The David Pakman Show - 4/10/25: Trump randomly pauses tariffs, insider trading fiasco explodes

Episode Date: April 10, 2025

-- On the Show: -- Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) joins David to discuss possible insider trading allegations surrounding the Trump tariff fiasco, the latest with the Ukraine-Russia war, and much more -- An internal email suggests that a Trump-run government agency is specifically targeting David's book for removal from Amazon -- Donald Trump randomly pauses all tariffs, seemingly having no idea what is going on -- Donald Trump appears confused when asked why he paused all of the tariffs -- As Donald Trump was pausing all tariffs, his trade representative was testifying before Congress that no pause was coming -- Insider trading and pump and dump suspicions grow after strange patterns emerge during the Trump tariff pause and stock market fiasco -- Karoline Leavitt, Donald Trump's White House Press Secretary, gets absolutely destroyed by Trump's flip flop on tariffs -- Fox News host Charlie Gasparino admits that it is Donald Trump who capitulated on the tariffs, not foreign nations -- On the Bonus Show: House Republican holdouts threaten Trump budget bill, appeals court rules Trump can fire probationary federal workers, FBI Director Kash Patel replaced as acting head of ATF, much more... 🔬 Freedom From Religion Foundation: Text DAVID to 511511 or visit https://ffrf.us/freedom 🔊 Babbel language learning: Get up to 60% OFF at https://babbel.com/pakman 🧠 Try Brain.fm totally free for a month at https://brain.fm/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

. you know, I've gotta be honest when I started the show, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would be doing this story, but we are now in a situation where it seems as though the Trump administration is trying to get Amazon to ban my book. I'm going to explain to you what we know, not going to sugarcoat it, but this is what I believe is now going on. A Reddit thread was created this week. The Reddit thread is called Trump admin trying to remove books from online marketplace. The person who posted this is a regular poster in the Amazon AWS subreddit and seems to have deep knowledge of Amazon cloud hosting. Very much indicative that they are indeed an employee of Amazon in the post. They write, this is insane. I work for a very large cloud

services provider. We have a lot of government clients. Another side of our company sells books online. You have a hundred percent heard of them. So of course it appears that they're referring to Amazon. The individual seems to work at Amazon. AWS continues today. My boss got this email that one of our largest government clients is going to cancel their contract if we don't remove these books that are critical of Trump. This is nuts. We have nothing to do with the book side of the business. And even if we did, this is censorship.

I can't believe this is happening. My boss is pulling his hair out over this. No one knows what to do. Let's take a look at the email. The email seems to say book removal request. We S we just see the okay. And book book removal request, please be advised. We were recently contacted by redacted regarding renewal of their contract. Redacted maintains that they will not move forward with contract renewal Thank you. for removal. And as you can see at the bottom, the echo machine, how right wing extremism created a post-truth America, David Pakman. It has the correct ISBNs. You will also notice that our friend Brian Tyler Cohen's book is on the list. Heather Cox Richardson's book, Brian Stelter, Mary Trump, et cetera. We did some digging and made contact with a couple of Amazon AWS employees who said essentially no comment. I'm not touching this. This is radioactive. We were able to make

contact with someone who did acknowledge knowing a little more. And they said that this has been sort of brought up the flagpole and that legal as well as higher ranked folks at Amazon are now evaluating this. I'm almost speechless. You know, we we sort of started to think months ago, this is an administration that might start to touch things that we're doing. We're sort of big enough and they seem petty enough that they might touch what we're doing. Now could this be an extraordinarily elaborate hoax where the person making these claims has been posting for months with expertise about Amazon AWS in order to do this exact thing this week.

It's theoretically possible. It seems extraordinarily unlikely. So now the questions are the following. Number one, which Trump government agency is doing this? Number two, how is Amazon going to respond? Number three, would others follow suit if Amazon were to delist my book, which, by the way, we've already had preliminary conversations with lawyers. This may very well be a violation of the First Amendment in the sense that it would be government government imposing limitations on the speech of others in exchange for government contracts. This is potentially by far the biggest scandal that has even tangentially touched this

show. And it wouldn't be that tangential. It would be pretty head on. Would this be censorship? Of course. Would this go against their stated claims about how they value free speech? Of course it would. What can we do? I don't yet know the con we're talking to publisher lawyers, et cetera. Could there be a significant expense coming to try to keep the book listed on Amazon? I have no idea. I don't even think I would have any say in this. This seems to be between as shocking as this is. The book now seems to have been pressed between Trump government agencies and one of the biggest

companies in the world, Amazon, as to whether they would consider delisting this book in exchange for maintaining government contracts with the Trump administration. I just don't even know. How did we end up in this position? I mean, partially we know it's because of who was elected. So what are the immediate things that we can do? First of all, all the free stuff that you can do to just show support for the book and the show and to put us in the best position to if the hammer comes and if Amazon D lists to be able to make as much noise

as possible, please do those things. Make sure you're subscribed to the YouTube channel. It costs nothing. Make sure that you are on our sub stack newsletter, which by the way, if any of our other platforms get shut down, the only way I will be able to reach you would be sub stack. It's the only place where we own our data. We would have no way of reaching our YouTube subscribers. If we get shut down there or on any other platform, subscribe to the audio podcast, rate the audio podcast on Spotify and Apple. All these things are completely free. Now, if you can buy the book and I, this is crazy that I'm saying this in this case, it might actually make the most sense to buy the book on Amazon because that's the platform that is being

pressured to delist the book. Anywhere you can buy the book is great. Maybe in this particular case, buying the book on Amazon is one of the better protections to make the book as strong as possible. Certainly make sure you have reviewed the book if you have the book. And then at the end of the day, I don't know if we have a big legal thing coming. I don't know what the trajectory is of this. We're just starting to talk to lawyers. But if you can get a membership on my website at join Pacman dot com, that would go a long way to making us as robust as possible. You can use the coupon code.

Not again. It saves you about 50%. I hope by tomorrow to have more information about this. Some of the questions that I would love to ask people in the audience and you can contact us confidentially info at David pakman.com a Number one, does the image that we put up comport with the internal Amazon AWS communications platform? We've sort of anecdotally been told it seems consistent, but I would love something direct and someone more willing to say it directly.

We will keep your name completely out of it. That's question number one. Number two, can anyone at any level at Amazon independently corroborate that this specific, uh, discussion is taking place? And do you know anything about where that stands right now? Any information anyone has, uh, we would really appreciate because we are in a, this is uncharted territory. We have never been targeted in this way. And it is a reminder that when months ago I said, lawyers are starting to warn me. There are ways in which this administration could start to touch progressive independent media. Brian Tyler Cohen's book is on the list.

My book is on the list. We are in uncharted territory. So if you have any information you can provide, please get in touch. Info at David Pakman dot com. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube. Make sure you're on the Substack newsletter. Anything you can do is so appreciated because we're really up against it right now. As soon as I have more information about this, I will come to you with it. You know, on this program, we have talked about two really important changes happening in the United States. One is that more people

than ever have stepped away from organized religion. And two, we've talked about how Christian nationalism seeks to assert its dominance in so many of our institutions connecting church and state under the law in schools, in government, et cetera. I fully respect people's rights and freedom to believe anything they want privately. But we need to draw a line and say that can't be pushed onto others through government and through civil legislation and lawmaking and all of these processes. That is exactly what our sponsor, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, is fighting to do. Keep church and state separate, just like our founders intended. So no matter whether you're secular and you've always been

or you left religion or you're religious, but you understand that the founders said keeps church and state separate, the FFRF has your back. And I invite you to join the David Pakman show in helping the FFRF go to FFRF dot U.S. slash freedom or text David to 511 511 and become a All right. Well, the tariffs have been randomly paused by Donald Trump. He seems to have no idea why he did it. They cheered a stock market reversal yesterday, which only paired part of the 15 percent losses we had seen since March 24th. And then as we speak right now, the Dow Jones industrial average is back down another thousand points. Wow. Where to even start with this? First of all, all these people saying none of this makes sense. Why can't people just accept that the tariffs, which were permanent and not a negotiating tactic and weren't going anywhere, are now paused because every country gave Trump what he wanted, even though they actually gave him nothing?

Why can't you all just accept that? And of course, that's not actually my position that seems to be the sort of blended, combined, cumulative position of every MAGA acolyte who has been defending everything around this issue, even as the 180 turns continue. Now, I want to be super clear. Yesterday, after the tariffs were paused, markets rose eight to 10 percent, depending on the index that you looked at. For context, stocks were down 14 point point five percent since the Trump tariff announcement. They recovered yesterday about

nine percent, meaning they were still down six percent. And now they're down another thousand points, which is roughly depending on the market. We're looking at two point five percent down on the Dow, three point six percent down on the Nasdaq. So this is a complete and total disaster. But they've abstracted everything. They've stepped back from all of the details and are saying, hey, you know what? Trump did an amazing thing. He paused the tariffs for reasons he can't explain.

And we saw a partial recovery of the stock market still down as of this moment, something like nine percent. And Trump's calling it a victory despite nothing being fixed about trade and despite countries giving Trump nothing. If your belief was that the tariffs were being put in place because of things other countries were doing, which was Trump's claim, we need to do these tariffs because here's this country treating us unfairly, that country treating us unfairly. What is the victory? Because not a single country has conceded anything. It was only two days ago when Donald Trump was asked, are you open to pausing the tariffs? And his reply was, we aren't looking at that. Trump has now proved

that they have no plan. It's all just crisis to crisis, all caused by him. Here's a compilation from Sarah Longwell of all of the MAGA affiliated people over the last three days saying, no, no, no, we're pausing. Of course, this time I'm doing what I want to do with respect to the tariffs. Would you be open to a pause in tariffs to allow for negotiations? Well, we're not looking at that. The president was asked to answer this yesterday. He said he's not considering an extension or delay. I spoke to him before this briefing.

That was not his mindset. He expects that these tariffs are going to go into effect. There is no postponing. They are definitely going to stay in place for days and weeks. That is sort of obvious. The president needs to reset global trade. I don't think there's any chance that President Trump's going to back off his tariffs. This is the reordering of global trade. We're going to hold the course. And this has been years in the building, years in the making. This time I'm doing what I want to do with. And just like that, the tariffs are paused.

Now, here's the the there's going to be one takeaway to each aspect of this that we deal with. The first and critical takeaway here is that they are bragging about stocks being up yesterday, even though it didn't nearly recover the losses and they're down another three percent today. Here's Trump bragging. We've never had a day like this ever. You see what happened today? I don't know if it's still there. You know, this is I looked an hour ago, but we were up like close to three thousand points. Nobody's ever seen a day like that. I think that's a record, isn't it? So it's definitely a record. It's a big quarter.

We're going to have a record like that after watching. But because and there is Lutnik. Yes, sir. Now, of course, an actual person who cares about reality would say, well, sir, with tears in my eyes, I do have to mention we were down 15 percent. We've only recovered part of it, even accounting for yesterday's recovery. This is still one of the worst starts economically to any presidential term in 50 years. And by the way, nothing really has been resolved. And that's why today the Dow is down another thousand points. So completely just throwing darts at the wall.

Let's now ask the next question. Why does Trump say he paused the tariffs? You know, this is going to be a doozy. A very confused Donald Trump stood outside the White House yesterday to answer questions nominally as to why he stopped the tariffs or pause the tariffs. Better said, Trump doesn't know he's not able to explain it. Now, of course, in the vacuum of an explanation, suggestions include this was an insider trading pump and dump scheme, which we will talk about later and is now under investigation. This was Trump not really having

a plan, but because the stock market was going down every single day and people's retirement accounts had lost 15%, he panicked and reversed. But when Trump is actually asked for an explanation, why did you pause the tariffs? The explanations leave a little something to be desired. Here is Trump asked, was it the bond market that made you pause? See if you can make heads or tails out of this answer. It does take guts, believe me. The bond markets that persuaded you to reverse course. I was watching the bond market. The bond market is very tricky. I was watching it. But if you

look at it now, it's it's beautiful. The bond market right now is beautiful. But yeah, I saw last night where people were getting a little queasy. I think everything had. Well, the big move wasn't what I did today. The big move was what I did on Liberation Day. Right. We had Liberation Day in America. We're liberated from all of the horrible deals that were made, all the horrible trade deals that were made. And I was helped by people. Notice everyone standing behind Trump looks like they're at a funeral listening to this. It's like this senator, congressman and friends. All right.

So he doesn't really know. Was it the bond market? Well, I don't know. I looked at it, but it was last night or it was today. And really, the thing was the Liberation Day thing. But people were getting queasy. It doesn't really sound like every aspect of this was part of a beautifully orchestrated master plan. It doesn't sound like that at all. Trump on the market going back to still being below where it was before this fiasco started again, Donald Trump claiming

complete and total victory. You know, I think in financial markets cause they change, look how much it changed today. We went from, uh, you know, pretty moderate today, but over the last few days, it looked pretty glum to, I guess they say it was the biggest day in financial history. That's a pretty big change. And I think the word would be flexible. You have to be flexible. Like he's asking the question about some companies, some companies through no fault of their own. They happen to be in an industry that is more affected by these things than others.

You have to be able to show a little flexibility. Whatever he sees on TV five minutes prior is what guides his behavior. It's extraordinarily revealing about how ignorant this guy is. He can't think past. Do I turn on Fox or CNBC and see the numbers in the green or the numbers in the red? It's like there's not he lacks object permanence in a sense. It's like brain injury type stuff. And by the way, later tomorrow, maybe I don't know if I'll get to it today. There are now a finance experts who are saying we now wonder

if Trump is just insane, like clinically, whether there's something just wrong with with his brain, which is funny that eventually everybody comes around to the exact same conclusion. Trump was asked, would you consider giving exemptions to the tariffs if and when they are put back in place? It's just all nuts. Would you consider exempting companies that are being particularly hit hard? And Trump says he will use instinct to decide that this guy's instincts are no good. So the fact that he's going to employ instinct is terrifying. Speaker 4

Yeah, go ahead, please. Speaker 5 Would you consider exempting some U.S. companies, maybe some larger companies who have been hit hard in the markets last few days during this 90 day as time goes by. We're going to take a look at it. There are some that have been hard. There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder. And we'll take a look at that. I just instinctively more than anything else. I mean, you almost can't take a pencil to paper. It's really a more of an instinct, I think. Trump's instincts are terrible. The idea that he is using instinct should should terrify really all of us.

And then in an insane moment, Trump brags. He's sort of like privately hunched over and talking to some of the people that stood up there with him. And he is bragging about the stock market being up, you know, twenty five hundred points for the Dow, despite the fact that it was still down more than three thousand from when all of this started. All that matters is what happened in the last 10 minutes. You got the market seeing your brilliance. Yeah, that's almost seven points. Twenty five hundred points.

Nobody's ever heard of it. It's going to be amazing. Yeah. Yeah. You make an announcement. Yes. This is where we are. There is no plan. There is no master plan. It's reacting to what happens in the moment. And if you want to talk Kafka esque, you've got to see this next one.

Yesterday, the trade representative Greer was testifying before the election. And he said, you know, I'm not going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you.

I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be able to get a deal with you. I'm going to be this next one. Yesterday, the trade representative, Greer, was testifying before Congress. And during the testimony, Greer said, we are not pausing the tariffs. No, no, no, no. And during the testimony, the tariffs were paused. There ensued a conversation that I think calling it amateur hour

doesn't go nearly far enough. And this exchange, this exchange raises significant questions about market manipulation, about insider trading, all of which we will get to. But look, how can anyone trust the United States if this is how we do business when the trade representative is testifying to a while Trump is outside saying we are canceling a listen to this. Mr. Trade representative, are you aware that the tariffs have been paused? I am. Yes. When when when were you made aware of that? Well, I understood the decision was made a few minutes ago.

Sitting here under discussion, sitting here under discussion. So did you know that the that this was under discussion? And why did you not include that as part of your opening remarks? So typically what I don't do is divulge the contents of my discussions. What are the details of the pause? Speaker 1 Let's start. So so right there. That implies. That he knew Trump was considering a pause, but because those were private conversations, he showed up and testified to something completely different that this is his first claim.

It's not that I had no idea. It's not that they sent me up here like a lunatic to say you're doing one thing. And then while I'm here, you're doing a different thing. It's that I knew that he was considering it, but I can't testify to that because it was a private conversation. Well, then your entire testimony is just based on lying. Well, my understanding is that because so many countries have decided not to retaliate, we're going to have about 90 days. No, excuse me. You we are China increased their tariffs on the United States. Trump blinked.

What's the blink, sir? What do you know about this pause? What are the blink, sir? What do you know about this pause? What are the details of it? Well, the details, as I understand it, is that China continues to retaliate. Other countries didn't retaliate. The president two or three days ago said we wanted to negotiate with those countries that asked for that asked for meetings. That's what we're doing. What are the details?

How long is the pause? How many days? How many weeks? I understand it's 90 days. I haven't spoken to the president since i've been so the trade representative hasn't spoken to the president of the united states about a global reordering of trade that's right that's exactly what's going on yes i have i've just been in the hearing with you but yet he announced it on a tweet

yeah wtf who's in charge the president united states is in charge and what do you know about those details well as i mentioned it looks like your boss just pulled the rug out from under you and paused the tariffs the taxes on the american people there's no strategy you just found out three seconds ago sitting here. We saw you. We've been discussing if you came here knowing that you were going to be turned off, that these tariffs were going to be turned off. Why didn't you include that in your opening statement? Why didn't you reference that as part of your testimony? Well, I don't disclose my conversations with the president, sir. These were specific questions we asked you all along.

What's the strategy? These are real consequences for the American people and small businesses. I had a group of small businesses in my office earlier today talking about the impacts of these tariffs on aluminum and steel. This is amateur hour and it needs to stop. What does this even mean for your negotiating strategy? This is amateur hour and it needs to stop. What does this even mean for your negotiating strategy? How are you in charge of negotiation? It's this painful for an additional three minutes and then really hours if you want

to review the full testimony. When other countries see that this is the way the United States now operates, we lose credibility in humiliating fashion. Why would anyone enter into an agreement with a Trump administration that runs the country when these agreements mean nothing? And on a whim, because Trump sees a red number instead of a green number on Fox News or because someone shows up at the White House and gives them an idea, everything changes and does a 180 on a dime. Now, even if the stock market were to fully recover to the pre-tariff

levels, we would still have done irreversible damage because we are no longer credible as trade partners. But of course, that didn't happen. And as we speak, the Dow down another thousand points later in the show. We have to address the elephant in the room, which is was this entire thing a pump and dump insider trading scheme? I don't know the answer, but it's looking very, very ugly. Quick break. Back after this. What is the best way to learn a language? Immersion, living where the language is spoken and using it every day when that's not possible. You can still learn a language. And I think the second best way is Babbel. Our sponsor, Babbel is the science backed language learning app that works and works quickly. Don't pay hundreds of dollars

for private tutors or waste hours on apps that don't really help you start speaking the language. Babbel's quick 10 minute lessons are handcrafted by over 200 language experts to help you start speaking a new language in as little as three weeks. You know, when I travel to a country where I'm unfamiliar with the language, I just start using Babel a few weeks before I get on the plane. And I end up with a surprising level of comfort with the language. Once I'm at my destination, there are studies from Yale, Michigan State University and others that continue to prove Babel is better. One study found that using Babel 15 hours is like a semester of a language class at college. Babel has sold over 16 million subscriptions and all of Babel's 14

award winning language courses are backed by their 20 day money back guarantee. Here's a special limited time deal for my audience right now. Get up to 60 percent off your Babel subscription, but only for my audience at Babel dot com slash Pacman. Rules and restrictions may apply. Get up to 60 percent off at Babel dot com slash Pacman spelled B.A.B.B.E.L. dot com slash Pacman. Rules and restrictions may apply. The link is in the podcast notes. It's great to welcome to the program today, Senator Mark Kelly from Arizona. Senator, you I don't even know where to start, but let's start somewhere. We are seeing after what was hailed as a miraculous action of economic instinct, a big bump in the stock market yesterday, the declines resume in an environment that some of your colleagues like Senator Schiff

are concerned point more to market manipulation and pump and dump than just ignorance from the White House. I'd love to get your 30,000 foot view right now of basically dating back to March 24th when this stock market decline started. What do you think is the most important prism through which to understand what's happening with the tariffs and the market right now? Well, I think the best prism to think about this policy that we've seen put in place and then removed and then reinstated and changed over and over and over again is just the prism of competence and whether or not this administration is competent enough to administer the economy of the United States, the biggest economy in the world. I think, I don't know if it was yesterday or the day before, the president said something

that I think was rather instructive. He said, no other president would have done what I did. That's a quote from Donald Trump. And I think that's true. I think so, too. Yeah, because any other president would have known better and would know that the the path to success for our economy, for the American people, for American families, for American companies is not trade wars, especially with our allies. We do well in the world, not just because we are a military and economic superpower we do well because we have friends across the globe and that means we have business relationships and economic relationships that are positive and he just flipped those over you know he's like you know the guy that runs into the party and you, flips the whole table over with all the drinks on it. Right. I mean, that doesn't make any sense.

And I think over the last couple of days, he started to realize it. He's got a bunch of yes people around him. You know, folks at his secretary of commerce and treasury that won't tell him that his ideas stink. But when you destroy six trillion dollars of wealth practically overnight, you're going to hear you're going to hear from the outside world. And I think that's what happened here. Do you think there is at least enough to look into the market manipulation insider trading angle here? Yeah, with this administration, sure. I mean, a president and his family who have meme coins and the expected rug pull on them, in the case of at least one of them, that looks to be the case to me. I don't think that's been investigated. But I do think it's fair to

look into this. Was there anybody around him or maybe the president's stockbroker or anybody that could have some inside information that traded on that information? If you know what he's going to do, you know, you can you can pretty accurately predict when you're making big decisions like this, how the economy and how the markets are going to be impacted. In terms of your constituents in Arizona, if the tariffs eventually do come fully in force and start to trickle down to businesses of different sizes, you know, we're hearing about 3000 or $6,000 iPhones. And, you know, you, you hear about all this big picture stuff. Can you talk about some of your constituents in Arizona in tangible terms, what these tariffs could mean for the

prices that folks will ultimately be paying for products? Yeah, they're going to be paying a lot more. And it's and it's not, you know, trick. It's not trickling down over a period of time. It's happening already. I've got a friend that just told me that he has a container sitting in the port of Los Angeles that has $75,000 of product in it that he purchased from China. It has recently arrived. To get it out of customs, he has to pay $100,000 in tariffs. There's $75,000 of stuff in the container. He's immediately going to pass on as much of that cost as he possibly can to his customers. Probably can't do all of it, so there's going to pass on as much of that cost as he possibly can to his customers. Probably can't do all of it. So there's going to be losses for his business in the short term. And by the way,

if those tariffs get undone later, he doesn't get his money back. So we're seeing it already, and it's going to happen rather quickly. You talk about a $6,000 iPhone. I don't think somebody's going to buy a $6,000 iPhone. So that will hurt jobs at Apple. Apple employs a lot of people here in the United States. So those folks will start to see some job loss from this. And what ultimately happens is more people get laid off. The economy starts to shrink. We go into a recession. Some economists are saying that's already happening. Like we're going to see a second quarter of negative growth in the economy, which isn't good. When we have a recession, other bad things happen beyond just people losing their jobs. I mean, death rates go up. There are huge negative impacts. And this is

self-inflicted. This president inherited a rather decent economy. Inflation was coming down. Unemployment was low. The stock market was at the highest levels we've seen. Those are good things. We also had problems. I will admit it. Housing prices are too high. Yep. Prices of groceries are too high. He said he was going to address these things. And he is his policies have done exactly the opposite.

I'm curious your thoughts and maybe also, interestingly, the thoughts of your Republican, you know, Republicans in the Senate as well, if they share with you. We're starting to see, for example, in the new Republic, there's an interesting piece this morning that some of the economic experts in light of the last 72 hours, this is a quote, are wondering whether Trump is insane. In other words, to put it less cartoonishly, whether this is less about malevolence or grift, but it's just there's an instability of some sort fundamentally there. That's just one example. What do you and maybe some of your Republican colleagues privately think about the genesis of all of this and the kind of lack of a master plan? Is this about personal gain the way some propose? Is it there's

just a he doesn't know what he's doing or the wrong people are directing him. We saw you had a very sort of public conflict with Elon Musk, for example, who's behind a lot of what's going on, although he's against the tariffs. Interestingly enough, he's broken on that. How do you see it? I think the genesis is the one in the middle. Right. You remember what you said in the middle, you presented three different options were the last one, people around him. The first one was something else. And I already forgot what it was. Maybe I got the same. That he's insane. That one. I don't think it's that. Okay. I think it is. He just doesn't really

have a good grasp on what it takes to make good decisions. He says this, he admits to it. He goes with his instincts, but he's got bad instincts. That's why he's filed for bankruptcy multiple times. That's why he couldn't successfully run a casino, which by the way, you can make an argument, is a business that just is a money printing machine. And he wasn't able to successfully do this. So I think it's that piece of it. Hey, this is a guy who said he is a genius over and over again.

Have you ever heard anybody say such a thing? I can only think of one other person. I'm not going to name who it is. Uh, but one other person that's ever said this to me, that they're really, really smart, smart people generally don't say that. He says it repeat. I haven't heard him say it in a while. And I certainly don't think he would risk saying it this week. But he says he says it a lot. Smart people don't say that. We are only seven and a half months from 2026, as crazy as that is. And very soon voters are going to start to think about, OK, here's how this has gone so far since the president was sworn in. Here's how it's gone with Republicans controlling the House and Senate. We now have some choices to make.

One of the things that I'm hearing from my audience when, when we've heard from Senator Booker, for example, or Senator Schiff is that we see really well-intentioned people, but we're not feeling that they're articulating specific reasons to vote for Democrats in November of 2026. Yes. A lot of bad things are happening. Yes. Trump's incompetent. The grift, the scams it's yes, absolutely. But to some degree we can't just be voting against that. We need something to vote for.

And a lot of people in my audience, and I know that that at the town halls, this sometimes comes up as well, aren't thrilled right now with the state of the Democratic Party. What needs to happen between now and 2026 to change that? Well, I get their frustration. We suck at the messaging side of this. We're not really we're not good at it. I think Democrats generally are good at the policy to and we get too specific about the stuff we're trying to do and not enough about how it affects real people at home, sitting around their kitchen table with all like, like my mom. I remember my mom used to, was the one who was paying the bills. She'd have all this stuff out. They paid it. She paid a lot of money for a calculator when calculators became a real thing. And I remember it sitting on

the kitchen table and she would have to figure out how to manage this stuff. Because at the time, my dad was a police officer. She was a secretary and a waitress. That's most families in America are just trying to figure this out. And I think Democrats, we just kind of suck at explaining what we're trying to do here to help them. Elections are about choices. They're going to have to evaluate what this president and this administration is doing, which in my view, really, really bad, not helping them, just helping billionaires at the expense of them and their families. Prices are going to go up. Billionaires are going to get a big tax cut. People are going to lose their Medicaid if they get their health care through Medicaid. Or in Arizona, it's called access. In most states, it's not called Medicaid, by the way.

Right. And people don't even realize that they get their health care from Medicaid. I did a couple of town halls on this week ago and heard from people that this is going to really hurt. So, David, to answer your question, we got to do a better job explaining this stuff because we, we've, we've failed pretty miserably at it so far. Uh, I'm committed to trying to do better. I'm trying to reach people where they're at, not just on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox news on podcasts like yours and others on social media, um, on Twitter, even though it's owned by Elon Musk.

We go we go and use Twitter. It's a platform that reaches a lot of people. It's it's kind of a hellscape now when I don't advise people to look at the comments now. But what about like, for example, to take one of these issues, crime, right? Because one of the things that was true during the 2024 campaign was that nationally crime was down. We've seen, we've seen the data, right? We see the national statistics. Violent crime is generally trending down.

Property crime is generally trending down. At the same time, many voters felt, we know from exit polling data and from people who call in, they felt concerns about crime were dismissed by Kamala Harris's campaign. And so crime may have been down nationally, but people felt invalidated with regard to what they were seeing in their communities. What's the right messaging on that from Democrats to both acknowledge that crime is down, but also this is still a concern and your your concerns are heard. I don't think we got that in 2024.

Well, maybe you don't acknowledge that it's down. Crime is always a real concern. There are people getting murdered every day in our country and they're getting robbed and they're getting ripped off. So maybe you don't have to acknowledge the first part that it's down. Maybe you say, hey, here are the solutions that we have for this. You know, that's what we want to do. We want to deport criminals. I do. Gang members, they should get kicked out of the country with due process. And by the way, we want to be careful enough that we don't kick out people that don't fall into those

categories when there is no reason. We've got to be incredibly careful and folks need to have their due process rights and a day in court. But we've got to have solutions to problems. Getting firearms, this is an issue I used to work on, and my wife Gabby Giffords does every single day, is getting guns out of the hands of criminals and domestic abusers and people who are mentally ill. That's a big problem. Until that number gets driven down to zero, especially among kids, it's still a big problem in this country. Even if it's one kid getting shot and killed because of a firearm in the hands of somebody that shouldn't have them have one. That is a big problem. So I think that's probably the way we should we should approach this. And I do think we have better we have better ideas and better solutions.

I mean, it was up to the Republican Party and the people around them and the people that they listen to, it would be everybody would be carrying a gun on every street in America and nobody would be safe. That's what they claim. Everybody would be safe, of course. But if you look at data and now here I am going to I'm going to talk about the wonky side of this that doesn't work well in talking to regular people. But but just think about it for a second. If there is a gun in every conflict, just one, especially two, it's more likely somebody gets shot. And when somebody gets shot, they get killed. And the statistics support that where there are stronger gun laws, there is less gun violence. That is true. That's factual. But I think on issue after issue,

I think we have better ideas. Billionaires can pay more in taxes. They shouldn't be getting a tax cut. And if they do, we can stabilize programs in a positive way, like Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, when people pay their fair share. We want a strong national defense. I'm on the Armed Services and the Intelligence Committee. We have to do it in a smart way.

We have to put competent people in these jobs. Pete Hegseth is not a competent sec def. The guy had no business even being considered. His name should have never been in front of the president as an option. But he got selected because he spent nine years on Fox News. So you have to put, as Democrats, I think we like to put really competent people in jobs. This administration puts people who are on TV. That's the number one qualification for them. And we got to keep fighting. You know, I'm here

in Washington, D.C., every day fighting for my constituents and for the American people and pushing back on this administration when they do dumb things. And when I can find some opening where maybe they do have a decent idea or maybe I have a good idea that they can adopt, which they did yesterday with an executive order on what's called the Ships for America Act, which is to rebuild the Merchant Marine, I will work with them. Because the goal at the end of the day is that we have a an economy that's working for everybody and that everybody's safe. Those are the two things that really matter. Every senator, you you've got your work cut out for you for sure. But I think that you're absolutely what you're saying, I believe, will resonate with my audience

anyway, that the messaging and the way that Democrats are dealing with some of these issues definitely can use a little bit of a modification, for lack of a better term. Senator Mark Kelly, of course, from Arizona, really appreciate your time today. Thank you, David. Appreciate it. Do you ever feel like it's tough to stay focused? your time today. Thank you. designed to support ADHD brains. Brain.fm's music works within minutes and it delivers results. A peer-reviewed study showed

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try it for free for 30 days when you go to brain.fm slash Pacman, you can get access to brain FM's entire library of science supported focus music for an entire month. Totally free. I think you'll find that as useful as I do. Go to brain dot FM slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes. Well the obvious is now happening. There are calls for an insider trading investigation over the Trump stock market fiasco over the

last 10 days. You might remember that this week Donald Trump posted this is a great time to buy just minutes before stocks exploded upward. Coincidentally, right after he announced a sudden pause on these disastrous tariffs and markets soared for the day. S&P 500 jumped over 9% in an afternoon. Trump's own media company ticker DJT was referenced in his post, which some people sort of read as a not so subtle wink wink. And now Senator Adam Schiff is asking the question that we should all be asking, which is, does Donald Trump commit insider trading or market

manipulation? And I want to talk about what that means. Insider trading is illegal when someone uses nonpublic material information to buy or sell stocks for personal gain. For example, if the president knows he's about to make a move that will dramatically move markets and he or someone who knows that he's going to do it profits from that knowledge, that would be illegal insider trading. There's also market manipulation where you're creating artificial market movements through misleading statements or rumors or timed announced announcements also to benefit yourself or other people that know what you're doing financially. That is also against the law. Now let's go back to Trump. The setup is Trump's trade war. Trump's trade war drove markets into chaos and stocks were tanking down 14.5% from their

peak on March 24th. You then get the flip. Trump abruptly pauses most of the tariffs with no hint that it was coming. And in fact, after spending three days alongside people that work for him, denying, denying that that's what they were going to do. That causes markets to spike bond yield, stabilize oil prices, recover. And of course, S and P 500 NASDAG as Trump calls it, the Dow, they all surge. The post of course is Trump saying this is a great time to buy on truth central timed perfectly for this massive one day rally.

If it sounds coordinated to you, you are not alone. And Adam Schiff says that he's going to investigate. Now, Senator Tim Kaine says that people on the street, even barbers, have expressed suspicion that this was all a sort of pump and dump insider trading style fiasco because that's what it looks like. You create a panic, drive prices down, pull a surprise reversal and cash in on the rebound. Now the question is, did Trump and his allies trade on this? Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wants to know.

She put out a tweet on Twitter where she said any member of Congress who purchased stocks in the last 48 hours should probably disclose that. Now I've been hearing some interesting chatter on the floor. Disclosure deadline is May 15th. We're about to learn a few things. It's time to ban insider trading in Congress. We also saw, by the way, that Nasdaq trading volume spiked minutes before the 90 day tariff pause was announced. This is nowhere near the first time that Donald Trump has been accused of shady financial moves. This is probably not

going to be the last time, but there is something different about this one because when the president uses presidential power to tank the stock market and then ride the rebound, it's not politics anymore. If it can be proven it's criminal. Does crime matter anymore? That's a different question. Uh, Caroline Levitt, who is Donald Trump's white house press secretary has self-destructed over Trump's tariff flip-flop here is, uh, uh, Tuesday versus Wednesday. Okay. And then we'll look in more detail at each of

these Tuesday, Caroline Levitt saying no tariff pause. Of course not. And then yesterday after the tariff pause, the president was asked to answer this yesterday. He said he's not considering an extension or delay. I spoke to him before this briefing. That was not his mindset. He expects that these tariffs are going to go into effect. And there will be a 90 day pause on the reciprocal tariffs as these negotiations are ongoing

and the tariff level will be bringing the brought down to a universal 10% tariff. Many of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal. You clearly failed to see what president Trump is doing. Quite a different situation there. As you can tell, let's dig in a little more. Here's what Caroline had to say on Tuesday in a little more detail. Elena, it's clear the president's on the world's attention with these tariffs. Is there is he considering at all potentially holding off on imposing some of them before the deadline or maybe later, you know, reversing them because he's having these negotiations and having these good talks with other leaders? The president was asked and answered this yesterday.

He said he's not considering an extension or delay. I spoke to him before this briefing. That was not his mindset. He expects that these tariffs are going to go into effect. And you said something very important, Elena, in your question. You said the president has captivated the attention of the world. Absolutely he has. And it's about time we have a president in the Oval Office who is

putting the world on notice and is putting the American people first and again, is using the leverage of the United States to negotiate good trade. Very strong, very definitive, very clear. And then yesterday, Caroline Leavitt with a straight face standing out on the front lawn of the White House and saying, this is Trump doing deals. Why can't everybody tell that he's doing deals? He's not reversing. Excuse me. Excuse me, your call.

If I could just add to what the secretary said, many of you in the media clearly missed the art of the deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here. You you tried to say that the rest of the world would be moved closer to China when in fact we've seen the opposite effect. The entire world is calling the United States of America, not China because they need our markets, they need our consumers, and they need this president in the oval office to talk to them. And of course, no mention of the fact that now she defends Trump's pause as the greatest sign of strength in the world, except 24 hours before she was insisting pause.

Of course not. Trump's strength comes from the fact that there will be no pause. But that was Tuesday. And then Wednesday, Trump's strength comes from the fact that, of course, he paused. He's so strong. Everybody capitulated. Everybody came to him. Now, in a very funny moment, Scott Besant was asked, can you tell us more about the

decision making process? And he just says, no, I can't. Can you explain what the decision making on what feels like a reversal here? I mean, just these went into effect less than 15 hours ago. These tariffs. Why the pause now? What led to that? No, again, President Trump created maximum negotiating leverage for himself. And

which tariffs went into effect 15 hours ago? The ones that we have lowered went into effect a week ago. They were announced a week ago. And we've just been overwhelmed, overwhelmed by the response from mostly our allies who, this is of course a lie, but of course he can't really explain the decision making process because the decision didn't make sense. There's no barometer or rubric that is being employed here. It's not, Hey, you know what? 25 countries have agreed to lower their tariffs and therefore we are going to lower our tariffs

or eliminate tariffs on those 25 countries. Now Trump simultaneously said, we're going to go up even further on the Chinese tariffs from, I guess most recently 104% to 125%. What are these numbers even mean at this point? And simultaneously pause the tariff. So it's all happening completely erratically. And the funniest part about all of this is that there's a guy on Fox news who was willing to admit this isn't Trump winning.

This is Trump capitulating. I want to talk about that next. Charlie Gasparino is a, um, a correspondent, a reporter on Fox news for lack of a a correspondent, a reporter on Fox News, for lack of a better term, a reporter on Fox News. I know it sounds funny. And occasionally he will just sort of acknowledge basic realities about the world around him. And he made clear yesterday after Donald Trump paused the tariffs that Trump didn't win here. Trump is the one who capitulated. And Gasparino even says this pained me to admit. But Trump didn't win this thing. Trump's the one who gave in. Take a listen to this. Well, I mean, because of the mixed messaging, how can you how can you doubt them? I mean, let's be clear what happened. You know who capitulated here and why. And, you know, I don't want to say this because

I'm a patriot. I'm an American. And I work on Fox News where we're supposed to say Trump always does everything right. But it is the White House who capitulated based on everything I hear and all my sources. and the reason why is because of the bond market and what happened last night you know best knows this better than anybody when you have yields on the five ten-year rising to five percent stuff starts shutting down when you have the lending markets screwed up by the way who was dumping the bonds somebody asked him if it was china right it

wasn't it was China, right? It wasn't. It was Japan. While he was negotiating with Japan, Japan, according to my sources, were running major money management firms that are involved in the bond market without giving up names. Japan was dumping bonds because they believed this was not a great place to do business. That forced their hands. Now, what you can say, I think, legitimately here is Trump decided to take the win. And here's why. There was overwhelmingly, you know, deal potential here among the entire world, except for maybe China,

right? Everybody really wanted something. So he did take the win. But make sure make make no mistake about it. Peter Navarro was talking as of yesterday about not taking the wind and now they did and it's all because of the bond market. I want to put, so Gasparino, you know, he's got to soften the blow and he has to couch it as this is a win in the sense that we are seeing, uh, the bond market stabilize and there were some countries who agreed that they'd be willing to come to the table to negotiate. Even though we were originally told this is not a negotiating ploy. This is just what needs to be done because other countries are doing bad things and it's not up for negotiation.

You all know because you've been following this now for weeks that there is no rhyme or reason to any of it. But the key part is that Gasparino knows that the White House capitulated, though they didn't. The idea that they came to the table willing to negotiate, that doesn't actually solve anything. You still got to negotiate and you've got to get whatever deals fixed that Trump claims are unfair. Now, another interesting note, because this is going to be the next thing that we're up against. Gasparino also mentioned that now because of the increased tensions with China, the possibility of a tick tock saving bill to avoid a tick tock ban in the United States. Gasparino says no way tick tocks going by.

Barr was talking as of yesterday about not taking the win. And now they did. And it's all because of the bond market. I want to point out one other thing because of China, there will not be a tick tock deal. OK, that the White House has confirmed to me that is basically off the table. So now, of course, you might be saying, could that possibly be true? Trump loves tick tock now. Now, of course, he has conflicting motivations. He wants to hurt China, but he also wants to probably keep TikTok as he

sees it as a platform where he got his message out. He believes the young people during the election and there are people on both sides of the aisle that want to save TikTok. There are some people on both sides of the aisle that want TikTok to go. I wouldn't read much into this other than Gasparino is correctly identifying that there is a huge emotional component to this. And because Trump's mad at China, the primary prism through which the tick tock future is evaluated is can I hurt China by denying tick tock access to the American market? Whether any of this will come true, we have no idea. But it reminds us of the vindictive and childish nature of the way that this white

house does business. Now on the bonus show today, there's a budget bill now that is growing in importance, including because a lot of people expecting Trump to cut the military budget. We knew he wasn't going to are shocked that the budget now has even more money for the military. And there's a bunch of other sort of interesting points of discussion related to the budget. There are Republican holdouts to this budget bill and the vote has been postponed because Republicans may not even be on the same page about passing this budget.

And that's in the middle of this entire tariff and stock market crisis. So we'll talk about that on the bonus show. The, uh, um, an appeals court has ruled that the Trump administration can fire probationary federal workers. Again, there was one ruling that they can't now it's been appealed. The new ruling is yes, they can. Where is this going and what is this all about? We will discuss. And finally, you may recall, this wasn't a huge story, but you may recall that FBI director Kash Patel was also made head of the acting head of the ATF. He has now been replaced by Army Secretary Driscoll in that role. And this is a bigger deal than maybe is obvious until you start digging beneath the surface a little bit. So all of that,

we will be talking about on today's bonus show. Oh, the bonus show where you want to make money. Yes. Everybody else that makes money to fund themselves is bad. Remember that my book, The Echo Machine remains available at least for now everywhere books are sold. The future of that statement is sort of in question. You can get instant access to the bonus show by signing up at join pacman.com and make sure you're on my newsletter. You can email info at David Pakman dot com to get on that newsletter or go to David Pakman dot substack dot com. Great to see everybody. See you on the bonus show. See you back here tomorrow.