The David Pakman Show - 3/28/25: Trump's cabinet down big, how empires fail

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

-- On the Show: -- The wheels are not-so-slowly coming off of Donald Trump's clown car cabinet -- Alina Habba, Donald Trump's former personal attorney, now US Attorney in New Jersey, claims that the entire Signal fiasco is a "hoax" -- A look at how empires fail and how the US could enter a death spiral -- Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr starts pushing a debunked cell phone health conspiracy theory -- Social Security is starting to break, including long lines, delayed new benefit approvals, and more, all by design -- The Wall Street Journal appears to slowly be turning on Donald Trump -- This week's Friday Feedback -- On the Bonus Show: The Friday Bonus Show with Producer Pat 🥐 Wildgrain: Use code DAVID for $30 off & free baked goods at https://wildgrain.com/david ☕ Beam’s Dream hot cocoa: Use code PAKMAN for 40% OFF at https://shopbeam.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/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, everybody. You know, if you were wondering what a second Trump administration might look like, who'd be in charge, what kind of decisions they would make. We now have a pretty clear picture and it looks sort of like a group project gone very, very wrong. Remember in school when you'd be assigned, maybe, maybe this is, uh, just my experience. Remember in school when you'd be assigned to a group project and there was like one person in the group who didn't carry their weight and

it was either allow everybody to fail or just kind of like do their work for them. Well, what happens when every person in the group is the drag down that can't do anything right? Well, that's what we are seeing with Donald Trump's cabinet. I'm going to kind of give you a little bit of an overview of the cabinet, uh, um, fiascos of this week alone. And what we were quickly thinking as we put this clip together was there's not a single adult voice in the room, even like the national security advisor, Mike waltz. Okay. Not someone we agree with politically, but maybe somewhat more competent.

And then we've now got the signal chat fiasco. So it's bad all the way down. Let's start with Donald Trump introducing his secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., as the guy who is going to be in charge of health aspects of the educational process. Now, if you're saying, David, what does that mean? I don't know. Let's see what it was. And Bobby is going to be taken over their various medical aspects and health aspects

of the educational process. So and he's going to do a fantastic job of it. So thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. I just say that I'm very grateful to you and very grateful for the partnership with Doge, with Elon. We've identified extraordinary ways in my department and HHS. All right. So Trump just kind of randomly stringing together words. And then we hear from RFK Jr. specifically. Now, understand that putting RFK in charge of the health aspects of education, that could that could mean nutrition. It could mean vaccines. It could be banning books about puberty. I mean, I have no idea what that even means. But here is RFK following up, saying we will be restoring science. All right. None of them talking to each other.

We are with Elon's help eliminating the redundancies. They're streamlining our department. We're going to go back to providing gold standard science. We're going to get the money to the scientists and to the patients rather than to the administrator. They're going to bring science to patients. And we're going to restore gold standard science and we're going to make America healthy again. We're going to do it now. What? Who is speaking in the least intelligible

word salads there? I'll leave it to you to decide. But this sort of gold standard science line from RFK is particularly rich given that he has spent 20 years undermining actual science. If you ask me who has most prominently undermined science over the last 20 years in the United States. I don't know that it's the number one guy is RFK Jr., but it's certainly up there. It's like putting Alex Jones in charge of the National Archives and saying, we finally got the guy here who's going to restore truth. OK, so then we go to Kristi. No, another Trump loyalist. She announced at the bonkers cabinet meeting she will be going to the brutal Salvadorian

prison where Trump illegally deported migrants in order in order to build relationships with who you might escalate and to go up, sir. This next week I'm headed or this week I'm headed down to El Salvador. I'll be in the prison where we sent TDA members. I'll be meeting with the president and also Colombia and Mexico and talking about building these relationships so that we can continue to get people out of this country that don't belong here and take them home. And also, you had talked to me about sending the message worldwide about the fact that people shouldn't be coming to this country and they shouldn't be coming here illegally. So we are in several other countries around the world with a

message right now. Imagine that conversation. Hey, Christy, Don here. People shouldn't be coming here illegally. Oh, oh, interesting. OK. Now that's saying if you are thinking about coming to America illegally and coming here, don't do it. You are not welcome. We have a legal process to becoming a United States citizen. And there are consequences if you come here illegally. And America has changed because we're putting Americans first. Right. So, of course, nothing screams diplomatic engagement like photo ops in a prison notorious for alleged human rights abuses, strongman aesthetics for Instagram. And then she did it as we covered yesterday. Here is her message with shirtless men in a cage behind her in El Salvador.

Here at Seacott today and visiting this facility. And first of all, I want to thank El Salvador and their president for their partnership with the United States of America to bring our terrorists here and to incarcerate them and have consequences for the violence that they have perpetuated in our communities. I also want everybody to know if you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face. First of all, do not come to our country illegally. Right. You will be removed and you will be prosecuted. But know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use.

All right. So we talked about this yesterday. This is a dystopian nightmare. Everything they're doing there is against the law. The deportations, the court said, don't do it. They did it anyway. And now they are flaunting it. They are going there and doing videos.

All right. So that's Christina. We then get to Pete Hegseth. Pete Hegseth, just a few days ago, looked directly into the camera and said, we used to look like fools when Joe Biden was president. Under the previous administration, we looked like fools. Not anymore. President Trump has reestablished American leadership. The F-47 is part of it. And Mr. President, thank you. Thank you, Mr. President. We don't look like fools anymore. Not only is the cabinet a mix of conspiracy theorists and self-aggrandizing billionaires and Fox News hosts and right wing influencers, but Pete Hegseth himself is now involved in the most embarrassing national security failure, certainly of this presidency,

certainly of the last decade, maybe longer, wherein specifics were shared about attack plans in Yemen on a signal chat that involved a journalist who had no business being there. This was just days ago that Hegseth said we used to be. It used to be the case that we looked like fools. But now we don't. Well, now we do. We then have Elon Musk. Elon Musk wearing a Trump was right about everything hat at Trump's cabinet meeting. Further embarrassing as a member of this. You know, it's not a cabinet member, right? Not even subject to confirmation hearings, but another element of this group of people

that are handing out loans, a $330 million worth of loans to people under the age of 11. I think the youngest Kelly was a nine month year old who got $100,000. That's very precocious baby you were talking about here. They were handing out. All right. So there is Elon continuing to tell stories that are never proven about Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, wearing a Trump was right about everything hat. This is this is one of the main decision makers in the country right now. How do you feel about that? I know there are some

people who feel good. I am not one of them. And then finally, you know, every time Trump gives us like a glimpse into who's he's, who he's bringing along for the ride in 2025, it becomes more obvious. It's not just that the wheels are loose. They are flying off of the clown car and everybody in the car is insisting everything's completely fine. From the outside, we can tell that it isn't. Here is Marco Rubio, admittedly, one of the less whacked out members of the cabinet, throwing National Security Advisor Mike Waltz under the bus. As we talked about yesterday, when Rubio here says somebody made a big mistake, he's talking about Waltz. The MAGA civil war has been. First question, let me just say on the signal thing, this thing was set up for purposes of coordinating how everyone was going to call. You know, when these things happen, I need to call foreign ministers, especially of our close allies.

We need to notify members of Congress. Other members of the team have different people they need to notify as well. And that was the purpose of why it was set up. Obviously, someone made a mistake. Someone made a big mistake and added a journalist. Nothing against journalists, but you're supposed to be on that thing. So they got someone made a big mistake. So now Rubio getting into it, saying Waltz is the guy who made a big mistake. This is not a surprise. This is an embarrassment. The world sees it when you choose your cabinet by watching Fox News and just saying, who's even richer than me that I might be able to suck in? Who donated a lot of money to me? Elon Musk, who will lay down like a doormat and let me walk all over them and do whatever

I tell them to do, regardless of what the law says, regardless of what due process says we're supposed to provide. Who are the people that check these boxes? This is what you get. It's embarrassing and it's humiliating, but it's where we are. One of Donald Trump's lawyers, former lawyer Alina Haba, is out there doing exactly what you would expect from a MAGA mouthpiece with no good defense, which is screaming hoax into every single microphone that she can find. And now they are taking the hammer, the one tool they have calling things a hoax and applying it to the signal text fiasco. Here is Alina Haba in an exclusive one-on-one interview on Fox news. After it was announced that she would become U.S.

attorney for the district that includes New Jersey. She says there's no story with the signal hoax, with the signal fiasco. It's a hoax. It's a distraction. That's all it is. And that is really the sum of it. You want to talk to me about Doge. You want to talk to me about what's happening with this signal nonsense where they're communicating high level people. Maybe a mistake was made. But at the same time, I'll tell you one thing. There was high side communications that were proper, that were done correctly. And nobody here got hurt. A.B. They. Yeah. Thanks to Jeffrey Goldberg.

We're allowed to do it because there was no classified information. But you know what this is? The information was wrongly unclassified, if that's true. But here's the key part. It's the same thing we've been talking about for four years. It's a hoax. It's a distraction. It's the same thing they did when they said Biden had no cognitive decline, absolute garbage. And they're going to continue to do it in this administration. Why? Because we're winning, because we're winning and we're successful and we're going to keep hitting hard for the American people. And all right.

She says it's a distraction, a distraction from what? Right. I mean, this this is not a hoax. Military strike plans were leaked in a signal chat, real messages, real national security risks. And now there are lawsuits and there are court orders and Republican finger pointing to show for it. But it's really critical for us to understand the MAGA playbook. If you don't understand the playbook, you can't do much about it. Deny everything, label it fake, label it a hoax, hope that your base can't tell the difference. And to a great degree that the base can't tell the difference. And to a great degree that the base can't tell the difference because remember Trump's impeachments, hoaxes, dozens of felony charges, hoaxes, top secret documents stacked next to Trump's gilded toilet, another hoax. And now what? It's just the signal leak leak. That is the hoax, except it's not. And shouting hoax when

something is real just makes the previous denials look more ridiculous in hindsight. That's the really important thing to understand. Now that we see them labeling this a hoax, something which so obviously is not a hoax, the more obvious it becomes that everything they call a hoax turns out to be true and turns out to be real. Now my instinct here is that Alina Haba knows that this is bad. The she is a lawyer, but she's not making legal arguments when she appears on Fox news like this. She's running a PR campaign and as I've said before, she has previously served as Donald Trump's legal lawyer. But for the most part, Alina Haba has been Trump's TV

lawyer, which is essentially the same role as Caroline Leavitt. And it's a desperate attempt. The louder they yell distraction, the louder they yell hoax, the clearer it becomes that they have no actual defense. Now, as we are now at the end of the week, I'm not going to sugarcoat for you that it seems as though best case scenario, best case scenario, some sacrificial lamb will resign or be fired as a result of the signal fiasco. Um, of course, Hegseth waltz Gabbard at minimum should resign or be fired. Doesn't seem like it's going to happen. They just don't care. They do not care and we can't make them care. So prepare yourself for the real possibility that there is one person picked to take the to sort of fall on their sword for this.

We figured out who took Mike Waltz's phone and added Jeffrey Goldberg to the group chat. What? Yeah. And that person has resigned. So now the whole thing is fixed and everything's completely fine. That's my expectation at the most for accountability, because Trump never apologizes for anything. He never admits mistakes. And I think that that's very clearly what they are planning to do. All right. Thanks to everybody who has been reviewing my book. Thousands of these finally

have now gone out after some shipping delays. They are ending up in people's hands. If you've gotten the book, you don't even know the power you hold in your hands to now review the book. It takes 15 seconds. Review it on Amazon. Review it on Barnes and Noble. Review it on Goodreads. This really helps us keep the momentum going. We have kept the book ranked right around a thousand on Amazon for all the millions of books that Amazon sells. This is a really big deal. Let's keep the reviews going. Let's take a quick break after the break. Empires never think that they will fall. And usually they do. What does that tell us about the future of the United States? If anything, if anything, we will discuss it after this short break. People in my audience know I am a bit of a pastry connoisseur. Our sponsor,

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That's wild grain dot com slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. Sleep is one of the most important foundations for every aspect of health. If you are having trouble falling asleep or waking up too early, beam dream powder may help beam dream is a calming, delicious hot cocoa with melatonin to help you unwind drift into restful sleep. Melatonin is well studied. It's a non drug option proven to help you fall asleep faster and

stay asleep longer without a lot of the side effects that are not so good from the antihistamines or the prescription drugs, which is why beam dream has helped so many people improve their sleep with a hot chocolatey relaxing nighttime ritual that has zero sugar and only 15 calories. Thank you so much for 40 percent off. That's shop B.A.M. dot com slash Pacman. Then use code Pacman for 40 percent off. The link is in the podcast notes. What would a collapse of the United States of America look like? I want to talk about that today. I believe that if the United States of America were to collapse, it would not likely be with like tanks rolling down the street. I don't think it would look like a movie.

It'll look like what we already see, but a little more chaos, a little more confusion, a little more stupidity every year until it becomes completely unsustainable. It'll come through entertainment. It'll come through politics becoming reality TV even more. It'll come through voters picking their leaders like they're casting a game show, which has already started to happen. It will happen through a media machine more focused on clicks than truth. And if you think that that sounds dramatic, just look around. It's 2025

Trump's back in the white house and no Trump, I don't think will be what causes this collapse, but certainly his second term could be an accelerant. The moment that the kind of downward slide picks up speed will be a critical moment because this didn't start with Trump. The United States has been fraying for a long time. I talk about in my book how Trumpism is really the end result of the civil rights movement starting in the late 50s. But what's happened over time is that we stopped trusting each other.

We stopped trusting the system. The people who run the system stopped caring whether they were trusted. And I know that it's very easy to assume that what happened in the Roman Republic could never happen in the United States. But it's also important to know history and that the Roman Republic didn't fall overnight. It's sort of slowly ate itself alive. It was corruption. It was gridlock. It was lies. It was power grabs. People lost faith. The elites hoarded wealth. And when it finally collapsed, no one was really surprised. It was sort of the logical endpoint of what they had been seeing. That is really how empire dies. Here is what America's version looks like. Much of the elements of which we've talked about, many of the elements of which we've

talked about before. We can't agree on basic facts. We fight over science. Half the country thinks elections are rigged. The other half thinks nothing will ever change. Almost nobody trusts the people in charge. And that is the collapse of civic trust. And once that is gone, it's very difficult to build. It's very difficult to rebuild as well. The press is supposed to keep power in check, but corporate media gave up on that a long time ago. Instead, they kind of feed us distractions, horse race polls, uh, more airtime to nonsense than policy. We saw that with the interview of Bernie Sanders on Sunday by Jonathan Carl. And then now we have a generation raised on propaganda, addicted to outrage, can't tell the difference between news and opinion media trained to believe politics is just a game. So there is an aspect or there's this idea of an

empire collapsing around you as you scroll through memes on your phone and everything kind of falls off the walls. Plato warned about this. I talked about it last week. Many of you found it interesting. He said that in a broken democracy, the people would eventually choose a tyrant, not because they want one, but because they've been taught to hate everything else. The dumbest, loudest voices take over and people cheer. If that doesn't sound familiar, I don't know what does. Now, meanwhile, the country rots from the inside out. Wages flat, cost of living up, billion, buying up politicians like baseball cards. And then we have to keep pretending that the same old status quo is going to fix everything. The military bloated,

militarized police, protesters treated like enemies by the people who say they defend free speech, dissent, punished people divided. Some would rather see their old, their entire country fail than watch the other side win. And then the part that nobody likes to say out loud is that the collapse often won't come with fireworks. It'll come with boredom. It's really more reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's book, Brave New World, much more so than it is of George Orwell's 1984. At some point we get used to it. You get used to the corruption, you get used to the dysfunction, you get used to the nonsense and we kind of stop expecting better. The country still exists. The flag is waving out there,

but the soul of the thing, the civic project, the idea evaporates. So this is not about Trump alone. This is about a long, slow decline where Trump kind of held up the mirror to show us what's going on. And if we don't like what we see, we've got a couple of options. You look away or you look towards and you try to stop it. History's lesson I think is pretty instructive here. Every empire thinks it's too big to fail until it fails. The optimistic thing is we are starting to see through some of these resistance rallies over the last week, we are starting to see a growing, maybe robust opposition as what's happening in DC

is just the epitome of vanity. And I want to talk about that next. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now says that he wants to remove cell phones from schools because they produce electromagnetic radiation, which can damage children neurologically and maybe even cause cancer. Um, this is not some random guy. This is the secretary of health and human services. Here he is on Fox news. This is a conspiracy theory. As often as the case, there is more to it than just yes or no. Let's listen to what he said first. Cell phones also produce electric magnetic radiation, which has been shown connected with depression, with with poor performance in schools, with suicidal ideation, with substance abuse. And, you know, it's it's the other countries that have done this. The states that are doing this have found that it is a much

healthier environment when kids are not using cell phones at schools. Listen, you can make a very good case of getting cell phones out of schools. And in fact, I'll make it in a moment. You don't need to go to the electromagnetic radiation conspiracy theory on this. RFK is mixing two things. The social effect of phones in school, the social effect of phones creating clickiness, seemingly more for adolescent girls than boys and leading to depression and suicidal ideation. You can make that case without swerving off of the highway into a backwater of conspiracism. So here's what we know right now. Cell phones do emit electromagnetic radiation. They emit non-ionizing RF radiation. There is no good evidence that typical exposure from cell phones causes neurological damage to

children or to anybody else. The kind of radiation phones emit is not what x-rays emit, which can do damage to DNA. Major health agencies, WHO, CDC, FDA, National Cancer Institute, they all agree that right now the current scientific evidence does not show that cell phone exposure causes harms to brains or to child development or to any of it. There are some animal studies which have raised questions. What they would do is subject animals to extreme levels far beyond what anyone experiences from having your phone in your pocket or in your backpack. And there is nothing from real world settings, even looking at long term phone usage and have brain tumors changed over time or neurological issues. There is just no evidence of that at

this point in time. Is it reasonable to study this stuff? Should we know? Does having a router in our house do anything? Does having a phone in our pocket do anything? Of course we should study that stuff. And right now the evidence points to the stuff RFK is saying isn't true. Now, if you want to limit cell phone use in school to reduce distraction, improve focus, reduce some of the social downsides of phones in schools, that's a different conversation.

And we probably should do it. Cell phones are so interesting. And what I mean is the draw of the phone is so, so compelling, such a distraction. It's probably logical to question allowing them in school. When I taught at Boston college, um, even though it was all like, you know, we're not doing phones in class. You can have your laptop, right? How am I going to enforce no laptops, right? Supposedly notes are being taken. The laptops themselves and the phones being there was such a distraction that I could see students. It was almost like physically unable to resist them. It wouldn't shock me if in some number of years when phones are banned in school,

some people say, Hey, remember when like you were just allowed to have your phone during class, it'd be like, remember those smoking sections on airplanes? I remember that from flying internationally to Argentina when I was a kid. That is all plausible, probable, likely. But the claims that phones cause neurological damage just by being nearby, it is not backed by science. I'm not jumping into that. You shouldn't ask that. I'm not jumping into any of this conspiracy stuff about it. You, you have to suppress it.

We can't talk about that. We have a bunch of data on it. It doesn't appear to be true. It's irresponsible for him to be spreading, spreading this stuff. That's the bottom line. We've got a fantastic bonus show for you today. And I can't tell you how excited I am that the book is out. The book I've been working on for a very long time. The echo machine is out today. I know that hundreds of you have already received the book. I know that thousands of you will shortly receive the book. This is no longer months away. This is the now we have seven days to do what we can to see if we can get this book, some accolade for new nonfiction book, whatever is your preference in terms of audio book, Kindle or physical book. They're all available. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, local bookstores,

signed copies still available at David Pakman dot com slash booksmith. This is it. Please leave a review. OK, some platforms require proof of purchase to review. Some don't. I'm just telling you that's just a fact. OK, I'm just mentioning that if we can rack up a bunch of reviews over the next 48 hours, it would really help. So please do review the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Goodreads. We will see you on the bonus show. I'll be back tomorrow. What a day guys in my audience. I know you're tired of the chafing with traditional underwear. Our sponsor sheath makes the most comfortable boxer briefs I've ever worn. If you're sick of the boxers that are too loose or the briefs that are too tight, sheath is for you. Sheath underwear is designed with two

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didn't even know it could go head over to sheath underwear.com slash Pacman and get 20% off with the code Pacman. That's S H E A T H underwear.com slash Pacman use code Pacman for 20% off. The link is in the podcast notes. All right. I want to be clear right off the bat. They're coming for your money. And I don't mean that in like a vague and abstract way. Right now, as you listen to this, social security is starting to break down. The website has been crashing. The phone lines are jammed or silent and the staff has been either laid off or demoralized or limited.

And behind the curtain, you know what's behind the curtain. It's Elon Musk's doge, the department of government efficiency running the show like it's a bad crypto scam or the latest meme coin. We are talking about $1.5 trillion in benefits gone glitchy and occasionally inaccessible. It's I mean, listen, we we we all understand large systems don't function perfectly. It's not like Social Security was this perfectly oiled machine before. But the Trump Musk team has thrown gasoline onto a system that was working by firing more than 12 percent of the staff, eliminating the office that tracks how the public

is being treated so that you can't complain when you get screwed anymore, slashed call centers, canceled, uh, ongoing and open modernization contracts, and also outsourced the critical decision-making for social security to a private tech billionaire with a fraud obsession who is the very unelected bureaucrat. We were told Trump was going to get out of government. And the guy now running the place is a mid-level analyst who handed over internal data to Elon Musk's team behind his boss's own back. And he's now in charge of whether 73 million Americans get their checks on time. So what's the plan here? The plan is very simple. It's almost stupidly simple. Break it and then say, look, government doesn't broke, but government

doesn't work. It broke. It's broken. Well, it's broken by your doing, but that allows you to manufacture consent for privatization. You create a crisis, you make people miserable, and then you sell them the idea. You're not happy with this, right? I have the solution for you. It's wall street. Wall street can do it better. Private industry can do it better. Let's let in the hedge funds and the financial advisors and the whole thing. It's a very old playbook, but the problem is that social security is not some abstract policy idea. It's groceries, it's rent, it's medicine for millions of people. Social security is survival workers at many companies scrape by on 14 bucks an hour. And then you've got the CEOs and the owners pulling down millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars from the labor of the people making 14 bucks an

hour to scrape by. And now we want to go in and mess with the only safety net that they might ever see. So you've got the staff at the field offices, no paper, no pens, no headsets. Some are faxing documents like it's 1994 because the phone systems aren't holding up. The calls flooding into Congress are from people in their seventies and in their eighties begging to understand, are my benefits going to arrive? I can't get through to anybody. And sometimes the answer they're getting is we just don't know what's going on right now. So we are seeing in real time the dismantling of one of the most successful government programs in American history, which you paid into your entire working life because it's easier to let it die for Republicans than to admit that it works and to stop privatizing it.

They want you to hate it. They want you to believe this thing is so broken. I'll let anybody run it, even if it's wall street. And then they can come in and say, we've got a plan. We're going to hand this over to private banks that yes, they will take some fees. Yeah, they're going to take a cut. That's fine. Yeah.

They'll profit a little bit off of your retirement checks that you've been paying into if you live long enough to get those by the way. Um, but this is how we're going to fix a problem that we created. I, you know, sometimes it can be easy to feel like you're kind of screaming into the void. I really hope that the audience understands how they are applying this technique in so many places. Look at these crappy public schools. Well, yeah, you reduce funding. You give them kind of one size fits all metrics by which they'll be evaluated. And you insist that they're merely worthless liberal indoctrination. Is it surprising that they start to fail? And then they come in and go, how about private schools? How about pulling money out? How about vouchers? And then we go, oh, I don't know that it doesn't seem to be working that well. Maybe we should consider

some of these ideas. Postal service. Let's slow it down. Let's stop paying overtime for mail carriers. Let's make it function as slowly as possible, right at the time when everybody's sending in absentee ballots for the 2020 election, September, October, 2020. Hey, this isn't working very well. Maybe we should really be bringing in FedEx, UPS, DHL, or some private company to do this. Well, it's not working well because they're making it not work well. And it's the same playbook with social security. They want to apply it to Medicaid. They want to apply it to Medicare. I hope that people are understanding what's going on. They want you to just look the other way and say, do whatever you want because it's not

working. All right. There's a little bit of trouble in paradise. A top right wing newspaper is expressing some skepticism about Donald Trump's economic agenda. We could call it trouble in MAGA paradise. That might be a better way to say it. When Holman Jenkins at the Wall Street Journal editorial page, this is the same Wall Street Journal owned by News Corporation, generally supportive of Trump for a very long time.

When the Wall Street Journal editorial writers start saying a lot of what Trump's doing doesn't make sense. You know that the cracks are starting to appear. There is a new Wall Street Journal column in which Jenkins essentially lays out kind of a polite wall street coded version of this administration is a mess. Now, of course, there's the signal chat leak, which we've spoken about this week where a Trump official, uh, led in a journalist where Yemen war plans were being discussed in a secure government. That would be a scandal in Trump world. It's I guess it was Monday that it happened.

What Jenkins writes is, quote, This may be the episode that causes the administration to pull in its horns. Republicans in Congress may threaten investigations to gain leverage over a Trump team that has disconfided GOP ears as well as Democrats in some of their cherished programs and prerogatives. So let me translate that for you. Even Republicans are pissed about what Trump and Elon Musk are doing even while defending Doge and you always have to say, okay, they're still mostly defending what's going on.

Even when defending Doge Jenkins says, quote, Mr. Musk's chaos would be the worst possible solution to the spending chaos. If not for the fact that more orderly reforms are out of reach. That's not what we usually hear from the right wing press that's been carrying water for this administration. And yet this piece, even in its criticisms of the administration, is still number one, trying to acknowledge that there is a mess here, but also to softly justify it. It's sort of like watching someone apologize for their friend who burned down a house by saying the house was really old at the end of the day. Wasn't right to burn it down, but the house was

kind of really old. The big picture here is that they're nervous and it's not that they're nervous because they've suddenly developed compassion. They're afraid that Donald Trump's chaos is going to start touching things that they care about. The stability of the stock market, defense policy, reelection odds. Once Trump is gone, you don't start a column saying Doge or nothing unless you've run out of coherent ideas. And you definitely don't start cautioning that the administration needs to pull in its horns unless people in your circle are saying this is starting to look bad. Now, I want to be really clear. Yes, the Wall Street Journal editorial board is trying to thread a needle here. We like the goals of Doge.

We don't like the execution. But when the paper of Wall Street starts kind of looking skeptically at Donald Trump's team for leaking war plans or breaking federal agencies, it's a warning shot. It's not a critique, but it's a warning shot. It's not to Trump. Trump doesn't give a damn. It's a warning shot. It's not to Trump. Trump doesn't give a damn. It's a warning shot to down ballot Republicans. You can't necessarily count on us if this goes completely

screwy. And at some point, right wing media, I guess, is realizing at some point you can't keep pretending that the guy burning everything down is just shaking things up. Sometimes he's actually burning it all to the ground and you're standing very close. So do I expect the wall street journal editorial page to all of a sudden completely turn and say Trump's a disaster. He must resign. Of course not. Of course not. The point here is they are getting nervous.

A lot of these more establishment traditional right wing editorial pages and media outlets are getting nervous. And what elected officials are telling us is that behind the scenes there's Republican elected officials also getting very nervous. They just aren't willing to say it publicly because they know they will become targets of Trump or Moscow primary campaigns or whatever the case may be. So we're going to be watching for these cracks. And one of the things you're going to notice in the Friday feedback is that the more that the cracks develop among elected Republicans and right wing media, the more that the average

Trump supporter supports Trump even more, which is exactly what cult behavior would suggest. The more pressure there is on the dear leader, the more the cultists will come out in. Usually it's his defense. So we'll see that in a moment on Friday feedback, but the cracks are there. Will it matter? That's tougher to say. Another day, another Tesla story. What is going on with this company? Well, if you go to ground dot news slash Pacman, you will see how some outlets are covering Tesla and Elon Musk compared to others. The story really is one story, but the way it's told really can change your perspective. And this is the exact

problem that our partners at ground news helped to solve. Ground news is the only site that shows you how political bias and financial incentives and even blind spots shape the narratives in the news that you read. Otherwise you're letting billionaires and political agendas shape everything from public opinion to policy. See every side of the news story, read the news from multiple perspectives and see through the media bias with reliable news from local and international sources. Go to ground dot news slash Pacman to get the same top tier vantage plan that I use

at nearly half the cost, just five bucks a month. The link is in the description. All right, let's get into Friday feedback for the week. Info at David Pakman dot com is the place to send your thoughts, criticisms, questions, suggestions which may be featured on Friday feedback. We also look at comments and replies across all social media platforms. And we will also start including book reviews in Friday feedback, although none today, none today, maybe next week. Okay. Let's start with a negative comment as we sometimes do. Then we move on to more positive things. Here is a feedback from Michael Shermer.

Michael Shermer says the David Pakman show is going broke. I can't wait until this hateful, divisive propaganda show goes straight down the crapper. Flush this turd already. Well, listen, unlike the classified documents in Trump's bathroom, I don't think that the show is going to be going down the toilet. Now, it is not new that there are people anxiously awaiting, welcoming, and even trying to precipitate the decline and destruction of this and other progressive independent media channels. It's not, you know, I'm not so naive as to think it's just about me. It's they just want the whole movement to collapse right now. It's not the direction things are going. The best January the show has

ever had from a viewership standpoint was January, 2025. The best February the show ever had from a viewership standpoint was last month. And we are on track still a few days to go, but we are on track for the best March ever for the show to be this month. So, yes, I understand, Michael, you want the show to go away. There are certainly other people who do as well. But for now, for now, reports of our imminent destruction have been greatly exaggerated. OK, Mark Byrne said, who would have thought that the convicted felon would have trouble obeying the court? Oh, right. Everyone.

Yeah. You know, one of the things that I continually am surprised by is that people act surprised at completely obvious things. Trump has flouted the law and used corruption and nepotism and creative accounting and you know, all of these things fraud in his, um, uh, uh, what's it called? The charity, the slush fund, all of this stuff are things he's been doing for decades. And then all of a sudden people go, oh, he's ignoring a court order. Now his administration's ignoring a court order about the deportations to El Salvador.

Well, of course he, this is is this is Trump and we need to stop being surprised. That's the thing. And the concerning part is there is some naivete here. And there are people who voted Trump who said, I really don't like a lot of the things that he says. I just don't think he's really going to do them. And then now he's trying to do all of them. As I've said so many times, believe people when they tell you what it is that they're going to do. Lawrence T wrote, if I was a Democrat, I would stay clear of a situation with criminal illegals. This will destroy your party for a long time coming. The majority of Americans wanted this to happen. You know, there, there is an aspect to this that's important to listen to.

There are so many Hills to die on and I think that it is critical, critical for the left to hold Trump accountable over the fact that we were told that the focus would be criminal illegals, people accused, convicted of crimes, et cetera. And that all of a sudden, you know, people whose citizenship paperwork is in progress are being either detained, imprisoned or deported. They lied about what the focus was going to be. But to the extent that anyone would do this, the left Democrats, progressives, whoever coming out and making the hill to die on individuals who do MIT, uh, a fall under those lurid examples of sexual assault or violent crime, et cetera, who are also here on documented the left making that group the hill to die on defending bad

political strategy doesn't make any sense whatsoever. Trump's doing plenty of bad that the left doesn't need to go out and go, no, I believe that this, uh, um, uh, rapist who's here on documented should be allowed to stay now due process period, right? Earlier in the week we talked about Brian Kilmeade saying it's not really convenient or practical to give due process to everybody. No, no, no, no, no. We can't fall into that. Due process must be provided.

But the left should not die on the hill of arguing that the relatively small number of undocumented immigrants who have been involved in violent crimes should get any kind of special treatment or be allowed to stay. Very bad move politically. OK. Travel time car asks an investing question on the subreddit. Are y'all avoiding putting money into the stock market? Just wondering, I know most here probably hate Trump and the direction the country's heading, but I'm kind of wondering what to do while working with my savings account. Maybe simply putting money into my IRA account without actually investing anything could be a good idea. I know people say not to time the market, but it does seem like a shit time for

them. For anyone into this sort of thing, what's your strategy? I'll tell you my strategy. This is not financial advice ever. My strategy is just keep buying. As the stock market declines, if you have a fixed amount that you're buying each month, you are getting more shares because the price has declined mutual funds, whatever it is you're invested in index funds. The more the market drops, as long as you generically believe eventually it'll recover, will it be months? Will it be years? We don't know. But if you eventually believe the stock market will recover, which historically it always has, The best strategy is just keep investing every single month. It's called dollar cost averaging. That's what I'm doing.

And then over time, what you will see is that having accumulated all of those shares will increase the amount that you accumulate in dividends during that time. You reinvest the dividends when the stock market pricing is lower, the dividends buy you more shares. And then when things recover, you are in a way better position than if you tried to time the market or whatever other idea. So that's what I'm doing. It's not advice for anybody else, but it's what I'm doing. Print this and smoke it asked on the subreddit is Elon Musk, just a Mike pillow 2.0. Both are known to have used drugs that are known to create a sense of euphoria in the brain. Both got caught up in Republican nonsense and tank their companies

chasing a propaganda dream all over the world. You're seeing people rejecting everything about Tesla and Musk. I personally want an electric vehicle, but would not be seen in what they are now calling a swastika car. Yeah. There's an interesting analogy there. Mike Pillow sort of tanked his business by getting involved in politics. And Elon Musk seems to be tanking Tesla by getting involved in politics. It's a perfect analogy. That's absolutely right. The good news about the electric vehicle thing is there are endless options. There's no reason right now to say, oh, I want an EV, but I don't like Musk. What do I do? You've got dozens of options and more coming every year.

So in that sense, it's actually a great spot to be in. If you are an anti Tesla pro electric vehicle person, Gerald Carper wrote on Facebook. So, David, don't you see the hypocrisy of Democrats where all in on Tesla now that Trump and Elon have cut off the gravy train to these as politicians, they all now hate Tesla. Do you so the never ending hypocrisy of the left atrocious, just an absolutely brutal assault on the English language. Let me rephrase what I think this person's trying to say. Will I acknowledge the hypocrisy of Democrats who loved Tesla, but now that Trump

and Musk are doing stuff that the left doesn't like, they hate Tesla. Uh, no, here's the bottom line. Elon Musk and Tesla advanced Evie technology extraordinarily battery technology. No doubt. First mover advantage. I saw the promise. I invested in it. I drove a Tesla for a while. Now we have so many more choices and you can still be all in on electric vehicles while

saying part of the reason we have all these choices is Elon Musk, but I don't like what he's doing right now. And so what I will do is I will vote with my dollars. I support electric vehicles. I will get an electric vehicle. I don't support Musk. I won't get a Tesla. It's completely consistent. It's completely coherent. When people's behavior changes, you adapt and evaluate their new behavior. That's it. Very simple. Academic value wrote on the subreddit. Wasn't it just last week that we got lectured by Trump about how it should be illegal to

criticize judges? How long are people going to buy into this utter bullshit? It shows he just says anything and these fools continue to go along with it. I know I sound like a broken record, but isn't it obvious that someone is a con man when they promote two totally opposite positions? Yeah, I mean, listen, Trump has a long history of taking completely different positions on different issues so that you can just pick one you like and say, I think I agree with Trump.

Of course, Trump is a hypocrite. He previously and recently said it should be illegal to criticize judges when it was people criticizing, for example, Eileen cannon who presided over one of Trump's cases. And then on the other hand, Trump is saying, here's a judge that didn't do what I wanted. This judge should be impeached there. The judge's wife is a Democrat. Of course he's a cripple, a hypocrite. The question is, does anybody care? I think the people that care are already not voting Trump. Consistency no longer matters to the modern American right wing. You can't get them to care about it. Roe Santucci wrote even I'm sorry, Ron Santucci, even left wing notables like Bill Maher and James Carville are highly

critical of the Democrats. And with good reason, the Democratic politicians are destroyers of our country. And liberal outlets like Pacman are propagandists who support the left no matter how bad they are. I don't think this person has ever seen my show. I, first of all, do not care about the Democratic Party as a party. I always just want to elect the best person and I just look at who's running and vote for the best person.

OK, never been a Democrat, never donated to the Democratic Party or to even I never made a political donation in my life. I just don't do it. This is what I do. I have criticized the Democratic Party for picking candidates that do not seem authentic. I have criticized the Democratic Party for this instinct to be exclusionary rather than inclusionary and doing the opposite of what Republicans do. I have criticized the Democratic Party when I see an excess. I don't know what Ron's talking about.

OK, but one of the things that I am used to is being criticized for things that aren't actually happening on this show. So that doesn't come as a surprise. But Ron, maybe try watching the show first before making such a criticism. OK, thank you to everybody who has bought and reviewed my book. We are soon going to know, is there any accolade based on first week sales that the book qualifies for? I would love your help. The supply chain issue on Amazon has been resolved. The books are shipping overnight. It's available at Barnes and Noble. Every Barnes and Noble store got two physical copies. I don't know if they're still there at your local Barnes and Noble, but every Barnes and Noble store did get two copies. And of course you can get it

everywhere. Books are sold. Please leave a review. It is critical that we really focus in on the reviews on three sites. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Goodreads doesn't have to be long, can just be one line. Loved the book. Could thought this other part would have been better or whatever. Right. Just an honest review. But we want to get those ratings and reviews in Tuesday, maybe Wednesday. I hope to have auspicious news for you about the first week for the book. We'll see you on the bonus show.

I'll see you back here Monday.