it is someone else monetizing my likeness with things I didn't really say or things I did say where they're changing the background to try to defeat content ID systems. That is step one. Step two is where it starts to become really dangerous. Once these channels are established and trusted by the algorithm, and this is why we have to work to take them down, once these channels are established and trusted by the algorithm, there is no reason that people are going to assume that those videos are not

authentic. At this point, the technology is good enough to make it look like I'm saying things I never said. Anything, it could be policy positions I don't hold. It could be false claims. It could be statements designed to inflame, divide, or discredit. For now, the AI content is stuff I really said repackaged with a different background. Or stuff I would say, stuff that's aligned with the political space I occupy. But the next step would be, I don't know, hardcore right wing David Packman, good enough AI that maybe you can't tell the difference. Once that happens, that could be ruinous. Corrections never spread as far as the viral clips. The explanations come later if they come at all. The damage happens instantly.

There is another trick that is being used. Some of these channels do put up an AI disclaimer, but they hide it. Many of them put no disclaimer up whatsoever. Some of them, you know, if you look behind more and somewhere buried, it'll say, this is fan-generated content. This is an AI parody. It's my face. It's my voice. It's a political message that maybe is mine.

Maybe it isn't. But to viewers and to the algorithm, it looks legitimate. This is not an accident. Right now, most of these videos line up with the views of the people they're impersonating to build trust. The threat is that they start putting out videos where the content is very much not aligned politically. Now, many of you, I know when you see these, you report them on YouTube, on TikTok. We do the same thing. We can't really do that much more.

And sometimes the videos are taken down. Sometimes the videos stay up. Sometimes the channels are taken down. Sometimes they stay up. Sometimes YouTube or TikTok will ask more. TikTok than YouTube, which of these channels is real and which one is getting impersonated, even though we are verified on TikTok. This is about real people, me and others you might follow, being impersonated at scale.

I don't know who's complicit at this point. Like, is it so good for the platforms that they are better off not policing the AI content? I don't know. It's kind of early in the game. We still don't know. But the technology to do it is becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. So what can we do? I'm trying to figure it out.

We have to be skeptical, even if content that sounds like it agrees with you, if all of a sudden I'm in a weird 3D generated studio and it's not the studios I actually use or occasionally in a hotel room when I'm traveling, be skeptical. If you see a clip of me saying something and it's not on one of my actual channels, stop, check the channel history, check what else they post, look for sudden virality. with no track record. Second, reported. It might feel pointless. Platforms respond to volume. And one report might get ignored. Thousands will get it reviewed. And use the real established channel when asked what is being impersonated. Well, here's the official David Pakman show YouTube or TikTok or Instagram or whatever. Third, we got to talk about this. It needs to be divulged that this is happening. The assumption is that we have now, I'm operating under the assumption that we have crossed the line. What I was writing about as 12 to 18 months in the future is happening right now.

And so we are in this moment where the AI is coming for all of us. It's here. And if it can monetize what I've already said, which is what's happening, they can put words in my mouth tomorrow. And that's the fear. The timing of it is particularly pernicious now in 2026 with maybe the most, important midterm election, certainly that I've ever covered, just 10 and a half months away or something like that, 10 months away, 11 months away, we are in a position where it could

really wreak havoc. So it is happening. I want you to be aware of it. Reported if you see it. Let us know if you see it. The David Packman show is an audience supported program. And the best most direct way to support the show is by becoming a member at join packman.com. You'll get the daily bonus show, the daily commercial free show, and plenty of other great membership perks. Get the full experience by signing up at join packman.com. It is the first Friday feedback of the year. It's 2026. It is an election year. And we start with a lot of messages related to this year's important midterms. Remember that you can email info at David Pakman.com. If you have anything to say, we will sometimes feature comments,

replies on various platforms, et cetera. We start with a message about the Texas Senate race coming on the subreddit from friendly drummers who says Jasmine Crockett should not be the nominee. As someone in Texas, long time fan of her, I will vote for James Tala Rico in the primaries, and here's why. Trump is not on the ballot. We don't want these old white MAGA voters to get out of their sunken couches permanently facing the tella to vote. I want them to stay there. We want them to feel unmotivated and to not vote. Trump brought out the fight. He's not there anymore. Jasmine Crockett has made herself a staple out of being a fighter. She's gone viral when fighting back and God damn good for her. It's what her voters sent her to do and she did it well.

But we do not want Jasmine Crockett in this fight because we don't want a fight. James Talarica is a soft-spoken, passive milk-toast white man who won't scare these uneducated MAGA voters. Jasmine Crockett is a loud, educated, ambitious black woman. She is exactly who will scare these uneducated white MAGA voters. She will scare them right out of their damp, sunken sofas straight to the voting booth to vote for a Republican. So this person says, Jasmine Crockett should not be the Democratic nominee in Texas for Senate. It should be James Tala rick.

Another message about that same race says this is sweet potato gut from the subreddit. All red and crockett should have fought it out. Most of the coverage I've seen claims that the switch reduces dem chances in the race. I don't know. And I don't think anyone does what this means for the race. But I'm very aggravated that these two are pretending to play nice for the sake of the party. The Democratic Party is rudderless. We need candidates of varying backgrounds and approaches to compete throughout the country to see what works and who's effective.

Avoiding costly primaries is the same lame excuse that delivered Trump in 2022. Anyway, so this is someone who says, all red should have stayed in, let him fight it out. Listen, I do not know who is most likely to defeat the Republican senator in Texas. I think it's an uphill battle no matter what. I think Colin Allred had his challenges. I think James Tala Rico has his challenges. I think Jasmine Crockett has challenges. What I don't see evidence for is that a robust primary weakens the eventual winner.

So I would have been fine with Colin Allred staying in. And we could see a multi-way Democratic primary. What I do know is that whoever is the nominee, they are going to pull out all of the stops. because if Republicans were to lose this Texas seat, it would be such a disaster to them that they realize, in addition to maybe losing the house, they would further humiliate themselves, humiliate Trump, and make themselves the lamest of lame ducks for two years. So I expect to fight no matter who wins that primary. All right, on the issue of when I quote Trump, should I read what you?

Trump said or should I play audio or video of Trump talking. Divergent opinions of this. Just wrote in on Spotify. Play the clips, David. It gives you way more credibility when you respond to what Donod actually says. That way, there's no room for misquotes or accidental misinformation. Some hosts just paraphrase with an I feel like he's saying and it comes off disingenuous. It forces me to look up what was really said. Well, that's one view, but Dom has a totally different view and says, I can't listen to the show regularly because of Trump clips. Hearing him speak is miserable and makes me sad. I listen to Bullwork a lot. I listen to Bullwork a lot more now because of Tim's rule about not playing Trump's voice. Listen, everybody can make the determination they want to make. If I'm covering

the president to say I am banning his voice from the show, it doesn't strike me as in line with the way I do things. If Tim Miller has that rule, I don't know if he does, by the way, but let's assume Dom is right. If Tim Miller has that rule, then that's a great rule for Tim. But I find it difficult to argue that it makes sense not to play the actual messages from Trump if I'm going to comment on them, if policy depends on them, if they can move markets or change foreign policy and foreign relations. So that's my view as of this moment. Fran Montana. Doesn't like me. And Fran says, L.O.L.

This guy's stories are comedy. He makes up the wildest narratives for this channel. It's so funny. Well, you know, Fran, there's no better time for some examples than right now. And if you have any examples of the narratives that I have made up for the show, I would love for you to tell me at least what a couple of them are. And then I can evaluate them and then we can figure it out. Not surprised.

No examples cited. Grant McClellan on the subreddit says, so what do the Democrats have left? Given how much of a bust the Epstein files release were, and that was the last best hope the left had in the hopes of getting Trump out of the White House, what's left? Can we just accept that nothing the left does will ever get him out? And I say this as someone who's just checked out with Trump. Listen, I don't know who Grant was listening to specifically. I've made it very clear.

Unless Trump is physically incapacitated, he's serving the rest of this term. It doesn't matter what's in the Epstein files. It doesn't matter if he, as he likes to say, shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. Trump is serving out the rest of his term. I don't think there's anything that would make the Republican-controlled Senate turn on Trump. and actually convict him in an impeachment trial. I don't think there is anything that would do it. So the question is, how can Trump be diminished in his ability to do harm?

And how can we weaken MAGA so that they don't get to put in another lunatic in 2028? That's the goal. And right now, in 2026, as we're approaching the midterm, Trump knows it, Maga Mike Johnson knows it, Democrats know it. Most of you recognize that if Democrats take control of the House in November, Trump is neutered. That is it for his term. He doesn't get a single additional piece of important legislation passed unless it's completely uncontroversial and, you know, some response to a national natural disaster or something like that. So that is where we have to keep our eye right now.

But on the idea of removing Trump, I don't know who is setting the expectation that he could be removed, but I certainly was not. Friendly drummers with a double dose this time around writing on the subreddit, I miss the Collins. I know David would constantly get annoyed. Some people just tried to call for the sake of it. Some didn't pay attention. Some didn't answer the call or the dreadful mic issues. But I miss it.

It was one of my favorite things to watch. Right now, it kind of feels like he's in a locked room with no connection to the real world. Plus, I found his conversations to be a good example of talking to apolitical or conservative voters. It was a good guide into those conversations. I know he got annoyed, but maybe a moderator could get the callers before David picks them, et cetera, et cetera.

Listen, couple things. Number one, overwhelmingly, the audience hated the call ins. So I know that we occasionally hear from people who liked them. The audience mostly hated them. And I get overwhelmingly positive messages that we don't do the call ins on the show anymore. But if you did like them, I've moved them to TikTok. When I do TikTok lives, we are doing basically an hour. of the same thing we used to do 20 minutes of, the Collins.

I find that on TikTok, the callers are better prepared. They actually, nine out of 10 or 19 out of 20, have an actual question or something to say, as opposed to kind of rambling with no set endpoint where I have to then interrupt and go, is there a question? I think the quality during the TikTok lives has gone up. The people that didn't like it on the podcast are still pleased. So check it out because we're doing a lot of the same stuff over on. the TikTok lives and I'll keep doing it. Waffle Nebula asks on the subreddit, why does it keep

feeling like we're losing? I'm constantly fed up with how politics has been materializing. You obviously have a felon that somehow skirted into politics and letting him unfettered do as he may, despite every knock against them, whether by the charges, past crimes, or at least backlash coming from some of the media. Usually someone under adversity would alter their behavior. and try to be careful and leave a low profile. Instead, you find him brandishing his exculpability as if he is invincible. Look at how he keeps violating court orders, skipping Congress to attack other nations, or altering federal property and renaming everything he could to his filthy name.

Where is the restraint or checks against his behavior or actions? Our country is a joke that they allow this clown into power and how laws don't apply to him and he keeps lying over and over again. I sometimes wish the other countries of the world would ally together to help us rid of this tyrant kind of like Germany when it was ruled by Hitler. Yeah, listen, I recently talked about this on a podcast with Mark Elias. There are a lot of things we can't do with the power we currently have. There are a lot of things we can do at the local level and in other ways through the courts.

But there are certain things we can't do. We have to figure out what is the immediate next step. The immediate next step is take the House, see if we can take the Senate. We're going to deal with other things later. But we have to figure out where we can be effective. Voting in local elections, donating to candidates when they represent your values, working at the state level, as in many cases, governors have a lot of administrative power that can contradict or juxtapose with what the federal government is doing. So there are a lot of things we can do. But when you control nothing, it's natural to kind of feel like you're not getting too many wins.

We're going to keep at it. And 2026, I believe, is a key year for this. We're going to be here. I know many of you are going to be here. I believe we are going to see a turn. We have a phenomenal bonus show for you today. Sign up at join hackman.com to get instant access to today's bonus show. Thank you.