The David Pakman Show - 7/2/25: Disaster bill passes, Trump wants to deport citizens, job losses mount

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

-- On the Show: -- David Graham, staff writer at The Atlantic and New York Times bestselling author, joins David to discuss his new book "The Project: How Project 2025 Is Reshaping America" -- The Senate passes Trump’s tax-cut bill by gutting Medicaid and the ACA, stripping health coverage from at least 17 million people -- Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski votes yes on Trump's spending bill after securing Alaska funding, then freezes when asked about selling out national healthcare -- The Trump spending bill passes easily despite grassroots resistance, showing how power and pressure remain firmly in Republican hands -- Private sector jobs decline for the first time in over two years, raising fears that Trump’s tariffs will deepen the slowdown -- Maria Bartiromo abruptly changes the subject on-air after reporting Trump-era job losses, dodging the bad economic news -- Trump rambles about washing machines, plastic straws, and heavenly water in a series of confused public appearances -- Trump calls for deporting natural-born US citizens he considers undesirable, embracing open authoritarian rhetoric -- Trump threatens to prosecute CNN employees and critics, cheered on by allies like Kristi Noem as he escalates attacks on free speech -- On the Bonus Show: Most Americans think ICE is going "too far," American pride at a new low, Trump's 60 Minutes lawsuit settled, and much more... 💼 Odoo: Try it completely FREE for 14 days (no credit card needed) at https://odoo.com/pakman 🩳 SHEATH Underwear: Code PAKMAN for 20% OFF at https://sheathunderwear.com/pakman 🥐 Wildgrain: Use code PAKMAN for $30 off & free baked goods at https://wildgrain.com/pakman 🛡️ Incogni lets you control your personal data! Get 60% off their annual plan: http://incogni.com/pakman 💻 Sponsored by Aura: Try it free for 2 weeks! See if your data is safe at https://aura.com/pakman ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman -- Become a Member: https://davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe to our (FREE) Substack newsletter: https://davidpakman.substack.com/ -- 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

Ladies and gentlemen, the Senate passed a bill which will strip health insurance from at least 17 million people. And they did it to pay for more tax cuts. Here is Vice President J.D. Vance brought in to break the 50 50 tie in the Senate, casting the tie breaking vote as the vice president is able to do. Here is the moment with a little bit of applause, not that much, to be honest. on this vote the yeas are 50 the nays are 50 the Senate being evenly divided the vice president votes in the affirmative the bill as amended is passed Yeah. So this is going to be a tough show. I can tell you right now.

Let's break this down. This bill is part of Trump's legislative push to get a massive tax giveaway that Republicans rushed to do before July 4th. But to fund it, they're gutting Medicaid, Medicare, the Affordable Care Act elements over a trillion dollars in cuts. Medicaid takes the biggest hit. Now remember that back in Donald Trump's first term in 2017, they had a health care proposal. They didn't do it because it would have led to 24 to 32 million Americans losing health

care. And they realized that's very bad for us. We can't do that. Apparently, they've decided that 17 million losing health care is an acceptable price to pay. So this is not like a bureaucratic reshuffling some vague legislation off somewhere in the distance that won't really affect people. This means that there will be disabled people who lose coverage.

There will be working poor people, most of them, most most poor work who lose coverage. Seniors in nursing homes who will have limited coverage, low income kids who will lose coverage. If you look at the CBO estimate, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, 17 million people will be kicked off of health insurance over the next decade as a result of this bill. Half the country doesn't even seem to know that this is going on. Here's how it will happen. If you are on Medicaid, you'll get extra paperwork twice a year. You miss it.

You're out. You need help. And states have underfunded offices that you can call for help with limited hours that conflict with your work schedule. You're out. Second, if you are a working adult under age 65, you will need to prove that you're working 80 hours a month or you could lose coverage as well. Even if you're already working, you miss the documentation. You're gone. There's a new thirty five dollar copay for some doctor visits for somebody who's scraping by. That's the difference between getting care and saying I'm not going to go be seen. And for people who buy insurance on the Affordable Care Act marketplaces like me as a self-employed person, enrollment

windows are going to be shorter. Automatic re re enrollment is going away. Subsidies won't kick in until your eligibility is verified. That can take take weeks, if not longer, meaning you will pay full price until the bureaucracy catches up. You can slow down the bureaucracy and make it unaffordable for people. But it gets even worse. The bill will target abortion providers, banning them from even billing Medicaid for non-abortion

services. Planned Parenthood says a third of its clinics are potentially going to close. Republicans love that. Many of these clinics serve poor women who are coming in for birth control, cancer screenings, not abortions. If you live in a rural area, your hospital could be next. Cuts to Medicaid mean more uninsured patients, less money to keep hospitals running. One estimate says hospitals could lose seven hundred and fifty billion dollars under this bill.

Fewer hospitals open means longer E.R. wait times, even closures. You go to nursing homes, an area that's been ravaged by private equity. By the way, read the book Plunder if you're interested in learning about how private equity is ravaging nursing homes. Sixty percent of long term care residents rely on Medicaid. You take funding away. Facilities will have to close beds. Stop accepting Medicaid patients entirely. Where will those seniors go? All of this hospital closures, coverage losses, paperwork traps. This is the the the cost or the price of another Trump tax cut. And remember, Republicans know this. Some of the Republican senators said we're concerned about the Medicaid cuts, but then

they voted for the bill anyway. Lisa Murkowski is one of those people. She froze and just stared at a reporter when asked about this yesterday. We'll get to that. So if you're keeping track, 17 million or more will lose coverage. Six hundred family planning clinics at risk. Rural hospitals on the chopping block, seniors in nursing homes potentially displaced. And why?

So that billionaires can pay less in taxes. Again, this is cruelty disguised as policy and it's happening right now. Now, I've said many times before the 2017 Trump tax cuts were great for me. They created a new business deduction exactly for my type of business. I got a great tax cut. Now, did I go and hire more people because of that? No. Why not? Because it doesn't work that way. I hire more people when there is more demand for the product or service that I am offering.

Simply giving my business a tax cut doesn't create more demand for my product or service. In fact, because we're viewer funded, the way that we expand is by my audience having more money so that they can afford memberships or they can afford to buy the products that our advertisers are offering. So I'll take it right. As I've said before, me alone sending in more money is in policy. This is not how we fund a modern Western rich country. But the cruelty here.

It's happening right before our very eyes. And a little bit later, I'm going to I'm going to sort of I'm going to do a segment in a little bit that I think might upset some people, but it's going to be very real. And so we'll get to that. But first, I want to talk about Lisa Murkowski. Sometimes silence says more than words. And what happened yesterday with Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski from Alaska is like nothing I have ever seen.

Let me set the scene for you as we check out this video. The Senate passes the big ugly bill, the death bill, the beautiful bill. Call it what you want. Devastating cuts to Medicaid, Medicare, Obamacare subsidies. 17 million people at least projected to lose health care coverage over the next decade. Lisa Murkowski was on the fence. She might vote for it. She might vote against it.

Right. But she ends up voting for it. Why? She struck a little side deal. She got a goodie. She got a little bit of funding for rural, rural hospitals in Alaska, a little carve out for her. Basically, Ryan Nobles catches Murkowski in the hallway and And she asks, she is asked a simple question by Ryan, which is Rand Paul says you sold out your vote for a little side deal for Alaska. And she stares at Ryan. You are going to hear silence because she's just staring at him once she gets past the blank

stare. Listen to what she says. Senator Paul said that this was that your vote was a bailout for Alaska at the expense of the rest of the country. That's what Senator Paul said. Senator, we've got the. I didn't say, ma'am, I'm just asking for your response. My response is, I have an obligation to the people of the state of Alaska. And I live up to that every single day.

I fight for my state's interests, and I make sure that Alaskans are understood. I work hard to take care of a state that has more unique situations, more unique people, and it's just different. And so when when people suggest that federal dollars go to one of our 50 states in a quote bail out, I find that offensive. I advocated for my state's interests. I will continue to do that and I will make no excuses for doing that.

Do I like this bill? No, because I that's the key part. OK, do I like the bill? No, I tried to take care of Alaska's interests, but I know, I know that in many parts of the country there are Americans that are not going to be advantaged by this bill. I don't like that. I don't like the fact that we moved through an artificial deadline. So she doesn't like it, but she did what was best for Alaska, which is she got something

for her constituents. Now, there's two sides to this. Murkowski knows exactly what she did. The bill was going to pass. And this is what I'm going to talk about in a moment. This, this bill was going to pass. They were going to offer goodie after goodie after goodie until they get to 50. And then they bring in JP Mandel, JD Vance to be the tie breaking vote.

This is as ridiculous and disgusting, but as honest an answer as we have heard from any senator. She knows the bill will hurt tens of millions of people. She knows seniors in nursing homes are going to lose beds. She knows people on Medicaid are going to get kicked off, but she voted for it anyway. Why? Because she knew what we've been saying for weeks, which is the bill was going to pass. So she is she's getting pushed towards it, grabs anything she can off the wall. And now even members of her own party are calling her out. So this is where we are in 2025. I don't feel bad for her.

She did this to herself. But there is a certain real politic here that relates to what I really want to dig into with you right now. The big, beautiful bill passed. Of course it did. Of course it did. Of course it did. We all knew that it would. Didn't we?

No, we didn't. I was getting emails from people. David, let's call this senator and get him to oppose the bill and let's do this and let's do that. I said it weeks ago. OK, this bill is going to pass. Republicans were always going to pass some version of this damn bill in the Senate. The day it passed the House on the bonus show, I said to Pat, you know what's going to happen,

right? You're going to have a handful of Republican senators. They're going to suck up media attention. People are going to go, oh, let's convince this person or that person not to vote for the bill. And then they don't have the 50 that they need. Apoplectic headlines for days, four or five, six days, people staying up all night. You should see the chat threads I'm in.

Let's call this person's office that they don't have the votes. If you have any idea how this works, you would have known the moment it passed the House. Republicans are going to pass this. And it's just a matter of offering enough goodies. We flipped one vote. Now Murkowski doesn't like the bill, but she got some goodies for Alaska. Now we got 50 incomes, JD Vance to pass it. OK, they had to pass this bill.

They they knew that the marching orders from the top, what the Trump White House demands is this bill must pass in some form. And so now we've got the whole same game going on. We can block it in the house. The House is ultimately going to pass some version of this. OK. And I wasn't pretending otherwise. Now, you you might recall that over the last two weeks, I didn't do this whole thing of, you know, this all might come down to Rand Paul. Let's call his office. There were there were a lot of people doing that stuff. OK. You saw my interviews with senators and such last week and they would say what we really

need to do is kill the bill. And of course, I agree ideologically. That's what we need to do. But it wasn't going to happen. And when this filters into the broader discourse, I think that it actually damages the possibility of if we acknowledge somehow they're going to pass it, maybe we could focus on let's get some things in the bill that are good for us, good for the American people. And so I've done this long enough to know how this goes.

Now, here's the part that's going to be difficult. I think this is going to upset some people in my audience. Sometimes it doesn't seem everybody in my audience wants the truth. OK, when I say they're going to pass the bill, David, you're being defeatist. David, you're giving up when I say there is not really a path to stopping this because it's going to be Republicans negotiating with Republicans to get 50 of them because they have more than 50 to go. I'll go for it.

And in comes JD Vance. And sometimes I end up in the position where I think some in my audience want me to sell a feel good story. We can stop this thing if you just make the right phone call. If I go, guys, we're not stopping this. Can we get some things in there that we think are good? Maybe that's the effort because we're not stopping this. I don't know which story my audience wants to be told.

This is not the first time that honesty pissed off some people in my own audience. When I told my audience after the June 27th debate last year that Joe Biden is going to need to drop out of the race, it's unrecoverable. The pressure is going to be too great. He's going to have to drop out a very loud section of my audience, lost it and said, David, what are you talking about? What are you? Biden's not dropping out. A very loud section of my audience lost it and said, David, what are you talking about? What are you? Biden's not dropping out. You got to be behind him because he's the. It was obvious he was going to have to drop out. And some people in my audience didn't like that. When I said in September and in October, guys, Trump is beating Kamala Harris in every damn

swing state poll. Every single one of these seven states that are usually swing states, Trump is beating Kamala Harris in every damn swing state poll. Every single one of these seven states that are usually swing states, Trump's winning all of them. And I got flooded with messages saying, David, you're spreading defeatism. We need you to stay positive on election night when at seven oh five p.m. Eastern, the Indiana and the Kentucky numbers came in and Trump was leading by three times what he won those states by in previous elections. And I said, that looks bad.

And then by nine p.m., as we saw the gap in Pennsylvania swing from a Harris lead to a tie to a teeny tiny Trump lead to a medium sized Trump lead to a bigger Trump lead. And I said, guys, those numbers do not look recoverable. There aren't the votes left. There were people saying, David, it's only nine o'clock. You're being defeatist. So what am I supposed to do? OK, am I supposed to lie to make people feel better?

It's just not what I do. My preference is let me say the hard thing and be right rather than say the comforting thing and let people walk into surprise. OK, I'm here to tell the truth, even when it's frustrating. This bill passed not because we didn't protest enough, not because we didn't call Rand Paul's office enough times or Lisa Murkowski or whoever. The system is fundamentally rigged and Republicans control everything. Now, I want to say one more thing about this.

I still believe in pressure, right? It's not that I think we just let Republicans pass this with no challenge calling their donors. You know, I believe in all of these as tactics. We should make everything as hard as possible for Republicans to do. It matters to make them sweat and to recognize that a lot of this country despises what they're doing. That's part of the long game.

But I don't see the value in doing the dog and pony show when we just don't hold the power and going, I think we can defeat this guys if we make enough calls. So there's there's a conflict. There's a contrast here, but a tension between these two things. So I don't think it's time to spiral. I don't think we disengage. We expose the bill.

We track the fallout when it goes back to the House. We see, can we get some things in there that are objectively good, even though they're going to pass the damn bill. But I think we need to be a little more honest here. I don't know what my audience wants from me, but my instinct is not to do the we're just one vote away from defeating this thing. They were always going to give handouts until they got to 50 and then bring in JD Vance to be the hero.

So let me know what you think. Does this anger you? Do you do you not want to watch or listen to this show anymore? Because that's my attitude, not the, you know, let me sell you some fantasies thing. I want to hear from you. OK, info at David Pakman dot com. Subscribe to the YouTube channel if the perspective I'm outlining, if my attitude makes sense to you and get on my sub stack newsletter where I am going to be writing more about

this at sub stack dot David Pakman dot com. I'm here. The mustache is here. I'll be it briefly. We've got a great show for you today. the the Let's be honest when it is hot outside the way it's been bad underwear makes it really much worse. Our sponsor sheath underwear has completely rethought how men's underwear should function in the heat. Sheath's boxer briefs are designed with a dual pouch system, keeping everything in place

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If you've never thought much about your underwear, this is the one brand that might make you start. Go to sheath underwear dot com slash Pacman. Use the code Pacman for 20 percent off. to see audience come or become a gold member. Trump has his gold card. Gold members who are subscribed both to the website and to Substack really appreciate everybody. It pains me to tell you this today. For the first time in more than two years, private employers cut jobs last month for the prior 26 consecutive months.

Every month, employers added jobs. In other words, 26 months in a row at the end of each of those 26 months, the country ended the month with more private sector jobs than it started with. In June, that number went down. June ended with fewer people working for private employers than there were on June 1st. To make things even worse, the main numbers were revised down. So in May, we added just twenty nine thousand jobs. In a sense, we are in a net negative of jobs for two consecutive months.

We had plus twenty nine thousand followed by minus thirty three thousand. So over the last two months, we have a four thousand private sector job decline. Why did this happen? Employers are reluctant to hire due to fears of what is coming in this economy. And so we aren't seeing mass layoffs. But what we're seeing is that when when people leave, when workers leave jobs, many are simply not being replaced. Companies say we're going to eliminate that position. We're not going to hire someone new to fill it. Now, there

is some good news. We are seeing some wage growth. There's an expectation for two rate cuts this year, which the reason there is that expectation is because things aren't looking so hot. But the rate cuts should help a little bit. And like I said, we are seeing like a trickle out. It's not a layoff wave. Now, this is where Donald Trump's tariffs can really start to play a role. Remember that we are now just a week from the deadline, July 9th, for Trump's 90 deals in 90 days.

We could see that completely explode an already slowing job market if indeed Trump goes, hey, we didn't actually get any deals done. All the tariffs are going into place. We would see higher import costs. This would hit American businesses that rely on foreign parts and materials, meaning they are going to need to either eat the costs or cut jobs to stay afloat. If you are a company that's already hesitant to hire or replace workers, Trump's tariffs going into effect, depending on what happens in a week, could tip the balance from we're

not going to replace people that quit to we've got to actually start layoffs here. So we are now looking at this self-imposed deadline from Trump. Will he follow through with blanket tariffs or won't he? Now I have to admit that on a personal level, when I look at the stock market, I'm glad that the stock market is stable and is not following what we are seeing right now in the job market. But there is a reasonable question. Why isn't the stock market collapsing given the warning signs that we are seeing?

Well, one of the things that's going on, presumably, is investors are saying, OK, things aren't looking so hot in the job market. But now that we expect to rate cuts from the Fed, we can keep buying or at least not sell. But these signs of cooling are potentially a real problem. I hope that that doesn't happen. Now, one of the unfortunate things that's happening if you're a Fox News host is that you're bragging about the economy becomes more difficult when these sorts of job numbers come in.

And you've got to see what happened when the job numbers broke on Fox News. Fox News host and Trump brown noser Maria Bartiromo was live on air when the disastrous jobs report came in. There was an announcement that in June, the country lost private sector jobs rather than gained them. And Maria Bartiromo goes, we're getting the jobs number. And then when they learn that the country lost jobs in June, she changes the subject so quickly that I'm surprised it didn't give her whiplash.

Let's check it out. Of course, President Trump is talking about this bill leading to growth in the economy. We are waiting any moment now to get the jobs numbers for the month of May. The expectations call for the ADP numbers to be up 95,000 for the month of June rather. It's the June jobs data. And we'll of course, uh, right now seeing, seeing the number actually, uh, show a decline in jobs down 33,000 on, on ADP. Uh, the bill includes $25 billion for the golden dome, the missile defense system.

The Senator you introduced a bill supporting back to the bill. Golden Dome. This is what happens when your job isn't journalism. It's cheerleading and you look at the scoreboard and it shows the wrong score. Your team's losing. You pretend you didn't see it. We've been. Oh, here's the score.

We lost. You know, I've been watching our practices. We're just killing it during practice. The problem is that other people did see this coming. So Maria Bartiromo scramble is really emblematic of a deeper issue. There is a cognitive dissonance required to defend Donald Trump's economic claims in the face of hard data, because for months Trump has been saying we're going to have so much growth because everything's going so well. We had Q1 GDP decline.

Oh, we don't want to talk about that. But we were told, don't worry, jobs are going to be supercharged. Then the numbers are going to be great. But we've got looming tariffs and market volatility, even though the market has recovered what it what it lost. Some companies instituting hiring freezes the first private sector job loss in 26 months. So all of a sudden, reality contradicts political identity. And if you're Maria Bartiromo, you go, I'm bailing out mid-sentence.

I just got a bad number. I don't want to talk about that. And so the commitment to Trump, as often is the case when you commit to cult leaders, it becomes a trap. The deeper you go, the more ensnared you are with the cult leader. It becomes more and more difficult, sometimes impossible to acknowledge when the leader has failed. And this is the nature of cults of personality.

Loyalty is the currency. Critical thinking is not thinking for yourself is not objective analysis of the facts is not valued. Loyalty is valued. Sometimes reality doesn't cooperate with loyalty. We were told the economy would soar. It's kind of sagging. We saw job decline and you end up looking ridiculous.

You end up on live TV going, where can I look? What else can I talk about? This is a much bigger moment than Maria Bartiromo when your political credibility is built on unwavering faith in one man, even if he's orange. Right. It's an orange man, but it's a man nonetheless. When you're your your vision is based on based on loyalty to Trump rather than the facts. You're no longer doing an analysis.

You're doing damage control and viewers will start to notice these jobs numbers are people's lives. Thirty three thousand more people than at the beginning of June now don't have a job and they have to figure out how do I pay for my life? And so pretending everything's fine and the Golden Dome provisions in the bill are so cool when people are losing their jobs, it's dishonest. It's dangerous. I think people are going to see through it in today's episode of if Joe Biden had done

this, Donald Trump suffering another brutal cognitive crash. Trump was asked during a press conference down in Florida where they are launching this prison camp, Alligator Alcatraz. How much time do you believe detainees will spend in this prison camp? And Trump goes, I'm going to be down here a lot. I live in Florida. If Biden had done this once, they'd be demanding his immediate removal. Do not pass go.

Do not collect two hundred dollars. Go straight to a mental institution, as Trump likes to call them. Here is Trump. Dana Marie McNichol Fox News Channel. Mr. President, is there an expected time frame that detainees will spend here days, weeks, months? And does that have anything to do with the immigration judges you just spoke about being trained and staffed here?

When you say, what was the first part of your question? Is there a specific timeframe you expect the detainees to spend here? Days, weeks, months? In Florida? Yes. Here in Alcatraz. I'm going to spend here days, weeks, months in Florida. Yes. I'm going to spend a lot. Look, this is my home state. I love it.

I love your government. I love all the people around. These are all friends of mine. They know very well. I mean, I'm not surprised that they do so well. They're great people. Ron has been a friend of mine for a long time. I feel very.

This answer is completely non-responsive to the subject matter. Trump not only clarified the question and still is saying I'm going to be down. He was asked twice. How long are detainees going to be here? I love Florida. I'm going to be down here a long time. If this were Biden, it would be a week of Fox News. Comfortable in the state. I'll spend a lot of time here. He's going to spend a lot of time in Florida. Question was, how long will detainees be held here?

Trump then slurring his way through an impenetrable word salad about washing machines. This if Biden had done it once would have been all you hear about. I know how good we were, but others was getting rid of rules, regulations and all of the things that I got rid of already. I signed more executive orders than anybody in history times, like three or four. And I got rid of just one. I got rid of the other night. You buy a house, they have a faucet in the house, Joe, and the force that the water doesn't

come out. They have a restrictor. You can't in areas where you have so much water, they don't know what to do with it. You have a shower head. The shower doesn't the shower does it. You think it's not working. It is working. The water I just can't get clean is dripping out. And that's so good for me. I like this hair lacing. I like that. Nice and wet. Thanks. You have to stand in the shower for 20 minutes before you get the soap out of your hair. And I put a thing in, and it sounds funny, but it's really not. It's horrible. And when you wash your hands, you turn on the faucet, no water comes out. You're washing, the water barely comes out. This was done by crazy people. And I wrote it all off and got it approved in Congress so that they can't just change

it because I did it in my first term. Everyone was so happy. And then one of the first things that Biden did when he came back is he put the restriction on showers, toilets and sinks with old man ranting about water pressure. OK, we're back to it. We're back to it. And then finally, again, this was the entire thing. Was it it it was just so hot?

You know, Trump was just tired. That's all that's going on here. Trump continuing. Do you have problems with water? And the people came to me from Whirlpool. They said, we can't make a machine that's competitive. We can't make a machine. It doesn't work.

Why? They don't let us use water. Do you have any problems with water? No, we have so much we don't know what to do with it. You know, it comes down from heaven. Right. And I I approved all of that washing machines, the whole thing. And be honest.

Why won't they talk about it? Why forget about Fox for a second? Why will corporate media, non Fox corporate media, Why won't they talk about a guy who is clearly unintelligible in terms of translating whatever is going on in his big brain into speech? Terrifying, absolutely terrifying. people in my audience know I am a bit of a pastry connoisseur. Our sponsor wild grain is the first bake from frozen subscription box for artisanal breads, pastries and pastas. Wild grains boxes are customizable depending on what you like and prefer. They've got their classic variety box.

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and also author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Project, How Project 2025 is reshaping America. David, so so good to have you on. You know, we're at this moment right now. We're a few months into the second Trump term. We're in the middle of this budget negotiation, which is it going to ultimately be the Senate or the House that decides what happens, who might kill the bill, who will pass the bill. Doge is sort of on its way out, although it's really Elon who's out and Doge is nominally still going. It might be a good place to start in terms of based on what we knew about Project 2025

from the documents prior to the inauguration of Trump. How relevant have its goals been during these first few months? What has been done to achieve its goals? I think in the first 100 days or so, what we saw and where they've been very successful is in what Project 2025 laid out as a plan to seize control of the executive branch, take powers from Congress, take powers from independent agencies, lay off civil servants, cut government departments. So we saw all of these things happening very effectively.

And those things are essential to what they view as in a policy platform. And I think we see more recently some of the attempts on the policy platform. So when I look at the at the bill in Congress, I see project 2025 priorities all over it. And that needed to some extent the groundwork they've laid. When it comes to Doge, it seems the primary overlap is Doge as the tool to fire a lot of those civil servants. But but is there more to the overlap between Project 2025 and what does has done? I think that's the big one.

I mean, you know, you see things like closing the Department of Education, which is something laid out in Project 2025. But, you know, those claims to be about efficiency, but it's obviously mostly about cutting government. And Elon Musk came into the government without really understanding a lot about how the federal government worked, as we saw. And so for Project 2025, that was for the authors, it was very helpful. They had somebody who was willing to sort of go in with a wrecking ball and had Trump's ear and would do all of these things that they wanted to do while dispensing with some of the legal niceties. Ignoring court orders, as an example, we saw it in terms of the denial of due process to

people who have been deported. We've seen that in a bunch of different places. Is that either philosophically or logistically part of Project 2025? I think it's especially philosophically part of it. And it's not so much that they are opposed to the courts per se. It's that they have this almost religious faith that the Supreme Court will back them up. And if they can challenge things to the Supreme Court, they will win. And they say over and over, you know, these where there are these laws, we understand

that we are violating the laws, but we believe those laws are unconstitutional. And what we've seen over and over is the Supreme Court, once they get those cases, no matter what lower courts have done is saying, yeah, you're right, you can go ahead and do this. You know, you can go ahead and fire the heads of independent agencies. And so they're having a lot of success in that approach. When it comes to something like Christian nationalism, you know, there's this wacky video I don't know if you saw. I think it's a wacky video from about 10 days ago of the faith office of the president with

people speaking in tongues at a spot I've stood at. And when I stood at that spot outside the White House, there was nothing like this going on. We had a different president at the time. But all of a sudden, you had people speaking in tongues just outside the White House. What is the role of religion generally and maybe Christian nationalism more specifically in Project 2025? I mean, I think that's the most important thing about all of this.

It's very important to look at the policies. It's important to look at how they're taking over the executive branch. But all of this is in the service of a Christian nationalist division of American society. And that's something that, you know, that's a term that a lot of people on the right resist. But it's something that Russell Vote, who's one of the lead authors of Project 2025 and obviously now the head of the Office of Management and Budget, he embraces that term. And so what they want to do with all these things is they want to reorient American society around that Christian nation's version vision.

And they want to have, you know, religious organizations taking care of social programs. They want American society oriented to say run a biblically based vision of the family. They want strict gender gender roles. They want religion in schools. So I think that's very much at the heart of all of this. One of the things that I remember talking about in 2024 related to Project 2025 or maybe this actually applies more in 2023 is that the architects of Project 2025 saw it as a vision that could be implemented by any president, at least in theory, and

that would outlive whoever had four years in the Oval Office. Now, it pretty quickly became clear that there wasn't an appetite among Republican primary voters to choose someone other than Trump. So Trump became sort of like the de facto guy who was going to oversee it. But that really the ideas could have been carried out by anybody and also that they will kind of outlive the next presidency in terms of the outliving the current presidency. What would you say has been done so far that is going to go beyond Trump? And it may be it's reversible by the next president or maybe it isn't. But like, where are we in terms of the legacy of this?

After Trump leaves office? I think these changes to the executive branch are very important and they're going to be durable. A lot of these things are done by executive order. And so they look like they're going to be fragile. But if you think about, you know, laying off thousands of federal workers, closing up research shops that have existed for many years, cutting off big projects, cutting off major regulations. These things are hard to spring back up quickly.

And so I think that we're going to have a really permanent impact, even if courts overrule some of these things and no matter who the next president is. And generally what we're seeing is a disempowerment of these independent agencies, disempowerment of Congress. And so that's going to encourage a stronger president and president who can defy checks and balances, I think, for the foreseeable future. Do you have a sense of how much the vision of the of Project 2025 really reflects Trump's sincere beliefs to the extent that he has any and how much of it is like he's really just a vessel and this is a useful thing for him to allow, but that it's not really reflective of his political philosophy. And again,

it's sort of a tough question because I don't know that he really has a political philosophy other than like what can help me win. Right. I think what the authors realized is that Trump has a few things he cares about a lot. He cares about immigration. He cares about tariffs. He cares about retribution. And they found ways to work around that. So, you know, many of them come from the more free trade side of the Republican Party historically, and they understood they weren't going to win that fight. And so they basically surrendered on tariffs. They care about immigration. They're happy to go with that. They care about things like seizing control of the Justice Department

for reasons of political philosophy. He cares about it because he wants to use it to punish his opponents and then everything else they realize that, you know, by providing a strong set of employees, people who are going to be loyal, they can get what he wants done and what they want done. So I think it's really sort of symbiotic relationship and he is a vessel for them. In terms of what's going on in the Department of Health and Human Services with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., I don't remember looking as deeply in the pre November 2024 era at the degree to which Project 2025 is what we might nominally call like anti science or conspiratorial when it comes to some of these medical and science institutions.

Can you kind of like lay that out? Is what we're seeing as the approach from RFK Junior related to Project 2025 or is it sort of its own outcropping? I think there's an overlap. They're not exactly the same. I mean, what Project 2025 sees for for health and human services, I think, is many of the most Christian nationalist views. They're really traumatized by churches being closed for Easter 2020, for example, by public

health authorities. So they're very skeptical of public health authorities for that reason. They're skeptical of vaccines for pro-life reasons. They believe that vaccines are a violation of their pro-life principles. They want to ban abortion. They also have a skepticism of pharma companies and regulators as a sort of revolving door, which is something that I think we've seen very much from Robert F. Kennedy, obviously. So there are places of overlap, but I think it's a place where maybe some of their priorities have been eclipsed a little bit by Kennedy's. One of the things that I find interesting in a kind of dystopian and terrifying way is that for a while it seemed as though the kind of prevailing narrative within MAGA,

let's say not necessarily Project 2025, not necessarily Republicans, but within MAGA was extremely skeptical of government surveillance, extremely skeptical, skeptical of anything that puts our data in the cloud, skeptical of seeding any kind of power to big tech. And I think you can see where I'm going with this. We now have, on the other hand, ideas, including from RFK Junior and others, you know, just a couple of weeks ago or last week, he said he wants everyone with a wearable so that then, you know, rather than making sure no kid goes hungry, get everybody a wearable and then something happens with the data.

And it's interesting because in the past, I think some of these folks would have said, wait a second, insurance companies could get that stuff and say, you're resting heart rate is high. We think you're a risk. We're going to charge you more money or you're only getting five hours of sleep a night. And so we don't want to ensure you. There would have been like a skepticism about some of these ideas. What does project 2025 say about data tracking, surveillance, this sort of stuff? So I would divide it a little bit. On the one hand,

there is a real skepticism of big tech inside project 2025 and it's written before Elon was inside the Trump tent. And they're concerned about data. They're concerned about controlled speech by tech companies where they would rather grab that control, I think, for the government. They're concerned about the effect of technology and social media on children. But in a broader sense, and this is where I think one of the more radical things about Project 2025, I think, there is a willingness to embrace real coercive government power. Things that the right, at least in, you know, lip service has criticized in the past.

They worried about too much government control and they've worried about an overweening federal government. And what you see in all sorts of areas, including data, is a willingness to use the federal government to their ends to force states, to force individuals, to four states, to force individuals to sort of to trample, I think, on a lot of civil liberties in order to achieve what they want to do. When it comes to the civil liberties stuff, when it comes to as some examples, sending

in national troops to states, as we saw in California or, you know, take your pick. So to speak, where is Project 2025 philosophically on that? Because on the one hand, certainly blowing up and increasing the power and power of the executive branch, firing people, shrinking these departments. There is an authoritarianism in that, but it does seem distinct from we're straight up sending in the troops to California. For for example, is that under the Project 2025 umbrella? You know, they talk about using troops within the U.S. for immigration enforcement.

OK. And using them in a role that has not been contemplated by any president in the past, not even Trump in his first term. They don't talk about the same deployment of troops to the streets, but they, you know, I think they're opening the door to uses of troops domestically in a way that connects very closely to what Trump is doing now. And as far as the people around Trump, who are the individuals who you would say are the most closely linked to Project 2025 that have made it into Trump's inner circle.

The most important one, I'd say, is Russell, though, who's at office, the office of amendment budget and who who grasped how he could use OMB as a kind of control center to force a lot of these priorities on departments. So he's a very important one. Another one is Peter Navarro, who's an influential trade adviser who wrote a chapter in favor of protectionism. I think a third one is Brendan Carr, who is the head of the Federal Communications Commission and has spearheaded ideas to defund PBS and NPR or to try to revoke broadcast licenses from broadcasters

who criticize Trump. There's very hard people, John Ratcliffe, the head of the CIA is involved. You can sort of run down the list. I think those three are the ones who have been most influential so far in this administration. I want to briefly just shift gears in our last few minutes here. I saw that about 10 days ago or closer to two weeks. You wrote a piece for the Atlantic Trump's trouble with Tulsi. And I found that article really interesting because I've been following the Tulsi Gabbard thing ever since she was the last true liberal and the only actual antiwar candidate back during the Democratic primary of it was twenty twenty. Right. I. Yeah. And I personally never fell for what I

thought was the sham. And this very interesting thing kind of came to a head where she presented a report that actually did seem to reflect what the intelligence community believed about Iran's proximity to nuclear weapons in in March, which Trump just dismissed multiple times as I don't care. I believe that that they've almost got it. What what do you think? On the one hand, we were hearing she's going to get fired. This is just as completely untenable on the other hand, because of everything else going on, the Tulsi fired stuff has kind of died down.

And even though she's publicly kind of missing, maybe she's not as front and center in Trump's mind right now. Give us your overall assessment of what you believe her future is within this administration. You know, she's in a very difficult position anyway. The director of national intelligence is this spot where, you know, you're they're supposed to have a sort of oversight role of all the intelligence agencies. They don't really have a lot of control over people like the CIA director, especially the CIA director like John Radcliffe has an existing relationship with Trump.

And there's a desire to crack down on intelligence agencies from Trump who's been skeptical of them really since his first inauguration. And I think she, her connection with Trump was that she was also skeptical of the intelligence agencies but she wasn't skeptical of them because of agendas they were pushing, not sort of per se. I don't know how she finds a way out of this.

I think she clearly opposes American intervention and she maybe believed that Trump did. Um, but he, you know, that's not really where he's coming from. He's happy to intervene in a limited way. Um, so I think, you know, she was in an untenable position probably from the beginning. It has become more untenable, but Trump is so reluctant to fire anybody this term. You can imagine her hanging around an administration as a sort of sidelined concern for a good long time. Is she maybe kind of like a loyalty type pick where it's there was a group of people that were advantageous to Trump's campaign,

her leaving the Democratic Party and then becoming MAGA was just sort of useful. And he ended up kind of feeling like he just had to find something for her to do. I think that's a good way to think about it. And it's interesting to compare her to somebody like RSK, who, you know, early on appeared like he might be one of those, but has since emerged as a real power center in the administration. Yeah. And, you know, he's he's it seems like that's a place where his priorities don't conflict with Trump's, whereas her her priors maybe do.

And so that's creating this conflict. Well, we're going to follow it. We've been speaking with the Atlantic's David Graham, also author of the New York Times bestseller The Project, how Project 2025 is reshaping America. David, thanks so much for being on today. Oh, thank you. Every few weeks, there's another headline about a massive data breach. Your bank hospital, a retailer you shopped with five years ago.

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Scan the QR code or use the code Pacman in the app to start. The link is in the description. In a mind blowing Lee dictatorial moment, the president of the United States is now talking about deporting natural born U.S. citizens. I told you yesterday he's now looking at denaturalization for naturalized citizens like me. He now yesterday during his visit to this prison camp in Florida, alligator Alcatraz says we got some bad people born in this country. We got to get him out of here. The president of the United States, unthinkably anti-American.

Let's get citizens out of here. Like to say, you know, a little controversial, but I couldn't care less. We have a lot of bad criminals that came into the into the this country and they came in stupidly. It was an unforced error. It was an incompetent president that allowed it to happen. It was an auto pen maybe that allowed it to happen. And it did happen, but we also have a lot of bad people

that have been here for a long time. People that whack people over the head with a baseball bat from behind when they're not looking and kill them. People that knife you when you're walking down the street. They're not new to our country. They're all to our country. Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too. You want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job that we'll work on together.

But one of the tragedies that has happened because Trump has the media so well trained, he can basically say anything at this point, no matter how unhinged, no matter how illegal. And everybody's just like, it's Trump doing a schtick. I just looked as the clip was playing CNN's headline, Diddy acquitted nothing about Trump saying let's deport natural born citizens. Washington Post, Diddy acquitted nothing about, you know, smaller article about the bill that passed yesterday. Elon Musk wants a third party. The president is saying let's deport natural born citizens. New York Times, a map of A.I. ratings for Manhattan restaurants, did he acquitted? And then divided GOP will decide what happens with Trump's bill.

This is this is where we find ourselves as unhinged and crazy as it is that the president is saying, let's deport any citizens. Also now focusing in on natural born citizens. It's not even really showing up in corporate media. And if you press some of them, they'll go, you know, Trump says crazy stuff all the time. A lot of it he doesn't really do. So we don't have to worry. Absolutely terrifying situation.

Not only is Donald Trump talking about deporting naturalized and natural born American citizens. Trump said yesterday during a brief conversation down at Alligator Alcatraz, this prison camp facility in Florida, Trump said, we may really need to criminally prosecute employees of CNN. And one of the most notable elements of this video is that a secretary of Homeland Security, Christine Ohm, is nodding along. They're not even pretending anymore to be anything but authoritarian wannabe dictators. Listen to this. Secretary CNN yesterday pushed an app that lets you track where ICE agents are. Tom Homan was saying that perhaps CNN should be prosecuted for that. Is that what you want?

Enforcement, your response? Yeah, we're working with the Department of Justice to see if we can prosecute them for that. Because what they're doing is actively encouraging people to avoid law enforcement activities, operations, and we're going to actually go after them and prosecute them with the partnership of PAM, if we can, because what they're doing, we believe, is illegal. And they may be prosecuted also for having given false reports on the attack in Iran. They were given totally false reports.

It was totally obliterated. And our people have to be celebrated, not come home and say, what do you mean? We hit the target. We hit the target. You know, the pilots came home, they said we hit the target. So they may be very well prosecuted for that.

What they did there, we think is totally illegal. This is Idi Amin style stuff. OK, during Idi Amin's brutal rule, the regime would crack down on press freedom, censorship and shutdown, state control, harassment and violence, expelling foreign media, bogus charges against the press. That's where we are right now in 2025. And it got worse. Trump asked, what's your message to a communist Zoran Mamdani? Trump goes, well, we might have to arrest him. Your beloved New York City may well be led by a communist soon. Zorhan Mandami, who in his nomination speech said he will defy ICE and will not allow ICE

to arrest criminal aliens in New York City. Your message to communists is Orhan Mondani. Well, then we'll have to arrest him. Look, we just casual. We'll just have to arrest him. We'll have to arrest him. Even more dystopian.

Ron de Sanctimonious, the Florida governor who now he's friends with Trump again. Now they're on good terms, I guess, saying, hey, you know what? This one prison camp down here in Florida, we want to see these all over the country. We might even make a system of prison camps. It was when I first came in, you know, we lowered the cost of groceries. A simple word like that groceries. Sorry, this is the wrong clip. I actually don't think I have the dear God. OK, I don't have the DeSantis clip or do I have it?

Let me just take a look here. I have this. This normally doesn't happen on the show. Normally, everything is just perfectly fine tuned. Ah, here it is. Here is the sanctus talking about a system of these camps. Given the likelihood of the one big, beautiful bill passing and we look forward to the success of this facility here. How many more facilities like this do you feel that the country needs in order to enact your agenda of mass deportations? Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really many states. This one I know runs doing a second one, at least a second one and probably a couple of

more. And, you know, at some point they might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time. You know, it's not that far away from jails and take years to build. And. All right. So I actually got it confused. It's Trump talking about to Santa's plan, not to say to saying it.

But the point here is a system of prison camps with terrible conditions. United States, 2025, not whatever country in whatever year you would imagine we would hear that. And then finally, Trump capping off this completely abortive attempt at a press conference by just telling a bunch of lies back to back to back to back. He and his bad spending is what caused inflation. So now we have no inflation. Gasoline just hit one ninety nine today in five states.

Gasoline did not hit one ninety nine in five states. And we have inflation. One ninety nine. Isn't that a nice sound? It was up to four or four dollars and going up to five, six and seven in California was seven dollars and 70 cents. But we just hit in five five states, one ninety nine, one ninety eight. And it's coming down to that level.

So that'll be a big thing. And one of the reasons the prices and costs are going down when you go to the supermarket, because I said I was going to get cost down. We're getting the cost down. Food is coming down when I none of that is true. The rate at which prices are increasing is relatively stable and equivalent to what it was under Joe Biden. The state in which gasoline is currently the cheapest is Mississippi and it's two sixty

nine per gallon, even in California, where Trump likes to say it's expensive. It's only four fifty per gallon. Everything he is saying isn't true, but these are loyalty tests. Are you loyal enough to him to keep repeating this stuff? Unfortunately, many Americans do fall for these sorts of things. However, more than half of Americans say ICE has gone too far in arresting migrants. And we're going to talk about that on today's bonus show. Speaking of polling, pride in America has slipped to a new low.

Is that something we should care about? And finally, we are going to look at the details of Paramount settling Trump's 60 minutes lawsuit with a 16 million dollar payout. But no apology. Does that trigger Trump? We'll talk about all of it on The Bonus Show. Get instant access to The Bonus Show by signing up at join Pacman dot com. Get on my daily newsletter at sub stack dot David Pakman dot com. I appreciate you. I'll see

you on the bonus show. I'll see you back here tomorrow.