The David Pakman Show - 5/23/25: TV hosts warned about slamming Trump, tourists cancelling US trips

Episode Date: May 23, 2025

-- On the Show: — TV hosts at ABC’s The View were told to stop criticizing Trump, as networks cave to lawsuits, FCC pressure, and corporate cowardice under authoritarian threats — Adam Schiff eviscerates Trump’s EPA chief for gutting cancer prevention and clean air protections: “You could give a rat’s ass” — International tourists are cancelling U.S. trips in droves, costing $12.5 billion in lost spending as Trump’s America becomes hostile, unstable, and unwelcoming — MAGA doesn’t want freedom — they want a daddy to punish the people they hate, and Trump is giving them exactly that — Disease outbreaks are spreading while the Trump-controlled CDC goes silent, as public health infrastructure is quietly dismantled — A car bomb explodes at a California fertility clinic in a far-right terrorist attack — this is not hypothetical anymore — Ted Cruz calls birthright citizenship “bad policy,” despite it being the 14th Amendment — and despite being born in Canada himself — A Republican senator claims Biden’s cancer diagnosis was a distraction tactic, as MAGA continues spinning conspiracies -- This week's Friday Feedback -- On the Bonus Show: Right wingers turn on Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, Elon Musk's Grok goes wild on South Africa claims, and much more... 🌿 CBDistillery: Use code PAKMAN for 25% OFF at https://cbdistillery.com 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- Get David's Books: https://davidpakman.com/echo -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- David on Bluesky: https://davidpakman.com/bluesky -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow  

Welcome, everybody. You know, things are getting bad when the view, a show that is basically coffee gossip and yelling about Trump gets told by ABC executives, you've got to take down the Trump criticism a notch. According to multiple reports, ABC News presidents, I don't, this is going to be a tough one. Alman Karam, the Medavik sat down with the co-hosts and said less Trump, more celebrities. Disney CEO Bob Iger reportedly backed it up as well. Disney owns ABC.

This is not a show changing direction. This is part of a much darker story that we have to talk about. And it involves, yes, some corporate cowardice, although some corporate fear is understandable. Authoritarian pressure from the Trump administration and the slow suffocation of a free press that has even started to hit independent media shows like the David Pakman show. ABC is not going to move away from the Trump stuff because ratings are down. In fact, they're not.

The view is beating Fox in the same time slot and pulling, pulling great numbers from the key demographic that advertisers want to be marketing to. What's happening here is that ABC is being pressured because Trump is actively trying to break the press that is critical of him and big media executives are mostly folding. Now we saw yesterday on yesterday's show video of that meeting in the oval office between Donald Trump and Cyril Ramaphosa where Trump started flipping out on NBC's Peter Alexander because Alexander had the audacity to say, what about this white genocide thing that doesn't really exist,

but that you keep talking about? What about the plane that you're accepting from Qatar? And Trump said these pointed questions are fake news. He doesn't want pointed questions. He wants people lauding him and cheering him and celebrating him. And so this is all having an effect. The CBS situation is analogous to this. Trump sued 60 minutes for 20 billion because of an interview with Kamala Harris that he

says was distorted, even though factually the show edited two parts of an answer together. 60 minutes has been cutting together and cobbling together answers for decades. That's the format. That's the way they do it. I prefer seeing an entire interview. The 60 minutes is a different type of show that that's just not the way they've done it. Uh, Trump didn't care that that's all that took place.

He doesn't care about facts. Trump sees an opportunity to attack a show or a channel or a network that he has deemed as adversarial to him. And sometimes it works to panic whoever you are going after. Paramount is trying to merge with Skydance. So instead of defending 60 minutes, they caved. CBS is reportedly submitting all Trump related content for internal review and their longtime executive producer Bill Owens, as we talked about recently on a bonus show, resigned in

protest and said, we've lost editorial control here. This is not good. You then look at the FCC Trump's guy at the FCC, Brendan Carr, supposed to be a leading an independent agency, has started reinstating old complaints against networks. Fox News excluded, of course, and is now promising news distortion investigations, parroting the accusations of Trump, weaponizing them with the investigative power of federal agencies. And that's the theme. Trump as the top of the federal government wants to use federal power to punish criticism.

And now you've got Disney and ABC getting nervous, too. They've already paid Trump 15 million for his presidential library, a million in legal fees to avoid further lawsuits. And now they are telling the view you've got to tone it down so it's not random. It's strategic. It's damage control and it is appeasement of Donald Trump. Now, I don't think it's going to work and I'll explain why. Trump is never satisfied.

He even attacks Fox News for posting a single poll that Trump doesn't like because he doesn't want neutrality. He wants obedience. And so ABC might think if we tone down the criticism of Trump on the view 50% we won't be on his radar anymore. He won't target us anymore. But the truth is, if you tone down the criticism of Trump, 50% Trump will just flip out about the 50% that you're still doing and it's not really going to be safe for you.

They might think it's going to be safer. So unless what they're doing is completely eliminating all criticism of Trump from the view and probably from the entire channel, this is an exercise in futility because the only safe place under a tyrant is on your knees. This is how authoritarianism takes hold. It's not just brute force. It's institutional cowardice brought on by these sorts of threats. It is a slow and shameful erosion of resistance and opposition in exchange for let us do our

corporate merger. Let us keep our ad revenue. And the chilling effect is no longer somewhere in the distant future. It's right here. I know that there are likely some people in my audience who will say this is a corporate media problem only. It's is a corporate media problem only. It's just a corporate legacy media problem. This is creeping authoritarianism and it's not just targeting corporate networks.

Independent media is in the crosshairs. We've already seen demonetization campaigns. We've seen shadow banning. We've seen vague misinformation label slapped on political commentary. The infrastructure is already being used to punish dissent, even outside of the corporate newsrooms. Tech platforms often financially tied to regulatory fears under Trump 2.0. They are tightening the screws.

And so sometimes the pressure isn't direct. Sometimes it's algorithmic. Sometimes it's financial, but it's happening in all shapes, forms and sizes. And so even independent voices like the David Pakman show that rely on platforms like YouTube or Patreon or whatever, everybody's realizing you don't need to be silenced with a government order necessarily because intermediaries can turn off your income or throttle your reach or derank your work. And it is death by a thousand quiet cuts, not Fox, not CNN, not the view, not me, not

you. Nobody is safe if this continues. And what we're watching is not about one show. It's a climate of fear. It extends from the biggest broadcast networks all the way down to the smallest creators. And if the press doesn't fight back now, I don't want to be hyperbolic, but it's not good. It is not good.

We had a very fiery exchange this week where Senator Adam Schiff shredded EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin for cuts to the agency that are going to adversely affect water, air, all of it. And Adam Schiff said straight up to Lee Zeldin, you don't care how much cancer your agency causes. And this got very heated. Take a listen. You have the big and are you in the big state?

So and are you go through every single list of the grant? Well the way with that windup, by the way, I understand that you were an aspiring fiction writer. I see why. Oh yeah. Well, I understand your view that you can cut half of the agency and it won't affect people's health or their water, their air. That to me is a big fiction, Mr. Zeldin.

You forgot about the fact that cleaning up the well in wildfires I think Mr. Zeldin, if your children were drinking water in the sewage crisis, apparently we wouldn't have our own. in Santa Ana, Mr. Zeldin, maybe you wouldn't be so cavalier about whether there was lead in their water. Maybe you would give a damn instead of coming in here and suggesting that any grant that takes lead out of the water must be waste, fraud or abuse because you need the money for a tax cut for rich people because you're totally beholden to the oil industry.

You could give a rat's ass about how much cancer your agency caused. The gentleman's time has expired. You know, the thing that's tough about watching this is Adam Schiff is really trying. You know, we've had Adam Schiff on the show and I've had some conversations with him. You can say a lot of things about Adam Schiff, but he genuinely cares about the things he's talking about. He genuinely is concerned about regulatory decline and crumbling under Trump's director here in the EPA, Lee Zeldin. And the thing that is a sort of a brick wall that Adam Schiff can't get around is that Lee Zeldin doesn't give a damn. Lee Zeldin is just can Lee Zeldin is not actually concerned with the substance of what

Adam Schiff is talking about. Lee Zeldin just wants to do Trump's bidding and ease regulations as much as he possibly can and make it so that Trump's corporate cronies can make as much money as possible without being constrained as they see it by regulations. That's what this is really about. And so if you're Adam Schiff, you can't no matter what you say, you can't get Lee's Zeldin to care.

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse also was getting in on the action during this hearing. And it's just all pathetic. You're insisting on the fact. also was getting in on the action during this hearing and it's just all pathetic. You're insisting on the fact. I'm insisting on the facts. That's exactly what I'm insisting on. I'm insisting on the facts and I now have three different versions of the facts that Travis oil department of justice lawyers working on this every single day that we're in court.

The way you're saying now is not true. Just because you insist on EPA lighting taxpayer dollars on fire. The American taxpayers, they put President Trump in office because of people like you. They have Republicans in charge of the House and Senate because of people like you. Because you don't care about 99% of this story. You don't want me to go through the list of all the evidence of waste and abuse. No, what I want you to do... In conflicts of interest. What I want you to do... You don't care me to go through the list of all the evidence of waste and abuse. No, what I want you to do in conflicts of interest, what I want you to do qualified

recipients, you don't care about what I want you to do is explain why the department of justice lawyers representing EPA in court under a duty of candor have said that everything you've just said isn't true. That's what I want. And of course, they only have one real narrative right now, which is we've all come in descending like angels from heaven to find and root out all of the waste, fraud and abuse. The fraud, we still haven't found a single perpetrator of that fraud. Fraud is a crime and we still don't have a single person they've identified as committing fraud waste and abuse. You know, what's wasteful to a degree is in the eye of the beholder, but we know what

this is really about, which is pushing a political agenda primarily. And it's very transparent. While Maga diehards keep chanting, we don't care. Every time someone points out the cost of Donald Trump's policies, international tourists are quietly delivering the one response that matters in Trump's America, which is they're not coming to the United States for vacations. We have new data now from the world world travel and tourism council. The U.S. is on track to lose over 12 billion dollars in international travel spending this year.

That's a decline of seven percent. It's not because suddenly the sand on the beaches is no good. It's not because the theme parks got rid of everybody's favorite ride. It's because the rest of the world sees what the United States under Donald Trump has become expensive, hostile and unstable. And they're voting with their passports of the hundred and eighty four countries surveyed. The U.S. is the only one with an absolute decline in international visitor spending. The according to the WTC's CEO, quote, the U.S. has firmly got a we're not open, open

for business sign right now. And that's correct. Germany has updated its travel advisory after several Germans were detained at the US border. Canada which used to be exempt from most of the short term visa requirements now has to register and submit fingerprints for any visit longer than 30 days. That's new under Donald Trump. You've got Canadian airlines canceling routes due to declining demand. Vehicle traffic at land crossings is down significantly from Canada.

So these are not anecdotes. This is an economic warning siren. The largest travel economy in the world is bleeding visitors and Magas response is always, so what? We don't want sissy Europeans and liberal Canadians coming here. Well, one of the things that you have to understand is that overseas visitors spend seven to eight times more than domestic tourists when they come to the United States. Canadian visitors spend three times more than Americans when Canadians vacation in the United States and we're losing a bunch of them.

So when conservatives and right wingers blush, brush this off as, oh, globalists are scared and liberals are whining. They are not understanding the math. This isn't about politics. It's about dollars. It's about cities losing tourism jobs. It's about entire regional economies built on foreign travel drying up. And you can't own the libs with a bankrupt hotel.

That is what decline looks like. And it is completely self-inflicted because of Trump's policy of punish, restrict and intimidate. He's making visiting the U.S. feel like a gamble. What will happen at the border? What, how will I be treated and for what? Because of a big, big, unfortunately for Trump in the U.S., there are many other options for vacations and a lot of people are choosing not to come at all.

So Maga can pretend this doesn't matter. That's what they usually do. Just like they pretend, you know, Trump's deficits don't matter. His tariffs don't matter. The legal attacks on the press don't matter. But eventually this is going to get pretty expensive. So they might not care yet. Oh, it's only a 7% decline.

But what about when the flights are empty and the cities are quiet and the economic fallout starts hitting red state economies that rely on foreign dollars just as much as the blue states. You really can't isolate yourself from the world in the way that Trump has done and antagonize allies and expect everybody to still show up and spend money. So this is a real problem. We started getting an inkling of this two months ago. We now have more firm data. It is a major problem for the

economy and it's going to become a major problem for Trump as well. We've got a great show for you today. Let's take a very quick break and continue right after this. the targeted for on basis. And my prediction is you would like the bonus show because it's just more show. Sign up at join Pacman dot com and you can use the coupon code. It will end soon. All one word, no spaces. It will end soon to save bigly off of the cost of a membership. Let's stop pretending a huge chunk of the MAGA base does not care about freedom. What they really want is a daddy to tell them what to do and to tell them that they're being

good boys and good girls. Someone to tell them what to think, who to blame, why everything wrong in their life isn't really their fault. Despite talking about personal responsibility, they've got a whole cast of characters you can blame if things aren't going well. Democrats, Marxists, anarchists, globalish, the whole thing. And where we find ourselves today in 2025, they have that in President Donald J. Trump now back in power, doing exactly what they always wanted.

Cracking down, lashing out, throwing out the rulebook, throwing out the law book and telling you who you can blame for all of your problems. Is it China? Is it immigrants? Is it Joe Biden? Is it socialism? And the people that are cheering this on, they're not confused voters. They're not fighting for liberty.

They are knowingly backing a strong man because that's actually what they want. I talk in my book, The Echo Machine, about how one of the greatest sort of wastes of time is talking to these MAGA people about their principles as if they really care about their principles. The truth is that they will abandon them immediately when they are inconvenient. And while they claim to want liberty and freedom and all of this stuff, they want certainty. They want control. This often pushes them to conspiracy theories.

If certainty and control mean less democracy to get there, fewer rights for people, a president who does whatever he wants. They're fine with that. This is backed by real research. Studies show that Trump's strongest supporters score highly on authoritarian traits, blind loyalty to authority, something they ascribe to the left. But they actually fit the bill for hostility towards outsiders, political outsiders, ethnic and religious outsiders, nationality outsiders and an obsession with what they've identified arbitrarily to some

degree as traditional values. Sociologists have studied this and they found that these traits, traits, not economic anxiety, as we were told. These traits are the best predictors of remaining loyal to Donald Trump, especially when he abandons the principles that he set out. So in other words, a lot of these MAGA people didn't turn to Trump because they lost their job or they were worried about Chinese trade. They turned to Trump because they like power and they want someone else to use it on their

behalf. And right now it's Trump. This is to a degree, by the way, they talk about how they're against identity politics. This is in a sense white conservative Christian male identity politics. I know that that doesn't encompass everybody, but to a degree, that's the orientation of this. And the support isn't evenly spread. White men and women are most likely to show these authoritarian attitudes.

Women of color least likely. Why? It's because this isn't really about populism. It's about preserving old power structures. Trump promises to bring back the way things were or the way some of his followers remember things being. And for some of his followers remember things being. And for some people, that's all they need to hear. And so Trump is already acting like a dictator because he sees himself as one.

Just look at what's happened so far. Trying to use the alien enemies act to rush deportations without due process. Supreme Court sort of blocked parts of it maybe, but does Trump care? I don't know. Uh, Trump's response was, we're going to figure out a way around it and we'll say it's an emergency and these are terrorists and we're going to just do whatever we want to do. He fired civil servants that weren't loyal enough. He's demanded personal loyalty pledges from federal employees.

He's floated suspending habeas corpus and says he has the right to do it if that's what he wants. So this isn't a theory. These are no longer campaign promises. This is the current president of the United States acting and behaving like an authoritarian. And the MAGA base loves it because what they want is a strict father to tell them what to do, what to think, who to hate and who to go and bully. We look at polls from last year and they show that nearly half of Republicans who believed

half of Republicans believed the U.S. needed a leader who would break the rules to fix things. They didn't mean we need to reform the system. They seemingly meant bypass Congress, ignore courts, silence the media and punish enemies. And that's what they are getting right now. And Trump is using the presidency to do what authoritarians do, consolidate power, crush dissent and institutions so far are bending. The guardrails are breaking.

The base is cheering and they love it. So this was never about democracy. This was never about liberty or freedom. It was about obedience. And the reality is Trump supporters never really wanted a president. They wanted a ruler, a daddy, someone to punish the others and to make them feel safe. They say they love freedom, but what they love is domination as long as they are the ones dominating other people.

So we now are in a situation if the rest of us don't wake up to what that means, if we keep pretending this is partisan politics as usual, which some people out there are still doing, we're going to lose more than just elections. I hope we start winning some elections, but the risk is that we lose way, way more than that. And some of the related ways in which this is playing a role I want to explore now. We have a public health disaster in the making right now, and it's all because of Trump's authoritarianism. I'm going to explain it to you right now.

May 20, 25 measles, hepatitis, salmonella and Listeria are spreading in the United States. You might be saying, David, sir, with total respect and tears in my eyes, what are you talking about? I haven't heard of that. The reason that you haven't heard about it is that the CDC, the agency that's supposed to keep us informed and help doctors and warn parents and give guidance is barely saying a word. There aren't comprehensive updates going out.

There's no alerts and health warnings. The CDC's newsletters have stopped. Their social media channels have gone nearly silent. They've missed publishing their own flagship disease report, the morbidity and mortality weekly report for the first time in over 60 years. So you would be right to ask what the hell is going on here. What's going on is that since Donald Trump returned to office in January, his administration has slashed thousands of jobs at the CDC.

Entire teams have been fired, including the people who handled public communication, social media, health alerts. The CDC can't post to its own Facebook account, to its own Instagram account, because the people who had the passwords are gone. And the kicker is that even when the CDC does try to get a message out, it has to be approved by you know who Robert F Kennedy jr. The vaccine conspiracy guy who has somehow ended up as the secretary of health and human services.

So instead of telling you what foods might be contaminated, where is measles spreading? How do you prevent it? Get a vaccine. How to protect your kids from hepatitis. The CDC's social media is posting vague fluff about Bobby Kennedy Jr.'s travel schedule. It's not a stake. This is the plan. This is what they do.

Step one, sabotage the agency. Look at the Postal Service. Republicans hated that the U.S. Postal Service was a functioning public service. So they defund it. They cut routes. They put Louis DeJoy in charge, who seems to not even like the Postal Service, forced them to prepay decades of pensions. And then you go, look, it's not working.

Let's privatize the thing. That's not incompetence. That's proactive sabotage. Same thing with public transit. Gut funding to public transit. Complain when the trains and buses aren't on time and then hand giant contracts to private rideshare companies that don't serve low income neighborhoods and don't care about accessibility or the IRS.

Republicans gutted the IRS for years. They laid off auditors. They froze hiring. They made it harder to enforce tax laws. And then they pointed at rich people not paying taxes and saying, look, the IRS is broken. Let's cut even more and make it easier for the richest to continue avoiding taxes. Of course, it's broken. You broke the thing. And finally, they do it with public schools, starve them of funding, overload them with standardized testing and various requirements, force them to fire teachers and then say these

schools really aren't working well. Let's do charter schools. Let's do voucher programs. Let's promote private schools. So that's the process. Step one, make it work like crap. Step two, complain it's not working. Step three, say we shouldn't even be funding this.

Let's just privatize. So they're doing the same thing with public health. Got the CDC, make it nonfunctional, turn around and say it's bloated. It's useless. Let's shut it down. And the most depressing part is that voters keep falling for it. People will get sick. Some will die.

As long as their side wins, a huge part of the country will cheer it and go, yeah, the CDC was just so bad on COVID. I'm glad it's failing. Americans will choose to suffer as long as they think it's angering the left. And this is how democracy breaks down. It's how a country lets public health collapse in real time because there's a political movement, MAGA, that is more interested in controlling the message than protecting people's lives. So we've got to live with the consequences and people keep falling for it.

Now, that's the Republican model. They're applying it federally. What can you do? I don't want to encourage people to abandon red states, but the blue, well-funded functioning states have their own versions of the CDC that they can't do everything the CDC does, but they can at least work to keep people informed. Listeria, salmonella, measles, whatever the case may be. So I'm not saying go and move to a blue state, but there is no doubt that in a sense, blue state governments are a sort of bulwark against the insanity that we are seeing at places like the CDC. with traditional underwear. Our sponsor she makes the most comfortable boxer briefs I've

ever worn. If you're sick of the boxers that are too loose or the briefs that are too tight, sheath is for you. Sheath underwear is designed with two special pouches in the front, keeps everything separate in its own compartment with extra confidence that you will feel throughout everything him Well, they blew up a fertility clinic with a bomb. This actually happened in the United States in 2025. An explosion tore through the American Reproductive Center's fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California on Saturday morning. A car bomb, a car bomb detonated in the parking lot behind the clinic. The roof collapsed.

Debris scattered across five lanes of traffic, glass shattered in businesses that were blocks away. And the FBI says this was not an accident, that this was terrorism. One person is dead, believed to be the attacker. Four others were injured. And authorities say that they recovered an AK 47 style rifle at the scene. There are even reports of possible live streaming of this entire fiasco. The clinic ended up closed for the weekend. By chance, the there were no patients inside because it was a weekend. The embryos and the IVF lab are off site.

So that spared what could have been an unthinkable additional horror. But this was really not luck. I mean, this was a failed mass casualty attack thanks to it being closed and embryos being stored off site. This was less tragic than it could have been. The clinic is not a random building. This is a place where people go to build families, where couples go if they're struggling with infertility.

It's a place of science. It's a place of medical care. And someone blew it up. So this is not theoretical anymore. They will blew it up. So this is not theoretical anymore. They will blow you up if you've spent the last few years hearing warnings about rising far right extremism in the US from shows like this. This is what I've been talking about. Fertility clinics, LGBTQ centers, synagogues, mosques, schools, libraries, FBI offices, power stations.

It's getting to be a very long list. The data from CSI is is that, as I've told you before, nearly all ideologically motivated terrorist plots and attacks in the U.S. in the last many years come from the right wing of the political spectrum. In twenty twenty two, right wing extremists were responsible for somewhere between two thirds and 90 percent of all terrorist attacks and plots within the United States. So this is not really about one deranged person. We've talked about the radicalization pipeline.

It includes right wing media. It includes social media echo chambers. It includes politicians who kind of wink and nod at violence. They talk about vermin. They talk about purges. They talk about taking matters into their own hands and Second Amendment solutions. And then stuff like this happens at a fertility clinic in California, which gets bombed. And if you think it stops at clinics, it's not going to, because if you can blow up a

fertility center and have parts of the media shrug, this didn't get that much attention. What won't some people feel entitled to do? They don't want you to start a family your way. They don't want IVF. They don't want reproductive freedom. They don't want you to start a family your way. They don't want IVF. They don't want reproductive freedom. They don't want bodily autonomy. They want control. They want to make the decisions.

And they're proving to us that they're willing to use violence to get that to be the way others operate. And so if you're still waiting for some dramatic sign that this has all gone too far, this is it. They blew up a fertility clinic with a car bomb. And so the next time someone says, oh, this stuff would never happen. David, you're being hyperbolic. Show them this story because it already did. And they feel justified in taking this sort of action. Ted Cruz, who, by the way, was not born in the United States, has decided now that the Constitution is bad policy.

It's inconvenient policy rather than the Supreme Law of the land. In a recent statement from Cruz on Fox News, he said, I think birthright citizenship is a terrible policy. We're going to look at the clip, but just think about the words he's using. It's kind of cute, right? It's bad policy. Birthright citizenship is not from some executive order or from bureaucratic rule. It's in the Constitution.

The document that Cruz and his party treat like it's carved into stone tablets from Mount Sinai, except when it's inconvenient. And here is Ted Cruz on Fox News explaining why it's just bad policy. Ship is terrible policy. It is right now. Sorry, I think we cut off the beginning of that part of the argument is here. That is the absolute heart of the argument. And I think birth birthright citizenship is terrible policy.

It is right now. Current U.S. law before the Trump executive order that if an illegal alien is here and she gives birth to a child, that baby is instantaneously a U.S. citizen. The problem is that's an incredible magnet for illegal immigration. You see people crossing the southern border. You see pregnant women crossing the southern border explicitly to give birth in America so their baby can be an American citizen. We also have this phenomenon called birth tourism, where you have people from foreign

countries, people from China come to the United States when a woman happens to be eight or nine months pregnant. Yeah. You know, what Ted Cruz won't mention is that while while that, of course, anecdotally has people from China come to the United States when a woman happens to be eight or nine months pregnant. Yeah. You know what Ted Cruz won't mention is that while while that, of course, anecdotally has happened and it theoretically could happen, immigration officers are trained to look for that. Now you could say, well, they're not going to catch everybody.

Some women don't look that pregnant or I get it. But the point is, you're not allowed to do that. Ted Cruz acts like just because you can come here and there's birthright citizenship. People do this, do this all the time. If it is suspected that that's what you're doing, you are not allowed into the country and come here to give birth. So the baby has American citizenship. That is an abuse of our laws. And so I have long supported ending birthright citizenship. In fact, I filed legislation in the Senate to end birthright citizenship. And that's what President Trump is trying to do as well.

The 14th Amendment ratified in 1868 guarantees that anybody born in the United States is a U.S. citizen. It was passed after the Civil War. Part of it was to stop southern states from denying citizenship to formerly enslaved people and their children. And now, because Republicans think immigration fear mongering is good politics and maybe for them it is, I don't know, they're openly attacking that part of the Constitution. But this is much bigger than Ted Cruz's opinion, because this is about how the entire MAGA

movement slowly and publicly wants to erode constitutional protections. But they want to also pretend that they are defenders of the founding principles and see the Constitution as the law of the land. The irony, by the way, is that Ted Cruz was born in Canada. His entire eligibility to run for president is based on his interpretation of constitutional law. But now you're maybe it's you.

Maybe it's not me. I was naturalized. Maybe it's someone else. Other people's citizenship is bad policy, according to Ted. So to recap, the Constitution is sacred unless it protects immigrant kids. Citizenship by birth is bad policy unless it applies to Ted Cruz. And the MAGA movement is in favor of the Constitution, except when the Constitution gets in the way of their agenda.

Sort of like if during the civil rights movement, a senator stood up and said, you know, I think the 13th Amendment is bad policy. That's the amendment that ended slavery. Imagine calling that bad policy because it interferes with your political goals. That's the level of constitutional cherry picking that we're dealing with. You can't claim to worship the founding document and then treat it like a menu where you go, I like these and not those like it's door dash. Right. You don't get to opt out of the amendments

you find inconvenient. It's the Constitution. Now, if you don't like it, go look at getting a another amendment passed to undo it. I don't think there's any political will to do that. Mark Wayne Mullen is a Republican senator. He's a particularly violent, disgusting individual. And he says that the release of Biden's cancer, like they released it into the wild, the release of Joe Biden's advanced prostate cancer is a calculated distraction, he says. Take a listen. It's interesting, though, the timing of them releasing the cancer. Right. I said this while we were talking kind of tongue in cheek a while ago. But it seems like since her tapes were released, they were like, hey, wait, maybe a good time

to distract the American people and talk about his cancer because we know that cancer has been there for a while. And then when you start talking, of course, we don't know that. As we've said before, we've spoken to urologists. We've already talked about it. Is prostate cancer typically slow moving? And by the time it gets to stage four metastatic, um, it, it's been a while. That is often the case, but it is not always the case.

And particularly with the Gleason nine score on Biden's tumor suggests very aggressive cancer. It is not standard of care to do a PSA blood test for men after age 70 or 75. Biden's in his 80s. If Mark Wayne Mullen has some evidence to present, I want to hear it. But absent that, this is pretty irresponsible speculation about the tapes themselves. I think as a special counsel, he went as far as he could. But then you had the left media that was that was completely covered it up. And I, you know, Robert, her, of course I did. But you start looking at even Jake Tapper and who is now wrote a book on this. He wrote a book pretty quick. So that means that they knew this was being covered up for quite some time.

That doesn't make any sense. The book was written quickly, meaning they knew his cancer was being covered up for a long time. Now, I will be the first to tell you if it is the case that Joe Biden knew he had prostate cancer last year and he was maybe already getting hormone treatment and maybe that treatment was responsible for some of his behavior on the campaign trail. As far as side effects go, we should know that.

And at some point, maybe we will. At the same time, if they don't have evidence for that, how long can you insist without being required or asked to show some evidence of what you are saying. These people are being extraordinarily irresponsible. And of course, they are furious, furious that there might be sympathy for Joe Biden and his diagnosis. So that's where we are. And it's all pretty vile. X could be an employer. And these brokers sell the data to other businesses and even

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Pacman and use the code Pacman for 60% off. That's INC og ni dot com slash Pacman for a huge 60% discount The link is in the podcast notes 60 percent discount. past YouTube comments, Instagram comments. You never know what will be featured. Let's start with an individual who goes by the name Devalos Michael, who says it's insane that anyone would critique RFK for wanting to make things safer. There's no harm in looking into these things. He's not making it illegal to get a vaccine. It never will be.

What he is doing should be applauded. If he finds no wrongdoing, then great. What does he have to gain from this? This is sort of how the grift works. RFK positions himself as a brave truth teller just asking questions. He even recently said, oh, you shouldn't take medical advice from me, but he's just asking questions. But the questions have been answered over and over by actual experts.

And one of the greatest grifts that exists is saying about something that we've already gotten answers to. Why am I not allowed to ask questions about this thing? I'm just asking questions. We should praise that. And the idea is that he's just doing this harmless investigation for the betterment of everybody. But it's actually sowing distrust in public health for clout and and in some cases for

cash, although maybe not in RFK's specific situation. He's not risking his life to save yours. He's building a brand. He ran this anti vaccine nonprofit that raked in donations and would get booked on major platforms. And, you know, now he's secretary of Health and Human Services and he continues to amplify dangerous ideas all under the guise of asking questions. So yes, critique is not only valid, it's necessary. We love critique because the issue is that when you give conspiracy theories, you know,

a suit and a famous last name, people mistake them for leadership. They mistake them for thought leadership and guidance on issues where we've already gotten the answers from people who are actual experts. So we don't want to just do the, uh, a fallacious appeal to expertise. We want to actually find X subject matter experts and review what's been studied and what has been determined. You know, the, the, the fluoride stuff is a great thing. Listen, there are tests associating higher fluoride with lower IQ.

And I'm just saying if you want fluoride, great. But I don't know about putting it in water systems or because it's very it looks seems to be very dangerous. Never included in that. Just to take the fluoride example is that those studies looked at places where the naturally occurring level of fluoride in the water is 50 to 70 times what we would ever consider putting in water systems. And it just it takes you into this whole whole wow, why can't we explore this?

Why haven't we asked questions? Well, we have we have the data. We've explored it already. And that that's where we are. All right. Let's go next to Beth Moore. Beth says, dude, you do nothing to help your country. You were lost.

I could stand. I guess she means I couldn't stand. I could stand two minutes of this video. Please stop taking money to butcher the efforts of this presidency. The people involved are good people. You know, I'm trying to expose corruption. I'm trying to call out authoritarian grift and drift. I'm trying to hold elected officials accountable. If that doesn't help a democracy, then what does? OK, whether the people in Trump's administration are good people or not,

it's not a defense against bad actions. You can be polite at a dinner party and still support policies that might rip families apart or enrich the ultra wealthy or got civil rights or flout the rule of law. You know, the bar cannot be. They seem nice. We're not grading vibes here. We're trying to grade governance. And if pointing out that I'm evaluating action makes me lost to you, you seem to be completely off the map, Beth. So I would

suggest that you maybe reorient yourself a little bit to the way that we do things here, here on the show. Todd O'Brien wrote on Facebook, the Democrats don't have a populist little David. So the only way a Democrat could ever win back the White House would be corrupt elections. That's the left's only choice at this point. This is where we are now. Accusations of election fraud as a default when you lose. But the reality is that the Democrats have won the popular vote. What is it? Seven of the last eight presidential elections.

I might be getting that wrong. So if anything, the real rigging is a system where the loser still gets to be president because of something called the Electoral College, something I'm against. Also, you know, I take issue with this idea that only a populist can win because that assumes voters want simple slogans over policy and maybe some do. But as I've said before, populism is really more of a rhetoric than anything else. It's not a set of ideas. Bernie and Tucker both espouse populist rhetoric on policy. Their ideas couldn't be more different. And so the emotional appeal of populism, I don't find

to be particularly good. Trump used it to sell tax cuts for billionaires. Bernie used it to say we should have universal health care. It's not the same. OK, so this argument that populism is the only way to win. I just don't know. And to Todd, you know, if your ideology survives only by denying election results, you might be in a cult, my friend. All right. Marcus on the sub reddit said, Can anyone admit Trump has only done one good thing? The border Marcus writes border crossings are down 94 percent since he took office. I agree he has effed up on everything else. But regarding the border, does anyone agree? He has done good here in reducing the crossings.

It's the only thing he's done. Am I right or am I misguided? So here's the I guess here's the question I would have. The idea that Trump's border policies were and are effective really depends on what you're measuring and then what you're willing to ignore. Did the reported number of illegal crossings drop recently? Did it drop at some point during Covid? Did it drop at certain points during Biden's presidency? Yes. The number of reported illegal crossings has gone up and it has gone down.

And at one point it was down partially to Title 40 due to Title 42 global shutdowns, pandemic, all these different things. If you acknowledge that border crossings being down is not necessarily because of something the president has done, although that can certainly be a factor to me, it seems that we should really be evaluating immigration a little bit more broadly. If you do believe that Trump's policies of cruelty and dysfunction reduce the number of illegal crossings, if that that's what you see in the data.

And you say that makes sense to me. You know, when Trump said only three people crossed illegally in March or something, I don't know anyone who believes that. But if you believe that, then I guess Trump gets partial credit. But then he's also got to get credit for the chaos and for the areas he has failed to deal with immigration on, you know, child separations, the ICE raids, chaos at ports of entry, detentions with no due process, deportations with no due process. You've got to do the whole thing.

OK. And if to some degree, Trump's responsible for the decrease in the illegal crossings, if we believe that, then he can get some credit for that. I don't see a problem. But then we've got to evaluate immigration in some total as you am total. And in total, it's actually been one of the greatest fiasco. So if we just zoom out and we go, OK, overall, has the immigration situation improved or worsened under Trump?

Arguable reduced number of illegal crossings, which were three months in. And you've got to look at that track record over four years, but arguable reduction in illegal crossings in the first three months. OK. And then four months, on the other hand, complete flouting of law and order, ignoring legal court decisions, talking about ending due process, ripping people off the streets in total, I think were worse off than when we started. That's my view.

OK, Mick Priestley says on YouTube, imagine being a Christian and then going berserk because the pope follows the teachings of Christ. Yeah, it's almost like some people don't really want a pope. They want a culture war mascot. And the moment that the Catholic Church got a new pope who talks about refugees, who talks about poverty, who talks about peace, climate change, maybe suddenly the pope's a Marxist rather than the messenger of Christ that they wanted every in this, by the way, every time the Catholic Church liberalizes just a tiny little little bit.

And we've covered a number of popes now. Every time that this happens, all of a sudden they go, oh, this is this is not this is not really Christianity. And of course, maybe the problem isn't the pope following Jesus. It's that a lot of American Christians are following their political party instead of the teachings of Jesus. That that's what I would that's what I would propose to them. OK, where are we at on? OK, here we go. Admiral Wit the with says, yes, David, here we go. Did you know that Barack Obama received one million in jewelry from Saudi Arabia and that

King Abdullah from Jordania give Michelle Obama and her kids three hundred thousand dollars worth worth of jewelry? Those demers think he means Democrats. Those demers keep it and nobody in the demo rats party say a word about it. Dear God. So this is all, of course, in the context of Trump getting a free plane from Qatar. Obama, while president, was the recipient of some gifts from foreign leaders. That's right.

Every modern president has been the recipient of gifts from foreign leaders. It's part of democracy. And what happens to those gifts is that they go to the National Archives, they get reported to the State Department under the Foreign Gifts and Decorations Act. There's an entire federal process for it. It's public. It's cataloged. It's audited.

If you're imagining Michelle Obama walking out of a state dinner with three hundred thousand dollars worth of necklaces stuffed into her purse, that's a fantasy, not a fact. And the there are two issues with what's going on with Trump. Number one, undisclosed gifts and payments, emoluments when foreign dignitaries would stay at Trump's failing D.C. hotel to ingratiate themselves with him so that when they go to the White House, they go, oh, we love the hotel. The minibar was so good that they get that. That's an emolument. OK, something of value that is undisclosed. And further, the airplane, which then goes to Trump's presidential library after Trump's

president presidential library foundation, I think it is, is just nowhere on the same scale as Obama getting some jewelry that he has no interest in that immediately is turned over to the National Archive. So give me a break. All right. Justin from Spotify says, stacking up wins across the world so fast we can't even count. Peace not war and libs still laugh at sound bits, blow and smoke all the way to the finish line.

And you will thank him. Meaning Trump later. What wins is Justin talking about? Trump's main export is chaos. He didn't end wars. He's cozying up to authoritarians around the world, gutting the diplomatic corps, mass firing federal workers, shaking up the economy and and potentially imperiling American businesses with blanket tariffs. If your win is that sometimes we on the left get mad.

I don't know what to tell you, bro. You know, at some point people stop laughing and we start saying there's something really dangerous here. And I don't know exactly what wins Justin is referring to, but they seem pretty few and far between. Miriam on Substack says it occurred to me the other day, watching all this stuff about Trump and the deep money grabs he's doing around the world that he fully expects to get impeached. He's making sure he gathers as much money in his pocket before it happens.

Have you had any thoughts? I'd be interested. You know, it's an interesting theory, right, that instead of governance, Trump's doing liquidation, foreign deals, real estate, shell games, super PACs, paying legal bills, endless merch grifts, the meme coin, the entire thing, because he's not running a country. He's running a fire sale before the feds close in or before he gets impeached. I just struggle, Miriam, to believe that that's what this really about, because Trump has

now found de facto immunity by becoming president. And if I were Trump, I would be feeling pretty damn good that they couldn't get me legally criminally. They couldn't get me with two impeachments. They couldn't even prevent me from winning and becoming president again. And so if I were Trump, I wouldn't be assumed I'm getting impeached. And if I get impeached, I would assume I'm going to be acquitted in the Senate because that's what happened before.

And I think it's what will happen again. So it's an interesting idea. But if I'm Trump, knowing everything we know about Trump, I don't think that that's really what he's thinking. I don't think he's worried about. I think about that. I think it's very clear that Trump sees having one as all the immunity that he needs. Let me know what you think.

Info at David Pakman Dotcom. Remember that my book, The Echo Machine, an instant New York Times bestseller, is available everywhere books are sold. Any bookstore can get it for you. It's on Barnes and Noble. It's on Amazon. It's everywhere. It's in too many places.

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