The David Pakman Show - 9/10/24: Debate TONIGHT, Trump cuts Kamala's lead IN HALF

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

-- On the Show: -- Tristan Snell, lawyer, legal commentator, former New York Attorney General who prosecuted Donald Trump, and creator of Taking Down Trump, joins David to discuss his experience prosecuting Trump -- Donald Trump has cut Kamala Harris' lead in national polling by nearly 50% in just one week -- Multiple new polls have Donald Trump losing North Carolina to Kamala Harris, a state that is almost certainly a must-win for Trump -- Nikki Haley gives us her pathetic and disgusting explanations as to why she is supporting Donald Trump in the forthcoming election -- Donald Trump's team is reportedly terrified that he will get completely destroyed in the debate against Kamala Harris -- Melania Trump floats the idea of a police conspiracy to assassinate Donald Trump -- Donald Trump attacks voters and stuns the crowd of a Fox News town hall hosted by Sean Hannity -- On the Bonus Show: Harris campaign website outlines policy platform, RFK Jr. wins effort to leave North Carolina ballot, Trump says he will vote to legalize adult recreational marijuana in Florida, much more... 🍽️ CookUnity: Get 50% OFF your 1st week with code PAKMAN at https://cookunity.com/pakman 🪟 3 Day Blinds: Buy one get one 50% OFF at https://3dayblinds.com/pakman ☕ Beam melatonin hot cocoa: Get up to 40% OFF at https://shopbeam.com/pakman 🥄 Use code PAKMAN for $5 off Magic Spoon at https://magicspoon.com/pakman ✉️ StartMail: Get 50% OFF a year subscription at https://startmail.com/pakman 🛌 Helix Sleep: Get up to 20% OFF + 2 free pillows at https://helixsleep.com/pakman -- Become a Member: https://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/davidpakmanshow -- TDPS Subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/thedavidpakmanshow -- Pakman Discord: https://www.davidpakman.com/discord -- David on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave a Voicemail: (219)-2DAVIDP

Speaker 1 Welcome, everybody. The debate is tonight between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, and we're going to start with everybody's favorite topic polling. No, I know some in the audience are following polling and others are beleaguered by discussions of polling that they find cloying and disgusting in every way. Listen, we are just weeks out from this from this election. And with the debate tonight, it's of particular importance to kind of draw a line in the sand

and say, where were we before the debate, which will better allow us to gauge the impact of what tonight's debate does. I think there is asymmetrical risk tonight in the sense of the downside risk being higher than the upside risk. If you perform fine, you basically keep your base and probably don't really convince anybody new and the election moves on to hinge on whatever the next scandal is. If either candidate really face plants tonight, the downside risk is significant. The other thing that's happening is there are expectations games that are being played, which we're going to talk

about a little bit later, where on the one hand, there are leaked reports that people around Donald Trump are terrified he's going to completely flop tonight, while at the same time there are those going on Fox News and saying there's never been a better debater than Donald Trump. And we need to evaluate to what degree these are expectations games that are being played. But let's start with the big polling news, which is, hey, we want to know where is polling today. And in a stunning, stunning reversal, continuing the trend I told you about yesterday, Donald Trump has clawed back roughly half of Kamala Harris's lead in just a single week. That's right. I didn't misspeak in just one week.

Almost half of Kamala Harris's national polling lead has evaporated into thin air. You may recall that one week ago, Kamala Harris's lead was nearly two percentage points nationally, 1.9 percent. And today, today, thanks to some new polling that is better for Trump, Kamala Harris's lead has been cut nearly in half to just one point one percentage points. This creates not only a baseline to say, OK, at the start of the debate, Kamala Harris held a one point one percentage point lead. Where will we be in a week? Where will we be in 10 days, 14 days beyond 14 days? More than likely, other things

will have happened that will impact the standing. And maybe just as importantly, maybe just as importantly, what are the trend lines here? And if we look at the trend lines which are on the screen now, this black line that goes through the chart is when President Biden stepped aside and Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee. The storyline that led up to Biden stepping aside, as you can see, is a growing polling gap between Trump and Biden, Trump being the red line and Biden being the blue line. What had been just a half point separating the two candidates in mid-June started to stretch and stretch and stretch.

And at the time that President Biden stepped aside, it had grown to a three point national polling lead for Trump. Now, it's not a crazy reaction to say, but David, sir, three points isn't that much. And you would be right. The the thing to understand is that because of the Electoral College, even with a couple of percentage point lead for the Democrat, the Democrat can still lose electorally. And in fact, we saw that in 2016. And so a Republican having a three percentage point lead nationally is very much not good.

OK, so Joe Biden steps aside. Kamala Harris steps in. You saw a very rapid decline for Trump. And then Kamala Harris took a lead. That lead grew, grew, grew all the way up to nearly two points a week ago. And now the trend line has been Trump rising and Kamala flat. So I don't know where this is going to be in a week. I don't know what's going to happen tonight, although my expectation for tonight is that Kamala Harris will, quote, win the debate, but it won't be as much of a drubbing as some fear, and therefore it will probably reinforce Trump's

support to some degree, particularly among his base. But put that aside for a moment. The question now becomes, where do we go next and what are the sort of big tentpole events after tonight's debate? We have the October 1st VP debate. And beyond that, it is going to be storylines that we don't yet know. So that's the storyline nationally. But there is another polling storyline and it comes from North Carolina. And that's where I want to go next. In a very stunning set of new polls from North Carolina. We have multiple polls that say Donald Trump is losing the state of North Carolina,

which he won in both 2016 and 2020. This is wild, wild stuff. There is a new Quinnipiac poll, which says Harris plus three in North Carolina. There is a new survey USA W.R.A.L. TV poll out of North Carolina, which has Harris plus three. The margin of error is five points on that one. But we now have two new polls from North Carolina that say Kamala Harris is winning by three in an average of recent polls. North Carolina is a tie. Technically, Trump winning by one tenth of a point. That is as close to a tie as you can have without it actually being one. The scope and magnitude of this cannot be understated. If Kamala Harris were to find a way to win in North Carolina, it is over. Save a miracle for Donald Trump. And let me explain why. This is the map from 2020. And these are

the state by state results from 2020. If we were to take North Carolina, as I'm going to do now and flip it blue, you end up with a scenario where even if Trump flips Pennsylvania. And flips Georgia. And flips Arizona, he still loses and Kamala Harris wins. Now, you can come up with other combinations. Maybe Trump doesn't flip Pennsylvania, but he flips Michigan. Kamala Harris still wins if she gets North Carolina. Or what about if it's Wisconsin and not Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, but not Arizona? Kamala Harris still wins in that scenario. So the reason that this is so critical and I will reset the map here to the 2020 results is that if Donald Trump does get North Carolina, he doesn't need to flip that much more to have a shot at this thing.

But if Kamala Harris is able to get that state, it all of a sudden becomes extraordinarily unlikely for Donald Trump to find a path to victory here. So do I think if I were a betting man and you gave me no odds, you just said it's a straight up bet. Who wins North Carolina? I'm probably still betting on Trump. I think Trump will react and he's already been reacting to these tight polls from North Carolina by putting money into North Carolina, a state that he probably shouldn't have to or didn't expect to have to put money into. But one of the important things to understand is that there are states where just making Trump fight for them is a win for Kamala Harris. There's really close polling in Florida right now. Texas, although

we do this every election, I don't think Kamala Harris is really going to have a true shot at Texas by the time Election Day comes. But the fact that there's some polling out of Texas that looks a little tighter than we would be expected expecting to see it. Trump now has to figure out, I need to take states because I lost in 2020. I need some combination of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin. You know, Trump's talking about Minnesota. He's not going to get that one, but he needs to find new states. But at the same time, he's distracted from being able to focus on the states he needs to get that he didn't get in 2020 because he's having to defend at least one state, North Carolina, that he did win in 2020.

And then Florida, he's he may end up having to defend Florida. Texas is this sort of, you know, it's a distant kind of pie in the sky sort of thing. But without a doubt, Texas may be closer than it has been in decades based on the polling that we are seeing so far. So what's the strategy here if you just want to get involved? Well, the the logical strategy is, hey, you live in California. Kamala Harris doesn't need your help in California. What do you do? You phone bank and you phone bank specifically in some of these other states. Maybe you phone bank in Pennsylvania because it's tied and you want to make sure that Harris gets Pennsylvania because without it, the road to 270 becomes more difficult. Or maybe you say, I'm in a phone bank in North Carolina

because I want to put Trump up against the wall and have to spend money, resources and invest time in defending North Carolina, which is already a bad sign for Donald Trump. So many ways to get involved here. We will be looking so closely at the aftermath of tonight's debate, the narratives that develop, the effect that this has. My warning, and we're going to get into this later. My warning is. Yes, I expect Kamala Harris to win the debate tonight. I expect her to be more coherent and stick to the truth far more than Donald Trump.

I expect Trump to use ad hominems. I expect Trump to be confused, disoriented, bumbling and stumbling and tell endless lies such that it will be difficult to even fact check. But I don't believe that to the average Trump supporter, Trump will appear to have had the floor wiped with him tonight. And when the expectation is incredibly low, just getting through it without poopy pants, as some online are calling it, ends up seeming like a win. So I think we have to be ready for Trump not to collapse the way some are expecting him to and for Kamala Harris to do well, but to be understandably nervous.

So we'll delve more into our debate preview a little bit later. Let's take a quick break. Make sure you're subscribed to the YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash The David Pakman Show. Our sponsor, Cook Unity, is the number one meal delivery service in the United States, and it's really easy to understand why CookUnity stands out from the other meal subscription services by offering chef crafted restaurant quality dishes by chefs you've actually heard of. CookUnity is the first ever marketplace

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Pakman dot com slash echo or on Amazon Bookshop dot org, Barnes and Noble or any website or platform that sells audio books, e-books or good old fashioned physical books. More on the book release forthcoming. Nikki Haley, the former ambassador to the U.N. under Donald Trump, former Republican governor of South Carolina. She was Donald Trump's toughest challenger during the primary in the sense that she secured the most votes other than Trump. She's been a significant Trump critic, but we all expected her to. And she did ultimately kiss the ring and say, yes, I'm supporting Donald Trump. However, she regularly seems disgusted with the things that Donald Trump actually says and does.

So she went on Face the Nation this weekend and was asked, why are you supporting Trump, given all of these different disagreements and things that he's saying and things you don't like? And I'm going to translate her answer as it's good for my political ambitions. It is mere naked egocentrism that is guiding Nikki Haley to support Donald Trump, despite the fact that we can all tell she thinks he's a doofus and doesn't like him on a personal level. OK, so let's go to the first clip. guiding Nikki Haley to support Donald Trump, despite the fact that we can all tell she thinks he's a doofus and doesn't like him on a personal level. OK, so let's go to the first clip.

See if see if you can unwind what she says. It'll be helpful. Donald Trump just finished a press conference, three quarters of which was about grievances related to that past conviction related to alleged sexual assault. I know when you were campaigning, you said you had no reason really to question the findings of the jury related to the defamation case brought by E. Jean Carroll. I'm not asking about the specifics of the case, but if that's the focus of a press conference for a presidential candidate, A, is it the best use of his time? And what is the message to female voters to be going through this again? Well, I think the focus for me is on

policy. You know, I think I've always the candidate. No. And I've always said, look, if I thought Biden or Trump were great candidates, I wouldn't have run for president. I ran because I thought I could do a better job. You don't think he's a good candidate. I think he is the Republican nominee. And I think put him against Kamala Harris, who's a Democrat nominee. For me, it's not a question. Now, do I agree with his style? Do I agree with his approach? Do I agree with his communications? No. When I look at the policies and how they affect my family and how I think they're going to affect the country, that's where I go back and I look at the differences. I mean, these are the candidates we have been given.

You look at Kamala Harris, and it's quite remarkable. She never had a debate. She never had a primary. She never had anyone vote for her. And they basically took her, and in 48 hours, they put her back out there, and she was this whole new candidate. But the reality is she has a record. The administration has a record. Trump has a record. And so neither are perfect. Neither are ideal. So she is making this decision with one thing in mind. She sees that the the Republicans who boisterously and loudly denounce Trump, people like Adam

Kinzinger, Liz Cheney. There was Jeff Flake back during Trump's first term. There's Mitt Romney. There's you know, you can go through the whole list here. They are either people with no political ambitions such that it doesn't matter to them what the consequences are of saying, yeah, I'm a Republican, but Trump is not for me. They are retiring from politics like Mitt Romney or they end up losing and getting kicked

out. I mean, look at what happened to Liz Cheney in her Republican primary because of the stand that she took against Donald Trump. Nikki Haley sees this and Nikki Haley is young enough that she still does have political ambitions. It's not 75 or however old Mitt Romney is independently wealthy, retiring. His career is over. What does he care? It is a different situation for Nikki Haley. And so we all know she finds Trump repulsive. We all know that she personally despises the disgusting attacks that Trump launched on her bird brain and all this other stuff during the

primary. We know that normal people wouldn't be called the bird brain on a global stage by a guy for months and then go, that's the guy I'm voting for. Even if you don't like Kamala Harris, you might just say nothing. You might just stay out of it. But that is not what Nikki Haley is doing, because although she knows Trump is bad for the country, she doesn't care because what's more important to her is what's more important to her are her own political ambitions. And she's calculated. I just need to stay silent at this point with regard to my disgust with Trump. And then when Trump is gone, maybe it's 2028. Maybe it's by January. Maybe it's who the hell knows when she wants to be in a position to still be in the good graces

of the most number of Republicans that she can. Now, she was also asked about J.D. Vance saying all of these disgusting things about women. And she also acknowledged there that a lot of that stuff is not helpful. Not helpful is quite an understatement for what J.D. Vance is doing to Trump's candidates. We know that since Vice President Harris entered the race, the gap among women voters has grown to a now double digit lead for her over Donald Trump, according to our CBS most recent survey. So how do they close that? Because just as recently as last week, J.D. Vance said he's disoriented and disturbed that the head of the most powerful

teachers union in the country doesn't have a single child. He continues to say things that certainly are highlighted as being offensive to women. That is going to hurt, won't it, with female voters? It's not helpful. It's not helpful. I mean, is he an effective messenger for the policies you say they are stronger on? I think that the policies, look, you can either look at style or you can look at substance. I choose as a voter to look at substance. How you end up voting Trump with substance as your priority, I don't know. The style, I will say. What's the substance of that, though?

The substance is cutting taxes, making housing more affordable, immigration, national security. That's the substance. The style is, no, it is not helpful to talk about whether women have children or whether they don't. It's not helpful to say any of those things that are personality driven or anything else. I have I have said that and I will continue to say to Republicans, stop it. That's not helpful. Cut it out, guys. And I'm voting for all of you. You know, if you want to talk about things, stick with policy. Americans are smart. They don't need all of this other noise to distract them.

They just want to know how you're going to help them. And, you know, what I would suggest to every American, look at the records of each of them. You've got some stark contrast there. You know, Harris was not strong on the border. Trump was strong on the border. Harris wanted to eliminate fracking. Now she's taking that back. But energy production was not as strong as it was under the Trump administration right now, actually. But when. Yeah, it's actually at a record high, as Margaret Brennan points out there.

So listen, this interview is a stark reminder of the reality. And this is not a defense of Republicans that a ton of the prominent Republicans that are publicly supporting Trump don't like the guy. They think he's bad for the country, but they don't care. And we have to remember that they can't then be rewarded later when they say now I'm running for something and Trump was a mistake and all these different things. This is the opportunity to actually have the testicular fortitude, ovarian fortitude to say this is bad. I'm a conservative Republican, whatever that means at this point to them. Who knows? And I'm

just not going to vote for it. And this is the wrong thing for the country. And it's been the wrong thing for our party. We've lost ever since Trump eked out a win in 2016. We've essentially lost everything. That's not what Nikki Haley is willing to do. And we should remember that numerous stories now proclaim that Donald Trump's team is absolutely terrified that he is going to get destroyed at tonight's debate. I believe it. And also, we have to consider that these may be attempts, maybe attempts to set expectations

very low. Hey, Trump didn't fill his diaper. He's better than Kamala and more competent and more with it. We don't want to allow the expectations to get set so low that Trump being able to utter words that exist in the dictionary is able to be couched after being sane washed by the corporate media networks as a victory for Donald Trump. So let's consider some of these articles. Politico reports Trump's allies fear he'll blow the debate his best chance to regain ground against Kamala Harris.

The challenge is getting the former president to stick to the script. Now, what sort of off script moments there might be? I have some thoughts on and we'll talk about that in a moment. This article from Politico says that the debate is an opportunity some Republicans fear Trump could blow, especially if he gets personal with Kamala Harris. Prominent Republican officials and Trump's advisers have been urging him for weeks. Keep the focus on her policy record. But Trump keeps signaling he's not interested in backing down on personal attacks.

Newt Gingrich said, quote, I assume she'll come in very, very aggressive and she will try to bait him, getting very angry. And she'll be personal and, very aggressive and she will try to bait him, getting very angry. And she'll be personal and try to demean him. I think I hope what he'll do is be a guy who's been a real president while she has been kind of a semi vice president and a guy who knows all the world leaders and a guy who has been through an enormous amount. Just be calm and steady and stick to the real differences. That is not a Trump that I've ever seen. So that sounds like it'll be difficult for him to do. Tricia McLaughlin, one of the Republican strategists that's worried, said, I think I pray that he can be disciplined if Trump feels like he's backed into a corner

and feels like it's three on one. That could be a problem. Referring, of course, not only to Kamala Harris, but also the debate moderators. The New Republic has an article. Team Trump is freaking out that he'll blow the debate with Harris. Donald Trump's team is nervous about the first presidential debate with Kamala Harris. So I believe all of these headlines. My my hope is that when we have the media reporting on what happened at the debate and I plan to release a video within within a half hour of the debate ending, I will release a video with my thoughts and what I think are the critical moments of it.

I hope they apply the same standard that they applied when Joe Biden didn't do well in the debate, but apply it to Trump. Think back to the June 27th debate between Biden and Trump. Biden didn't do well. I said it within 20 minutes. I had a video out that said Biden didn't do well here and this is a problem. But the Biden performance sort of ran cover for the fact that Trump was barely coherent in that debate, lied 150 times or some outrageous number once a minute, two or three times a minute, I think is what it came down to in terms of his speaking time. And the story of Trump's incoherence was essentially missing from the post debate analysis. So I hope corporate media doesn't you know, Trump can go out there and just yell at

Kamala and insult her. And it'll be framed as Trump was very animated and passionate or something like that. The other thing I think that is important to consider is whether part of what's going on is that these concerns from the Trump team are being deliberately leaked in order to lower expectations. And I think we have to be careful about that as well. Now, there is an interesting report from Vanity Fair, which is more specific about the concerns that Trump's advisers have and they are that he will launch, quote, race based, misogynistic, unhinged attacks on Kamala Harris. In other words, be himself. I think that it's extraordinarily likely that that is how it will play out. But here's the you know, sometimes we on the left,

we imagine that the country or Republicans or MAGA will interpret something the same way we would when we think. Imagine if Trump launched a racially tinged, misogynistic attack on Kamala. That would be terrible for him. It wouldn't necessarily be terrible for him. That's the thing you have to understand. Trump will likely do that. I don't think most of his followers care. Trump's base isn't going to say, wow, Trump brought up the thing about Kamala used to be Indian and now she's black. Now I'm not voting for him. No, no.

And in fact, since Trump said that, he has gained back support. Trump said that at the NABJ several weeks ago. Trump's polling is better today than it was then. So let's be cautious because to some degree they are setting expectations. So when Trump is able to hold it together 5 percent better, they can say he did really well. It's a resounding victory. He's taking control back of this race and they are setting it up to say if he puts together

a coherent sentence, he won the debate. That's one thing. The other part of this is expect expect that no matter how disastrous Trump's performances, he could go out there and say to Kamala, you're a blank, blank, blank, blank, right? Like the worst slurs that you can imagine. And we are going to have to explain to people why that's unbecoming of a presidential candidate. We can't assume that if he does that, that he is going to actually suffer electorally because, as he said famously, he could shoot people on Fifth Avenue or whatever and it wouldn't even be a problem. So we will be watching closely.

Let's not be swayed by the low expectations and let's make sure that we're accurate, accurately reporting what it is that takes place. Are you having trouble sleeping or staying asleep? Sleep is one of the most important foundations of mental and physical health. And our sponsor beams formulation called Dream is a delicious nighttime hot cocoa drink with melatonin clinically proven to help you fall asleep faster and stay asleep longer. Melatonin can also help correct circadian rhythm disturbances, get your sleep schedule back on track, for example, in jet lag situations. Dream comes in great tasting flavors like mint chocolate chip, chocolate, peanut butter, sea salt, caramel. I love the cinnamon cocoa version. No sugar added, sweetened with monk fruit, just 15 calories per serving.

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without the sugar and packed with protein. Every serving of Magic Spoon cereal has 13 grams of protein, zero grams of sugar and four net carbs. So you can feel good about what you're eating. The most popular flavors are fruity and cocoa, but there are many more. And if you're already Thank you, David. The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com slash Pakman for five dollars off. The link is in the podcast notes. Today I'm going to be speaking with Tristan Snell, lawyer, legal commentator, former New York A.G., who prosecuted Trump University and also creator of the book podcast newsletter series, I guess we might call it Taking Down Trump. A number of iterations. Tristan, really great having you on. Thanks so much, David. So, I mean, listen, to start with, I think some in my audience know

a little bit about Trump University and the civil suit and kind of everything that went down. Talk to me about how you first became aware, hey, there might be something here to investigate. Yeah, I mean, it was my second day in the office. It was a newly minted assistant AG. This was back in 2011. And it's the it's actually how I opened my book to describe this, you know, and, and what people don't realize about offices like that, even the

New York AG, we think of these, oh, it's high powered offices, these big, big shot prosecutors, you know, the way I described it is that it's less like TV and more like the DMV. Like if you, if you're used to watching Billions or Suits or something like that, it doesn't look like that. It is stained carpet and stained old ceiling tiles and 25-year-old computers and 40-year-old phones and everything's in paper and everything's dusty. I'm sitting there being like,

oh my God, did I choose the wrong job? Like it's my first job doing anything in government enforcement. And my second day in the office, my bureau chief comes in. It's like, we have this case. It's kind of stuck. Uh, but it's against Donald Trump. It might be interesting, but we don't know if there's anything here. They, what I ended up doing was they wanted me to go interview maybe a few dozen of the victims. I ended up just getting completely obsessed with it and They felt like there was nowhere for them to turn, that they had been ruined. A lot of these people spent $35,000 on Trump University and it was a complete scam. They got, they had nothing to show for it. They couldn't get a refund even when they tried. And they felt like no one was ever going to help or fix the problem. It also speaks to like how poorly we feel the system is working, right?

That you don't actually think that anything's going to happen to the bad guys anymore and that the good guys are never going to do anything about it. People felt that way back in 2011. I'm sure it's way worse now, but that but that was where it came from. It came from probably a few hundred hours of interviews with the people that had been ripped off by the scam. Was there a point where you thought maybe there are misunderstandings here, but it's not an overt rip off bait and switch sort of thing? Or did you pretty quickly realize this is this is acutely

pernicious? I probably for the first 10 calls, I was keeping an open mind. I tried to keep an open mind for starters. And I was told to even if I had been disciplined, to be clear, this was not like, oh, we're going to go get Donald Trump. No, this was actually one of five cases that we were undertaking to look into for-profit schools about which we had gotten a decent number of complaints. And we wanted to dig deeper into the Trump case to figure out like, look, what really, what really happened here? There might not be anything. We might be dropping this. That's how it was started. That's how it was framed for me at the beginning. So I'd say for the first like 10, 15 calls I had, I was keeping an open mind about it and like, look, maybe, maybe these people just misunderstood what was going on. Exactly. told a series of very clear lies that Donald Trump handpicked the instructors, that Donald Trump was the creator of the curriculum, that it was his secrets and his techniques that you were going to learn, that you were going to be told how to invest in real estate if you just attended this

one three-day session. And then when you attended that session, it was a bait and switch. They upsold you to a more expensive mentorship program. Then when you did that, there was nothing there at the end of the rainbow. There was never a point at which you were then all of a sudden, the golden doors are going to open up and you're going to become rich because you've learned how to invest in real estate. There was never that moment. The whole thing was a sham. And it was illegal and

unlicensed. They never had a license to operate from the state of New York. They didn't have a license to call themselves a university. You can't just show up and do a fly-by-night operation, call yourself a university, call yourself a school. It doesn't work that way. Precisely for this reason, because it can rip people off. People trust in the notion that anything calling itself a university or school is going to be legitimate. And when that trust is breached, like horrible things can happen.

There are a lot of stories over the last five years that we've come to know about the relationship between Donald Trump and his various lawyers. You know, there are so many civil and criminal cases involving this guy that there's so many different lawyers, so many stories, stories about he doesn't pay stories about he gets mad at them and tells them, here's how you should be handling this. I know more, you know, this whole laundry list of stuff at the time that you were working this case and you started having interactions with the lawyers Trump had in this particular case, what were the dynamics you picked up on, if

any, in terms of their feelings about Trump and his Trump University, Trump's feelings about the lawyers, et cetera? Yeah, I mean, we learned more about this kind of after the fact. At the time, we were just dealing with this one lawyer for Trump named Avi Schick, and he mostly spent his time screaming at us. later is that he had a direct pipeline to the attorney general, to Eric Schneiderman, who was the elected attorney general at the time. And then of course, as everybody knows, uh, resigned in disgrace, uh, after a Ronan Farrow piece on his, uh, violence toward women, uh, came out in the New Yorker. Uh, Schick unbeknownst to us was also simultaneously during that time period serving as one of schneiderman's main fundraisers so total conflict of interest schneiderman should not have been communicating with schick on this at all uh and yet that's what

was going on here. And so every time we wanted to do something, we were getting undercut upstairs and we didn't know why. And this is a story that I that I've tried to tell because I think it's a very important one about how people like Trump buy their way to immunity and access and special privilege and special treatment. Right. Right. Right.

I mean, for all the use of the phrase weaponized justice system that he uses now, it sounds like it was weaponized in his favor. It was weaponized in his favor. And it has been since 1974 when he had his first run in with with government enforcement. He was sued for housing discrimination. He and his father had about thirty,000 units, apartments in Brooklyn and Queens. And there were about eight, give or take, that were eight, a single digit, that were occupied by Black families. That's it. And then as now, the population of Brooklyn and

Queens, the Black population of Brooklyn and Queens, just not quite square with that. If you told me eight units out of 35,000 in like rural Idaho, I would be like, okay, maybe that makes sense. But in New York, I mean, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was sued by the Fair Housing Administration and they counterattacked hard. This was with Roy Cohn back in those years, the notorious McCarthy lawyer who then worked for a lot of other unsavory characters besides Trump. Cohn had Trump countersue the government and completely disparage and defame the government lawyer and said that she had fabricated the whole case and that it was all made up and so forth and so on. He's been doing variations on all of this for 50 years now. And I think the kicker is we're finally figuring out how to fight back against it, starting with the Trump U case. The New York AG's office is, I think, still the gold standard. I was thinking the Manhattan DA's office was going to get there and had really figured

this out. But I'm having my doubts again. The New York if you want to see how to beat Donald Trump, look at the New York agency's office because I'm still going to say we even though I haven't been there for 10 years, we've done it three times and counting. We're going to keep and I think they're going to keep doing it. Somebody's got to pick up on exactly how to take this guy down. Well, in a moment, I want to get your thoughts on everything going on with the current cases.

But before getting to that in now deal, still talking about the Trump University handling that you were involved in. Did you did Trump ever come to the table literally or figuratively? Were there any interactions where you saw directly what his thought on the whole thing was? Now, sadly, no. I wanted to depose Trump. I wanted to take his deposition.

We had the right to. We could have subpoenaed him. We did subpoena the guy who was the head of Trump University and who and the other and a guy who was the accountant or comptroller for Trump University, as well as one of the instructors who lived in New York. When you're at a state AG's office, it's a lot easier to subpoena people in your own state. It's a lot harder to subpoena people who aren't. We could have subpoenaed Trump. The office decided not to.

They figured that the food fight that would ensue with court battles and motions and all sorts of other stuff would cause more delay. We weren't going to get that much more out of him and that the rest of the case was so strong because of a lot of documents that we'd managed to uncover, other testimony that we had, as well as some things that we had gotten by virtue of the civil class action that was going on in parallel with ours. That was the case pending in federal court in San Diego that yielded the infamous that Mexican judge comment from Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. We had enough of a case that we decided not to actually depose Trump. And no, he then he never attended any

of the settlement meetings. The case almost settled. We had multiple different conferences sit down to the opposing counsel. During those things, Michael Cohen was there at one point. George Soriel was there at one point. But we did not see Trump. And everything that we found out about Trump

and his relationship with the lawyers was stuff that really we were able to, or I was able to find out after the fact. I'll say one thing though. In retrospect, at the time, back in 2013, it was when we first started seeing opposition briefs from Trump after we had filed our case. It was insane. The guy, we thought it was coming from

the lawyer, he would do things like say exactly how many pages our last brief had been and then brag that he was going to submit a brief that was longer than that. He would say that in the introduction to the new brief that he was doing. And then it would just be this long vitriolic rant with very few citations to case law or evidence. So in other words, it didn't look very lawyerly. If you look at a legal brief, there's all these, it's constantly citing to quoting other cases,

to particular exhibits in the case, et cetera, et cetera. These briefs that we would get from the Trump people would go 10, 15, 20 pages without a single citation. And the writing style was not very lawyerly either. Well, looking back on this, when I wrote the book, I was really struck by this because we, back in 2013, we didn't really know how Donald Trump wrote. Like what it was Donald Trump's writing style.

His books are all ghostwritten. Those weren't his. We'd never really seen what his writing looked like until Truth Social, especially. Twitter, a little, obviously, but shorter. The long rants we see on Truth Social, that's really much more of a contemporary phenomenon. If you go back and read those briefs from Trump University case in 2013, you're like, wait a minute, Donald Trump wrote these. This isn't a lawyer. This is Donald Trump on the phone with a lawyer who was probably dictating, taking dictation. So it was really

striking to me. So a lot of things we can see in retrospect that I've now come to believe that that case 11 years ago, he was very much pulling the strings. The lawyer was just there to do his bidding. And we know that that happened in the hush money case. The campaign cover up case. And you know, it was said right afterwards, oh, yeah, Donald Trump was really the co-lawyer on this. He was the co-litigator on this. Speaker 1 So let me ask you a little bit about the current cases. So there's a sense of frustration when you look at, you know, I don't have every bullet point, but delayed sentencing from,

you know, whenever July, whenever to September 18th, now into November, one case is not going to be tried until who knows when indefinite suspensions. Can you even really prosecute this guy? What's an official act? What's an unofficial act? There is the sense that he's going to get out of all of it. Right. Do you think that's the most likely outcome here?

I still don't. I have been quiet about these issues the last month or so. I've been trying to take a little bit of time off and stuff, which was a foolish notion because how was that going to happen in an election year? But there you go. I'm I'm getting ready to talk about this a great deal. I'll give a bit of a preview now. I don't think all hope is lost. However, I am deeply furious and frustrated with what has happened here because some of these things should not have happened. There is no excuse. He is a private citizen. I don't give a rat's ass if he's running for president. There is no rule. There's no law. There's no anything that just because you're

a political candidate, you should get to have special treatment and get your criminal sentencing for conviction by unanimous jury. And you get to have that punted off until after the election. So in my view, everybody who went along with that needs a reckoning. And that's all I'm going to say for now. I'm going to elaborate on this a good bit more. But in my view, I don't think that Judge Morshon reached the right decision. Really, I think that I and I got to dig deeper on this and I'm going to talk to some people. I'm going to get to the bottom of this. What the hell happened with the Manhattan DA's office on that one? I just don't understand how that was something that they agreed to. They needed to fight for that. And they and they didn't. As far as we can tell. Maybe there's more to the story, but right now it doesn't look like it. I'll just say this. I believe a lot of these cases are going to end up in the right place in the end. The Trump University case had an appeal in the middle of the case that caused an 18-month delay from basically, I'd say, fall of 2014 to spring of 2016, the case was basically nothing because

an issue had to go up on appeal about the applicability of statute of limitations. Then it came back down, we won. And that's what set the table for the big settlement that we were able to get. There was another delay in there that was because the judge in that case delayed trial from spring of 2016 to after Thanksgiving 2016. And so Trump did not have to stand trial on the Trump University case during the 2016 election. And that shouldn't have happened either. That was another travesty. But even when we see these delays, they are delays, they are not complete denials. And so I do believe a lot of these cases are going to get there. What ended up happening is

we are going to have to be the ones to bring justice for Donald Trump in the year 2024. And if we can- Electorally, you mean? Electorally. And then we are going to have to vote to keep him out of office. And then the and then I hope and pray and we are going to have to like get out there and be active and vocal. We got to start doing it now, too. We got to push these prosecutors to finish the job in 2025, because this is ridiculous. This can't go on for any longer. We cannot have two systems of justice like this and just have like a private jet lane for someone like Donald Trump, because that's what we've got. He's got his own goddamn system of justice all to himself right now. Speaker 1 Yeah, I mean, it seems, you know, there's been a lot of baseless allegations made by Trump and people around him that everything is biased against him. But there's been no substantiation.

It's been that the charges are somehow connected to President Biden. There's no evidence there. You know, you know all the allegations. What I do see as a lay person and as a non lawyer is I see a Trump selected judge in Eileen Cannon making favorable decisions to Trump. I see, as you point out, Judge Mershon making decisions that I can't really seem to find dictated by any kind of procedural guidelines, as you're pointing out with regard to. So when I see the bias, it seems all the bias is

in favor of Trump, if I'm honest. Speaker 4 that's that's exactly right. You know, a lot of what he does there is the whole accuse the other side of that which you are guilty. Yeah, he has he has built a system for himself used every lever at his disposal as somebody of wealth and privilege to be able to to be able to buy and bully his way into getting into getting what he wants and so he accuses everybody else of bias but he's actually rigged up the system in which he has worked it yeah you have his own handpicked Supreme Court justices giving him immunity that has basically thrown a monkey wrench into the DCJ6 case, too. Right. in the Atlanta case to bring these puffed up allegations against Fonny Willis that now are going to merit this ethics appeal issue that's not even going to get heard until October. So

that case is not going on until 2025 either. But he's been following this playbook that he's had for 50 years and we need to follow our playbook back. But part of the problem with how to fight him is that you have to play the long game. And sometimes that means you're not going to get the result that you want at the time you want it. And the fact that we wanted to get some of these results before the 2024 election is heartbreaking. But I think that we got, we saw enough from these things. We did get that jury conviction. He is a convicted felon. We're starting to see consequences for him. We're going to the people are going to have to finish the job at the ballot box in 24,

followed by maybe the prosecutors and judges getting their acts together next year. We've been speaking here with Tristan Snell. Check out Taking Down Trump, the book, the podcast and the newsletter. Tristan, really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much, David. Any time. If you're still using a free email service, your emails are often being scanned and tracked even after you delete them.

Companies use the data to know everything about you and show you ads, even your most personal communications. Thank you, David. And when you delete an email and start mail, it is gone forever, keeping your information private. Start mail allows you to create unlimited email aliases, protecting your identity and reducing spam. This lets you use different email addresses for different purposes like newsletters or shopping. Plus, start mail lets you encrypt every email even if the recipient doesn't use encryption. Switching is easy. You can migrate all your existing emails and contacts with just a few The David Pakman Show David Pakman dot com. I love my Helix sleep mattress. The link is in the podcast notes. whether you have back pain and Helix will match you with a mattress that's perfect for you, which is really unique and helpful because a lot of people don't know where to start when buying a mattress. I certainly didn't. Their newest collection of mattresses called Helix Elite come with a built in Glaciotex layer to keep you cool at night, an extra layer of foam Thank you so much for joining us. My audience also gets a whopping 20 percent off all orders, plus two free pillows.

Go to Helix Sleep dot com slash Pacman and enter code Helix Partner 20 at checkout. That's Helix Sleep dot com slash Pacman. Then use code Helix Partner 20 to get 20 percent off and two free pillows. The info is in the podcast notes. One of the strangest kind of political sideshows that surfaced over the last few days is that Melania Trump has a new book coming out, her memoir or whatever it's being called. And every aspect of this book promotion is bizarre. The first is that some of the videos look completely AI generated. Now, I'm not asserting they are AI generated. They've not been marked as AI generated something about. I don't know if it's the blur filter. I don't know what it is. They look like synthetic content.

But what I want to focus on is what is said in the videos in the latest little promo video promoting the book. Melania Trump seems to allude to the idea that a law enforcement conspiracy to kill Trump is what allowed the assassination attempt to come so close to succeeding. Listen to what Melania had to say. Attempt to end my husband's life was a horrible, distressing experience. Now the silence around it feels heavy. I can't help but wonder why didn't law enforcement officials arrest the shooter

before the speech? There is definitely more to this story and we need to uncover the truth. There is absolutely no basis in fact for that conspiracy theory. And Melania Trump is just floating it out there. Now, I'll be very frank with you. I don't think she cares very much about the assassination attempt. The extent to which Melania cares about the assassination attempt is probably it would be really tough for her son, Baron, if Trump had been shot dead. But by every report, Melania and Donald Trump barely speak, don't live together. And there's very little love lost there, for lack of a better term. So why she's doing this, I can only be led to believe that she is doing it because she thinks

it will help sell more copies of this book, which is not selling very well and has been instantly ridiculed. And just ask yourself, who would want to read this crap. Here's another promo video about the book. Writing this memoir has been a deeply personal and reflective journey for me as a private person who has often been the subject of public scrutiny and misrepresentation. I feel a responsibility to clarify the facts. I believe it is important to share my perspective, the truth. Yeah, right now it is still in preorder and it is listed as the number one Amazon bestseller in memoirs. But as you all know, it doesn't take that many preorders to be listed as number one

in various categories. And Amazon, my forthcoming book, is listed as number one in a bunch of different categories. The the context of she feels a need to clarify the facts. No one is waiting around saying, you know, I really need Melania to tell me the truth of what happened with that ridiculous day that Trump took a picture with an upside down Bible in front of a church after violently having protesters cleared out. What would Melania's view on the truth of that event be today? I don't think anyone's waiting around for this thing, and it'll be one of these books that does well because of all of the purchases from organizations and propaganda outlets. But

if you plan to read this book, let me know. And wildly, wildly irresponsible to float this law enforcement conspiracy theory about the failed assassination attempt against her husband, at least for now, Donald Trump. I want to play a couple of clips from the conclusion to that multi-night town hall that Donald Trump did with Fox News host Sean Hannity, because they are truly terrifying and really give us insight into, you know, Melania says in her book, she wants to clarify the truth about this, that or the other thing. Donald Trump really revealed a lot about the truth as he sees it with regard to his feelings about various voters. There was a moment during the concluding night of

this town hall that Donald Trump addressed the concept of how he should just accept anybody who wants to support for him. And he seems to be saying he doesn't want the support of people who didn't support him during the primary. They said one person who didn't support me, he said, I must admit, I had the most successful four years of my life, but I'm going to vote for some. And he said, and now that person came back to me. I don't want that person. I don't want that person. You know, they say you should take everybody, but that's not the way I'm built. It's one of those little problems. This person, no, this was in the Republican primary. He said, I had the best four years I've ever had under Trump, but I'm going to support this one.

I said, that's the end of that. You know, when they came back, they said, there you go. So Trump is saying some people think he's talking about Sununu, that maybe this is actually a direct attack against New Hampshire Governor Sununu. I don't know. But remember that this isn't the first time Trump has alluded to this idea that if you weren't with me in the primary, I don't want to hear from you and I don't need your support. He said it about all of the Nikki Haley voters from the Republican primary.

And I hope that Nikki Haley's voters remember that now that Nikki is out there going, no, we have to vote for Trump because Kamala is bad for this, that and the other reason. I hope that Nikki's voters remember, hey, you know what? She said that Trump isn't fit to be president. Trump said, I'm not going to need Nikki supporters. I don't care what Nikki says today. I'm not voting for Trump now, whether they will do that. I don't know.

One of the other really ridiculous claims that Trump made during the town hall. Well, look at that still image. Yikes. Is that 75 or 80 percent of the country supports Trump? Now you know that's not true. I know that's not true. Trump supporters are by last elections count roughly half of those who voted. So it'd be like twenty nine, 30 percent of the country. But one of the ways that you create an environment into which you might more successfully hurl allegations of voter fraud is to prime your followers with false claims like 80 percent of the country

supports me. Because if you believe this, you would then say there must have been fraud if you lost hope. They're going to be fair. We're putting a lot of reliance on a network which is known for being extremely hostile to the people in this room and to, I think, 75, 80 percent of the country. If you want to really know the truth. Right. If you go into Election Day thinking 80 percent of the country supports Trump and then

the next morning you wake up and you turn on your TV or you pick up your phone and you see Trump lost, you say to yourself, wait, 80 percent of the country supports him. The media is saying that he lost. There must have been fraud here. Take my money for whatever it is you're actually going to use it for. So as wild and disjointed as these claims are, it's really important to understand that they are calculated to the extent Trump can calculate to foment an environment in which voter fraud claims might be believed. Strangely, Trump said that he went to Arlington Cemetery, Arlington Cemetery for that fiasco photo op to celebrate the soldiers that died in Afghanistan. Now, I know it's just a weird word to use and we would say to commemorate, to remember,

to honor. But it is sort of a Freudian reminder of the way Trump sees all of these. You wouldn't have had the Afghanistan disaster, which I think is the most single, most embarrassing day in the history of our country where they have billions of dollars of equipment. We lost 13 great, great soldiers. And I celebrated and honored their wonderful and they call them their children. Then they are their children, their wonderful children. So he celebrated and he honored them. And the way I understand that is for Trump, it's an opportunity to celebrate a political victory. It doesn't matter whose grief or anguish or heartbreak gets connected to.

It's what political victory can I obtain today and celebrate it? And Trump does see it as a victory. And then finally, finally, Trump seemingly unable to get through a single interview or a rally without echoing Hitler's rhetoric on immigration. Trump again with they have poisoned our country last night. I tell you tonight, it's the single biggest problem. They've poisoned our country. They're coming in from prisons.

They're coming in from mental institutions. There you go. He just can't get through a single one without invoking horrifying World War Two era rhetoric. If this Trump is the one that shows up for the debate, it's going to be very, very bad for Trump and very good for Kamala Harris. On today's bonus show, Kamala Harris is now outlining her policy platform on her website. Will it satisfy any of the haters? Probably not. I'll tell you why.

Also, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has successfully sued to get off the ballot in North Carolina. I know it's crazy, but he is staying on the ballot in Michigan per a court decision. And Donald Trump is saying that in Florida he will vote to legalize adult recreational marijuana use. There is one word that explain what explains why Trump is doing this. And that word is me. What is best for Trump? That's why he's doing this.

I will explain all of these stories when producer Pat joins me on the bonus show, the bonus show where you want to make money. Everybody else that makes money to fund themselves is bad. Sign up at join Pacman dot com..