The David Pakman Show - 3/12/25: Trump's Tesla infomercial implodes, Europe hits red states hard

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

-- On the Show: -- Donald Trump, desperate to save Elon Musk's Tesla, does a bizarre and humiliating infomercial on the White House lawn during which he says he will buy a Tesla -- No matter what MAGA tells you, not buying a Tesla is not "cancel culture," it's capitalism -- Is Fox News starting to turn on Donald Trump? -- Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump's weaponized Press Secretary, gets brutally fact checked over her tariff lies -- MAGA is slowly shifting to "cutting Social Security is good" -- An examination of how, in just 35 days, Donald Trump has taken the American economy from totally reasonable to being on the verge of a recession -- Out of options, Republicans are changing the definition of inflation -- Fox News host Laura Ingraham delivers a brutal impeachment warning to Donald Trump -- On the Bonus Show: Inflation at 2.8% in February, Katie Porter running for California governor, Utah to ban fluoride in water system, and much more... 🍵 Pique: Get 20% OFF delicious Pu’er Teas at https://piquelife.com/pakman 😺 Smalls cat food: Use code PAKMAN for 50% off & free shipping at https://smalls.com 💻 Sponsored by Aura: Try it free for 2 weeks! See if your data is safe at https://aura.com/pakman 🛡️ 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 -- 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

Welcome to the show. I love Tesla. What on earth am I talking about? You want to see a president completely debase himself in front of an audience that hates electric vehicles, telling all of them, please, please buy one of these so that you can help Elon not lose yet another business. A desperate Donald Trump doing a Tesla infomercial out front of the White House or out back, technically the front, the back, who the hell knows, refers to it as Tesla as Elon Musk looks on. Thank you all very much. I love Tesla. I love Tesla. OK, I've never seen anything like this. Elon Musk's Tesla is collapsing. I am so glad I got out with my sixteen hundred percent gain a while ago. The sales of the company are in the toilet.

Elon Musk has infuriated the very base that likes electric vehicles. And now Donald Trump is relegated to promoting Elon's cars at the White House. He claims they don't let him drive because he hasn't driven in a long time, but he is going to buy one and let his staff use it. President Trump, are you looking to buy or lease? I'm going to buy and I'm going to buy because number one, it's a great product, as good as it gets. And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he's been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people. Yes, the cars I said suck before. You should

really buy them because they're treating him so unfairly. And I just want people to know that you can't be penalized for being a patriot. And he's a great patriot. And he's also done an incredible job with Tesla. And I mean, nobody else has a car company started up in the last 30 years. It's been successful. I don't think so. And not only successful, but super successful. And because he's able to find billions and billions and billions of dollars of fraud and waste.

And remember, not a single dollar of actual fraud has yet been proven. Maybe they found it, but they haven't proven a single dollar of fraud. All of the things I mean, our country is going to be very strong very soon because of a lot of the. All right, you get it. So basically, Elon is so awesome. Please buy his cars, even though I used to talk about how terrible they are. Trump appearing to see a Tesla for the first time

ever. Check this out. Wow. I give him this. That's beautiful. This is a different panel than I've had. Everything's computer. That's beautiful. Wow. This is completely farcical. The world is laughing at us. Yeah, it's just a break and an accelerator. This is the break and the accelerator. Can you start it? It's really always on.

I mean, again, it's just like, does anybody even know how these things work? You don't you don't want me to drive it to you. I thought I could do it. I'll tell you, it could be. Yeah, but I'm very easy to drive. That's the only one that saw it. Yeah, of course, Trump saying they won't let him drive Joe and says Biden can't drive. Biden drove a bunch of cars. He drove the F-150 light and lightning.

He drove a Jeep. Anyway, it's all lies. It's all lies all the way down. Trump then holding a piece of paper that listed Tesla prices on it, started talking about how you can get one for 35 grand, which is pretty good. I bought for a very special young woman. Do you know? I'm sure you've never heard of a guy and she's a great golfer and she puts the clubs in the back.

And I guess it's a very safe deal. She loves it. And I actually bought one about a year ago and she loves it. And it's very safe. It's very strong, heavy. It's all steel, stainless steel. But the cars themselves. So what is this one?

You know, that's the Model Y. It's a Model Y. So I have a lot of information to put into price. I've got the real information about the Model Y. I used to drive one. It's very shoddily built. That's the information. Yeah. I want to make a good deal here. You know, I do notice this. They have one which is thirty five thousand dollars, which is pretty low. What is that all about? Yes, I guess you want to make the point that Tesla's are all expensive. You can get a Tesla for as little as thirty five thousand dollars.

A very articulate Elon Musk jumping in so charismatic really makes you want to buy the car. Trump then saying he would be using a check to buy the car because he doesn't really like all of these new systems. Now remember that he now wants you to believe that cryptocurrency is great, even though he thinks old fashioned checks are really the way to go. The one I like is that one. How does this work? I want that same color. Are you going to put down a credit card? Elon, would you take a personal check? I do it the old way. I give checks. I like checks. I think it's good. It's good.

You know, I like to check better than this modern system of all of a sudden there's money in your account. Nobody does. I like signing a check. All of a sudden, these modern systems, there's money on your account. Meanwhile, he's promoting Bitcoin and cryptocurrency and meme coins. Now I do want to remind you, for years, Trump would just talk trash about these electric vehicles for years and years and years.

We have and it's what it's what people want to drive right now. And there's a little story about it, but you're going to see it a lot. I guarantee you they have so many electric vehicles. Nobody wants to buy them. They're expensive. Well, they can probably get them by the way. Now, nobody wants to buy them. They're expensive. Well, they can probably get them by the way. Now, nobody wants to buy them. Three thousand dealers around the country wrote Biden and said, please stop making us sell something. Would they want Ford lost four and a half billion dollars? Let me ask you this. You know, over the last 48 hours, these two gentlemen, Donald Trump and Sean Hannity, have been saying Tesla is God's gift to vehicles and they both said they are buying Teslas.

You're going to have trouble selling electric vehicles to an audience of followers to whom you've been trashing electric vehicles for four, five, six, seven years. It's going to be difficult. Now there was some question as to whether Fox News is starting to turn on Trump. We're going to deal with that more substantially later. But here's Peter Doocy saying, you know, you're coming out here and just making a show of buying a car. A lot of people's retirement accounts are in the toilet thanks to your economy.

Check this out. President Trump buying a new car while there are some folks who will see this clip at home and they are struggling with their retirement accounts down at the moment. Uncertainty about work ahead. Well, I think they're going to do great. I think we're our country had to do this. We had to go and do this. They've taken away other countries, have taken away our business. They've taken away our jobs. I did it initially very strongly against, as you know, China and some others. Yeah. Now, of course, they didn't take our jobs. The jobs were offshored by American companies to save money. The American companies did it. It's all backwards. It's all backwards. And this

pathetic infomercial eventually devolved into Trump talking about things he just doesn't really understand. Stock is all drops and markets are going to go up and they're going to go down. Yeah. But you know what? We have to rebuild our country. Our country has been stripped of its jobs, of its factories. And I'm tired of seeing where they build apartments, cheap apartments in an old broken down factory. He hates it. He hates it. He doesn't like the repurposing of buildings. And then finally capping this off by saying, I don't even know if Ilan is a Republican. He's penalized because he's a patriot. He's an incredible patriot. And I don't even know if he's a Republican. All right. So a pathetic I mean, have you ever seen the prostrating of an American president in in

this way doing infomercials for I love Tesla, Tesla. I've never seen anything like it. And now they are coming up with it's cancel culture, what they're doing to Elon. And I want to deal with that next. Sorry, MAGA, choosing not to buy a Tesla is not cancel culture. Donald Trump is now flipping out. Started yesterday, continued because some people don't want to buy a Tesla. And in classic Trump fashion, he called it on truth, social and illegal and collusive left wing conspiracy. We talked about it yesterday. I have a message for the free market people that support Trump. Not buying a car isn't illegal. It's called capitalism.

It's a little thing called capitalism. As Donald Trump would say, people decide where to spend their money based on all kinds of things. I might consider price. You might consider price. You might consider quality. I might want to evaluate whether the CEO is a right wing troll involved in mass layoffs. And maybe that's how I decide which car I buy. That's not a crime. That's the free market. And telling other people why you are or aren't buying a car is a little thing we call free speech, which we still have for now

in this country. The thing that Republicans supposedly love. But even further, it's not cancel culture either. Elon Musk spent the last two years pushing conspiracy theories, boosting right wing extremists, making X a haven for white nationalist and misogynist excretion. Sorry, tweets. And now he's shocked that people who actually care about buying electric vehicles, people like me, people who are on average a little more educated, a little more progressive leaning. We're no longer excited to give Elon Musk money. We're no longer looking to line Elon's pockets with cash, as Trump calls it. And, you know, the great news, it's bad news for Elon. The great news is that there are more excellent electric vehicle options than ever before. The best day to get an electric vehicle in terms of options, price range, distance range and all of it

is today. Tesla is the least interesting today that it has ever been because of all the other options. And then there's Trump in the most painfully transparent way possible, trying to rally the MAGA base behind Tesla, a company that sells a type of vehicle. The MAGA's have been told to hate for six years because they can't go anywhere and it takes too long to charge them and all of it. It's sort of like when Trump held up the Goya can at the White House instead of holding up a can of beans. This time it's, you know, a car, 35,000, 60,000, a hundred thousand dollar car. But there is a hilarious irony here, which is, as I mentioned, that MAGA hates electric cars, partially thanks to Trump. Trump would have an easier time getting the MAGA Potamians to buy Teslas if he hadn't spent the last six years talking about how terrible

electric vehicles are. For years, they've been ranting about the globalist scam of the electric vehicle to force people into woke climate friendly transportation. They have no range. You can't go anywhere. When Joe Biden pushed for EV infrastructure, which is a great thing, they mocked him. They called electric trucks useless. When Biden drove the F one 50 lightning, they said California's banning gas cars as some kind of socialist plot. But now that Trump says Tesla's good, suddenly the base is supposed to do a one 80 and go, give me the F one 50 lightning. I want to plug it in at home. It's so awesome. Now, after you've been telling them how bad it is for so long, even they are not going to do it. So this isn't really so much a boycott. It's certainly not cancel culture. It's people making choices in a capitalist market environment, something that Elon Musk and Donald Trump support only when it benefits them. Conservatives want to

own the libs, I guess now by rushing out to buy Tesla's go for it. But I think it's going to be a tough sell. But don't be surprised when progressives who already drive electric vehicles say I'm going elsewhere. I went to Rivian build quality significantly better, much better vehicle, longer range. I'm disappointed I didn't do it sooner. It's called the free market. It's called choices. And this is what they said everybody's supposed to have major, major news. As of this exact moment, we have reached two point nine nine million YouTube subscribers.

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Is Fox News turning on MAGA and Donald Trump? Could this be the beginning of the end of Fox News supporting Trump? We'll start with the clip we already checked out at the top of the show. Peter Doocy pointing out to Trump that there is something a little bit disgusting about him making a big show of casually buying a Tesla. Why not? Right. While people are struggling, seeing every day the stock market dropping, dropping, dropping their retirement money evaporating. And meanwhile, Trump's buying a Tesla. Isn't this potentially going to rub people the wrong way? A really good question from Fox News is Peter Ducey, President Trump

buying a new car while there are some folks who will see this clip at home and they are struggling with their retirement accounts down at the moment. Uncertainty about work ahead. Well, I think they're going to do great. I think we're, our country had to do this. We have. All right. So Trump obviously doesn't deal substantively with what's happening to people's retirement accounts. But Peter Ducey is asking the question.

You wouldn't normally expect this from Fox news. We then heard more from Peter Ducey yesterday where he said, Trump is the one whose economic policy is not going so well. Take a listen to that. This is a White House that came in trying to get federal workers to retire by the hundreds of thousands. But it's tough to make the argument that you should retire if your retirement accounts are getting throttled, which is what is happening right now. A very good point.

When you're starting to lose Peter Doocy, you know things aren't going well. And when you get called out on national TV because your influence on the economy is bringing it down, you know it's bad when it's your typical mouthpiece. Fox News. bad when it's your typical mouthpiece Fox news, more minor, but still something, uh, a discussion about, um, uh, what's continuing to happen in, in the economy on another Fox news. And if you have different people in the administration giving different messages, I mean the commerce secretary and the president are having different messages on the same day. That's not giving the market

any sort of ease or certainty for investors. So I wouldn't be surprised if we have an even greater crash. We should let Jonathan keep talking because the market's come back 50 points. Hey, obviously, the Dow is 1500 points below where it was when Donald Trump took office. They're just telling the truth, right? And we'll talk about what this really means. Bigger picture. Just one more of these. Here is a Fox business host talking about the hideous situation in the stock market.

News what started as an ugly day on Wall Street has turned down right. Hideous broad-based selling across the board and you know you could call it a sinkhole that's opened up under the nasdaq with 59 minutes left to trade the tech heavy index is down this is a big big percentage loss here 4.6 percent or 845 points but i want you to turn your attention to the S&P 500 that really got traders squirming the broader index down one. We're squirming all right. Hundred and eighty eight points. So basically what that indicates to you and yes, we are at the lows of the session. It has now fallen below its psychologically important 200 day moving average. That's considered a sell signal now. All right. Listen, she's getting into stuff that's really more about, uh, traders

than it is longterm investors who are just letting their 401k money sit in the stock market. But what's the point here? The point here is that Fox news appears to be starting to turn on Trump. Now, let me tell you what this is really about. If you're sitting there going, this is it. They've lost Fox. Next thing you know, Hannity will be calling for impeachment or the 25th amendment. No, no, no, no. This is a calculated measure to show. Listen, everybody sees what's happening. Everybody sees what's happening in order to maintain a veneer of objectivity. We need to at least just point out what's happening. If we applied this elsewhere, we wouldn't say, oh, they've come around on climate change.

Just if they go, there's a hurricane today. No, no, no, no, no. They mentioned there's a hurricane today to maintain the veneer, um, of being able to say, no, we tell you what it is that's really going on. And what has happened is that the stock market situation has gotten so bad. The potential for a recession has gotten so unavoidable in terms of, we can't ignore it. Fox has decided we are going to interject little doses of reality here. It is Trump's economic policy that is at least a factor here. It might not look good to be buying a Tesla when people's retirement accounts are collapsing

so that then in the bigger picture, we don't want socialist Democrats. This is still better than Kamala Harris, but a little is able to pierce through and reach their audience. That's my belief as to what this is really about. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we will see Fox News genuinely turn on Trump, but I would be shocked. But now let's see how Trump's press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, is dealing with this stuff in an unbelievable moment. Caroline Leavitt was fact checked in real time, schooled by an Associated Press reporter over her continued denial of reality with regard to how tariffs work. Here is a reporter explaining how tariffs really work. Caroline Levitt insists that that's not true. She's wrong.

This is the kind of push pushback and confrontation that I would like to see every single day with these liars. You're welcome. If we could just step back for a second. When President Trump last addressed the BRT, when he was on the campaign trail, his big push was on tax cuts. He's going there today as he's proposing tax hikes in the form of tariffs. And I'm curious for why he's prioritizing that over the tax cuts. He's actually not implementing tax hikes. Tariffs are a tax hike on foreign countries that, again, have been ripping us off. Tariffs are a tax cut for the American people.

And the president is a staunch advocate of tax cuts. As you know, he campaigned on no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime, no. Remember that campaigning on something and doing it are two different things. Taxes on Social Security benefits. He is committed to all three of those things and he expects Congress to pass them later this year. I'm sorry, have you ever paid a tariff? Because I have. They don't get charged on foreign companies. They get charged on the importers. And ultimately, when we have fair and balanced trade,

which the American people have not seen in decades, as I said at the beginning, revenues will stay here, wages will go up, and our country will be made wealthy again. And I think it's insulting that you're trying to test my knowledge of economics. How dare you rebut my lies? The decisions that this president has made. I now regret giving a question to the Associated Press. Mary, you're welcome.

Oh, these people are pathetic. Good for the reporter. Truly good for the reporter. We even heard from Peter Doocy during this press conference where Ducey said there seems to be such a disregard. These are my words. Now, there seems to be such a disregard for the stock market declines. Has somebody here short sold the Dow where they are making money from this decline? And she goes, I don't think so. The Dow dropping and dropping and dropping is a period of transition. You're sure nobody here at the White House shorted the Dow?

No, I don't think so. Okay. But is there any concern here that it's going to be harder to ask certain federal workers to retire if they look at their retirement accounts and they're getting rocked every day? Well, I'm glad you brought up workers because that's exactly who President Trump is looking out for with his America first trade policy and his America first economic agenda. And I don't think Ducey's buying it. If you look at there's great indication to be optimistic about where the economy stands and the American people, investors, CEOs. Anyway, so she's talking about optimism as the Dow was down 720 points as she was saying

this and then finally another reporter asked, does Trump acknowledge any responsibility for the stock market chaos? What do you think she said? Thanks, Caroline. I'm just back on the markets. You said that what we're seeing this week right now on Wall Street is a snapshot of a moment in time. But does the president think he bears any responsibility for the turmoil in the stock market this week?

Look, the president is unwavering in his commitment to restore American manufacturing and global dominance. And I think he doubled down on that this morning with his new statement and the tariffs that will be implemented tomorrow. Better question. Does the president think he bears any responsibility for anything negative that has ever happened under his watch? You would get the same answer.

The president is committed to that. That's that's the way that these people approach it. At least. OK, I know that we're, you know, beggars can't be choosers and we're getting scraps. At least there's an effort being made to push back against this completely bogus story that everything that Trump promised is coming to fruition and that everything is going so well. Now I'll give you some good news. Egg price futures have started to come back down.

I have no interest in hiding that from you. We got a slightly lower inflation number for February. That's great. I have no interest in hiding that from you. We will follow the facts. Egg price futures down a little bit. Inflation ticking down after ticking up stock market. Absolute and total fiasco just for kicks because every day that we do the show, I look and it's down hundreds of points. Let's see where we are. And there we are. The Dow down another another 300 points today. That's where we are. Quick break back after this. Big companies with poor security get hacked every day and your personal information is

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be a good thing. Now, you might remember when Trump and his allies swore we will never cut Social Security. Trump made a huge deal out of attacking anyone who even hinted at it. Paul Ryan, a villain for pushing cuts. Democrats, oh, they'll gut Social Security, even though, of course, in reality, Democrats have consistently said we're going to protect Social Security. We're going to expand it. Never, never mind. Cut the program. But the script is starting to change. Fox News is Maria Bartiromo is laying the groundwork to brainwash her audience into

accepting Social Security cuts, Medicare cuts and Medicaid cuts. And it used to be we won't cut it. Then it became we're just cutting fraud. And like clockwork, it becomes, of be we won't cut it. Then it became we're just cutting fraud. And like clockwork, it becomes, of course, we're cutting it. It's good for you that we are cutting it. Here is how the language is changing. Listen to Maria screaming on her show about that. When you start digging, you're going to find it. I'm wondering if you started digging into Medicare and Medicaid to see if it's all muscle or if there's fat around the muscle

there as well, Mr. Chairman. You know, I welcome Doge looking at Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the IRS. They need to be audited. They need to look at their efficiencies. They're audited all the time, just so people, you know, they always love to say we haven't gotten they think nothing gets audited. We need to audit the full election. We need to audit a Social Security that that happens. It's run actually quite efficiently for its size. And they need to to analyze any kind of fraud within the programs. If people analyze, people say that there's not fraud in it. I would look at just CBO and CBO scores saying medical overpayments within just Medicare and all those overpayments.

Medicaid. This happens. These are efficiencies that needs to be rectified. And I think Doge is leading the effort in that. And I welcome it. And that's how we're going to look at efficiencies in government. By the way, this would make medical bills more expensive because one of the things that Medicare does is negotiate prices down. And so when you kneecap Medicare, they are restricted in their ability. You think prices are going to go up or down, but this is the MAGA bait and switch in action. First, they insist no benefits are going to be cut. When you press them, they say we're going to cut waste and fraud. Of course, they've still not demonstrated a single dollar that we can say meets the definition of fraud. But you give it a little time and suddenly

the argument becomes, you know, it's going to be necessary and fiscally responsible. You know, it's going to be necessary and fiscally responsible. You know, if you're a fiscally responsible Patriot, you should want us to go in and start looking around and making adjustments. And you don't need to wonder, might they use this playbook because we've seen the playbook before. Remember how Donald Trump's criminal cases went from, this is a witch hunt. There's just nothing factual behind this. Then it went to, okay, he did it, but it shouldn't matter because these really shouldn't even be

crimes. Oh, all these other people have, have been charged under these same statutes and laws. Okay, fine. It is a crime and he did do it, but it's good that he did it because it was how he was pushing back against the fake news media and the deep state or whatever. The shift is denial, minimization, and then you go to the full embrace right now on social security, Medicare, Medicaid. They are between minimization and full embrace. We're only cutting this stuff that you won't notice and employees that don't really need to be there. We're minimizing to no, no, no. These are programs that are really

problematic. We're going to have to dig in. We're going to have to start cutting. This is the Republican party's long game. You move the goalposts so slowly that the base doesn't notice that they have been manipulated into cheering for policies that will devastate them. They did it with Trump's crimes. They did it with the Trump Russia stuff. They're doing it with abortion bans. And now they are doing it with your retirement. The worst part is that it always ends the same way. The last, you know, the epilogue to the story is the same one. Billionaires end up with tax breaks, an opportunity to swoop in and buy up assets cheaply. If they're lucky, they get to privatize some stuff and make more money.

And the Fox News hosts who sold you this scam will be sitting pretty with their investments and their real estate and all of it while millions of Americans struggle while accepting what the wealthy Fox news hosts tell them. That's what it is. And now I want to talk a little bit about this 35 day sort of boom to bus that we have seen. Did you notice that Donald Trump has taken the American economy from boom to the dangerous precipice of a bust in just 35 days? Now, I am not here to tell you we are in a recession. I don't play politics with this stuff. Once, if and when we meet the

guidelines for a recession, I will tell you we're not there yet. But if you blinked, you might have missed that one minute Trump was taking a victory lap, pointing to the great stock market as if it was his personal approval rating. And then the next moment, Jim Cramer on CNBC sounds like he's about to have a full blown aneurysm shouting they're crushing us while foreign markets surge and the American stock market crater. So what happened?

How did we go from economic boom to full scale recession panic in just 35 days? Just a few weeks ago, the markets were at all time highs. The economy seemed fine. We weren't yet in a trade war. were at all time highs. The economy seemed fine. We weren't yet in a trade war. Now as a caveat, of course we always have structural problems beneath the surface. We have income inequality in the U S we have unsustainable debt. We have wage stagnation over long periods of time, poverty on paper, most major economic

indicators looked okay. And then Trump did what Trump does. He throws a grenade into the system and then everybody acts surprised when it explodes. First he announces the tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from Canada because nothing screams stable economy like a trade war with one of our closest allies. Then they do reciprocal tariffs. Then Trump doubles or cuts or we don't know when it ends or is it suspended? We just don't know. Then Trump starts making these vague, ominous comments about how he's not ruling out a recession. He's just sort of, you know, we're going to have a period of transition,

which is basically like a pilot getting on the intercom mid flight and saying, listen, I'm not here to say we're crashing. Like, I don't, I don't like to use that word. We are going to have a period during which the plane is going to be doing things that are not the normal things you want a plane doing, right? We would all be worried. We would be saying, what on earth are we being told? Markets rely on confidence, predictability and stability. They went into a free fall thousand point drop in a single day for the Dow 700 point drop, 600 point drops. And then you see what Wall Street analysts analysts are saying.

And they're saying we we may be in the direction of a recession. Now, I proposed that maybe Donald Trump is manufacturing a recession on purpose to allow his robber baron friends to come in and buy everything up cheap, make money on it, privatize CNBC's Jim Cramer, whose predictions are rarely accurate, is wondering the same thing. He said Trump may indeed be manufacturing a recession and playing with fire, committing economic arson. And even fund strat analysts asked, is Trump deliberately letting Germany and China's stock markets surge while tanking our own? If Trump had a strategy here, it's the economic equivalent of setting your house on fire, bragging about how much money you're going to save on heating bills, and then saying, we're doing a great job creating firefighter jobs in this administration or a

different analogy. The arsonist that set the fire puts it out and says, I'm a hero. I've put out a fire. Yes. A fire that you set by choice. So we see consumer confidence getting rattled, people delaying purchases, companies slashing profit forecasts and economic forecasts revised downward. We saw the GDP now forecast saying we're going to be down 2.8% GDP. Let me check where it is now, actually, just to be accurate. The GDP now model for real GDP growth now says minus 2.4. OK, so a little bit less bad. It was all the way down to we're going to lose 2.8% GDP in Q1. Now it says we're going to lose 2.4, uh, Delta airlines cut profit outlook says deteriorate deteriorating consumer confidence is the reason. And even Goldman Sachs, which is no

bastion of progressive alarmism that just wants to make Republicans look bad. Even Goldman Sachs said, we are also raising the odds of a recession to one in five. At some point, this administration is going to have to face reality. Trump will either do a 180 on policy. Maybe he'll announce an abrupt policy change on truth social. Maybe he'll start blaming Biden for an economy that actually Trump controls. The best case scenario right now is Trump does back off on the tariffs. He finds some face saving way to back off of the tariffs. There will be sort of a sigh of relief from the standpoint of business.

And we narrowly avoid a completely self inflicted economic catastrophe. Now the worst case scenario, and we may be going in this direction too, is that Trump doubles down and consumer confidence collapses even more. The job losses spike and very quickly we're back to 2008 levels of economic despair, except this time it would be because Trump chose to slap tariffs on other countries to really show them who's boss and who's the big boy. And if that happens, I assure you, I'm not a betting man.

But if I were to bet on anything, it's no matter what happens. If it's bad, Trump finds a scapegoat and never takes the blame. The question is whether the voters will buy it. I hope not. But I fear that the answer is yes, they will. Data brokers are continually collecting extensive details about your online behavior, address, phone number, email, financial information, even political views. This sensitive information about you can easily be found on public data search sites by anybody. Could be an ex, could be an employer. And these brokers sell the data to other businesses and even government agencies like the FBI

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and what they've managed to do is remarkable. Go to Incogni dot com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman for 60 percent off. That's I N C O G N I dot com slash Pacman for a huge 60 percent Well, they are trying to change the meaning of inflation. You know, the people who say everything has a fixed meaning. Woman has a simple, singular definition. Things just are what they are. Facts don't care about your feelings. Let's live in reality, that sort of thing. definition, things just are what they are. Facts don't care about your feelings. Let's live in reality, that sort of thing.

They are now completely rewriting the definition of inflation now that they are worried that Donald Trump's economic program is going to be an inflation bomb in the United States. Now I'm going to play an example here for you, and then we will discuss it. Here is Joseph LaVornia saying tariffs are not inflationary by definition. Take a listen. Tariffs are not inflationary. I don't understand why everybody thinks that's the case. If the money stock is unchanged and tariffs by definition cannot be inflationary, inflation is always and everywhere. A monetary phenomenon and a caveat if I, we add the word credit.

So what is he talking about? What is Joseph talking about? Joseph LaVornia is arguing that tariffs can't be inflationary because they don't change the money supply. So his reasoning is based on this extraordinarily narrow definition of inflation, which ties inflation strictly to an increase in the money supply. This has a name. This is called the monetarist view.

And this is a framework where inflation only happens when there's more money circulating without a corresponding increase in goods or services. Imagine that you have an economy with a trillion dollars of goods and services and you quote, print more money, which we don't print anymore. These it's really like computers doing stuff that only Barron Trump understands. Um, you increase the money supply, but you still have only a trillion dollars in goods and services. Therefore in, um, absolute numbers, those things become more expensive because there's more money circling circulating in the economy. That's the monetarist view of inflation. Since tariffs don't print more money, it's just an import tax. Livonia says you can't get inflation from tariffs. This is completely wrong. It's outdated. And have you ever heard MAGA bring this up until all of a

sudden they need some way to say the tariffs aren't going to be inflationary? Of course not. This is born out of the necessity now of saying, and by the way, inflation ticked down the tiniest bit in February. They expect it will become an issue. Uh, an increase in the money supply can contribute to inflation, but by a long shot, it's not the only cause inflation happens whenever prices rise broadly across the economy. And there's a lot of different ways that that can happen. Tariffs do cause inflation by raising the cost of goods, especially imported ones. Here's how it's not particularly complex. If an American company imports steel and there's a 25% tariff on steel, they now have to pay more for steel. They still are paying the company they import the steel from for the steel. And then they pay the American government,

the tariff, the import tax. Now that their costs have gone up, they will say, well, the steel costs us more. So we are going to increase the cost of what we're making out of the steel. Maybe it's a car, maybe it's a building. OK, that raises the price level for consumers. It is a form of inflation. Now, even if a company buys American made goods, they will often raise their prices to match the new higher price of imports. Why? Because they

can, even the companies that are not directly affected by that, uh, uh, import tax tariff, they will still say, Hey, well, our competitors who do import are now charging more. We will also charge more. Why not? Uh, and domestic producers no longer have to compete with a cheaper price. They go, listen, those who are, who are importing are going to charge more. We are now free to charge more as well. Remember that no matter how many times Trump tells you that it is, um, uh, the Chinese paying the tariffs or whatever the case may be, uh, that the reality is that it is the American buyers, businesses and consumers that pay

the tariffs. It is textbook inflation. Now to the people who say we are too Lucy goosey with our definitions, they are very happy to just change the definition of inflation. Let's go to another example of this. Here is Howard Lutnik trying to make a sort of similar argument. Well, as the president said last night, there's going to be a short period of time where there'll be some higher prices on certain products.

It's not inflation. That's nonsense. It's certain products for a short period of time. But then what? Well, what he's alluding to there is that it's only inflation if the price of every good and every service is going up. That's not the definition of inflation. You could imagine you could imagine a situation where just the market price of watches goes

up. We would say that's not inflation. That's a very specific market. And there are reasons why watch prices may be going up. And part of it may be, oh, people are hanging out at home during the pandemic and they're buying watches. OK, we wouldn't say that that's inflation. But on the other hand, it's not that the price of everything has to go up. You might have a different situation. You might have a situation where grocery prices are up and home prices are up and the cost

of electronics is up. But watch prices aren't up. Why? Actually, because of the inflation everywhere else, people are like, I don't have any more money for watches. So watch prices don't go up. But a bunch of other stuff does. That would be inflation.

So this whole like it all has to go up or it's not inflation doesn't make any sense. Here's another Lutnik euphemism where he says this is not inflation. These are temp short term price movements. Again, do words still have meaning? I guess we're going to bring back production of enormous amounts of things and make America and manufacturing center again. We're gonna bring back production of enormous amounts of things and make America a manufacturing center again. So yes, there's going to be, as the president said on the campaign trail, there may well be short term price movements. But in the long term, it's going to be completely

different. This is going to be the greatest America will have a balanced budget, a balanced budget. We will not have a balanced budget. Interest rates will come smashing down. And I mean, 100 basis points, 150 basis points lower. You're going to have income taxes, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, which Trump has still not actually proposed in anything on paper. This president is going to deliver all of those things and drive manufacturing. All right.

You get it. So, again, same same kind of idea. It's not inflation. These are price movements. And then finally, one more from Lutnik. This is him trying out, again, the monetarist view. This is the same thing that LaVornia tried at the top of this clip. I mean, how much pain are we going to be willing

to take in inflation if, you know, if all of a sudden they hit us right back? Remember, so you made one comment. So inflation comes from a government printing more money. Some prices can rise. You know, this bottle of water.

It can't happen at all. Tariffs do not, tariffs do not, do not, do not create inflation. Printing money creates inflation. You have a balanced budget. There can't be inflation. All right. We already debunked this. We talked about it at the beginning of this segment. That is the monetarist view about what inflation means. They say if the money supply hasn't changed by definition, it can't be inflation. We know this now to be untrue because six minutes ago we talked about it. They are rewriting the definitions of words. When the left says, you know, when you ask me, what is a woman? There is a biological definition, right? In a urology office, we are talking about biology. If a trans man comes in and

says, my prostate's all backed up, the urologist is going to go. We are in a doctor's office based on the biological definition here. You don't have a prostate, so that can't be the reason you're having an issue in the context of gender discrimination. We now have a different thing. A prostate is not required to make a case that there is gender discrimination happening in society. What about legally and issues of Title nine or whatever?

So when we go, yeah, listen, I know what you're trying to do by saying what is a woman, but it really does depend on the context in which you're asking that. Are we asking that for legal or social or medical purposes? They go, you people are crazy. This postmodernism, anything goes, whatever. But then on inflation they go, well, you can't have inflation unless we've changed the money supply. So this whole thing over here of prices going up, that's not inflation.

You can't call it inflation unless the price of everything goes up. And we found a few things where the prices didn't go up. So that's also not inflation. They are doing the exact same thing with the meaning of language that they criticize the left for doing. And it's pathetic. A Fox News propagandist, Laura Ingram, is warning Donald Trump. If Democrats win big in 2026, you are going to get yourself impeached. Let's take a look at this video. And I can tell you for the next this next fiscal year, we're going to be taking a flamethrower to the waste that Elon Musk better because this these midterms don't

go the right way. We're looking at, you know, the Democrats already planning to impeach President Trump. That is that is the truth. Investigations are going to start and they're going to go into town on you all on the Republican Party. So and again, you got here five minutes ago. Look, he's already getting the Ingram angle treatment. What I'm struggling with here is the idea that this is some Democratic plot to impeach Trump, right? Plotting as if there's a secret cabal of Democratic operatives huddled in some back room with maybe with cigars, maybe with gummies talking about the plan. And it makes it

sound kind of like a grand conspiracy. Now, should Trump be impeached? Of course he should. I did a video a week after Trump was back in office pointing out he's done five different things worthy of impeachment. But would the Senate actually convict him? Absolutely not. Now, 2026 is a long way off and a lot can happen between now and then. Right now, Trump has the House and Senate firmly in his grip. And unless Democrats can somehow crack the Republican loyalty cult to Trump, attempting to impeach Trump is going to be just another pointless, performative exercise deserved, but a pointless, performative exercise deserved, but a pointless, performative exercise. The unfortunate reality of the current political landscape is that the Republican Party has made

it abundantly clear that they're going to defend Trump no matter what, whether he's impeached, whether he's indicted, whether he's convicted, whether he's caught on tape admitting to crimes, which, by the way, all of those things have already happened. We know that the loyalty cult will continue, but now we have to act all shocked. Oh, Democrat, you know, Democrats are plotting to impeach Trump if they take over in 2026. And now it's a witch hunt and Trump is going to start selling impeachment survivor commemorative plays in the whole thing. We've already said it. The guy deserves to be impeached just based on his first week in office.

But it's not a secret thing. It's obvious. It's simply not going to go anywhere under the current political environment. And this if we zoom out just a little bit, we've talked many times over the last decade about how checks, balances and norms have completely and totally collapsed. And I write about this a little bit in my forthcoming book, which is that the reason we talk about norms collapsing isn't because of some, you know, nostalgic attachment to the way it used to be and pointless rules of decorum and etiquette, you know, kind of the, the, the stuff that Trump has done is not the political equivalent of putting

your napkin on the table before you're done eating in the world of etiquette. Okay. the table before you're done eating in the world of etiquette. OK, the reason that it's such a critical failure to explore is that when we talk about what some call the the perfect nature of how the framers of the Constitution set up checks and balances, we've learned they weren't quite so perfect because they assumed something about the American people. The checks and balances as established by the founders assumed that Trump would never be a reality because the American public would never be so dumb. They would never fall for it. And what we learned and one of the things that that I kind of pointed out in my segment about like Plato, I'm questioning whether democracy

is the best system sort of tongue in cheek. I still think it is, but it has real problems, which is the incompetent ultimately end up in charge or can end up in charge. The reason that the norm breaking is important is because it does go to the degree to which the checks and balances established by the framers simply don't cut it when it comes to a population like the one we have right now and its willingness to put someone like Donald Trump back in office. So that's really the point.

It's not just pointless, you know, like the French poly tests. It it has real impact here. Now on the bonus show today, we are going to talk about how inflation is lower than expected. Uh, in February, this is good news. I have made it abundantly clear. I have a perspective on this show. It is a left wing perspective, but I am not, not going to deceive you, at least not deliberately.

If I do it accidentally, I'll apologize and correct myself. I'm not going to deceive you and play political games with the economy. We saw inflation 2.9 when Biden left office. It went up to three. It is now down to 2.8. This is happening under Trump. We will discuss it on today's bonus show. I also want to talk about the California governor's race.

Former Congresswoman Katie Porter has stepped into the governor's race in California. This also relates to the future of Gavin Newsom politically. Many important aspects to this. And we also are seeing Utah poised to become the first state to ban fluoride in its public water system. Is this the influence of RFK Jr? We will discuss it as far as my book goes. We are now at roughly 7500 preorders.

I am going to be signing copies at Brookline Booksmith very soon. You can get a signed copy at David Pakman dot com slash Booksmith. I have started getting a bunch of my author copies. These will start shipping out soon. The official release date is March 25th. The audio book is available. The Kindle book is available. It's available at Barnes and Noble, Amazon. Any local bookstore can get the book for you. But the only place to get the signed copy is David Pakman dot com slash booksmith. In addition, it is possible that by this time tomorrow or maybe the next day, we will have reached three million subscribers on YouTube. Thank you in advance. I appreciate it so very much. And remember that we

will be back tomorrow. Actually, tomorrow. Let me see. I want to look at our schedule because we have something very interesting coming up. Yes. Tomorrow we will be hearing from one of the fired federal workers. Thanks to Dosh. And I think that's going to be very interesting next week. Jamie Raskin is going to be on with us. Congressman Dan Goldman will be joining us and then I've got a bunch of other things coming up. So we'll see you on the bonus show and I'll be back here tomorrow.