The David Pakman Show - 4/25/25: MAGA Governors terrified as Trump approval collapses

Episode Date: April 25, 2025

-- On the Show: -- MAGA Governors are increasingly terrified of their own voters, for good reason -- A confused Donald Trump struggles to use the English language effectively -- The military may soon be in the position of having to choose which side they are on -- Republican support for Donald Trump collapses -- Secretary of State Marco Rubio admits that Donald Trump might give up on his promise to end the Russia-Ukraine war -- Elon Musk's Tesla is accused of speeding up odometers to push vehicles out of their manufacturers warranty -- The Trump stock market is headed for its worst April performance since the Great Depression -- This week's Friday Feedback -- On the Bonus Show: Trump's tariffs will cause corporate price gouging, Joe Rogan starting to question Trump ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 🐟 Wild Alaskan Company: Get $35 OFF with code PAKMAN at https://wildalaskan.com/pakman  🍷 Naked Wines: Use code PAKMAN to get 6 bottles for $39.99 at https://nakedwines.com/pakman 🖼️ Aura Frames: Use code PAKMAN for $35 OFF & free shipping at https://auraframes.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- Get David's Books: https://davidpakman.com/echo -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow

Welcome to the show, everybody. MAGA governors are secretly scared of their own voters. Now, you would think that red state governors, especially the ones in the MAGA mold, would really be riding high right now. This would be their heyday because Trump's back in the White House. The Republican Party controls the House and the Senate. The right wing media machine is humming right along, probably as powerfully as it ever has. But behind the scenes, you've got a lot of these red state governors sweating, not because

of Democrats. Most of them barely have a functioning state party to deal with, but because they're terrified of their own voters. There is a sort of growing disconnect between Republican governors and the most hardcore reactionary base. And what we're seeing March, April, 2025 is a very nervous and quiet retreat, but it's there. you look for it. I want to talk about that today because there are these governors who have spent years stoking the culture wars and doing all of the stuff that Trump's been doing that are now vetoing certain bills, ducking MAGA primaries, hedging bets. And all of it is to avoid triggering into anger the very monster that they helped create.

They helped build the monster and now they've lost control of it. Let me give you some examples of what I mean. We start in North Dakota. North Dakota's governor, Kelly Armstrong, just vetoed two right wing favorites, a bill that would have expanded restrictions on sexual content in libraries, translation, banning LGBT books, and a school voucher bill aimed at funneling money out of public education. Now, did Armstrong suddenly have a change of heart or grow a spine or develop a new respect for public schooling and the first amendment. No, of course not. These were not vetoes out of principle. These were vetoes out of fear. Armstrong knows the public school crowd in North Dakota is strong. And even many conservative parents do not want their kids

library shelves gutted. And so Armstrong is afraid of a voter revolt. And he should be because this was all damage control dressed up as moderation. That's Armstrong. OK, now we go to Texas. Greg Abbott in Texas just launched something called the Texas Regulatory Efficiency Office modeled after Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency, also known as Doge. Here's what's really going on. Abbott is desperate to throw red meat to the anti-government crowd, cut red tape, slash services, deregulate everything we can. But Abbott is also terrified that when it blows up in

his face, he's going to get blamed because guess what? Even in Texas, there are still people who want their roads paved and their nursing homes inspected. And so Abbott finds himself walking this very interesting tightrope where he's pandering to the far right, but hoping that the state, the see maybe the clearest sign yet that Republican leaders are paralyzed by their own base. The club for growth just jumped into the 2026 governor's race backing Andy Biggs. Andy Biggs is an election denier and a full MAGA warrior over Karen Taylor Robson, even though both of them are Trump aligned. But understand what's going on here. The reason for the switch for the Club for Growth is that Biggs is more MAGA than Robson. MAGA donors are afraid that Robson might end up slightly off script. And this is not a party with room for nuance anymore. It's a loyalty death match. Who is the most loyal to Trump? And the fear is if you pick the wrong Trumpist, you're toast. So they are ducking and they are weaving and they are trying

not to get bit by the very base that they've spent years radicalizing. That's the new right wing calculus. Don't get primaried. Don't spark protests and whatever you do, never look weak. But there's a problem here. When your voters are conditioned to expect extremism, anything less looks like betrayal and the governors know it. That's why you're seeing vetoes on culture war bills. You're seeing these weird techno libertarian gimmicks. You're seeing intra party showdowns. They are

scared because they lost control. MAGA voters don't want governance. They want vengeance. And now that Trump is back in power, they want results. So this is where we're headed. Number one, expect more vetoes of some bills if they are engineered with bad optics. None of this is about actual morality as applied to policy and governance. This is it's optics. And what are the voters? What is the most powerful enclave of Republican voters going to think? So expect more vetoes from governors when they are saying this looks like trouble for me. Secondly, expect primary challenges from further right nobodies who maybe have a podcast or maybe put out excretions on X or, you know, minimally known extremist right wingers challenging slightly less extreme right wingers. And then number three, expect quiet concessions

when we see the public backlash all delivered kind of with a wink to the base and a lot of fear behind closed doors that the monster they, you know, Republicans helped build the Frankenstein, the Frankenstein monster. Frankenstein was the the builder of the anyway. Now they are stuck trying to survive the very monster that they built. And the problem is that if they too loudly go off script or to noticeably go off script, there's one very orange man in Washington, DC who's going to notice and who may turn on them.

And that's also a risk. So this is going to get very dicey, but the governor seemed to know that this is a very fine line. There's no gray area here. You're either with us or against us. And that's the way it's increasingly been for a decade now. Donald Trump is the man who once said he has the best words. He's back on camera butchering American history, butchering basic economics and quite frankly, butchering American history, butchering basic economics, and quite frankly, butchering the English language. Donald Trump once again is pushing this idea that before we had income taxes, we were wealthy and prosperous and perfect as a nation simply with tariffs.

He's doing this while simultaneously sort of backing off tariffs, but saying he's not and the tariffs are on and the tariffs are off and the stock market's up and it's down. But in the middle of this, Trump keeps going back to this phrase he's used. We were the wealthiest country ever in the tariff only era. Take a listen to this. Everybody wants to be a part of what we're doing. They know that they can't get away with it any longer, but they're still going to do fine. And we're going to have a country that you can be proud of, not a laughingstock all over the world for many years. You know, in 1913, they traded to the income tax system. We used to be all tariff and we had no income tax.

And we had the wealthiest country we ever had proportionately from about 1870 to 1913. It was all tariffs. And we did. We had more money than anybody. They had committees how to spend the money. They had so much money. They didn't know how to spend. Then some brilliant person said, let's go income tax. Let's let the people pay. So we're going to be able to substantially lower taxes when this is finished. So listen, Trump's told this story before. It's really important to understand not just its incoherence, but it's illiteracy and also its factual falsity. Trump seems to believe that the UL US was relatively wealthier before we had an income

tax because we relied only on tariffs. Set aside the complete mangling of the English language that we heard there. Unpack the nonsense. The 1870 to 1913 era that Trump romanticizes was a time of extraordinary wealth inequality, violent labor crackdowns and zero social safety net. Sure, the country was growing, but mostly for the robber baron types. Tariffs were regressive. They hurt working class Americans by raising the price of everyday goods and they spared the rich from contributing to government revenue more in proportion to their ability to do so.

The 16th amendment was passed in 1913 and it allowed the federal government to start collecting income taxes at a federal level. This was a progressive reform. The idea was shift the burden away from poor consumers and onto the wealthy and corporations. And we've talked about this before. If you make 40 grand a year versus 400 grand a year, and all of a sudden groceries go up 15%, that is much more impactful to the person making 40 grand a year rather than 400. The idea of the income tax was let's reverse that. Let's move in the direction of unburdening some of

those lower earners. So when Donald Trump praises the period, he's not glorifying a period of economic strength. He's glorifying a time when the government funded itself by taxing poor people relatively more for socks and flower and farm tools and letting the tycoons hoard untaxed millions or even more in today's dollars. But the kicker is that Trump isn't even proposing replacing the income tax with tariffs. He's going to give us both. Now, during the campaign, he once said we might be able to get rid of the income tax if we did tariffs.

Of course, it's never going to happen. Now he's saying we might be able to reduce taxes by doing the tariffs. Trump is giving us both taxes and tariffs. You're going to be taxed on your paycheck and you're going to be taxed with an import tax called a tariff every time you buy something partially or totally made abroad, which especially if you buy MAGA merchandise is just about everything. So the romanticization of this era is a combination of Trump not understanding what was actually going on at that time, combined with maybe understanding a little bit and how it was

disproportionately good for the billionaire robber barons. OK, Trump also spoke during the same press meeting about putting up 100 foot American flag. You said you're going up to the lawn for a flag. We're putting up a beautiful, almost 100 foot tall American flag on this side and another one on the other side, two flags, top of the line. And they've needed flagpoles for really quality polls. 200 years. It was something I've often said, you know, they don't have a flag pole per se. So we're putting one right where you saw us and we're putting another one on the other

side on top of the mounds. It's going to be a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful polls. Trump is going to be working on that. This is the political equivalent of waving your arms and yelling, look over here while the house behind you is on fire. Look, we're putting up these two huge polls. They're not flaccid.

They're stiff poles and it's all going to be great. Meanwhile, Americans, 72% believe prices are going to go up because of the tariffs. Housing is unaffordable. Democracy is eroding. And Trump's bragging on the White House lawn about putting up two giant flagpoles like this is the cornerstone of economic revival. And don't you dare be against it, because then we'll brand you as unpatriotic. This is way bigger than a guy who's wrong on the facts, which he is. There is a deep fraud of Trumpism

railing against the elites while pushing policies that benefit them, saying he's going to help the average American while looking wistfully at a period where we had no income tax, but only tariffs, which was terrible for the poor and middle class. This is the fraud that is Trumpism. And my only hope that I'm holding out for is that when I look at the rally crowds that AOC and Bernie have and when I see how John Ossoff and others are getting their own crowds and the town halls, then you also see that the polling is turning against Trump. 72% of Americans believe taxes that believe prices will go up due to the tariffs.

You rarely have 72% of Americans agree about anything. That is a maybe early sign that being a little bit possibly slightly cautiously optimistic is realistic rather than naive. That's my hope. And we're going to have to wait and see. Thank you to everyone who put my book, The Echo Machine, back on the New York Times bestseller list for the third time in four weeks. I didn't think we'd make it once. And we have now been on there three of the four weeks since the book has been out.

Thank you. Of course, the book is still available. Of course, please remember to review the book online if you've gotten it. And I look forward to telling you a little more about the future of me and books that that'll be upcoming at some point. So let's take a very quick break. We've got a great program for you today. You know, every time we call out Donald Trump's authoritarianism, the right calls it media

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I've been with ground news for years now because this is what they do. They expose the hidden agendas behind reporting sources and make it easy to compare coverage and understand critical issues. Even better, if I'm reading a story on another site, the ground news browser extension will flag the sources, political bias, and give me other reports on the same story. So I can verify the information. My viewers get 40% off the same unlimited vantage plan that I use. So you get their top tier plan for just five dollars a month. Go to ground dot news slash Pacman. The link is in the description or scan the QR code. All right. Awesome new sponsor to talk about Wild Alaskan Company. They do sustainable seafood memberships. I got one of

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encourage you to go to wild Alaskan dot com slash Pacman and use the code Pacman for thirty five The David Pakman Show continues to be primarily supported by our audience through the membership program. I invite you to read about it. And if it sounds good, you can sign up at join pacman.com. We do an extra show every day for our members. This has been the primary means of supporting this program for over a decade. At this point in time, we are not part of some media conglomerate. There's no seven layers of editors telling me what I can or can't say. It's just the show as I want to do it.

And the reason that that's possible is because of folks like you who have signed up over the years at join pacman dot com. I invite you to check it out. Sign up if it sounds good. The military is soon going to have to choose which side it is on. Let me explain. I saw some of our viewers discussing this on the David Pakman show subreddit Trump's back in office. The chaos immediately started courts being ignored, mass deportation plans in motion, no due process, no oversight. Uh, Pete Hegseth, Trump's defense secretary, cable news pundit with no military

command experience leaking classified or should be classified info to journalists, to his wife and signal chats and so much more of it at, uh, attacks on the media. You've seen it all at some point, probably soon Trump is going to cross a line and give an illegal order, a direct illegal order. Will it be shoot protesters? Probably not. Will it be, Hey, military, come help us round up immigrants illegally participating in immigration policy, which the military is not supposed to do.

Maybe. Is it going to be help us defy a Supreme Court ruling? It might be. And the U.S. military is going to have to choose the Constitution and the rule of law or the president. Historically, this is a critical moment in authoritarianism. What Trump is doing isn't really new. It's textbook strongman politics. We've talked to Ruth Benke out about it. It mirrors much of what we saw in the 20th century. You start by undermining the courts, attacking the press, filling key positions with loyalists, weaponizing the language of patriotism, and then you test the waters.

You start ignoring certain court orders. Which illegal orders can I give to others that they will also ignore the illegality of which ones will they help me carry out? This is how authoritarian regimes have built power in the past. It doesn't happen all at once, but it happens by pushing boundaries until someone pushes back or maybe no one pushes back. That is how authoritarian regimes rise and fall. And ultimately, it comes down to whether the military will play along. Look at some historical examples. In Chile, General Pinochet's coup succeeded because the armed forces turned on a democratically

elected government and backed dictatorship. It hinged on the military. forces turned on a democratically elected government and backed dictatorship. It hinged on the military in Nazi Germany. Hitler didn't fully consolidate power until the military swore personal loyalty to him rather than to the German constitution or the nation. If you look at Spain, Franco launched a civil war with military backing and ruled for decades. But counterpoint in the U.S. in the 70s, when Richard Nixon's orders started to veer towards madness, the military didn't bite institutions mostly held. The orders went

ignored and Nixon ultimately resigned seeing the writing on the wall about impeachment. So the difference is very stark. When the military sides with democracy, democracy tends to survive. When the military doesn't side with democracy, democracy tends to fail. Trump's inner circle knows this Bannon and people like that and people more, uh, close to Trump. They know this. That's why they are packing the Pentagon with loyalists and gutting oversight. That's why they're testing what they can get away with piece by piece, day by day. If they can get one unit to follow an illegal order, then they will try it again and then again,

and then they'll go bigger. So this is not theoretical anymore to every general, every private. You may soon have to choose when the orders come down. The people who swore an oath to defend the constitution won't get to hide behind politics. They're either going to say no to tyranny or they're going to help to enforce tyranny. And Trump's gamble is that the military will follow orders rather than principles. He's betting that enough people will say it's not my job to question the president and just go along with it. And so Trump is counting on a culture of deference, of obedience and of career ism. And that's why the people that he surrounds himself with, Hegseth, Stephen Miller, et cetera, they talk about restoring law and order. But the plan

is to ignore the law. The plan is to throw law and order in the toilet and flush it 10 to 15 times the way Trump has done so many times before their plan only works if the people with guns obey the man rather than the law. And I know we have many members of the military in our audience, and this is something you've got to be prepared for and you've got to be ready to know how you will react when that request slash demand from Trump comes down. So we do have some very bad news for the current administration. It's great news if you've been waiting for the spell to break, but it's bad news if you're Donald Trump.

New polling confirms that Republican support is collapsing under Donald Trump. And I mean collapsing by Republican standards, which is to say it has finally dipped below 50 percent. RMG Research polled a thousand voters last week and asked a simple question. If the congressional elections were held today, who would you vote for? Forty eight percent said Democrat. Forty four percent said Republican. When you factor in leaners, Democrats have 50 percent support and Republicans 45.

That is a seven point swing towards Democrats in the short three months since Donald Trump took office before Trump was sworn in. The question, who would you vote for in congressional elections? Generic ballot was 51 to 44 Republicans. That was Republicans plus seven. And now they're losing ground very quickly. So Donald Trump's second term has become toxic already. The story here, you know, the real story, the real story isn't just that support is dropping. It's that it was ever this high to begin with for reelecting Republicans. 40 percent of Americans still support this disaster. And that's the real WTF moment, because these are the people who tank the economy with tariffs, want to start an autism

registry, launched mass deportation raids, leaked war plans on signal chats twice, and whose secretary of defense is likely to be pushed out after just 100 days. And yet four in 10 voters are still on board. Why? Because millions of people don't read, watch or hear real news. And the impact of these disasters takes time to trickle through because Fox News won't even report that half of this stuff is going on. Now, here's the good news. And I think we need something to be cautiously optimistic about the fact, even though it's shocking that 40 something percent

still support Republicans, the fact that this much public sentiment has shifted so quickly is impressive in the modern media environment. It's a sign that the propaganda bubble is strong, but it's not impenetrable because once people see that the emperor has no clothes in one area, they sometimes start noticing how naked he is everywhere else as well. And Trump's approval is tanking faster than it did during his first term. He's upside down on inflation. He's upside down on the economy.

And now Democrats are seen as more trustworthy on the budget. That is not typical, even though I know it doesn't make any sense. Right. Even though Democrats tend to see lower budget deficits than Republicans, the stereotype, the theme is that Republicans are more trusted for the first time since 2021 Democrats are seen as more trustworthy on the budget. So the story here is that the midterms could flip everything. Uh, and Republican support is declining, but the real story is that it took this long because the Republican party has run the country like a bad parody of itself.

And voters are finally starting to notice. Now, when I said last week or the week before that there is this base of support that I don't think Trump will ever go below. I said it might be 34%.. It might be 36 percent. Many of you wrote to me and said, no, David, Trump support can go way lower than that. There are way more mega voters that are reachable. And when it hits their pocketbooks, they are going to turn on Trump. Well, I hope I'm wrong and I hope that you are right. My instinct for a long time has been that there is this sort of impenetrable level of support for whoever is the Republican nominee, Republican president in this case, 34, 35,

36%. I hope that the people writing to me are correct, that this time it's different and that Trump's potential support could be down into the twenties. Who the hell knows? I have not yet seen evidence of that. And so we are going to track it. We are going to follow it. But the seven point swing in just a couple of months is nothing to sneeze at in this modern polling and media environment. Facebook's still strong, encouraging people to

reshare those crazy fake news articles. That's still a problem, but the numbers are showing us that something seems to be a little different here. And if the inflation hits, if we start seeing those effects, maybe Trump's going to completely back off of the tariffs, which he is to a degree started to do. But if he doesn't, and those numbers start to go South, we may see his approval drop even faster. We're going to follow it. If you're like me, you may have found yourself standing in front of a massive wall of wine at the grocery store, clueless and unsure what to pick. Thankfully, I found a better way. And that's naked wines.

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Then it was going to be within a day of getting sworn in. Then it became 100 days. And now even Donald Trump's own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, is floating the idea that the United States might just give up. Uh, Senator Marco Rubio, sorry, former Senator Marco Rubio, secretary of state now is threatening that the U S may move on and like really soon within days if progress isn't made on Russia, Ukraine, is it a defeat? Never take a listen to what he had to say. We came here yesterday to sort of begin to talk about more specific outlines of what it might take to end the war,

to try to figure out very soon, and I'm talking about a matter of days, not a matter of weeks, whether or not this is the war that can be ended. If it can, we're prepared to do whatever we can. If it's not possible, if we're so far apart that this is not going to happen, then I think the president's probably at a point where he's going to say, well, we're done. I think from the U.S. perspective, we've spent three years, billions of dollars supporting the Ukrainian side. And but now we've reached a point where we have other things we have to focus on. We're prepared to be engaged in this as long as it takes, but not indefinitely, not without progress.

If this is not possible, we're going to need to move on. I think the president feels strongly that we've dedicated a tremendous we've done more in 80 days and Biden never did to bring this war to an end. Well, I don't know why he's bringing up Joe Biden, but it is another day and another promise that is going to fall flat. This is not a small pivot. They are acting like, well, no, no, it's all still the same as we said, but it might just not be possible.

Well, that's what we were saying all along. This is the collapse in real time of one of Donald Trump's most high profile promises. He would end the Russia Ukraine war within 24 hours of winning in November. It was then pushed back. He would end the Russia Ukraine war within 24 hours of being sworn in in January. And then it was, we would end it within a hundred days of being sworn in, which is roughly where we're about to be. And now it's, we might give up. We might just not be able to do it. Now you might hear Marco Rubio and say Marco Rubio is at least being a little more humble and honest, which is it's possible that the two sides are so far

apart. We may not be able to solve it to which I would say that's right. That's why Trump's bluster all along and criticisms of Joe Biden's handling and promises that within 24 hours of this or 24 hours of that he was going to deal with it. That's why that should have been more criticized at the time we were criticizing it. But the right, which now is going, no, listen, Rubio's being honest. It might just not be possible. Where were they then? Now of course, this is the same Marco Rubio who Trump humiliated in 2016.

He is now the guy put in the position of making the failure sound like a policy shift, but it's just a failure. It's a promise Trump made, which they are going to break. This administration isn't bringing peace. It is bringing abandonment. They're not going to stop the war. They're going to stop caring about it. They're going to say we gave it the old college try. We simply can't do it now. The right is framing this as a great acknowledgement of the complexity of the world.

Well, why did it take Trump nearly 80 years to learn that? And couldn't he have acknowledged that six months ago when he was making these outrageous promises? Now we simply have to accept it's a totally pragmatic shift. They may just not be ready to end the war. There's nothing we can do to force them to end it. That's right. That's exactly what we've been saying for a very long time. Elon Musk is facing serious allegations while he is busy promoting meme coins and cutting federal jobs. His company, Tesla, is accused of manipulating a dominoes to prematurely end vehicle warranties.

You know, when I see this stuff, I realize I got off that Tesla train not a second too soon. There's a new class action lawsuit and it says that Tesla vehicles are logging miles faster than they're driven. You might drive 100 miles and the odometer, which is completely digital, says, oh, you drove 110 miles. For example, the plaintiff, Nuri Hinton, alleges that his model wise odometer is overestimating mileage by at least 15 percent. Why?

The goal, he believes, is for the warranty to expire sooner, which in his case left him with a ten thousand dollar repair bill. This is not a minor glitch. The lawsuit is suggesting that Tesla's odometers are factoring in energy consumption, driving behavior instead of just measuring miles traveled. And if it detects certain behaviors, it will put more miles on the odometer. This is the allegation of the lawsuit. Now, if this is true, what Tesla might be doing is inflating mileage readings to avoid having to cover repairs by saying, oh, you've driven just a little bit too much here.

Let's not forget that this comes on the heels of other controversies surrounding Elon Musk. Of course, the involvement with Doge criticized for its lack of transparency and conflicts of interest and destructive actions. His promotion of cryptocurrencies like Doge coin, which some see is very sketchy, speculative ventures. But if this is true, this is not just shady. This is textbook fraud. Misrepresenting mileage to dodge warranty obligations is not a loophole. It is deceiving customers for financial gain. And if a smaller auto shop did that, they would be raided and shut down. Like odometer fraud is a serious thing.

When it's Elon Musk. I don't know. We're going to have to wait and see. It may be flat out illegal. If Tesla is using predictive software to manipulate a domino readings and then using those inflated numbers to avoid warranty claims that could violate consumer protection laws as well as automotive fraud statutes. So we're talking here about potential investigations from state attorneys general, the FTC, and even the class action liability that we're talking about. This doesn't seem to be a one off. Tesla has already been hit with lawsuits for faking driving ranges,

misleading on autopilot and now possibly cooking the odometer raises a very obvious question. How many parts of the Tesla experience are real and how many are software illusions meant to protect the bottom line? Because Musk has built an empire on dodging accountability, labor violations, autopilot crashes, potentially odometer manipulation. And the strategy is the same. You deny everything. You post memes, fire people if you think it'll help you cover it up and hope nobody notices. It's the tech bro playbook, we might call it rebrand fraud as innovation, slap a futuristic interface on it and then sell it to investors as disrupting

an industry. Speeding up a dominoes to cheat warranties is not innovation. It's a 21st century lemon law scam. And this is the guy who's now helping Trump to streamline everything. If this is what Elon Musk's a vision of efficiency is rigging metrics and pretending it's innovative. God help us when he applies it to public services, which of course he's doing right now. Hey, remember when Donald Trump promised economic greatness when he became president again about that. Once again, this week,

the Dow had one of the worst single day drops of Trump's entire presidency. And the Dow Jones industrial average is now on track for the worst April performance since 1932, not since 2008, not since the dot com crash of the 90s, 1932. Great depression. It's not just the Dow. The S&P 500 performance since Donald Trump's second inauguration, also the worst of any president this far in going all the way back to 1928. No one has done it worse. Why is this happening? Because Trump took us. Forget about a hammer, not not a little mallet. Trump took a sledgehammer to trade policy and now markets are

calling it what it is, a complete failure. Wall Street doesn't buy Trump's claim that the chaotic tariffs will bring everybody to the table. Corporate earnings are expected to tank because of the tariffs. Executives are openly warning that the economic damage is real and getting worse. And Trump is now floating the idea of file firing Fed Chair Jerome Powell again, because of course, that's what you want during a market panic. Fire the chair of the Federal Reserve and even the usual safety nets are starting to collapse when stocks tank.

Normally, investors move into safe assets like government bonds, which brings up the price of the bonds. Bond prices are falling to the dollar is dropping. Gold is skyrocketing. The fear index VIX is staying very high. And the kicker is that retail investor sentiment is the most negative it's been since that data started getting collected in 1987. I was only 30 years old back then. Eight straight weeks of the market is going to crash from from regular investors. Now, think back to 2016.

In 2016, markets shot up after Trump's win. Wall Street bet on tax cuts. Wall Street bet on deregulation, which would help corporate profits or so it was believed. Fast forward to today and it's very different. They got the cuts, but they got chaos. That's what that's. They got the cuts last time and this time they're getting chaos. The trade wars and the political purges and the threats to the Fed and the uncertainty have wiped out the optimism and investors are now seeing what I've been saying all along. Trump is an agent of chaos. Economies don't like chaos.

One investment firm put it very succinctly. It's impossible to commit capital to an economy that is unstable and unknowable because of the policy structure translation. No one knows what the hell Trump is going to do. No one even knows what the next Trump is going to do. No one even knows what the next problem is going to be. So when Trump talks about a booming economy, remember that he's competing with Herbert Hoover for the worst April in stock market history. And Hoover didn't even have truth central.

All right. Authoritarian regimes don't do well with markets. This is a historical reality. Markets like stability. They like the rule of law. They like independent institutions able to make the best decision with the data they have without political coercion. Trump has blown all of that up, especially the independence of the Federal Reserve. Markets aren't confused. They're saying we don't trust this guy. And it's sort of a, you know, that phrase, the beatings will continue until the morale improves.

That seems to be Trump's approach here. And it's not working very well. Your mom wants you to call her and this mother's day, give her a call, but you can also consider giving her an aura digital picture frame or a frames was named the best digital photo frame by wire cutter. I've gifted these to so many folks, including my mom, no matter where I am, if we're traveling, if my daughter does something absolutely brilliant on the playground, which happens all the time, um, I can take a picture or a video and upload it directly into my mom's or a frame or whoever's. I can also share access. I shared it with my brother so he can upload pictures directly as well.

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official audience email is info at David Pakman dot com. But as you'll see, sometimes we will grab comments from Substack or YouTube or TikTok or wherever it may be. We will start today with what are we starting with? We were starting with Facebook where Frank says the clown Pac-Man is arguing that they will be cutting social security benefits and at the same time arguing not to cut the cut, the waste and fraud and abuse in the federal budget newsflash. If we don't eliminate the waste, fraud and abuse, there will be no money for social security. While Frank is very confused about how government works. Of course, if you're talking about eliminating waste, fraud and abuse from within social

security, I'm with you. They haven't yet demonstrated that when Trump says there's a 250 year old on the list of social security recipients, they've not demonstrated that a supposed 250 year old is receiving any money. Social security is based on its own trust fund. The money for the benefits comes from the trust fund. It is based on monies collected from the social security payroll deduction, generically getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse, which they remain unable to identify specifically.

They found programs they don't like. They found claims like there's a ton of people, 150 years old getting benefits, but they've not proven it generically getting rid of waste, fraud and abuse. If you could find it wouldn't actually do anything because social security is a relatively closed system with its own trust fund. And Frank, not surprisingly, doesn't seem to understand how government works. Z Zahn wrote in on Facebook and said more gaslighting and lies. Please put a Republican on your show. Number one, I regularly do live streams on tick tock where all of the Republicans who want to come confront me can do it.

They can tell me how I'm wrong about everything. They can question me. They can give me their views as to why what Trump is doing is awesome. So we do that. And then as far as Republican officials, they don't want to be on. We invite Republican officials to be on the show. They don't come on the show. So you should go and talk to them about appearing rather than me because we're we're ready. SR Snugs wrote on

the subreddit. Has David done any interviews on other shows recently? I remember him promoting some for his book. Did he end up appearing? Yes. If you go to David Pakman dot com slash press, you will find everything from my MSNBC editorial to my appearances with Don Lemon, politics girl, Chris Cuomo, impact theory, the young Turks, Midas touch, Brian Tyler Cohen, Tom Hartman and on and on and on. OK, so many, many of those interviews at David Pakman dot com slash press for those who are interested. Candace wrote in on Spotify. You can leave comments on Spotify. Love the show.

But isn't it factual that the Garcia case is that he did enter the country illegally and was granted a stay. I'm not sure if when you were referring to Trump as deporting us citizens, you're referring to Garcia and then wouldn't it be beneficial to explain how you are viewing him as a us citizen? It sounds misleading. I love the show, but I'm seeking truth in reporting. I'm a firm believer in due process, feel it as being violated, but I want to call a spade a spade. Yeah, I've never once said that, um, that, uh, Garcia is a U S citizen. What I did say is that due process applies to people who are in the United States with a temporary protected status. Uh, it is not I who have been gaslighting. It is the right when they like to say things like these people aren't here

legally. Well, actually they are here legally. They're just not here permanently. If you have a student visa, you're here legally, but it is not permanent status. When the visa ends, when your schooling ends, you have, you've got to go back or get a new, uh, new type of visa or apply for different legal status. Similarly, if you're in the United States and you're seeking asylum or you have a stay or you have a court date, you are here legally. You don't have permanent legal status to stay indefinitely, but you are here legally. And that's the point. It doesn't matter whether Garcia is sympathetic. It doesn't matter whether he's a Maryland father or a Maryland mother or not, not a parent at all.

All that matters is, is he entitled to due process under the constitution? Did he get it? And the answer of course is that he did not. Doody said on YouTube, why do Americans have so much trouble understanding what a tariff is and who pays it? Because the party in power is gaslighting them about it. When Trump says we've taken in billions from China in tariffs, you've taken in none of it. The tariffs are paid by American companies and by American importers. The the reason Americans have trouble understanding it is many Americans have no clue how to think critically or look things up for themselves when they hear the dreaded. I've done my own research. Yikes. You do. I'd love to sit in front of a computer and see what that looks like. to think critically or look things up for themselves when they hear the dreaded, I've done my own research. Yikes.

You do. I'd love to sit in front of a computer and see what that looks like. Um, a lot of people don't know how to do their own research and there is a party that is pushing tariff policy that no one in their right mind would favor if they understood how tariffs actually worked. So there's an incentive, there's motivated reasoning for, uh, a lot of these folks to say it must be good because Trump's doing it. Well, Trump's doing it and he's lying to you about how it works.

Ariadne do Castello wrote in on YouTube and said, European here with advice, American citizens need to revolt right now. We've seen all this before and you guys are still hesitating. You know, what's interesting about this is I've gotten emails over the last three months from some people who say, David, you're being too hyperbolic. Democracy's not at risk. Trump's not trying to be authoritarian. You're being hyperbolic.

And then there's another group that writes in and says, David, why aren't you screaming on your show about the existential threat that what's going on right now presents? My goal is to thread the needle and find the truth. There are major reasons to be concerned and we need to activate around them. Screaming and being hyperbolic isn't useful. Pretending it's going on. It also isn't useful, but I'm doing everything I can to as accurately as possible convey the scope of the threat as I see it. And I do think that the threat is such that Americans should be protesting in the streets. And many Americans have been protesting in the streets. Domenica says, as a Canadian, I fully support my government developing a strategy to significantly diversify our trading partners to the detriment to the detriment of the US.

We can no longer count on them as a stable Democratic ally. How could I tell her that she's wrong? It is to the detriment of the United States. But of course the tariffs are on, the tariffs are off. The tariffs are because of fentanyl. The tariffs are because of fentanyl. The tariffs are because of the border situation. The tariffs are because they don't like Justin Trudeau's suits. It is outrageous to be operating in this way

as a supposedly developed, wealthy Western nation. And even if all the tariffs went away permanently today, the damage of Trump making the U.S. look like an unstable partner to any kind of agreement is going to take much longer to undo. It will probably take some other president to be perfectly frank. Rain Owens saying that like me, she is also naturalized. I'm also a Delta medallion level flyer, she writes. I wrote to Delta to explain that I won't be flying this year for the reasons you stated. This is a reference to me saying I've been warned not to leave the country because I might have trouble when I come back as a naturalized citizen. Anyone out there who has similar airline status or an airline card needs to write to the airline

and remind them that this is bad for business. The airlines have some influence. It's an interesting idea. And then Pamela on Substack on the same topic says we will not be traveling either. My husband is also a naturalized citizen for 60 years, but I am terrified. I'm even terrified to cross state borders. Yeah. So listen, I'll just be upfront. I think the crossing of state borders for 99% of people is not an issue. Uh, certainly if there's an issue with documentation, which is not the situation Pamela is talking about, there are states that are show us your paper states and that that could be a problem. But I'm hearing we got dozens of messages like this.

I'm a naturalized citizen. I'm not leaving the country because I don't know what's going to happen when I come back in. I will admit I am. I am tentative. I am tentatively scheduled to leave the country briefly soon. And I'm a little bit, as Trump would say, a little bit scared of what's going to happen on the way back in. But I will be making contact with an immigration attorney who will know exactly where I will be

entering and will be available should anything happen, I guess, is the way that I would say it. Info at David Pakman dot com. If you have anything you would like to communicate with us, please remember to keep those reviews going for the book. The book was back on the bestseller list, which is very exciting. The book of course is the echo machine available everywhere. Books are sold. We're approaching a thousand reviews on Amazon. That would be beautiful to get to. You can also review on Barnes and Noble and Goodreads. And remember that if the clamp down comes, if for any reason they shut us down on YouTube or Facebook. It's happened before. The only place I own my data is our mailing list, which is on Substack. The only way I'll be able to get a hold of you and

tell you what's going on if the clampdown happens is to our newsletter subscribers. It's completely free. Go to David Pakman dot Substack dot com and sign up or email info at David Pakman dot com. Say, David, get me that newsletter and I will put you on there, sir or ma'am. All right. We'll see you on the bonus show and be back here Monday.