The David Pakman Show - 3/4/25: Economic freefall as tariffs start, border numbers completely fabricated

Episode Date: March 4, 2025

-- On the Show: -- Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) joins David to discuss the trajectory of the Trump economy, the future of Social Security and Medicare, and much more -- Another downward GDP revision from the Atlanta Fed as Donald Trump's tariffs take effect and the economy appears to be on a clear downward trajectory -- Donald Trump crashes the stock market with his new tariffs -- Serious health fears grow about Donald Trump as his strange gait and limp become increasingly pronounced -- Donald Trump has halted all aid to Ukraine in a major gift to Russian President Vladimir Putin -- Social Security payments are facing disruption under Donald Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE interference -- The Trump administration is caught pathetically and obviously lying about border crossing numbers -- On the Bonus Show: Trump supporters lose $12 billion as his cryptocurrency collapses, US Customs cracks down on egg smuggling as prices soar, Andrew Cuomo attempting political comeback in running for NYC Mayor's race, much more... 🧠 Try Brain.fm totally free for a month at https://brain.fm/pakman 💻 Sponsored by Aura: Try it free for 2 weeks! See if your data is safe at https://aura.com/pakman 💪 AG1 is offering you a FREE $76 GIFT when you sign up at https://drinkag1.com/pakman 🤖 Sponsored by Venice: Use code PAKMAN for 20% off a Pro Account at https://venice.ai/pakman 🥐 Wildgrain: Use code PAKMAN for $30 off & free baked goods at https://wildgrain.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 everybody. We have another GDP decline projection. The economy is starting to crumble. Stocks are in the toilet and Trump doesn't seem to care. I hope you'll join me tonight for a live stream of the state of the union address. We'll be hearing from members of the house and Senate. I'll have pre speech coverage and post speech coverage, maybe even an opportunity for you to call in. All of it will start at eight p.m. Eastern on YouTube, Twitch and Facebook.

Hope to see you there. State of the Union eight p east five p west. Also thank you to everyone who keeps subscribing to the podcast on Apple and on Spotify over on Apple. We have now reached spot 53 among all news and politics show. We just beat out Michael Knowles, that disgusting and despicable extremist. And hopefully we will continue on up. So remember, no matter where you watch, you can subscribe to the podcast. It's free. Spotify, Apple really helps us listen. Economic growth projections are collapsing. Donald Trump has enacted tariffs. Every sign

is pointing to a crumbling economy and Donald Trump does not care. Now, yesterday I brought to you the unfortunate news that the Atlanta Fed has a new GDP projection and it went from the expectation of about 2% growth after Q1 of this year down to a reduction in GDP of 1.5%. While Donald Trump with the new tariffs that are enacted today, the counter tariffs from China and elsewhere and other negative factors, the Atlanta Fed has reevaluated and now has issued an updated downward revision. And this is painful. Now expecting Q1 GDP to decline two point eight percent and economic shrinkage of two point eight percent, despite Donald Trump and his acolytes and his suck ups and his brown nosers telling us he'll be so good for the economy that GDP growth is just going to explode

and everybody will be doing so well. And meanwhile, Donald Trump's tariffs take effect today, starting at the stroke of midnight Eastern, I guess Eastern, I don't know. Imports from Canada and from Mexico will now be taxed. Yes, a tariff is an import tax at 25 percent with Canadian energy products subject to 10 percent import duty. The 10 percent tariff that Donald Trump placed on Chinese imports in February is now doubled to 20%. Beijing immediately retaliated with tariffs of up to 15% on a wide array of US farm exports. This is going to crush farmers. Prump insists that he was so good for the farmers in his first term. He wasn't. He actually had to

bail them out. And now he is just going to crush them. And what I hope is the most important takeaway. Listen, we can spend hours talking about the pros and cons of tariffs when carefully executed as a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer and when they can do A and when they can do B and what kinds of tariffs in different situations. Yesterday, I did a Tic Tac live. I was live on Tic Tac. Um, I was actually chewing gum instead of having Tic Tacs. That's the funny thing, but I was live on Tic Tac and someone called in and said, you know, I don't really get the big deal. If we put a 10% tariff on whoever and whoever puts a 10% tariff on us,

we're sort of even it's even Steven. And I explained, no, no, no. You have to consider how much do we export and how much do we import from that particular country? What do we export and what do we import? Do the exports or imports have more or fewer substitutes from other countries? The idea that just, Hey, we 10%, 10%, it's all the same. First of all, if that were the case, there would be no point to the tariffs, but of course that's not the reality. And what the most important takeaway is, is that Trump does not care about you. He doesn't care about the people who voted for him.

And you should know that. Why? Because as a privileged New York City rich kid, Trump spent the first 68 years of his life trying to be kept isolated from the people that now he claims to care about. And quite frankly, most of the people who voted for the guy. But he doesn't care if you've got a 401k. Look at what's happening in the stock market. If you've got a small business or a job that depends on stability, the stability of knowing what are our inputs going to cost so we know how to price our outputs. Tough luck, because this is the guy who thinks trade wars are easy to win and good.

This is the same guy who during his first term racked up how many trillion in debt increase and oversaw manufacturing recession before COVID even hit. And now he's doing it again. I'm so sorry to be communicating this, but he doesn't care about you and he's doing it again. And let's look at his big boy powerful announcement when he explained what he was doing. It's just absolutely humiliating. The stock market crashed as Donald Trump was speaking yesterday, talking about how powerful

and strong and alpha his tariffs are. And you could see in the lower right of the screen as the Dow Jones was simply collapsing. Let's start with Donald Trump's big declaration, big dump of information here tomorrow, meaning today, 25 percent tariff on Canada, 25 percent tariff on Mexico. And he did it. Watch the stock ticker in the bottom right of the screen. So we're going April 2nd. But and, you know, I'm sorry, my logo is covering that up. Let me see if I can actually uncover that here. Let's just go with this for now.

Very importantly, tomorrow, tariffs 25 percent on Canada and 25 percent on Mexico. And that'll start. So they're going to have to have a tariff. So what they have to do is build their car plants, frankly, and other things in the United States, in which case they have no tariffs. There you go. So it's all starting. And the Dow at one point down more than 800, nearly 900 points. And Trump was asked, can can Mexico and Canada do anything so that you would change your mind here? Is there any saving grace where you would say, well, let's hold off? And Trump says, no, it's all set. And the stock market just tanked. Is there any room left for Canada and

Mexico to make a deal before midnight? And should we expect those Chinese tariffs, the extra extra 10 percent to take no room left for Mexico or for Canada? No, the tariffs, you know, they're all set. They go into effect tomorrow. Tariffs. Is there any room left for Canada? There you go. And then finally, just stunning, stunning stuff. This was as Trump continued speaking. You just see the stock market crashing and this guy doesn't care about your 401k. He doesn't care about any of a huge fan of Ronald Reagan, but he was bad on trade. Very bad on trade. He allowed a lot of people, a lot of business to be taken.

So I say that with due respect because I, I, he was so great on other things, but he was bad on trade. We are setting records right now. Records. Yeah. The Dow was down 650 as Trump was telling us. It's like nobody has ever seen before when you have companies like this coming in and almost 40 percent of their company in one signature is going to be devoted to what he does, which. Yeah. So bottom line, a disastrous day in the stock markets. And I know that a lot of times when we talk about stocks, people write in, they go,

David, you know, a lot of people don't have stocks. Stocks are heavily concentrated. Yes, that is absolutely the case. But in this situation, this market instability, this decline. And by the way, as of yesterday, what, 600 points down? We were already as I speak right now, the Dow is another 700 points down. If you say, well, what if we include everybody with a retirement plan, pension or other vehicle which is connected to the stock market? Now it captures another huge swath of people. What about people who work at companies whose hiring versus layoffs are based at least to a degree on what's happening in the stock market? Now

it encompasses an even greater share of all American workers. So those who laugh this off really do so at their own peril. And the critical and important thing to understand here is that this is all optional and it's driven by Donald Trump's egomaniacal narcissism and the fact that whatever constraints were placed on him in the first term by having some not completely crazy people around him that has gone away. You know, you in that crazy Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, as you looked around the room, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, did look horrified, but he didn't say a damn word. And it was all enablers, the biased media like Brian Glenn piling on Zelensky for not wearing a suit.

J.D. Vance laughing, Trump laughing. He has all enablers around him. And so when we talked about a second Trump term would be a disinhibited Trump. An unrestrained Trump, an unfettered Trump. This is what we were talking about. No one that at least he trusts who's willing to come to him and say, this is a bad idea. Why would we start this trade war? Look at what you're doing to the stock market. Now, if there's any hope to hold out here, it's that his rich buddies will

come to him and say, you're killing my net worth by what you're doing to the stock market. And it's a crazy thing to be hoping that those are the people that will get Trump to think about something different here. But with Trump, we know what he's most impressed by is authoritarian dictators and really rich people. Hence, Putin and Elon Musk being his north stars, co north stars. And so we will see where this goes. It wouldn't shock me if tonight we get an announcement that he has backed off of the tariffs because of some concession he was supposedly able to achieve. It wouldn't shock me if these stay in place.

Ugly, ugly stuff. And to a degree, I explain how it came to be that this is what we're dealing with in my forthcoming book, The Echo Machine. I have the first hardback copy in my hands right now. It's heavy. It's thick. The paper is called The Book. many exciting things going on, including a forthcoming trip to Austin, Texas, to promote the book. Morem slash pacman. Once you try Brain.fm, you'll quickly understand why this has become my go-to music app. When I just want to focus on work, in addition to music for focusing on work, they have modes specially designed for sleep, relaxation, meditation, all created by musicians working with neuroscientists. A peer-reviewed study showed that Brain.fm's music boosts attention,

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Go to brain.fm slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. That's brain.f FM slash Pacman. The David Pakman shows finances have gotten hacked before. I've talked about it on the show. The hacker stole a bunch of money. It was not a good feeling. I worry a lot less now that I use aura. Our sponsor aura gives me peace of mind by providing some critical layers of security. They continuously monitor the dark web and let me know if information has been exposed, logins, social security numbers, et cetera. They tell me quickly if anybody tries to use that information to access credit or bank

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That's a u r a.com slash Pacman to try or a free for two weeks. The link is in the podcast notes. An unexplained limp in which Donald Trump drags his right leg is generating a series of new health fears about Donald Trump just after the very strange bruising on his hand was written off as coming from shaking people's hands by the White House. An explanation that of course none of us believed even for a second. Now over the weekend, we're going to look at various videos. Donald Trump was filmed at Mar-a-Lago and uh, something seemed very, very off as he stepped out of a golf cart.

People noticed that something seemed up with that right leg that Trump regularly drags that right leg in a way that seems strange. It's stiff, it's awkward, like he's pulling it instead of walking normally. And this is not just a one off moment as far as Trump is concerned. There is another video from an event with Lara Trump, Lara, Lara, uh, in which Donald Trump similarly is sort of dragging that right leg and shifting around and trying to swing it rather than moving the leg under its own motion. And a lot of people looking at this extraordinarily closely. Now, of course, the internet immediately exploded and said, what's wrong with this guy's legs?

He's moving it like it's made of wood. It's not normal and it is absolutely the case that this is something that's been going on for a little while now. The immediate suggestions were, is this a neuro muscular issue? Is it drop foot? Is it nerve damage? Is it possible that Trump simply needs a hip replacement? And so because of the lack of strength in the ability to lift that leg itself using the femur, is he sort of using his body weight substantial as it might be to try to use momentum

to swing the leg around? We don't know. Now remember that Donald Trump also almost fell on the ground when he was trying to open a truck door in an incident during the campaign. And you similarly see that his control over that right leg seems quite limited. Ron Philip Kowski put together this video where you see the strange behavior of that right leg in a bunch of different scenarios. And something here does seem to be going on now.

Oh boy. Uh, possible causes as always, we are left to speculate. There's that right leg dragging once again, as Trump brings pizza to firefighters. Uh, we have a total lack of, we have a total lack of transparency about Trump's health. Could it be a stroke or a mini stroke? That explains this. Is it neuropathy or nerve damage? Is it drop foot, also known as peroneal nerve dysfunction? Could these be the early signs of Parkinson's? Is it as simple as osteoarthritis or a knee problem?

A spinal issue? Myasthenia gravis? Is it as simple as osteoarthritis or a knee problem, a spinal issue, myasthenia gravis? Is it gout? Could it be cognitive decline affecting motor function? We have no idea. Now, if Donald Trump's team were honest, they would just tell us what's going on. But the secrecy fuels the speculation. And of course, much like with the bruise on Donald Trump's hand, we know Trump's age. We can sort of make a guess about his weight. There's this history of odd public movements. This could be a big deal. It could be a temporary

injury that's being hidden. It could be a near hip replacement that he needs but doesn't want to get. And it would be nice if the same people who screamed about Biden's age actually cared about Donald Trump's physical status. They don't seem to. Now let me back up just a moment. Many of you will recall that both left and right wing commentators speculated at the start of Donald Trump's term, which was just, you know, five weeks ago, something like five, six weeks ago, speculated that a Trump health event would be the defining political moment of 2025. And I have to tell you just five or six weeks into this term, we have a number of unexplained medical situations.

We have the right leg drag now, which is something that we're trying to figure out. What are the oranges of that? We have the very strange bruising on Trump's hand and with all of it, the Trump medical records are so limited that we can't look at those and say, oh, you know what? In his medical record, he says he takes X medication. X medication can cause this or Donald Trump is on a blood thinner. The blood thinners can cause easy bruising.

That explains the bruise. We don't have any of that because despite Trump claiming and Caroline Leavitt claiming and everybody around Trump claiming this is the most transparent administration we've ever had, we know very little about what's going on with Trump's body, which he claims is some incredible physical specimen. Well, tell us about it. Then tell us about it. We'd like to know until that time we are only left to speculate about what is causing these

bizarre physical appearances. Aid to Ukraine has been frozen. What a gift to Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. The Trump administration has officially frozen all US military aid to Ukraine. And this marks, I would argue, the biggest shift toward Russia in modern American history. This is not just a policy change. This is a full throated capitulation to Vladimir Putin. Trump lashed out at Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House over the weekend.

We covered that yesterday. He said this guy's ungrateful as if Ukraine, which has been getting bombed and invaded for years, should be thanking Trump rather than fighting for its own survival. And the white house is now saying Trump's aid freeze is how they are going to focus on peace, freezing aid to Ukraine, eliminating its even theoretical ability to defend itself against Russian aggression. That is how you are going to push peace. And that is exactly what the Kremlin says every time it advances further into Ukraine and takes more land.

They say, no, we, we are pushing forward to peace and wouldn't you know it, Russia is thrilled that Trump has cut the aid. The Kremlin is referring to Trump's move as quote, the best step toward peace because of course it weakens Ukraine and it allows Putin to push forward unchecked even further. Now, France called it out immediately saying this doesn't bring us closer to peace. This strengthens the aggressor Russia to be unrestrained in its ability to continue into Ukraine. Now, for a very long time, there's a sort of geopolitical reality that's older than this conflict than this immediate conflict, wherein the United States has been leading

efforts to contain Russian aggression in Europe. And one of those elements of containment is making Russia think twice about going into Ukraine further and further. Trump shredded that doctrine. This this is the biggest geopolitical change as far as that goes in generations. And even some Republicans who were one strong supporters of Ukraine are saying this doesn't make a lot of sense, although let's not give them too much credit. They are too scared to really challenge Trump in any serious way.

Ukraine says temporarily with what we have that they can hold the line, but without the help from the United States that it's been receiving the ammunition, et cetera, it's not going to last forever. Now I know that there are some who have said, even though Russia is the aggressor, if Ukraine stopped resisting so forcefully, eventually there would be peace because Russia would just get whatever it wants and potentially impose martial law in Ukraine and it would be nominally peaceful and completely unjust circumstances. But that's not going to happen quickly.

And the idea that this will push us towards peace is, is pretty laughable. Now, meanwhile, Donald Trump is floating a deal where Ukraine will hand over its mineral wealth to American investors as if the survival of a democratic nation should be decided sort of like an M and a merger and accusation or a corporate takeover or something like that. This is not America first. This is all Putin first and they are loving it at the Kremlin. And I'll be frank with you. I don't necessarily know the degree to which Trump even knows how he's doing Putin's bidding. We know that he's enamored with Putin.

We know he generally defers to authoritarian autocratic dictators rather than liberal democracies. We know that he cares at the end of the day about himself and maybe his immediate friends or business partners, not the average person here or elsewhere. But I don't really know if Trump has convinced himself that he's not a pushover and just doing what Putin wants and he's just evaluating and deciding objectively what makes sense to do. Or if he's like, yeah, no, I'll do whatever Putin wants because of X reason or because of why reason we don't know the answer to do. Or if he's like, yeah, no, I'll do whatever Putin wants because of X reason or because of why reason we don't know the answer to that. But what we do know is that this is

the biggest geopolitical shift towards Putin, uh, in decades, decades. And where will it all end? Trump says we're heading rapidly towards peace. I will remind you the initial promise was the Russia Ukraine war will end within a day of becoming president elect. He pushed that back and he said, oh, it's going to end within a day of becoming president. They more recently have been saying we would love to have this conflict and within 100 days of being sworn in, even that is starting to look less likely. Could it happen? I guess that would be three months from January 20th would be like around April 20th, April

30th would be about 100 days. Is that even a realistic possibility at this point in time? I don't know. I want to hear from you. Info at David Pakman dot com. Will this conflict see a ceasefire before April 30th, which would be about a hundred days of Trump in office. Let me know. Yes or no. Big companies with poor security get hacked every day and your personal information is being sold on the dark web. So criminals can target you. Not something I have Thank you so much for joining us today. fraudulently, for example, to try to open a credit card and to keep you from getting hacked

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Protect yourself and your family. Now that's a U R a.com slash Pacman to try or a free for two weeks. The link is in the podcast notes. By now you've probably heard about deep seek. It's now the number one app on most app stores, but every conversation you have with deep seek is stored on Chinese servers and subject to Chinese censorship. If you want to try DeepSeek without sharing all your conversations with Beijing, then let me recommend our sponsor, Venice AI. Venice.ai is a generative AI platform. It's private and it's permissionless. And they utilize leading open source AI models to deliver text code and image generation right to your web browser. No downloads, no installations

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The link is in the podcast notes. It's great to welcome to the program today. Congressman Jake Akin class representing Massachusetts serving on the house energy and commerce committee. Uh, it's so great to have you on today. You know, I'm really curious as we record this interview, the Dow down nearly 900 more points tariffs going one way, retaliatory tariffs already coming back reports from the former Social Security administrator that it's conceivable that payments will be delayed.

It's not a reduction in benefits, but just from a logistical standpoint, because of what Doge is doing, it's conceivable payments might be delayed. What is the totality of how you're interpreting what was sold to us as a sort of populist revival for the middle class by the current president that seems to be working out to be very bad for the average American. Donald Trump is talking a good economy into a recession. He's doing so, one, by directly raising costs on the middle class. The middle class is going to see home insurance, car insurance, and health insurance costs spike by double digits over the next 18 months because of the tariffs, because of expirations for temporary protected status workers who make up a bulk of the health care and construction workforces, and because of the general uncertainty that he is pumping in to the

global economic system. The other thing that Donald Trump is doing is that he is making the United States harder to invest in and create jobs in for big businesses. I was recently talking to a prominent local manufacturer in Massachusetts who was saying that he manufactures basically intermediate parts for bigger businesses that they use and use in end products. And he was saying that the end demand for the product that he makes is as good as ever. And yet for the first time in five years, his order book is thinning out. And the reasons it's thinning out is that these bigger businesses are looking at the global macro environment and they're starting to tighten up. They're tightening up their orders to their own suppliers. They're tightening up on their own hiring decisions. And that cascades across the economy such that this local manufacturer now has pushed pause on some

hiring decisions that he was going to make. And you don't have to be an economist to see where this takes us. The animal spirits get depressed. And all of a sudden, what was a strong economy, both in terms of job creation and investment going into 2025 becomes a very soft economy that can tip into a recession. What do you make right now of the fact that similar to the Tea Party movement of 2010, there seems to be a contingent of voters that's voting for candidates whose policies actually will hurt them. You know, in 2010 with the Tea Party, you had folks who statistically were never going

to be very wealthy, supporting a movement that overtly said, we want to cut taxes on the rich. Now, the analysis then was maybe some of them believe they too one day will be rich, as statistically unlikely as that is given the reality of, of, you know, income mobility. On the other hand, there was the idea that some of them believed that when you give a tax cut to the rich, it quote trickles down in this now long debunked economic theory. What do you make of it in 2020, the 2024 election now, 2025, how did this party and Trump specifically secure the support? If you look at some of those states

that Biden won, that Harris lost, what was it that got them to support this package of policy ideas? Donald Trump is a cultural statement. He's not an economic manager. He was put in as someone who would destroy a system that many Americans felt alienated from. And it's much easier and faster to destroy things than it is to build things. So Democrats have a series of challenges ahead of us then, knowing what he is, that he is someone who, frankly, bested us in the culture wars between 2020 and 2025. One, we've got to recalibrate our own approach to sociocultural issues. Two, we've got to play defense to protect the Constitution and the rule of law against his depredations. But three, and I would argue most importantly,

we have to become the party that voters trust on the economy. And right now, bluntly, we're not. That means that we have to draw a sharp contrast for voters going into the midterms, that his chaos and corruption are raising their costs. It's raising their cost of home insurance, of car insurance, of health insurance, of utility bills, of home ownership. But two, going into the presidential primary of 2028, that we as a party have big ideas for how to lower the cost of housing, of health care, and how to improve the delivery of education. And that's where I want to spend the bulk of my time is being someone who can generate some of those ideas for Democrats to then mold and define pottery going into the presidential campaign.

I want to talk through with you the socio cultural aspect, which I agree Democrats have failed on. I recently interviewed separately Senators Booker and Schiff, and they both agreed that on issues like the what is a woman gotcha question or this is to quote the way they talk about it, men in women's sports dismissing it outright does come off as we don't care about something people say they care about. At the same time, we recognize that these are contrived issues to a degree, at least in terms of scale and successfully.

So as you point out, Donald Trump successfully did it. Can we workshop? How would you approach addressing these issues when someone brings them up in a way that's not dismissive, but does pivot to something that is far more tangible? Like, for example, the economic issues that we're talking about? How do you respond to what about do you agree with, quote, men and women's sports? Like, how do you diffuse it? Mike Pence, before he was a politician, was a radio host, and he used to have this statement, I'm a conservative, but I'm not angry about it. And the analog for Democrats is I'm a liberal, but I'm not condescending about it. I am not going to shy away from being a strong advocate for gun safety legislation. I believe in climate action. I believe in civil rights for our LGBT community. We can do those things while enlisting people into our

viewpoint, as we did with marriage equality at the turn of the century, and not lecturing people about why they are somehow morally broken human beings. And I think Democrats actually don't give Americans enough credit for wanting to dig into the details on policy. The average American under 40 consumes four to six hours of audio online and text content every single day. David, obviously, you know this better than me. People want to hear a long form conversation and happy to dig into trans issues as they relate to sports and why we can have a nuanced position on that that supports sportsmanship and fair play and safety, but also allows our trans neighbors to pursue their definition of

happiness. But I'm actually, when it comes to education, I'm not particularly keyed into the trans sports issue. I'll tell you what I'm keyed into, the school closures in 2020. Because the school closures in 2020 were a catastrophe, and they were a foreseeable catastrophe. And Democrats as a party have to own the fact that we as a party largely supported them, despite the fact that by May of 2020, the evidence was quite compelling that they were unnecessary and indeed harmful. That is the education issue we should be talking about. We need to go out to American voters and first of all, say, we got this one wrong and we're sorry about that. And secondly, here's how we're going to make it better because goodness knows Donald Trump has no ideas about how to make this better. We are going to guarantee every single kid in this

country who is behind grade level on reading, writing or mathematics, one-on-one high dosage tutoring, which is the most evidence-driven type of educational intervention known to the public school education system. And we're going to pay for it with a digital advertising tax on the social media corporations that have been making your kids miserable for the last decade. And I know that that reminds me a little bit of when I would speak to Andrew Yang and he would talk about the choice to sell or not sell our data, for example. What would be the structure of how such a digital advertising tax would work? Who pays it and how is it calculated?

The social media corporations pay it. Meta and Google would be the two biggest impacted. They make in the United States alone about 250250 billion a year on digital advertising revenue. And the way to think about digital advertising revenue is it quantifies the value of Americans' attention spans. What they've been doing with increasing success and rapaciousness over the last 15 years is attention fracking. They had been taking this incredibly valuable resource, which is our screen time, and they had been monetizing it in increasingly sophisticated ways. I mean, if you want to dig into how ad tech works, it's mind boggling, right? But it's actually very easily quantifiable. It's worth about $250 billion a year in America. They basically shield all of that from taxes through shell games and multinational arbitrage. My view is we're going to take 50% of that. And you know what? Meta and Google, you're still going to be plenty rich. I

mean, Zuckerberg's personal foundation is $250 billion. He's going to be able to make sure his legacy is sustained. They'll be still able to invest in AI. But we're going to take that money, and we are going to invest it in exactly what you as social media corporations have undermined, which is one, our kids' academic and socio-emotional well-being, and we're going to do that through education. And two, trust as a society. And we're going to do that through an endowment for local journalism that offers grants to nonprofit local journalism enterprises throughout this country so that we can build trust from the bottom up. When it comes to the issue of crime, it was very interesting to see that during the campaign and in the exit polls, many voters, including some Democrats, felt as though the Harris

campaign did not take seriously enough the concerns around safety of our communities. At the same time, the longterm data was very clear, uh, homicide down, violent crime down, property crime down, right? So there was this kind of conflict between the narrative around crime we were hearing at Trump rallies with the lurid stories that I'm sure you've heard. And at the same time, the prevailing data that we saw, one of the things or go ahead, go ahead, Jake. Yeah. I'm a law and order liberal, and I'm going to push back on this a little bit. Am I wrong on the data or the perception? On the perception and on the data, actually.

Oh, OK. You are right. The homicides went down from a spike during the beginning stages of COVID. Yep. When my constituents walk into a CVS and every single thing in that CVS is locked behind a lock and key because of petty shoplifting that local DAs will not enforce. When my constituents walk to the hospital and walk through an open air drug market that nobody will enforce, they don't feel safer. Public safety is one element of a wider perception of public order. And we have seen major cities like New York and LA, Boston, I will say is better than most, but in Boston as well, have a sense of public order be undermined by, I think, a misplaced, although well-intentioned imperative on the left that somehow we shouldn't prosecute

lower order offenses, or that somehow the perpetrators of crime are just as deserving as the victims of crime. And that is just not simply the case. You do the crime, you do the time. We have to enforce all laws and we need to uphold public order so that people have the perception and the dignity of safety so that they want to participate in public spaces. Because actually, when you don't do that, what happens is the wealthy privatize that sense of security and the poor are the ones who are deprived of those public spaces. In other words, the wealthy can always just buy their way out of the situation in a way that not everybody can. And so you actually defeat the longer term goal of the crime of dealing with the crime to begin with. 100 percent.

This is not to say, by the way, that we should not be taking a public health approach to public safety. Some of the cities in my district are pairing social workers, substance abuse professionals with police officers to do first response. Do you know who the biggest champions of that policy are? The police officers, because it equips them to better handle a situation. Same thing with the sheriffs. The sheriffs in Massachusetts are some of the most progressive law enforcement officials in the entire country. 75% of their inmates have either mental health or substance use disorders. They are effectively hospitals, and they are taking a very progressive public health approach to how do they reduce recidivism by treating that population with a health first rather than a sort of punishment first approach. But at the same time, those people are still in jail,

right? Like they broke the law and they are in jail. And I don't, Democrats need to get away from this idea that somehow the law is voluntary. If we're going to hold Donald Trump to account for his outrageous pardons of January 6th, cop beaters, and for his depredations of the rule of law, we ourselves have to uphold the rule of law in the cities that we govern. So then if you had been advising the Harris campaign, would the approach be, Hey, fortunately, thanks to things Biden has done, national crime rates are down. But meanwhile, we did, we still need to enforce the law while actively working to what, like how, how would you wrap that up? So it sounds like you were both hearing people, but also recognizing some of the realities nationally of what maybe was achieved. Honestly, I'm not sure Kamala Harris needed my advice on this. If you go back and look at her book that she wrote, I think, in 2008, she herself articulated it quite well in that,

you know, funding the police, supporting police along with other law enforcement and public health professionals is the idea that that gets coded for politics, I think, is just a self-defeating idea for Democrats. That does not mean that we should support incarceration as the vector of rehabilitation. It's not. Incarceration is about public safety, but we've seen another vector of rehabilitation so that people can be productive members of society again. We need to be compassionate in understanding that a lot of the people who are committing crimes are people who were not given a great chance in life to start with. None of those things are mutually exclusive. I thought she said them all quite well in her book, actually. And maybe she just got, you know,

too many of these DC consultants telling her things that were contrary to her own clearly pretty solid instincts on the matter. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting you say that and that you noticed that because in March of last, a year ago, essentially, I was part of a small group of creators that met with the then VP who was not at that point the nominee and the person that I met with behind closed doors at the, uh, EOB was so different from what we saw after the first three weeks of the presidential campaign that the only explanation I've been able to come up with is the, the DC consultants and the focus group people got to her because my opinion was that the first three weeks, two, three weeks of the campaign were excellent and the rest of it was not so good.

I, I, I'm S you don't have to weigh in on that if you don't want. I, I, I understand. Um, okay. Final thing I wanted to ask you about the, the, um, state of the union, non state of the union, you know, joint address, address to ask you about the state of the union, non state of the union, you know, joint address addressed to a joint session of the House and Senate tonight. Is there anything in particular that you are wondering if you will see from the Republicans in that chamber with regard to where they line up behind Trump or not? And might the Ukraine Russia situation be one of

those areas? Or do you know exactly where your Republican colleagues are on this one? They're lining up behind Trump and there's really nothing you need to wait and see. My Republican colleagues are going to huff and puff and do exactly what Donald Trump wants. I know that from five years of bitter experience in this place. So whatever they say to me on the House floor in one-on-one conversations doesn't make me feel that much better because I see how they vote and I see what they say. And listen, I was a member of Congress for four years with a Democratic president. I get that it's not always comfortable to disagree with the leader of your party when that person happens to be the president of the United States

and you represent a district that voted for the president. But I did it. I did it on a number of occasions. And I explained to my constituents why I was doing it. And all I'm asking for the Republicans is to do the same thing, not on every single issue. I get it. They have a set amount of political capital they have to expend, but on the really important ones and the two ones that I want to see and that I'll be listening for tonight is one, impoundment. Congress cannot cede the power of the purse. If we cede the power of the purse and we allow the president to decide for what purpose and how much he spends money that we have appropriated and authorized, then we become a board of advisors, not a separate and co-equal branch of government.

And it's hard to overstate how important that distinction is. 400 years ago, parliament cut off King Charles's head because he disagreed with them on power of the purse. That's how important this is. It is literally the foundation of the Anglo-American conception of limited government. We have to win this fight. And I want to hear him say that he respects the rule of law regarding power of the purse. Am I going to believe him when he says that? No, but at least he's putting out there a statement that we can work with. And then secondly, Ukraine, he's got to, he has got to bend the trajectory that we are on towards a deal with Ukraine that provides it with security. I have never been someone who said that Ukraine has to join NATO. I've never believed that was necessary or even

advisable. Ukraine needs to join the European Union, which has its own collective defense treaty under Article 42.7. It's going to need $20 to $40 billion a year to fund a three-layered security architecture, a frontline, a rapid response force, and air defense for critical infrastructure. And we can pay for that with the Russian frozen assets, $200 billion of which are held in Brussels in Europe and France and Germany are increasingly open to using it. So the plan for security, the money, and even the diplomacy are actually kind of locked and loaded to go here. We just need the president to say the very simple

sentence of Ukraine is the good guy and Russia is the bad guy. And he has for 10 years been just constitutionally incapable of saying that. Yeah. And so is Pete Hegseth. And so has everybody who seems to be surrounding the guy. Congressman Jake Auchincloss will be watching tonight. I really appreciate your time and your insights today. Thanks for having me on David. without any effort. Our sponsor, Wildgrain, is the first bake from frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, pastries, and pastas. Wildgrain simply takes the hassle out of baking. Everything bakes from frozen in 25 minutes or less. No mess or cleanup. Your family will be amazed thinking you've become a master bread baker all of a sudden. My favorite is the croissants. You throw them in the oven, 25 minutes. Wow. If you're ready to bring all your favorite breads,

pastas, and pastries right to your doorstep, check out Wild Grain. You can build your box of artisanal pastries, breads, and everything right now. And for a limited time, Wild Grain Thank you so much for joining us today. Go to wild grain dot com slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. If you think that Elon Musk, Doge and Donald Trump can't or won't mess with Social Security, it's time to think again, because for the first time in history, your monthly benefits are at risk of not arriving. Millions of Americans rely on Social Security to survive. Thanks to Trump and his billionaire buddy, Elon Musk. There is now a real risk that those payments could be interrupted. Former social security commissioner Martin O'Malley, the guy who ran the agency,

just put out a dire warning and said that we could see Social Security collapse in the next 30 to 90 days, not because it'll be out of money, but because Trump let Musk so-called Doge slash funding and gut agency staff and they've already caused system outages. And if the system goes down, no checks, no benefits, no nothing. Now who's going to get hurt? Is it going to be Trump and his friends? No retirees will be at risk. Disabled Americans will be at risk.

People who have lost a spouse and now get survivor benefits are going to be at risk. If you need to file a new claim, maybe it's for retirement, maybe it's for disability. Good luck because they may not be enough employees left to process those new claims. The Trump Musk cuts are so extreme that the Social Security Administration started paying people to leave, offering early buyouts to workers. This is not about efficiency. This is a backdoor benefit cut. Congressman John Larson from Connecticut put it very bluntly. He said that if you lay off half the workforce and shut

down field offices, it will delay, disrupt or lead to denial of benefits. And the kicker is that the guy Trump just picked to run Social Security isn't even confirmed yet. He's a financial tech CEO, not a government official, not an expert on Social Security. So this is how they'll do it. You have to understand the games that they've been playing. We've recently seen interviews with Republicans who are asked point blank if any bill cuts even a dollar from Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid. Are you voting? No. And they play this game where they

say, I will not vote to cut benefits. But if we find waste, fraud and abuse, then of course I'm going to vote to cut that. But if you are paying attention, you understand how this is just a pretext. They still haven't even demonstrated any real fraud. Waste is sort of in the eye of the beholder. Certainly any massive institution, be it government run nonprofit or for profit. Once you get to a certain size, you're not going to be able to say every single dollar here is being spent in the perfect, most efficient way. That doesn't mean that there is fraud such that the program should be cut. And so this is all a pretext. This is how they do it. They don't come out and say, we're cutting social security. They make it harder to access.

They create chaos. They allow the system to fail. They say, oh, in order to continue receiving benefits, you need to re register in this particular way at this particular place. And if people don't push back, they are going to get away with it. Now, O'Malley, former Social Security administrator, says Americans are about to bring the heat to members of Congress over this, especially if their payments start getting delayed. I hope that that's the case.

They should. These are earned benefits. The term entitlement is often used to suggest that someone is entitled in the way that that Trump is right. Like like a little rich kid is entitled. The reason that it's called an entitlement is you've earned it. You've paid the money in. You held up your end of the bargain, which is on wages up to the social security cap,

which goes up index to inflation every year. You've contributed and as such, you are entitled to the benefits. It's not what a spoiled little entitled kid. It's you've earned it and therefore we must uphold our end of the bargain. You paid into the system your whole life and Trump is willing to play games with it. And Musk is willing to play games with it when they do the $880 billion cut from Medicaid. And they go, no, no, no, that we're not cutting benefits. This is a pretext to say, look at all the fraud we found. We're going to cut this. We're going to cut that.

Oh, you know what? We actually now are struggling financially and we're going to need to delay a payout. There are a bunch of different ways that you can delay or hinder receiving benefits without officially saying we are cutting 10 percent off of what people are entitled to. And that is exactly what they are doing. The final question, and many of you probably suspect where I'm going with this. If this happens, who will get blamed? Will some of the people whose payments maybe get delayed or whatever, will they realize

this is Trump, Musk, Doge and the 20 year olds who have been given the keys to the castle? Or will they find a Democrat to blame? Will they blame Biden? Will they blame, you know, the previous guy? Yeah, that guy. I don't know. Because if history has told us anything, it's that Republicans are very hesitant to blame Republicans when things go wrong. Hey, did you hear that border crossings are down 96% thanks to Donald Trump? Does that sound a little bit weird? Well, I hope this segment will be useful.

Tell me if it is. I'm going to walk you through the architecture of propaganda. Let's discuss this. Donald Trump's press secretary, Caroline Leavitt, put out a tweet on the former Twitter. We call them excretions now. Caroline Leavitt put out an excretion on X where she said, remember when Joe Biden and Democrats said they needed a border bill to secure the border. President Trump did this in four weeks and then she puts up this image, which is from Fox news, which claims that in 2022 there were 166,000 encounters on the Southern border. In 2023 it was 156,000 in 2024 it was 189,000 and somehow six thousand in twenty twenty four. It was one hundred and eighty nine thousand.

And somehow somehow in February of twenty twenty five, only eighty three hundred encounters on the southern border. Wow. A reduction of almost ninety six percent. That is incredible. How did Trump accomplish such a majestic feat? Well, it turns out that it's all made up and I do mean all of it. So the first thing of course is where did these numbers come from? Let's look at the numbers. The data is from Fox news. So the article that

this graphic was sourced from is called Trump reports illegal immigrant encounters at historic lows during first full month in office. February's apprehensions are a record setting low number. And if you look at the text of the article, all it says is Trump is claiming this number. It says the data is just Trump says that this is the number that we are down to. So we're being thoughtful here. We go back another level and we find out that Donald Trump said on Troth Central, and this is where all of the information came from. Trump said, quote, the month of February, my first full month in office, had the lowest number of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country in history by far.

There were only eighty three hundred twenty six apprehensions of illegals by Border Patrol at the US Mexico border, all of whom were quickly ejected from our nation or when necessary prosecuted. OK, so this is not data. This is not a report. This is a post from Trump on Truth Social. And the key word here is that Trump is talking about apprehensions. Now, you should be critical thinking, right? You should already be saying, wait a second. If we go back to the Fox news post, it said there were 8326 encounters. Whereas in Trump's post, he says there were 8326 apprehensions and counters apprehensions,

exact same number. But logic and reason should tell you some encounters don't lead to an apprehension. If you as border patrol encounter a farmer legally in the U S working on his field near the border, you have had an encounter, but there's no apprehension because there's no crime. Apprehensions are a subset of encounters. Encounters include people who were apprehended, people who were deemed inadmissible at a port

of entry, voluntary returns, encounters with documented individuals. All apprehensions are encounters, but not Allen. All encounters lead to an apprehension. And yet you have Fox news saying we had 8326 encounters and Trump says we had 8326 apprehensions. Something doesn't sound right. So then we go back further and we go to Customs and Border Patrol and you look at the official data and what we find is that the data includes not only apprehensions, but it also includes people who showed up at a

port of entry and said, I would like to come in and were deemed inadmissible. They are legally trying to get in and are told you can't come in. Nothing. There's no crime. There's no undocumented. It's just someone who showed up and said, I would like to come in and they were told you can't come in for whatever reason. This should be a bigger number when you say how many people were actually apprehended versus how many encounters the encounter number should be much bigger.

And what you see is that the numbers that Fox News puts up for past years, like, for example, February of 2024, are both apprehensions and inadmissibles. And they are comparing the big number apprehensions and inadmissibles to the supposedly, if you believe Trump only apprehensions, which is a much smaller number, 8,326. Imagine if I came to you and I said, look in 2022, a hundred thousand cars broke down in 2023, 110,000 cars broke down in 2024, 95,000 cars broke down. And in 2025, only 6,000 cars broke down. And then you look at the data and you realize that for 2025, I'm only including cars that broke down due to a tire blowout. But for previous years, I'm giving you all vehicular breakdowns, engine fire and O2 sensor, whatever. That would be very unfair. It would be deceptive. In fact, if you really want to compare apples to apples, we don't have the February number yet. It just hasn't been published. You go to customs and border patrol and you look at the data. We do not have the February 2025 number yet. Now that didn't

stop Trump from putting this post out on truth central. It didn't stop Fox news from then carrying that number as if there's any semblance of reason to think it's true. And it didn't stop Caroline Leavitt from then posting about it to Twitter. And then it didn't stop Elon Musk from retweeting what Caroline Leavitt posted. And it's nonsense. Now, there are two other issues. They are choosing February of 2024, even as the comparison number. However, the last full month that Joe Biden was in office was December and there were only 47,000 in December. So why would we even compare February to last February? Well, you could say there's a seasonality to it. Okay. But if the idea is to show the failures of Biden, it would make more sense to look at a more recent number to say, is the drop

really that significant from where we've been? Now, there's one other problem with citing this data. And we've talked about this before. You can argue a low number of apprehensions or a or a low number of encounters. It doesn't matter. You can point to a low number as a sign of success or you can point to a high number as a sign of success. Let me explain that and explain to you why this is also so bogus. Imagine that you want to celebrate a low number of encounters and apprehensions. You say my policies have scared people from even trying to come over. And all of a sudden we're not encountering or apprehending people because my policies

have been so good at dissuading people from even making the attempt. On the other hand, you could also say the reason that encounters and apprehensions are down is because we are not properly funding Border Patrol. We don't have enough Border Patrol agents. It's sort of the if you don't test, you'll have no covid cases. So you could similarly make the argument if you had a high number of apprehensions, we're doing a hell of a job. Look at how many people we are apprehending and sending back. And so the point here is whether you have a high number or a low number, you can always argue that it's a sign of success.

The number is so low because we're doing such a great job of preventing people from even coming over. The number is high because we're doing a great job at actually catching people before they get into the country. Either way, Trump would be claiming success. But in this particular case, the numbers are completely made up in the sense that we don't have the February data yet. Is this useful? Is breaking this down layer by layer useful in any way to you? Let me know if so. Info at David Pakman dot com.

All right. Tonight's the State of the Union address. I'll be live at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific YouTube, Twitch and Facebook. I'll be live at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific, YouTube, Twitch and Facebook. I hope that you'll join me. We also have a bonus show today. The cryptocurrency of Trump has collapsed and Trump supporters have lost 12 billion dollars. Oh, boy. As egg prices are continuing to soar now up 33 percent since Trump took office, U.S. Customs

and Border protection is cracking down on egg smuggling. People are smuggling eggs into the United States. And finally, Andrew Cuomo is attempting a political comeback running for mayor of New York city. And so far Democrats seem okay with it. We will talk about all of those stories and more when I am joined by producer Pat on the bonus show whose Mexican investigation continues. Remember that in three weeks, my first ever nonfiction book, The Echo Machine, will be available. I am doing a bunch of interviews promoting the book, a bunch of trips promoting the book.

You can get signed copies at David Pakman dot com slash booksmith. It's really happening. I'll give you an update on preorders tomorrow or the next day. And remember that we are doing what we can to beat back the right wing podcasters. We are making a concerted effort. No matter where you watch the show, help us by subscribing to the podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. show.