The David Pakman Show - 4/2/24: Project 2025 goes nuclear, Biden fundraising goes nuclear

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

-- On the Show: -- Adrienne Shropshire, Executive Director of BlackPAC, a left-leaning political action committee focused on mobilizing and engaging with African American voters, joins David to discuss the false narrative that there is a massive racial realignment happening such that non-white voters are flocking to Donald Trump in 2024 -- A deeper dive at the authoritarian nightmare that is Project 2025 -- Donald Trump is scamming his followers with faux economic populist rhetoric once again, and they are falling for it once again -- President Joe Biden defends and supports the trans community on Trans Day of Visibility, while Donald Trump calls its overlap with Easter "blasphemous" -- President Joe Biden raises more money in one night, $25 million, than Donald Trump raised in all of February -- Confronting the harsh reality that the real problem is not Donald Trump, but rather the tens of millions of voters willing to vote for him -- Former Donald Trump voters explain the one major reason they abandoned him in 2024, the threat that he represents to democracy -- Voicemail caller threatens to cancel his Membership over Producer Pat's mixing up of "tragedy" and "travesty" on the award-winning, world-famous Bonus Show -- On the Bonus Show: Another Republican guilty of voter fraud, Google forced to delete Incognito mode data, New York inmates sue to see solar eclipse, and much more... 🔊 Babbel: Get 50% OFF a lifetime subscription at https://babbel.com/pakman ⚠️ Try Ground News and get 40% OFF the Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 🖥️ Malwarebytes: Get 50% OFF with code PAKMAN at https://malwarebytes.com/pakman 💪 Athletic Greens is offering FREE year-supply of Vitamin D at https://athleticgreens.com/pakman 🛌 Use code HELIXPARTNER20 for 20% off + free bedroom set at https://helixsleep.com/pakman -- Become a Supporter: http://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thedavidpakmanshow -- Subscribe to Pakman Live: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanlive -- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidpakmanshow -- Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave us a message at The David Pakman Show Voicemail Line (219)-2DAVIDP

. The authoritarian nightmare that is project 2025 is fortunately on the minds of many in my audience. And that's a good thing. I've been hearing from some of you who are saying, David, the threat from project 2025 is not being explored nearly enough. And occasionally someone will write in and say, David, are the fears about Project 2025 a little bit overblown?

And that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm going to skip right to the conclusion, which is Project 2025. Fears are not overblown. Project 2025 is, of course, this plan involving the Heritage Foundation and 100 other partners to if Trump wins, if Trump becomes the president, really turn even the nonpolitical and more bureaucratic aspects and elements and departments of government into partisan MAGA ideological actors. It will scale up the power of the presidency. It will diminish any ability to work beyond partisan lines.

And it would be the authoritarian nightmare that Jason Stanley spoke about on MSNBC. We're going to listen to a very short clip here. Here is Jason Stanley, former guest on the show. Check out his interviews, an expert on authoritarianism and more. And he explains how this is the blueprint for a second Trump term. And remember, on yesterday's show, we looked at Maga Mike Johnson saying this will be the priority. We're going to do the things that are laid out in Project 2025 if Trump wins and if Maga

Mike is still in power, which is a question. Here is Jason Stanley explaining it. And then we're going to delve into it in some more detail. Now, Project 2025 is a blueprint for the second Trump term, and its first priority for the Department of Commerce is to replace employees by make all decision making done by political appointees. Right now, just imagine that that's they're supposed to provide us with independent information about the economy. Instead, they'll be providing us with the kind of information used to justify whatever will increase Trump and his cronies wealth.

Now, I want to before we dive more deeply into Project 2025, I want to address one piece of misinformation that's being spread by Republicans about Project 2025 to try to defend it. Many Republicans, when they are confronted with the reality of Project 2025, will link to articles that say, for example, oh, Biden is cleaning house of Trump's political appointees and saying, see, look, every president does this. And the, of course, reality is no, no. As we have talked about before, when a new president comes in, they often replace ambassadors around the world.

They replace cabinet members, the secretary of state, the secretary of Homeland Security Transportation. They replace a number of other political appointees at various departments, but they don't go in and mass fire career bureaucrats in nonpolitical positions and replace them with political loyalists. That's what Project 2025 is about. When Stephen Bannon, Trump's former propagandist, talks about deconstructing the administrative state, it's very poorly coded and thinly veiled language to say we are going to take positions

that are not historically political and we are going to put in loyalists who will, you know, yes, men and yes, women who will do whatever the hell Trump wants. Now, there are a lot a lot of specifics to talk about here. The specifics of the nonpolitical positions where we would see replacement with political loyalists are only part of the plan. But the plan overall is turn the federal government in some total that's S.U.M. total into the operational arm of MAGA. And that's a major shift. That's a major shift even from traditional conservative strategies where it used to be. This isn't me looking at Mitt Romney or William F. Buckley or Reagan through rose colored glasses. This is a reality. It used to be that traditional conservatives wanted to limit government through fiscal

measures and through reduction in size of government. Now we could agree or disagree with them. In many cases, I disagreed with them, but they weren't looking to turn every department and every bureaucracy into a political tool. They wanted to in some cases, they wanted to diminish the power in those cases. And when Trump talks about expanding Schedule F, it's a phrase you'll often hear him use. It's not even clear he knows what it means when they talk about expanding Schedule F. It means growing the percentage of federal workers who can be fired. And in many

cases, it's by tens of thousands of roles. And they want to do that to many policymaking roles. They want to focus in on the Department of Justice and the FBI. They say we're not for defunding the police. It's Democrats who are defunding the police. But now, unfortunately, for unfortunately, for those who still understand how the country is supposed to function, Republicans see the Department of Justice and the FBI as obstacles to right wing policy. So that's another change they want to make. Defund and deconstruct the DOJ and the FBI.

They want to reclassify federal employees as at will workers to make it easier to fire them and then to replace them with political loyalists. They they want to overhaul is the word they use a bunch of different departments. And that will limit the independence of many of these departments. And it will allow for the political reversal of many policies that have built been built up nonpolitically across many administrations. And of course, at the end of it, there is in some cases we want to reduce the federal workforce. We may want to eliminate some departments, but their ability to get that done in four years is quite limited. So what we are talking about is turning everything about the federal government into weaponized political positions. And in my view,

anybody who dismisses this as not that much of a concern is really missing an extraordinary danger to the way this country was supposed to function. We will see how far they get if they win. I'd rather not see it. Unfortunately, we now are going to go from Project 2025 to economic policy because they are falling for it again when it comes to Trump's economic policy. Let's talk about that next. Failed former President Donald Trump is using the same nonsense talking points that even he doesn't understand that he promised in 2016 and he's promising them again in 2024 and his followers and loyalists are falling for them. We're going to talk about this in a little bit of detail today. Let's do some thick and meaty policy discussion. If you go to Trump's website,

hey, this this doesn't take a genius. OK, go to Trump's website and you look at Trump's positions on issues. And today we're going to look at some of the economic elements that Trump outlines and what you are going to notice. We're going to start with Trump's bullet point, rebuild the greatest economy in history. You will very quickly see that these are the same promises Trump made in 2016 and 2020, many of which he failed to deliver on, but is now taking credit for anyway. And he's offering it up for twenty twenty four. What's the definition of trying the same thing three times, even though it keeps failing? I forget what that is. The Trump issues page says Trump passed record setting tax

relief for the middle class, doubled the child tax credit and slashed more job killing regulations than any administration has done before. Number one, the tax cuts were not record setting in any way. There were disproportionately benefits for corporations and wealthier people. The corporate tax rate was cut from 35 to 21 percent. The tax cuts for individuals expire next year. But this concept of record setting tax cuts, not record setting by any any stretch of the imagination.

Trump did double the child tax credit from one thousand to two thousand dollars per eligible child. But if you think that that's good, Biden raised it even more. So if you like what Trump did with the child tax credit, you should really like what Biden did. But they don't. They only liked it when Trump did it and claiming to cut regulations, including ones that are, quote, job killing, always extraordinarily subjective, which regulations they never tell you. We don't

know what the hell he's talking about. All right. So that's rebuilding the economy. We move on to fair trade for the American worker. And here it says Trump recognized you can't have free and open trade if some countries are exploiting the system. And it points to Trump doing three things kill canceling the Trans-Pacific Partnership, replacing NAFTA with USMCA and renegotiating the one sided South Korea deal, as well as imposing tariffs on China. Let's not even deal in the immediate with TPP. TPP is complicated. There's pros and cons. Trump did say the U.S. won't be a party to it. OK, I don't think he really understood it. But Trump focuses here

on replacing NAFTA and tariffs on China. I want to remind you that Trump replaced NAFTA with USMCA, which is almost identical, with the exception of some percentage of vehicles built in order to qualify for different pricing. It's very modest differences. He changed it in name. I won't say in name only, but mostly in name. And also remember that the tariffs actually cause inflation. They don't really hurt China in the way Trump thinks they do. And the tariffs were paid by American companies. So same stuff on trade, same failed ideas and lies about what he did. And then thirdly, on the economy, this is still from Trump's website.

Unleash Energy Dominance, where Trump brags Trump's website, brags about the US becoming the number one producer of oil and natural gas and getting so-called energy independence. As a reminder, under Joe Biden, we remained independent when it comes to oil and natural gas production. And we had more oil production than ever before under Biden. I'm not even saying that's good, but we did. And we also had more oil production than any other country last year under Joe Biden. So I'm not bragging about oil.

I think we should get off of oil. But if you love oil the way Trump and his followers claim to, Biden was better by their own standards. So we have the exact same promises that Trump made in 2016 or the exact same claims to accomplishments that Trump made in 2020 in 2024. It's eight years later. Much of the stuff wasn't a good idea to begin with. Much of the stuff Trump is lying about having done and much of the stuff Trump did was actually bad for the economy. But they are falling for it again.

And if you go to the rallies and you see the interviews that Luke Beasley and others do, you see that they believe it. And when you say, well, but what about the fact that he already promised this or that it was bad for the country or that he says he did it, even though he don't care, he's got the right ideas for 2024. They're falling for it again. And it should make us all extraordinarily concerned about what's going to happen in November.

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Joe Biden isn't in charge of when Trans Day of Visibility is. And yet so many people, including at least by implication, the failed former President Donald Trump, are furious with Joe Biden for trying to turn Easter into a woke day of trans remembrance and visibility and support and everything else. And it's woke and it's blasphemy. Let's discuss it. And this really takes a special kind of call it whatever you want. Joe Biden, LGBTQ Nation reports.

Joe Biden calls trans people the fabric of our nation in a trans day of visibility proclamation. Joe Biden and the Biden administration putting out a statement and it included the line, whether serving their communities or in the military, raising families or running businesses, they meaning the trans community, help America thrive. Perfectly reasonable message. You're not saying anything about I'm going to use the words they use, quote, men and women's sports, which is an obsession for MAGA people. I don't know why they're not saying anything about mutilation, which they love to talk about so-called mutilation. This is just it's so simple. It's hey, these are folks in our community. We value them.

They do everything that others other Americans do to make the country a nice place to be. And that's it. You can read the entire declaration. So then conservatives start flipping out. Mother Jones reports Easter falls on Trans Day of Visibility this year. The right blames Biden. And indeed, this article, which we will link to, outlines how, quote, across social media, right wing posters are complaining that President Joe Biden

has usurped Easter Vivek Ramaswamy. Remember when he was the voice of reason? Joe Biden just proclaimed that Transvisibility Day is on Sunday. I wonder how he came up with that date. Well, Joe Biden did not come up with that date at all. I will get to that in a moment. Here is Donald Trump's statement about this, saying, quote, Statement from Trump campaign on Joe Biden's blasphemous declaration of Transvisibility Day on Easter Sunday. It is appalling and insulting that Joe Biden's White House prohibited children from submitting religious egg designs for their Easter art event

and formally proclaimed Easter Sunday as Trans Day of Visibility. Sadly, these are just two more examples of the Biden administration's years long assault on the Christian faith. This is unhinged, by the way. We call on Joe Biden's failing campaign and White House to issue an apology to the millions of Catholics and Christians across America who believe tomorrow is for one celebration only the resurrection of Jesus Christ. That's a statement from Caroline Leavitt, Trump's national press secretary. I hate to hear. First of all, they are smothering themselves in supposed Christianity to attack the marginalized and spread bigotry.

That's not something I'm really cool with, but they're also wrong on the facts. Joe Biden did not come up with Trans Visibility Day being on Easter Sunday by chance. Trans Day of Visibility has been March 31st since it was created in 2010 by Rachel Crandall Crocker, the executive director of Transgender Michigan. It has nothing to do with Joe Biden. It just so happens that because Easter, by the way, how is Easter determined? Easter falls on the first Sunday after the Paschal. I hope that's how it's pronounced. Paschal Full Moon, which is the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox as established by the Council of Nikaya in the year 325.

And since the date of the vernal equinox doesn't change, but the phases of the moon do, Easter can end up falling between March 22nd and April 25th. So that's the very complicated way in which Easter is determined. Trans Day of Visibility is March 31st. And it just so happened that the ecclesiastical approximations of the moon's phases lined up with March 31st. And by the way, at the tail end of this, the pot at the end of the rainbow happens to be that the very same Joe Biden that we're supposed to believe is completely

demented and doesn't know what day it is, schemed and was powerful enough to decide that they're going to put trans day of visibility on the same day as Easter just to attack the Christian faith, which, by the way, Biden is actually religious. He's Catholic, which is a form of Christianity. Trump isn't. And so I don't even know why it would be something Biden would want to do. Usurp Christianity with trans day of visibility. So it's all getting very stupid. The good news, if there is any, is that voters seem to be recognizing it in the form of the fundraising numbers we are getting. And it is wild, wild stuff.

Joe Biden raised more in one night than Donald Trump in all of February. But for those saying, of course, Biden raised a bunch of money. He's got the elitist rich, rich folks willing to donate to him. Trump's going to try to do the same thing very, very soon. So let's go through every every element of this story for framing. I'm against the campaign finance system we have. And I'll talk in a little bit about how I would reform it. But to the extent that we have fundraising of this sort, fundraising can serve as a proxy

to determine how enthusiastic our voters about supporting a particular candidate. Most people, most people won't donate to candidates. They have no interest in seeing when and have no interest in voting for. So we've been tracking and Axios is reporting on this. And so is the Associated Press. We've been tracking the insane fundraising numbers of President Joe Biden. And it's tough to believe that someone that has no enthusiasm among his electorate, among his constituency, is going to be able to raise this amount of money. Axios reports, as the Biden campaign touted Thursday night's 25 million dollar fundraiser as a political record, word leaked about a Trump campaign event that organizers say will raise even more,

at least thirty three million dollars. So let's take this piece by piece. Biden raising an insane amount of money, suggesting there is way more enthusiasm behind him than Trump. The right wingers say Biden has all the elites. That's why he's raising so much money. Trump's for the working man. But then Trump is going to try to raise even more money in a single night coming up very, very soon. In fact, just a couple of days from now, here is CNN reporting on these wild fundraising numbers.

Former presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton stumping for President Biden at a star studded campaign event in New York that bolstered President Biden's already sizable war chest. He raked in more than twenty six million dollars for just that event and set a fundraising record. This is the latest sign that former President Donald Trump is facing a formidable fundraising adversary. Trump has raised twenty million dollars for the entire month of February.

So 26 million from Biden in one event, 20 million from Trump in all of February. So that's because Biden's got the elites and the rich friends. But Trump's going to try to do the same thing. Now, let me take this as an opportunity to crowbar in here how I would reform campaign finance. First of all, you've got to limit election periods. If you don't limit election periods, you can't really limit fundraising because you can always just start running your campaign earlier and earlier and earlier. So the first thing is we set a fixed, shorter time frame for election campaigns. You reduce the duration and therefore you can justify limiting the spending. You set a start date for the official campaign activities.

You set an end date. You level the playing field. Will some candidates find ways to get around this with unofficial campaigning? They will. But it's at least a framework to begin with. And then you limit the time that elected officials are even allowed to spend fundraising. When you win with two year terms in the House of Representatives, you win, you're immediately fundraising again. That's wacky stuff. So you do a limit. And then this is the critical part.

You combine this with public financing of elections. You set up a set amount of public funds to eligible candidates to cover real campaign expenses. You reduce their dependence on the large private donations. And the way you would do it is with some kind of eligibility criteria for the public financing. You might say you need to get a certain number of signatures or this way doesn't totally make public financing possible. But another possibility is you drop drum.

I think the limit on donations is like twenty seven hundred per candidate. You drop it way down. Maybe it's 40 bucks. That's the most you can donate. Fifty bucks. Once you get a certain number of fifty dollar donations, now you are eligible for the public financing. And that's it. That's all the money you're allowed to spend. And that's the way that you could do it. You can do matching funds for small donations. You can figure out the way to do it. And this would do a number of different things. First, it'll encourage more diverse candidates to run for office because you eliminate the barriers where your average you know, there could be school teachers that would be great candidates or whatever.

They say, I don't have a network of rich friends from which I can draw the large money I need to even get to 2% in the polls or 3%. Well, you can level the playing field in this way and make it so more sorts of people will run potentially successfully. You shift from a focus on fundraising to a focus on engagement and maybe policy. You decrease the influence of wealthy donors. Obviously, you've got to do something about super PACs. But the idea is that that this would do part of that as well. And hopefully you increase the level of engagement and you bring in additional ideas, additional sorts of people and additional participants who can say, hey, now that instead of being

able to donate twenty seven hundred, nobody can donate more than 50 bucks or 40 bucks or 60 bucks. It makes the average person feel more like they matter or have as much influence as the very rich. They won't because the very rich can still hire lobbyists and so on and so forth. But it would be a path in the right direction. So the fundraising numbers looking good for Biden, not so good for Trump. Big picture. This is a completely and totally broken system, which hopefully at some point we'll be able to fix. For a long time, when I had a computer problem, I'd go on YouTube and read it and try to figure

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That's drink AG the number one dot com slash Pacman. The link is in the podcast notes today. We welcome to the program Adrian Shropshire, who is the executive director of Black Pack, a left leaning political action committee focused on mobilizing and engaging with African-American voters. Adrian, so great to have you on. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I think.

Thank you for having me on. So maybe we'll just start very top level. There are news articles breathlessly announcing that we are seeing, if you believe some of the claims, essentially the greatest racial realignment in American politics since honestly, I don't even know. Civil rights era, civil war. I don't know. And that nonwhite voters are abandoning the Democratic Party plan to vote for Donald Trump

in numbers like we've never seen in the modern political era. And it all strikes me as a little bit difficult to imagine could really be happening, particularly when you look at internal polling, polling in states with larger versus smaller nonwhite populations. Like, I know that there are some polls that generally say we're seeing a little bit of a shift in nonwhite voters towards Republicans in some states. But I struggle to believe that Trump is about to ride to victory on the backs of nonwhite voters in numbers we've never seen.

So how would you analyze what we are being told? What data would you look at? Is something happening here? So I really appreciate your characterization of these reports as breathless, because that is, to me also, what it seems like. It is almost like folks, you know, sort of breathlessly anticipating this major thing that, you know, is about to happen, even though there's not a whole lot of data, certainly not historical data, and I mean even recent elections to suggest any such thing is happening. So at BlackPak,

we are always doing polling, and we have since we started, because we believe that it is important to understand and to listen to and to talk to voters as they grapple with a host of different issues when they think about whether or not they're going to participate in any given election. There are things that weigh on them. There are challenges that they face in their day to day lives. And those things will determine whether or not they show up to the poll. So we're trying, always trying to understand what those, what those things are, how we can encourage people, what we need to explain to people, because part of lack of participation in our democracy is that people just don't understand things. And we don't do a particularly good job of explaining

our processes. So we're always trying to figure that out. What we have not seen in our polling over the last six months is this historic racial realignment that we are seeing people write about, whether it's, you know, in the headlines of our, you know, papers of record. And so I can tell you what we are seeing, right? We are not seeing from the voters that we are polling and the voters that are sitting in our focus groups, any change in terms of the level of support for the Republican Party or Donald Trump more than we have seen. Are there Black voters who support the Republican Party? Yes, of course. There always has been. Are there voters who voted for Donald Trump in 16, Black voters who voted for Trump in 16 and 20? Yes, there are. And they'll vote for him again. And so that's just not, that's unsurprising, right? And we know the support for

the Republican Party with, you know, by Black voters is always, you know, between, you know, it can get up to 15%, right? We've seen it mostly over the last couple of election cycles around seven, eight, 9%. And that remains true when we ask folks whether or not they support Donald Trump. Those numbers are still pretty low. And so there just isn't this idea that people are, you know, waiting around and it's sort of, you know, I always describe it as someone's fantasy, like someone's deepest fantasy. And it really seems to be Donald Trump's deepest fantasy, because he's obsessed with having black voter support and particularly Black men. So this sort of obsession, it's like his deepest fantasy that are, you know, sort of focus groups who absolutely are going to vote for Joe

Biden again, obviously, Black voters still are the voting bloc with the highest level support for the Democratic Party and for Joe Biden. And for some reason, we're not talking to those people, right? We're looking at these polls. We're, you know, having conversations, you know, taking analysis from the Breakfast Club and then suggesting that somehow that is reflective of all black voters and just isn't. So a couple of data points that I do think are interesting. There's a New York Times Siena College poll from March 2nd, and it says Biden's leading nonwhite voters, 56 to 44. That's a 12 point margin in 2020. Biden, based on exit polling data, seems to have won that group by about 50 points. So if indeed the margin among nonwhite voters goes from 50 to 12, that seems like it's a

big change. So I'm curious on that one, if you've seen it and you have if you have any thoughts on party affiliation. I'll also mention you talked about seven, eight, nine, 12, 15 percent. There's a new party affiliation report which says that black voters are up to 19 percent registered Republicans, which, again, it's not a racial realignment, but it's a higher number than the ones that you mentioned. So any thoughts on on those data points? So we need to make sure that we hold distinct the leanings right toward parties.

Right. Whether people identify as a Democrat or a strong Democrat or, you know, soft and Republican, you know, whether they lean toward the Republican Party. We need to hold that distinct from how people actually show up and vote, right? So I think that part of the challenge here is that, you know, in our own polling, we see Black voters identifying less and less with the Democratic Party and identifying as independents, right? That is a phenomenon that, you know, there's certainly many explanations for, right? It definitely is people feeling somewhat, you know, disillusioned with the Democratic Party. People feel like the transaction, right, that our politics can sometimes be, you tell me you're going to do X for me.

I give you my vote. I expect you to do the thing. And people feeling like that transaction isn't happening. There's certainly a generational difference where you have younger voters who just don't have the same level of allegiance to the Democratic Party. And I think the Democratic Party doesn't do a very good job of explaining to younger voters why they should have a stronger allegiance to the party. So I think when we have seen that, we know this to be true, that people are identifying more, that black voters are identifying more as independent. Right. We also know how black voters show up and vote. Right.

And so it's hard to make the connection between what people are saying in polls, because if we're going to compare polls right now, we also need to compare polls to before the election in 2020. Right. And frankly, the election in 2016. And you saw lots of movement, right? And we can go all the way back and we do this all the time. We think about what Black voters were saying about Obama, right, before 08 and before 12. And we see numbers, the support levels are not what they were on election day. And I think that that is a mistake to compare those two numbers. But it's also really important to look at the verified data of how Black voters voted on election day in 2018, in 2020, in 2022. Where did they give their support? And I think that

that is more of an indicator for what we can expect from Black voters than the sort of polling that we see that just feels inaccurate. And partly it's inaccurate, I would say, because the sample sizes are just, they're not very big. And so when we're polling Black voters, we're not, we don't have a sample, a small sample size. We're not polling everyone and then over sampling Black voters. We're just just pulling voters. And that's a much better sample. That's a much better indicator of where the range of black voter opinions are than having a small sample size and broader poll. Yeah. If I have the numbers right, if you look at the Pew validated numbers at the end of the day in terms of how folks actually voted. 2016, it was 91 percent of black voters that voted for Hillary Clinton.

Twenty eighteen was 92 percent of black voters voted for Democrats in House races. Twenty twenty was 92 percent for Biden. Twenty twenty two. Ninety three percent for four House races. And it's it's sort of similar to I'm Jewish. And so I follow stories about, oh, Jews are becoming more conservative because they don't like Democrats on Israel and all these and Jews. Jews and black folks are the two most liberal leaning voting groups every single election.

And while there may be some prominent voices you sometimes hear about, these are when you look at the voting numbers, these are groups not because they are sort of feeling that they they have no choice but the Democratic Party, but are evaluating what is being offered and are choosing what is most preferable and what's most preferable hasn't really changed, I think, is the message I'm getting. That's right. And I again, like, you know, we hear this all the time and it's true. Black voters are not a monolith.

Right. So we have a range of opinion and a range of thought. And quite frankly, black voters are conservatives. Right. And so I think that there is this idea that there is, you know, Black voters just vote for the Democratic Party because that's just the party that Black people vote for. That's kind of insulting, right, to not only the history of Black people in this country, but to people's ability to make complicated and sophisticated political calculations, right? And so Black voters

aren't just voting for the Democratic Party because that's what we do, like as if it's some herd mentality, right? Black voters are voting for the Democratic Party because it is the party that is not trying to wipe us out, right? It is the party that at least will put forward policies that are meant to get toward progress on a whole range of issues that Black voters care about. It is not the party that has the presidential frontrunner saying that it's going to deploy the military into the inner city, right? It's not the party that has a presidential frontrunner saying that they're going to build concentration camps, right? Like these things aren't happening in the Democratic Party. What we do see are attempts to get at some of the entrenched issues that are most that are sort

of top of mind for Black voters, whether it's Black maternal health, right? And we're living in an era where if things go in the direction that they seem to be going, the Republican Party won't allow us to even talk about Black maternal health or any health disparities, because apparently it's DEI and that's bad to talk about. So Black voters are voting for, certainly for the interests of the community. Black voters are voting for, in some ways, you know, elections, you know, are defensive, right? They are moments when the voters, and in this case, Black voters in the Black communities, will say we're voting this way because we're just protecting our community right now, right? It may not be, you know, the most revolutionary act we've ever taken, but what it's going to do is protect the community. And in this era, we hear Black voters say all the time in focus groups, we need to protect democracy.

And democracy means something very specific to Black people. Right. It doesn't just mean, you know, kind of guarding against election interference. It actually means the very freedoms that we have fought for our entire time in this country. And when you start to undermine that and you start to take things away and you start messing around with rights, whether it's voting rights or it's abortion rights, Black voters respond to that. And so I just think that it's offensive in some ways for the analysis that's out there to just be suggesting that we're just operating off a herd mentality and not off of real sophisticated analysis about what is in our best interest as a community and what is in the best interest of the country. Yeah. And along those lines, sometimes I'll get calls from Trump supporters who say they'll basically repeat what Trump says about about

black Americans during his presidency, which was, you know, record low unemployment and really, you know, wage growth and just kind of these vague things. And they'll say to me, what has Joe Biden done for black folks? And not that I speak for Biden, nor I'm a cultist follower of Biden the way some folks are of Trump. But I think to myself that there are so many things that seem that that have been great things, you know, even just recently announcing on replacing lead pipes. Yes. And you look at that's infrastructure spending. Lead pipes are disproportionately still in parts of the country that have been historically marginalized, where there have been issues of redlining and so on and so forth. It

seems to me that when you look at infrastructure spending, when you look at capping the cost of insulin, when we know that black Americans disproportionately are diabetic and it goes directly. There's all these things that I see and I say to myself, man, I don't know. It seems that there is a lot of substantive things that have been done. I guess my question to you is in the focus groups you're doing and the folks you're talking to, do people know that? Do people know about these things that have been done? No. And I you know, that was my quick response, because this is part of the problem, right?

There is this disconnect between what the Biden Harris administration has done. And I will say that some some of the information is getting starting to get out there now. But what we see in the groups and we ask this questions, you know, we ask, you know, what have you seen? What have you heard? What do you know that the administration has done? And largely people say nothing or I think I heard something, but I don't really know. And I, you know, like, you know, they said they were going to come in and do all these things and he made these promises and he didn't do them. And, you know, my student loan debt isn't forgiven. So therefore, no one's is forgiven. Right. Right. And so there's just this sort of disconnect between what the actually, here are the things that the administration has done.

There's a couple of things happen that are very interesting. One is that some folks will say, oh, yeah, right. I remember that. Right. Oh, yeah. I remember the American Rescue Plan. That's how I paid my rent during the pandemic. But I didn't know that was Joe Biden. Right. Oh, yeah. My student loan debt got forgiven, but I didn't know that was Joe Biden, right? Oh yeah, my student loan debt got forgiven, but I didn't know that was Joe Biden. I just thought that was a government program, right? There was not only a disconnect between what the administration has done, but a disconnect between actual benefits that people have personally had experience with and who actually did that thing, right? So that's sort of one reaction, which is problematic, right, for the campaign, for the

administration. The second is that people are angry, right, that they don't know, right? And so part of the reason they get angry is because they feel like, well, this is stuff that we ought to know. And why isn't Joe Biden out there telling us, right? Who is supposed to be telling us this? And the other reason is because people don't want to be out there spreading misinformation, right?

You walk into a room, you say, what has Joe Biden done? And people, someone asks, what has Joe Biden done? And you say nothing. You're spreading misinformation and you're telling that to your friends and family. You're saying it on Facebook and on Instagram, right? And people don't want to do that. They want to have the information. And so there is this disconnect that the campaign really and I think that they are right.

They have this big spin that they announced after the State of the Union. And so they they're starting to. But it also means that every opportunity to talk about what the president is doing, right, what he's done, you know, over the last three and a half years, you know, the campaign, the administration, the entirety of the administration needs to be out there talking about it when he forgives another, you know, five, six, $7 billion in student loan debt. Every cabinet secretary, regardless of what department they're over, needs to be out there talking about it, right? They just need to be there. Surrogates across the country, those running for House seats and for Senate seats need to be out there talking about this stuff every day in the places where people are listening, right? They need to be on Black radio every single day,

letting people know not just what the administration has done, but they also need to start to pivot to what the administration is going to do, because there are some big things that didn't get done that people are also fully aware of. Right. They're fully aware of the John Lewis Voting Rights Act not getting passed in the Senate. They're fully aware of the Joyce George Floyd Justice and Policing Act not being passed. So there's some they need to start talking about the things that they're going to do as well. Speaker 1 We've been speaking with Adrian Shropshire, executive director of Black Pack, a left leaning political

action committee that focuses on mobilizing and engaging with African-American voters. Really interesting stuff and insights, Adrian, and the work you're doing is really important. So I really appreciate you telling us about it today. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on. I love my Helix sleep mattress. I've been sleeping on Helix mattresses for years now, which is why I asked them to be a sponsor. You actually take their famous sleep quiz,

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Totally free. They come with a 10 or 15 year warranty and you get 100 nights to decide if you like it. My audience also gets a whopping 20 percent off all orders, plus two free pillows. There's a little bit of a difficult reality that I have to start with in this segment, and it's that the real problem in the United States isn't so much Donald Trump as Trump voters. Now, I'm not personally attacking anybody, but it is a reality which I've been talking about for years and which, very interestingly, is now also being discussed in a letter from the editor on SI Live Dotcom, which says perhaps Trump isn't the problem.

Perhaps the problem is that 74 million Americans voted for him. We're going to link to the article and the article makes very similar points to those that I've been making for a while. And they are the the umbrella point here is that the problem in the United States is not that Donald Trump exists, wanted power, ran for president, said horrible things, had terrible ideas. That's sort of like, listen, you go into the subway in New York City and you hear people yelling bad ideas who would love to be president as well. But that doesn't mean that they become president.

The fact that these folks exist doesn't mean that they have to become the president. It's not just Trump's existence. That is the problem here. It's the societal conditions and the political conditions that allowed Trump and his ideology to gain the foothold that it did in 2016, almost reelecting him in 2020 and potentially getting him back in office in 2024, just months from now, because Trump is really a symptom of deeper issues. The the piece on SI Live Dotcom makes exactly this point.

And it's really important that this this is not an attack on any individual. This is an American society problem. Part of it is the system that got us to the level of economic inequality that we have. Part of it is racial injustice. Part of it is distrust in the political establishment. Part of it is terrible educational outcomes and lack of critical thinking and media literacy. And so we really if we want to solve at some point, Trump's going to be gone. And I'm now starting to get questions, as you heard on yesterday's voicemail segment

and elsewhere, questions about what actually are the logistics and the mechanics of the end of MAGA? Is there an end? Does it get integrated into the Republican Party? Does it die with one man or does it continue? And it's really important. And this is where this is almost in talking about this. I'm almost defending the existence of Trumpism and Trumpists. Part of this is we need to understand the economic discontent that is legitimate, that allowed itself to be exploited by Donald Trump.

Trump voters are often driven by perceptions about what's going on with the economy. Now, I'm not going to fall into that horrible thing where we are told Trump ists are fine. They don't have a concerning bone in their body. It's just economic anxiety. And then you see the Jews will not replace us and all this wacky stuff. Now, there's a lot of horrible stuff in mega Trump ism. But also there are economic beliefs which may be grounded in reality, but exaggerated. And instead of seeking inclusive solutions, those concerns are weaponized and they end

up attracted to Trump's promises to revert to a time in American history that favored the fewer at the expense of the many, oftentimes along racial and cultural division. That gets us to the second part, which is that a lot of Trump's base is very responsive to Trump's racially charged rhetoric and violently charged rhetoric. It doesn't mean they are all racist. It doesn't mean they're all willing to do what the January 6th rioters necessarily did, but they show at least a willingness or indifference when it comes to embracing or overlooking

aspects of xenophobia or racism for political gain if they believe it will benefit them. There is also the misdirection of an anti establishment sentiment. Trump supporters have a distrust in institutions that is heavily exploited by Trump, with Trump positioning himself as anti establishment. The reality is Trump has been around and has served elites his entire life. He shrouds it in a populist veneer. We talked about the populist veneer at the top of the show to some degree and that Trump is making the same populist sounding promises for twenty twenty four that he ran on in twenty sixteen and ran on in twenty twenty. And some of these Trumpists are

being exploited in such a way that they are falling for it again. Trump has spent his entire life as a rich kid from Manhattan and Queens trying to be isolated from the very folks that he now exploits for votes and for money. And then you add on to this a layer of echo chambers and misinformation where when you have algorithmically polarized echo chambers the way that we have, it subjects those who are able to be exploited to not getting any other messages or being sort of predisposed not to believe any other messages. And we see a lot of the historical prejudices being rekindled by Trump ism. We see isolationism and a desire for it rekindled under the guise of populism and helping Americans. We see nativism.

We see deep seated resistance to immigration and inclusivity of all kinds. So as I've said before, Trump is a problem in a sense because he's been charismatic enough to exploit, weaponize and coalesce a lot of these movements. But if you didn't have 74 million Americans who are vulnerable to getting caught up in it, Trump really isn't dangerous. He runs a failed candidacy and he gets back to, you know, putting his name on buildings and whatever else he was doing, you know, being roasted or participating roasts and whatever else the case may be. That's really the problem. And unless and until we fix that, even if MAGA Trump ism goes away or kind of evaporates, we're still going to have the problem of this vulnerable group of voters that will fall

for whoever is the next populist demagogue. I don't know exactly how we fix that in my forthcoming book, not a children's book like my real book that is, you know, 250 pages of text. We're going to talk about how we got here more deeply, as well as some ideas about how to get out. That'll be out in 11 months. So the countdown has begun. There is one reason, one cause, one catalyst that has led many prior Trump voters to abandon the guy. And there is one word. The word is democracy.

And I'm going to give you some examples. My question, as we look at some of these clips from Republicans against Donald Trump, Republican voters against Trump. The question I have for you is how many of these folks are there? Let's start with Matt from Oklahoma, who says, I don't know if we survive four more years of Trump and the democracy we have is what has to be protected. Take a listen. The greatest, most immediate threat is to the democracy. We can survive four years of Biden. I don't know if we can survive four years of Trump. Hi, I'm Matt. I'm from Oklahoma. I'm a registered Republican, and I did vote for

Trump. Wasn't the best decision I think I've ever made. In fact, I think it's one of my poorest decisions I've ever made, but that was the decision, man, I got to own it. The scariest thing about his second Trump term is that there will be no guardrails, and he's already insinuated things that he would do, things that would be threatening to our democracy at home, threatening to our power in terms of global standing, economic, political, military. I think we may be witnessing if we don't check ourselves the death knell of our democracy. We've got to find commonality. We can have disagreements in terms of how we want to make this nation great, but we got to stop making each other enemies. And he's been the key factor in that. So I would. So listen, we all know that this is not the normal Republican voter. This is a guy capable

of an introspection, self-reflection, self-criticism that many of these folks aren't. But he gets to the to the main thing here. Democracy. Eileen from Mississippi also explains the dictator stuff is a straw too far. Like how I mixed metaphors there. Let's listen to what Eileen has to say. I believe that we're a country that we work together with the Democrats, the Republicans, independents to make what's best for our country and best for everybody in our country. And I don't see that happening with Donald Trump. I live in Diamond Head, Mississippi, and I am a Republican, a longtime Republican, and I will not vote for Trump this year. The insurrection, I truly believe that he was a part of that and caused a lot of the things that truly saddened me. Trump tends to be a bully, somewhat of a dictator trying to be king of the United States.

And that really scares me a whole lot. You know, someone mentioned this once and they said he's like a toddler. And you know that. And of course, we've heard the analogies to being a toddler and Trump's preference of pooping in the sandbox. So it gets shut down for the day rather than just going home when it's time for him to go home. Lastly, we will look at a statement from George from Utah, who again says, look at the risks here for the country. Trump, remember, says if Biden wins, we'll have no more

country. Some of these Republican voters seem to think that Trump's the threat to the country, not Biden. I compare President Trump with some of the great leaders that we honor and respect from history. Washington, Lincoln, Donald Trump is is not of the same. He is not a great leader. My name is George. I'm from Santa Clara, Utah. Lifelong Republican, always voted Republican, voted for Donald Trump twice.

But as I look at what's ahead of us and what's in the potential risks associated with the upcoming election, I can't vote for Donald Trump. I think he's too much of a risk for what happened, the Capitol, the attempt to overthrow the election, the type of person that he has demonstrated himself to be with the actions that are pending against him, the way I believe he's hijacked the Republican Party and is taking them in a direction that I can no longer support. So listen, these folks are right. These folks are willing to go beyond being Republicans. They're still Republicans, but they recognize that, you know, will I get a chance

to vote for any other Republican if we don't make sure that this one time the guy who happens to be the Republican candidate doesn't win? So there's two questions here. The first question is how many of these folks are there? And the second question is, where are they? And the reason I say that is Matt, we heard from three voters here, Matt from Oklahoma, a red state that will go red that Joe Biden has no chance to win. Eileen from Mississippi, a red state that will be that Joe Biden has no chance to win whatsoever. And a red state, Utah, George from Utah, a red state that Biden won't win.

So not only might we depend on enough of these voters in general, but we might depend on enough of these voters in the states that actually are swing states which could go to Biden, but might not places like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin, places that, yes, Joe Biden won in 2020 and he may well need to win again. Of course, more optimistically, if there's enough of these folks in Florida. Well, if Biden wins Florida, this thing is basically over. But that is not likely to be the situation. So good for these folks. But the question is, are there enough of them that we can make sure that the outcome is the right one in November? We have a voicemail number. That number is two one nine two. David P. We have a very violent threat to cancel

a membership here. And it's all because of a producer, Pat Gaff. Could it be? Listen to this, David. Longtime member. I love the show. I have to say the next time Pat confuses the words travesty and tragedy, I'm going to have to cancel my membership. You can just just give him a heads up. Yep. Well, listen, Pat glitched on the bonus show last week. He wasn't swollen or visibly confused or orange, but he did glitch and he was so overcome with the details of the bridge collapse, quite frankly, that he called it a travesty rather than a tragedy. And of course,

a travesty has very different meaning and implications. And a couple of people wrote to me about it. But Pat's message was one that made a lot of sense. And I doubt he will make that mistake again. I can't guarantee it, but I doubt he will make that mistake again. I can't guarantee it, but I doubt he will make that mistake again. And I appreciate the commentary on the bonus show. It means people are paying attention. Right. So you can sign up at join Pacman dot com. Remember, you can get my newest children's book. Think like a voter. Why should we vote? Why is it important? What is voting a great book? I'm biased, but a great book to start introducing kids to the importance of voting. Get it at David Pakman

dot com slash book. If you already bought it, please leave a review. Please leave a review and we will see you in mere moments on today's bonus show.