The David Pakman Show - 9/2/25: US losing influence as Trump health fears explode

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

-- On the Show: -- David considers suing after Wired publishes allegations about Chorus influencing his content -- David questions whether pragmatic progressives and purity test progressives are truly part of the same movement -- Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi align at a global summit as American influence weakens under Donald Trump -- Wall Street tanks after a court rules Donald Trump’s global tariffs unconstitutional and repayment may be required -- The White House posts outdated photos to cover for Trump’s unexplained six-day disappearance -- Viral medical threads spark speculation that Trump has suffered mini strokes during his absence from public view -- Trump’s social media posts change style dramatically, fueling suspicions that someone else is writing for him -- Viral video shows heavy black bags tossed from a White House window raising questions about renovations or hidden medical waste -- Trump admits his administration is being ripped apart by internal battles over the COVID vaccine -- On the Bonus Show: Trump to give Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Americans lose faith in upward mobility, Oklahoma unveils "America First" teaching test, and much more... 👩‍❤️‍👨 Try the Paired App FREE for 7 days and get 25% OFF at https://paired.com/pakman ⚠️ Ground News: Get 40% OFF their unlimited access Vantage plan at https://ground.news/pakman 🛌 Helix Sleep mattresses: Get 27% OFF sitewide at https://helixsleep.com/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

Well, I hate to start a show like this, but I do have to talk today about a defamation lawsuit after Wired published a piece last week that made a number of untrue allegations and implications about me and other creators claiming I'm taking money in exchange for letting someone dictate the content of this show or. restrict what I'm talking about and many other claims and implications a whole bunch of you wrote to me and said David are you going to sue for defamation suing for defamation and winning is really the way to take control back and to prove that you didn't do the things you're accused of now it's a fair question and I want to talk about that today I didn't even plan on mentioning this entire fiasco again but it really has taken on a life of its own so I'm going to get to the, am I suing for defamation question in a moment? But I also want to lay out a few other things. You know, the saddest part for me in all of this is that even though, you know, after the

first 48 hours, the overwhelming majority of my audience members and fellow creators and others realize there's really no story here. Like there's, it's not even just the allegations and implications are untrue. It's just, there's not even really a story here. Most people realize that. Way more people always see the original allegations and they never see the corrections. And that's something we're going to deal with in a moment as well. The hardest part is that some people who have trusted me for years have now canceled their memberships on my website because they wrongly believe the DNC tells me what to say or that chorus makes me get permission before I cover a topic or that my opinions two years ago were shaped by

chorus despite chorus being spun up like two months ago. These are, there are people who will not be satisfied unless I file and win a defamation suit and otherwise they have just said, this must be true and haven't even come and asked me about it. Now, I don't know that a lot of people I'm hearing from were really my core supporters anyway, and we're going to get to that a little bit later in the show. But I want to, again, say, chorus is not involved in content creation. They just, they're not involved in content creation.

They don't direct content. They don't pay for content. They don't subsidize content. They don't sponsor content. They don't restrict content. They don't require anything in terms of content of creators. They've never suggested, David, why don't you do the story? Or, David, why don't you stay away from this story?

It just doesn't exist. It's a scholarship and support incubator for creators. There are very small channels. There are larger creators like Aaron Parnas and I. The idea here is grow the left wing ecosystem. Now, because of a misleading article, and even more confused commentary from other creators who simply read the article, in some cases misunderstood it, went on and did stories about it.

Some people have decided to cancel the David Pacman show. I don't know how to fix that part yet. What we have here is Brian Tyler Cohen coming out and raising money for a project he doesn't take a penny from. It's not nefarious subterfuge of any kind. It's Brian. Of course, I supported it because I know Brian and I know his intentions and it's a great thing. Now, maybe the worst part of this is that other creators, some, although most now are kind of like there's no story here, but some creators in the first 48 hours, took the wired story and expanded it with even more outrageous claims, suggesting that it's APAC or IPAC.

I don't even know how it's pronounced, A-PAC, I-PAC, that is funding this show or other creators. Of course, not true. That the DNC is involved. Not true. The result is that a lot of people in my audience have become confusedly furious with me. And some have canceled memberships. It takes years to build enough trust with someone that they say, I'm going to pay for this. And it takes seconds for them to cancel it.

Others have unsubscribed from YouTube and other platforms. People are now, there are people now, not just hoping for us to fail, but monitoring to see if we do have the failure. I don't want to let those people have the satisfaction. So we estimate about 6,000 YouTube subscribers out of 3.3 something million, about 6,000 YouTube subscribers have canceled. Now, during the same period of time, 5,000 have signed up, but 6,000 have canceled. I'm not asking them to come back. Many of them have made their decision. If they decide to come back, great.

What I am asking is, if you're a regular watcher on YouTube and you're not subscribed, there's about 4 million of you, consider subscribing. If you listen to the audio podcast, you don't watch on YouTube, but you have a Google account, consider subscribing. If you watch on TikTok, consider subscribing on YouTube. There's no downside. There's no cost. And of course, remember that this show primarily is funded by direct memberships at join packman.com.

Now let's get to the defamation issue. Over the last few days, I've consulted with some of the top defamation attorneys in the country, lawyers who have won some of the largest verdicts, I think, in U.S. history. And one thing I appreciate about good lawyers is they give you the full story up front. And most lawyers I've dealt with discourage litigation. They give you all the downsides. If you go to a lawyer and they go, oh, this is a slam dunk. Let's start litigation tomorrow. I've learned to be skeptical of those lawyers.

And most lawyers try to talk you out of litigation unless you number one really understand what you're getting into. And number two, you really want to do it. Now I have not decided as of this moment whether to file a lawsuit. I'm not even going to name potential defendants in this segment. There's no reason to, but there would be, there would be multiple. If I were successful, the upside in theory would be, I've cleared my name, at least in some generic sense.

And that would be great. But there are some significant downsides to getting involved in that. Number one is the cost. Unless you're in a highly public situation like the Sandy Hook parents suing Alex Jones or some of these other scenarios, you're not going to get a lawyer to take the case on contingency, meaning you start paying legal fees immediately, and I've been advised this could take six figures in legal fees just to get to the end without even a guarantee of getting the money back, right? I mean, hopefully you win, but winning can depend even on technicalities like what states

are these lawsuits filed in. So that's the first consideration. Secondly, a case like this probably takes 12 to 18 months, and I'll admit, it would be extraordinarily stressful. I am not litigious by nature. I think all of you know that. I've never sued anybody. It would be stressful. It would be time consuming. It would, remember, I have a newborn at home. And it also likely would take me away from the show. And so part of it is a conversation with my audience. Is it best for the show? Is the audience best served by 12 to 18 months of litigation, instead of just focusing on the show and for focusing on the baby.

And then number three is the reality of the outcome. Imagine that it takes 15 months and I win, right? Imagine I win. Maybe there's a financial settlement. Maybe not. But even then, the damage to the extent that there will be damage is mostly going to be done. Am I really going to go 15 months from now and and show the people that did abandoned the show right now, the victory. And are they then going to come back and, you know,

most defamation cases don't even go to trial. They end in a settlement. The settlement often includes that no one can talk about the settlement. So it's also like if at the end of all of that, six figures and legal fees and all of this, if there is a settlement, okay, I get some money, But is it even really the public victory that might help from a publicity standpoint, especially if it's a settlement no one's allowed to talk about? So that's what I'm contending with right now. The damage, the possibilities of a defamation lawsuit, the effect on my audience, the effect on the business.

So I want to hear from you. That's really everything I have to say right now. The really good news is that most of the people that, are outraged by this aren't even in my audience. And I have to remember that. And that actually leads to the next thing I want to talk about, which is a sort of broader discussion of what's happening right now on the left. What's happened over the last week has convinced me of something I've never quite said out loud

that maybe the wings of the left, maybe we'll call it like the coalition building pragmatic progressives and then what we might call the more revolutionary accelerationist or purity test left, right, that those two sides, maybe those two sides of the left are not really part of the same movement. Now, I know that that's a big statement and that's different than what I've said in the past. My view up until last week was that, listen, the pragmatic progressives and the revolutionary leftists, We disagree sometimes. We do.

But ultimately, we're on the same team. We want broadly similar outcomes. Our next stop on the bus is the same one, even if many of them want to go further into socialism, right? We want more equality of opportunity, stronger social safety nets, climate action now, civil rights. We have different strategies for getting there. Some of us might go further later than others. but we are broadly part of the same movement. This Wired article that came out last week, and maybe more importantly, the reaction to it,

now makes me question whether this is really part of the same movement more than I ever have before. Now, just as a reminder, Wired published a piece about a group called Chorus. They implied and suggested that influencers like me have anyone other than, than me directing the content on this show, that I have to get permission for interviews, all of these things that are flatly untrue. I was named in that article along with others. And the reaction from some corners of the left, especially the online left, the sort of accelerationist left, was to assume the worst, which is that the DNC and IPAC are controlling

my content. And that commentary from years ago, even before chorus existed, was somehow. directed by someone that I sold out, et cetera. Now, none of that is true. I've explained that in detail elsewhere. Nobody controls my content other than me. But here's the thing. The speed and the ferocity with which certain elements of the left turned this into a betrayal narrative tells me something deeper really is going on here. This wasn't, David, we'd love for you to clarify what's going on. David, I've known you for a long time. This just doesn't sound like something that you would do, tell us what's going on before we cancel you or whatever. It was from some

corners, you failed the purity test, you're not one of us. And that's why I think maybe these two sides of the left have never really been part of one movement. Now, again, I don't know exactly the right terms to use. The movement I consider myself a part of would be like maybe we call ourselves pragmatic progressives or the coalition building left. maybe like the social democracy left. Our vision is Denmark, Sweden, Norway. You then have, I don't know if they should really define themselves because I don't know that I'm the one to define them, but we might call it the revolutionary left, the purity test

left. It includes probably more actual socialists. And these I thought were kind of parallel movements with overlapping goals in a lot of areas, but maybe some differences in endpoints or worldview. here. It's not that one approach is good or bad, although certainly I know kind of which approach I think is better, but you can kind of disagree and say, no, it's actually better to be accelerationist or to do the period testing or whatever. But I think that maybe these movements are not really as much overlapped as I thought. And I know some of you will hear this and you'll

say, oh, what you're doing here, David, is defending the establishment Democrats. No, no, the The Democrats are who I just excoriated last week in a video, which went nuts, something like 600,000 views on YouTube, over a million views across all platforms. I see this as really three elements. There's establishment elected Democrats. There's the progressive social democracy left of which I consider myself apart. And then you've got the accelerationist purity testing left. The strategic priorities might be so different that when a flashpoint like this comes along,

it might turn cracks into canyons very quickly. I think the timing of this also matters. And one of the thing I spoke about over the weekend with my fellow, I guess we'll call ourselves like pragmatic progressives. I don't know. One of the other things we spoke about is that the small portion of our audiences that are now furious with us, They probably would have been furious about something between now and the 2028 primary anyway. Like what I mean by that is if it weren't now over this chorus thing, I think there's a really

good chance that when the pragmatic progressives in 28 focus on backing a candidate that can win and that can stop this maga fiasco, even if they don't check every ideological box. My guess is that in 28, the kind of purity test left would see it as a betrayal and this exact same thing would happen. So the point here is, I think what's going on right now because of this chorus situation is kind of a preview of what was inevitably going to happen anyway. And if that's the reality, I think we just have to be honest that maybe these two movements are not as adjacent as we thought they were. I still believe we can work together and that our interests align in a lot of places.

And we can show up for each other when the fight is aligned. But I don't think we can continue to pretend that there is a singular unified left that contains both of these factions. I think that that's a fiction. I think it leads to misplaced expectations. It leads to outrage that is not necessary. It prevents planning strategy to actually win based on how the world works. And so the last week for me really has.

hasn't been about me. It really hasn't been about chorus. It hasn't been about the Wired article. It's really more of a stress test about whether the big tent vision of the left can withstand suspicion, misinformation, bad faith, purity testing. The answer I'm seeing and that I'm hearing from a lot of people in the audience who see this for what it is, is not really. The question is, can we or do we learn from that now, or do we wait, for the next explosion, probably right in the middle of an election that we can't afford to lose. I want to hear from you. Leave a comment on my substack, substack.com, or send me an email, info at david packman.com.

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a decline in the country that I fear may not be recoverable until we really get a change at the top. You know, when we talk about how empires fall and how superpowers die, it's often not with a war. It's with a handshake between your old friends and your enemies. And I I want to explain that. If you've been wondering whether the United States is still the world's dominant superpower under Donald Trump, it appears that the answer is no. Because while Donald Trump was busy cozying up to authoritarian, slapping tariffs on allies, and by the way, being missing for six days, which we will get to in a moment, the rest of

the world has been forming new alliances and they don't seem to need us anymore. We saw this during Donald Trump's first term as the United States was increasingly excluded from important climate change discussions and other aspects of global governance because Donald Trump just wasn't worth even including. We now are starting to see more of the same. In China, something happened that really should not send a tingle down your leg, but send a chill down your spine, which is that if you're still clinging to the idea of American global leadership, Chinese President Xi, Russian President Putin, and Indian Prime Minister

Narendra Modi, the leaders of China, Russia, and India, they held hands, literally, shared laughs, embraced at the largest ever Shanghai Cooperation Summit. This was not just a photo op. It was a signal of, we've got each other, we don't need Trump, we don't need the United States. The symbolism is brutal because Putin, who after meeting with Trump, conceding nothing, some people said Trump was cucked figuratively. I would never use language like that, but some people are out there saying that.

After that, Putin went and dropped even more bombs. Clearly, it doesn't care what Trump says to him. And then Putin meets with Modi, took a joy ride in Putin's limo, Modi did. And they are bypassing Trump figuratively and literally. Why is this happening? Trump's chaos. Trump's cartoonish nature. The US puts tariffs on India for continuing to buy Russian oil.

So India moves closer to China, China, its long time rival, and joins what's being called an axis of upheaval that includes Iran, Turkey, to some degree, Belarus, and others. China is filling the power vacuum. has announced a new development bank, a global energy cooperation platform, has opened access to China's GPS alternative. And so they are replacing American systems technologically. They are replacing American leadership ideologically. They are replacing American dominance economically as well.

And the biggest blow to the U.S. from all of this is that countries are listening. This alliance now includes 27 countries in Central Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East. And the message from Xi is the United States under Trump is more of a relic from the cold, the old world, not the cold world, the Cold War, from the old world. And China says, hey, we're going to offer a more multilateral, fair system. It's not American led. The U.S. can't come in and just throw its weight around. And for Trump, that may be more literal than figurative.

And Trump is saying, oh, this, this, a U.S. India relationship was a one-sided disaster. Okay. Well, India has other options. You really can't punch your allies in the face and expect them to stick around. And even a Putin's Ukraine summit with Trump, you know, it was supposedly a peace effort. immediately, it was immediately debriefed to Xi. And it made clear that the back channels here don't put the United States in the privileged, powerful position. Now, you've got China and Russia pushing to reform the IMF and to reform the World Bank. You've got them rejecting Western

sanctions and saying this is neo-colonialism. We're going to do our own system of global governance. And they're doing it with momentum. We have Trump missing for six days posting angry rants about handshakes on troth central and the united states is getting boxed out what's trump doing deploying federal troops to dc putting soldiers on our own streets it's like a collapsing regime trying to keep its grip on power that's not what stability looks like if you're in some other country right not russia uh china not the country india the countries we're talking about here. If you're just in, you know, France, the UK, Italy, wherever. And you look and you see, okay, on the one hand, you've got Russia, India, China, Turkey,

to some degree, other countries making their own alliances and getting completely decoupled from the United States. And what's the U.S. doing? They've militarized their streets. Trump, it's not clear what's going on with Trump's health. It's, you don't look at that and go, oh, I really am drawn to what's happening in the United States. You say, at minimum, I'm not drawn to the U.S., and probably you're drawn to this new global alliance that is growing. So, you know, we've got the military parades and the whole thing. It's not impressing global powers.

There is the idea of whether we are marching towards a funeral procession for American leadership and seeing a global realignment. And if we keep pretending that this is just about optics, we're going to wake up. one day, probably not that long from now, to be frank, and say, what happened? The world has moved on from the United States. And a lot of the problem is Trump and this humiliating regime where people like, take your pick, you know, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. wants to ban vaccines and all of this wacky stuff. This is why the world is going in a different direction. Stocks were getting absolutely brutalized this morning. Let's see exactly.

where they are right now, Dow down about four or 500 points. Why is it happening? Well, a court ruled that most of Donald Trump's global tariffs are illegal. And the wild part that is now crushing the stock market is that the government might have to give all of that tariff money back. Now, you might say, wouldn't that be good? Well, I'm going to get to that in a moment. A federal appeals court voted seven of four that only Congress, not the president, has the constitutional authority to put sweeping tariffs in place. Donald Trump's tariffs, we're going to bring in hundreds of billions of 2025. Those tariffs are now legally on life support. They are still in place for now.

But if the Supreme Court agrees with this ruling, we are talking about refunds, billions of dollars going back to the importing companies. And this is where the bond market completely freaked out. Now remember a tariff is a tax on imports the thing that most MAGA people and frankly Trump himself doesn't seem to understand is the money doesn't come from other countries. China doesn't mail us a check when you tariff China the tariff is paid by American companies that import goods. I know we're more than halfway through 2025 and I'm still explaining this, but a lot of people still don't understand it. The companies pass along some most or all of that tariff to the consumer. So this $170 something billion, it's not a windfall from abroad.

It's taken from American businesses and from American shoppers. Bond traders liked tariffs because it meant the government had revenue and didn't have to borrow as much. Less borrowing usually means less pressure on interest rates. But now the government, if it has to give that money back, is going to need to borrow more to make up the difference. And how do you borrow more? You sell treasury bonds. When you suddenly flood the market with bonds you're trying to sell, investors demand higher interest rates to buy them. That's why yields jump today.

The 30-year treasury yield went up to almost 5%. That's the highest it's been in a while. The 10-year went to 4.29%. Short-term rates were also up. Higher yields means it costs the government more to borrow money and then mortgage rates go up car loans get more expensive credit card rates climb it's like raising the cost of money Now Trump said the ruling's highly partisan he's going to appeal yada yada but wall street really isn't waiting here for months investors were happy that tariffs were plugging part of the deficit

hold now that's separate from the problems that tariffs were causing but now the little benefit investors did find in tariffs has been blown wide open by the possibility of refunds. Now, what's really tragic about this is that much of the problem is from the on again, off again, unstable nature of this. If we had had a situation where Trump didn't even open this door, we would have had significantly more stability, and it wouldn't be that every single piece of tariff-related news moves the market drastically up or drastically down. The tariffs as import taxes are inflationary and they're bad for businesses and they're bad for consumers. If you are a so-called deficit

hawk, in theory, you like a little bit of the tariffs because they help plug a little bit of the deficit hole. Now that that's in question, it's causing yields to rise and stocks to go down. So the lesson here, really, is Trump never should have opened up this door to begin with. But alas, that is not the situation we find ourselves in today. And this could leave the government even in deeper debt, which not everyone cares about. There's a lot of different views about national debt. But if you are someone who does care about it, which these MAGA people claimed to, Trump is really causing a debt problem here. So I don't know what the exit is from this because you now have, you know, at first you had Trump announces the tariffs, stocks go down.

Trump pauses the tariffs, stocks go up. There's like a one-to-one relationship. Tariffs on, stocks down, tariffs pause, stocks up. Now that there's a legal issue, the tariffs appear to be illegal, and we already have some that we're at least counting on the tariff revenue, which again comes from American companies, now not only do you have the effect of the tariffs on prices and on businesses, you have secondary impacts, which is how economies work at the end of the day. And then we have speculation as to, wait a second, what is this going to do to the debt?

What is this going to do to yields? It's a mess. I don't know that there is a clean off ramp at this point in time. But I want to hear from you. What do you expect Trump to do? That's if you believe Trump is even still physically with it. And based on what happened over the last five days after the break, we'll delve into that. A pending Supreme Court case could strip our Fourth Amendment rights and allow immigration.

to come into our homes for any reason, no probable cause needed, all while Republicans try to twist things so that you think this is all great for America. This should be the biggest story in the U.S. right now, but it's almost impossible to keep up with the millions of moves that Trump is making every single day. That's why ground news exists. Ground news is an app and website that exposes the blind spots and spin before it's a takes control of our opinions. Ground News is the smarter, more reliable way to stay informed when MAGA is banking on us getting distracted. I'm partnering up with Ground News to give you 40%

off the same vantage plan that I use. So you'll pay only five bucks a month for all of their premium features. Just go to ground.news slash Pacman or use the code Pacman in the app when you sign up. The link is in the description or scan the QR code. Donald Trump. He is reportedly resurfacing today, but he has been missing from the public eye for days. Speculation was running rampant that he's dead. I don't think he's dead. And the White House was caught posting an old picture as if it were a new picture. If everything's fine, why are they being so sketchy? Over the weekend, we saw a lot of different claims about Donald Trump apparently being fine.

Donald Trump disappeared from public view for about six days, no public appearances just gone. And on Sunday, a picture of Donald Trump with former football coach John Gruden was posted, but this picture is a week old. Why pretend that Donald Trump is active when he isn't? Travis Acres is a retired U.S. Naval Intelligence Officer who wrote, I'm not a conspiracy guy. But if you're fighting off increasing rumors that you may have suffered a major medical episode and to disprove that rumor and provide proof of life, you post a picture of allegedly playing golf with John Gruden today, it would be beneficial to post one that wasn't from August 23rd.

And it gets even worse because when Trump finally reappeared to go golfing, press cameras were kept a hundred feet away, not for security reasons, but for visibility. The pool report from Monday said Trump walked out of the South Portico entrance of the White House, walked 20 feet to an SUV. Pool photographers had a narrow view from about 100 yards away. Did I say 100 yards or 100 feet? It's 100 yards, so 300 feet between Trump's SUV and the one behind it through which to get earn their keep through which to get earned their keep. I don't even know what that means.

At 8.53, the motorcade is moving. The idea being that reporters were explicitly prevented from taking pictures. No close up footage has surfaced. Now, this isn't normal in general for presidents. Presidents don't vanish for six days and return under a press blackout and publish old pictures as if they were new. Okay. They don't do that unless there's a problem. This is smelling more and more like a coordinated attempt to keep people from seeing something. There's a very interesting tweet thread from Adam Cochran. And I'm going to go through it with you here. I think it's quite relevant.

More proof of a Trump health cover up, he writes. Trump leaves the White House again this morning, mouth agape, not allowed to speak with reporters. Then it gets weirder. He once again goes golfing at his club. and reporters are confined to the tennis court area, not allowed to speak to Trump, not allowed to see him golfing, which they normally can. His team posts this picture with close friend and radio host John Fredericks.

After days of outdated pictures, we finally get something that seems current, but something is off. Other than the weird staging, we notice that Trump's eyes are barely open, especially his right eye, something I've been pointing out for a long time. That's gotten worse and worse. This would be consistent with someone. recovering from a minor stroke or larger TIA, who is recovering physically, but not fully well yet.

But it's also an odd smile for Trump, large, overly toothy and uniform. The rare times he smiles with his teeth, it's smaller and larger on one side. It's not this clenched teeth full smile. And his face doesn't push back that much when he does it. So then I thought, what about tools like face app that use AI models to adjust a person's Since this isn't a press photo, we don't know it's not faced edits. Here's a sample of a Trump smile image run through face app smile feature on high settings. What do you notice?

When we make the change, the app squishes the face to expand the smile. Crow's feet intensify, lips furl in, smile lines pull back, eyes become more closed. The smile feels more intense, forced, and unnatural. Unlike an AI that fully generates images, a face editor like face sap is hard to programmatically detect. There are no hidden watermarks or super obvious tells. The best method is changing the contrast in Photoshop to look for odd noise. When you boost the contrast, you'll notice some hard to see with Twitter's compression,

but the outlines around Trump's face have pixelated noise and so do his teeth. Suggesting, although not proving, touchup. If there's nothing wrong with the president, why is he not taking questions from the press? Why are they not allowed to see him golfing like usual? Why are we only getting controlled media releases? Why are all press images inconsistent with what his team puts out? Something about the way Trump looks, moves, or sounds. Something about it.

The White House doesn't seem to want you to see. And it tells you a lot about what's going on. The word that is coming up more and more is. stroke and i want to talk about that next um actual doctors are now sounding the alarm it's not coming from ms nbc or ms now it's coming from a whole bunch of different people weighing in on every social media platform there was a viral 31 post thread that exploded on twitter which i want to talk about and it lays out the hypothesis i'm going to be careful it's just a hypothesis, absent medical transparency and absent Trump for six days, increasingly people

are talking about TIAs, mini strokes, transient ischemic events. Adam Cochran sort of attempted to connect the dots between a number of different elements of this. And I'm going to just give you a sense of it and then we're going to talk about it. The thread starts here. I believe there is growing evidence that the White House is covering up the fact that Donald Trump has been dealing with TIA strokes and that he likely had a more significant eschemic stroke this week.

Starting with the basics TIAs are temporary blockages. You'll see symptoms like dragging, eye drooping, but they resolve within 24 hours. Eschemic strokes leave a lasting impact, but can range dramatically in scope and severity. In March of 2024, Ron Filipkowski noted Trump was dragging his right leg and had been doing it for a while, something we've seen him do off and on during the last year, not really notable on its own. In a Time magazine interview from right after the election, we see the first note of Trump's hand bruising.

Again, people didn't think much of it at the time. This came up again during the Macron visit in February where Caroline Levitt said the bruise is from shaking too many hands. Something, by the way, my audience did not believe was true. The next medical event we see is the annual physical report. There are three new medications, resuba staff. Aetimabae, as a timibi, as etymabe, and daily aspirin. At first, you might think normal for managing cholesterol.

I've certainly heard of preventative aspirin use in the past. But I interviewed heart specialists, and I'm glad I did. There are two takeaways. Daily aspirin is not recommended for prevention anymore. An aspirin regime is treating something. By the way, something I pointed out back then as well. Eidomib is a second line medication, not used for regular LDL treatment. Statins like resubastatin will manage cholesterol alone, where azetamide, that's a tough one for me,

will be used as a second line if there is high cardiovascular risk like prior stroke heart attack or arterial disease, then it is used for stroke prevention. Trump's previous medical reports claim his cardiovascular health is great and is on the statin so he shouldn't need as an azetamide. But this brings us to the aspirin. Aspirin hasn't been used as a daily course prevention method. method for quite a while. In June, we see Trump's swollen ankles, and for the first time, the White House is willing

to admit he does have chronic venous insufficiency. His bruising is related to the aspirin regime and shaking hands. They keep coming back to this claim as aspirin does make bruising easier, but there are problems. As I pointed out, speaking as David now, bruising is on both hands, not just the hand that he would shake hands with. Number two, chronic venous insufficiency is not sudden onset. Swollen ankles are an intermediate symptom. An annual physical in April would have caught CVI back then if the ankles were going to be swelling

and aspirin isn't a CVI treatment. But third, some of the bruising is monthly around the 24th. It seems much more likely the president is being monitored monthly for something and getting occasional emergency IVs. What does it all mean? The suggestion here is potentially TIAs. Donald Trump also, as you recall, struggled to walk in a straight line as he went to greet Vladimir Putin.

So listen, people speculate all the time. The reason this has finally hit a nerve is because we have a timeline that is much more cohesive. Trump vanishes for days. His truth social posts sound notably unlike him. Old pictures are published as if they're new. Reporters are kept far away. And then the speculation begins.

This is not just rest. This is a medical event. Trump is never out of the public eye for this long. This is not something that Democrats are pushing. This is coming from ordinary people. Some of them are on the political right. And they're just watching and saying this doesn't make sense. Now, just consider for a moment if this were Biden.

If Biden were missing six days and had swollen ankles, they were publishing old pictures, he couldn't walk in a straight line, the whole thing I just told you, it would be, is he fit to serve 24 seven on Fox News? With Trump from right wing media, it's been mostly silence or complicity saying this guy is healthy as a horse. We appear to be watching something be managed. We don't yet know what. And I want to briefly talk about the posts.

Donald Trump has been posting during his six day absence from the public eye. But it sounds nothing like Donald Trump. During Donald Trump's six day absence, his social media posts have changed and not in a subtle way. The unhinged style was mostly gone. The random capitalization gone. The obsession with nicknames and rage and insults mostly gone. And we had during Trump's absence, this morning, we started getting more normal post,

normal, completely abnormal, but more typical of Trump. But during Trump's absence, we were getting posts with full sentences, a measured tone, punctuation. Trump didn't suddenly become a copy editor. The immediate speculation is that coinciding with Trump's five, six day absence from the public, someone else was writing the posts. Now, we've seen this before. It's not that this is, oh, my God, David, that's speculation, it's speculative, but we know we

have documentary evidence of there was a period during Trump's campaign, for example, where he would dictate his troths and someone would sort of clean them up and check the grammar and spelling and this sort of thing. But this seems to be something different. And so we now are at a point where I don't know what's going on. I'm not pretending to know what's going on. We've gone through all of the hypotheses. Trump is suffering from strokes and they're keeping him out of the public eye.

He's got heart failure. He's increasingly in dialysis. This is all speculative. We don't have medical diagnoses on this stuff. But when you take a step back and you think about Donald Trump's obsession with being in the public eye, his lack of absences in the past, and then the disappearance for five days, media kept away from him on the golf course, the fake working image that was published by the White House, it is naturally going to lead to speculation.

Now, I am 99% convinced the White House is hiding something. I don't know if they're hiding a health issue necessarily. I'm open to the idea that the White House is hiding something, but it's something different. The reason we don't know is because they're not transparent. And the reason the speculation is raging is because they are not being transparent. So I want to hear from you. After everything I've laid out, we've looked at the pictures supposedly from yesterday, but they were a week old.

We've looked at commentary of different kinds. We've heard from experts of different. What do you believe is going on here? Now, by the time today's show comes out, Donald Trump's 2 PM statement that has been announced will already have been made. There are questions. Will it be live or will it be pre-recorded? Obviously, if it's pre-recorded, it's only going to generate even more speculation.

It seems as though from the truth social posts this morning starting to sound more like Trump and the scheduled event today, it seems that whatever kept Trump out of the public eye for five, six days has subsided. Is it a political scandal? Is it a health scandal? Is it a personal scandal? I don't know. I want to hear from you.

Send me an email info at David Pakman.com. Leave a comment, substack. David Pakman.com. If you were shopping for a new mattress, I would. recommend you start by looking at Helix sleep, the mattress I've been sleeping on for years, the only one that I recommend because they custom tailor it to your needs. I took their sleep quiz. It took a minute or two.

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away your old mattress. Go to helix sleep.com slash Pacman and you'll get 20% off sitewide. The link is in the description. Forget about Donald Trump's health for a moment. What on earth is going on at the White house as bags have been thrown out of windows in a facility which has its own process for dealing with rubbish and trash and garbage, we have a video of multiple large bags. I don't think we need the audio from this. Multiple large bags. This is not like curbside trash. These are heavy opaque bags.

There they go. I'm going to back that up again. You'll see the bag being dumped out of the White House. Here it is again. What is happening here? Opaic bags. Now, before you ask, at the moment, the White House has not said anything about it. Online, people are going full CSI with the clip.

They're looking at White House floor plans. There is speculation that this window might be a bathroom. Oh, boy, Trump and bathrooms. You know, that's trouble. A bathroom or a dressing area near the Lincoln bedroom. And I'm going to come back to the Lincoln bedroom. aspect of this in a moment. But of course, it's, is this laundry? Is this Trump's medical waste? Now, it's getting so speculative. Why are people talking about medical waste being dumped

out of the window, which I don't think makes any sense. I think they would have some other way to deal with that. Trump was recently, I mean, listen, we don't know when he was diagnosed. Supposedly recently. The White House finally came clean with a supposed new diagnosis of chronic venous insufficiency. This is a vein condition that would explain maybe Donald Trump's swollen ankles and it can cause mobility issues. It can cause other symptoms. Photos have shown Trump's legs swollen and his hands bruised and covered with makeup, the whole thing. The White House, of course, has said it's all benign. But the timing is sort of interesting, I guess. And so you've got online sleuth saying the bags were tossed from a room.

that was used for private medical consultations when presidents didn't want to go to Walter Reed. There's no confirmation. Trump has used the space in that way. There's no confirmation. Trump is seeking medical treatment of this kind in order to avoid going to Walter Reed. There's none of it. Now here's the other thing. There is a Lincoln bedroom remodel happening right now.

Trump has ordered the, he said it was the bathroom was terribly remodeled. He wanted a different look. This is separate from that massive ballroom project that Trump is planning. And it's conceivable that they're doing bathroom work. And so there's debris and they're dumping the debris out of the window. If that's just renovation waste, it is a mundane and completely benign explanation. If they're not, then once again, medical waste, soiled clothing, some other mystery. The White House hasn't commented.

They haven't said, these are old curtains. This is not something you see. And when you combine it circumstantially with Trump not being seen much lately, it just adds even more fuel to the speculation. Now, could this be nothing, absolutely. This could be absolutely nothing at all. The biggest question for me is that the White House has a dedicated internal waste collection system. They have strict handling protocols, especially for anything medical. You know, you talk to

private investigators and they always say a lot of people think that you can't figure out anything about them, but they don't necessarily think of their trash. And if you go through people's trash, you can learn a lot. You can learn a lot about them financially, medically, socially. I mean, it's incredible what you can learn by going through people's trash. Not that I recommend going, going, you know, ankle deep, knee deep, elbow deep in people's trash. But what private investigators sometimes suggest in privacy experts is you've got to lock your trash. And the White House, four reasons of national security, has very strict handling protocol.

So seeing bags going out the window, it's just not normal. Now, other people have said, you know, this was filmed from the rooftop of a restaurant at an adjacent hotel. anyone at the White House would know that you could see them from other spots if you throw stuff out that window. And so they definitely wouldn't have been doing anything nefarious. That may well be. But really weird and unusual stuff happening over there at the White House.

The COVID vaccine, just from me saying that, I know some of your, some of your palms probably started to get sweaty. the COVID vaccine is ripping apart the federal government and the Trump administration, and Trump is admitting it. There's something very interesting and also disturbing happening with the vaccine situation. And the part that should make everybody's headspin is that in his first term, Donald Trump bragged about how he got us the vaccines, Operation Warp Speed, which was basically just fronting money to make vaccines.

Operation Warp Speed got us the vaccines. It's a victory lap. Trump got us the vaccines so fast. But now Trump is standing shoulder to shoulder with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. They're dismantling vaccine programs. There are reports that they will ban the COVID vaccine. And Trump has now started to demand that drug makers justify the use of COVID vaccines. And he put out one of these very strange truth social posts where he said, quote, it is very

important that the drug companies justify the success of their various COVID drugs. Many people think they are a miracle that saved millions of lives. Others disagree. With CDC being ripped apart over this question, I want the answer. And I want it now. I have been shown information from Pfizer and others that is extraordinary, but they never seem to show those results to the public. Why not?

They go off to the next hunt and let everyone rip themselves apart, including Bobby Kennedy Jr. and CDC, trying to figure out the success or failure of the drug company's COVID work. They show me great numbers and results, but they don't seem to be showing them to many others. I want to show them now to CDC and the public and clear up this mess one way or the other. I hope Operation Warp Speed was as brilliant as many say it was. If not, we all want to know about it and why. Thank you for your attention to this very important matter.

You know, this is what happens when the monster you created has taken on a life of its own. When Trump demands Pfizer justify its vaccines, that is not a serious. policy inquiry. This is an attempt to appease the mob. Trump wants the credit for the vaccines, but he also wants the credit from the anti-vaxxers. And it's the same tactic that Trump has used for years. He pretends to be the referee. I'm just, I'm neutral here. But he echoes the grievances of the most extreme supporters. And the tactic is eating away at his administration from the inside out. Trump wanted it both ways in the first term. Give me credit for the vaccines. Praise me for the vaccines, but he would sort of wink wink at the anti-vax people. And that worked for a little

while, not well, but it worked a little bit. Now that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is in charge of the health policy and he's restricting vaccine access. Trump is in a trap. He's stuck. If he defends the vaccines, which he used to say, give me credit for, he alienates the loudest voices in the anti-vax mega world. If he attacks them, he's admitting, if he attacks the vaccines, he's admitting that his biggest pandemic achievement is actually a mistake. So he loses either way. Now, this is not like a fringe Facebook group that is angry about this. The president of the United States is questioning his own signature pandemic achievement. This was his big, he said, reelect me because I got us the vaccines. And now he sees his base turn on it. And it's the political equivalent of Frankenstein's

monster. Trump fed the anti-science, anti-expert machine. I know better than doctors and RFK knows more and whatever. Target could have been Democrats, could have been scientists, could have been Trump's own policies. The fallout is getting really ugly. Trump fired the CDC director. Four senior CDC officials immediately quit in protest. They said RFK is putting lives at risk. And this is chaos at the highest levels of government over issues that really should just be about science, medicine, and experts in those fields. Trump, and to see Trump say, I hope Operation Warp Speed is as brilliant as people claim. He was the one boasting about it for years.

Now he's going, listen, I'm neutral. Hopefully it was great. I don't really know. When you build a political brand on fear, lies, and distrust, the machine at some point comes for you. And Trump was selling himself at one point as the guy who got things done. He got us the vaccines quicker than anybody. He now is reduced to taking this faux neutral perspective. Whatever my base says, I don't know, whatever they say. And he is demanding answers from the companies he trusted to front money for vaccines for and that he celebrated when they actually did it.

I don't know where this ultimately lands. But the reporting is they want to ban the COVID vaccine. What's going to happen in blue states if they do that we don't know and that's a part of the story that we're following All right, Rudy Giuliani was in what seems like a very strange car accident and in the midst of that He is going to get awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It's all really weird. We're going to talk about it on the bonus show We also have the list of questions from Prager You for the new America first teacher test Prager You has a test if you want to be a teacher to prove you're really America first The questions are nuts. And then finally, Americans are losing faith that if you work hard, you will get ahead economically.

Understandably so. We will talk about all of those stories and more on the bonus show. Consider signing up at join packman.com. You can use the coupon code. It will end soon to save about 50% off of the cost of a membership. You can also request a free membership. the financial element of it is complicated for you david packman dot com slash free membership and finally finally make sure you're getting my daily substack newsletter at substack dot david packman

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